CECAN Fellowship: Making tacit knowledge visible in RDI evaluation: a participatory systems approach for government innovation policy
Government-funded research, development and innovation (RDI) programmes operate in policy domains characterised by complexity. The UK’s 5G Innovation Regions (5GIR) programme, for example, aims to stimulate adoption of advanced connectivity through place-based interventions, with an implicit assumption that knowledge generated through local pilots, such as 5G-enabled agri-tech applications, will diffuse and drive wider system change. However, the value generated in such programmes often resides in tacit knowledge, including practical judgement, informal learning, and relational work across diverse actors, which is highly context-dependent and difficult to codify. Conventional evaluation approaches tend to privilege measurable outputs, leaving the mechanisms through which knowledge is shared, adapted and scaled insufficiently evidenced. This limits the ability of evaluation to explain how value is generated, shared and scaled within complex, interdependent systems. While approaches such as contribution analysis and outcome harvesting can capture emergent outcomes, they do not systematically externalise tacit knowledge across interconnected systems. This fellowship will address this gap by developing a complexity-informed, participatory systems mapping approach to make tacit knowledge visible in government evaluations. It will use successful 5GIR projects to demonstrate how making tacit knowledge visible can strengthen how evaluation captures knowledge dissemination and system-level impacts.
About Cate
Cate is a socio-technical researcher specialising in the social and policy implications of digital technology, with a specific focus on digital inclusion, AI ethics, data justice, and the role of public service in shaping digital futures. Her work combines qualitative, participatory, and co-creation methods to examine how individuals, communities and organisations adapt their practices in response to digital change, with a growing emphasis on the role of tacit and relational knowledge in shaping policy and innovation outcomes.
She is a Social Researcher and Evaluation Analyst in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) where she works on the evaluation of large-scale digital infrastructure and innovation programmes. Her work focuses on the methodological challenges of evaluating complex, place-based interventions, including how to better capture interdependencies, learning, and knowledge diffusion within research, development and innovation (RDI) systems. She leads the evaluation of programmes within the Government Major Projects Portfolio as well as her own programme of research, bringing socio-technical and data justice perspectives into the design and evaluation of digital infrastructure policy. Through this work, she is increasingly developing and applying participatory and systems-based approaches, including emerging work on participatory systems mapping to support evaluation in complex policy environments.
Cate holds a Master’s degree in Social Science Research Methods from Cardiff University, where she received the Master’s Excellence Award, and a PhD from Cardiff University’s Data Justice Lab. Her doctoral research, funded by the ESRC, used qualitative and participatory methods to explore how individuals and communities experience and respond to public sector digitalisation strategies. She has authored and contributed to academic publications and has an established track record of producing research for both scholarly and policy audiences.
