The opportunities and challenges to co-designing policy options for tree health with policy makers, researchers and land managers

We describe experiences between 2018 and 2021 co-designing tree health policy options linked with the UK’s evolving land use policy post EU-Exit within the Future Farming and Countryside Programme. Policy makers, researchers and more than 250 land managers took part in a series of co-design engagements in a three-phase iterative co-design process that culminated in a new Tree Health Pilot. After defining the components of co-design, we describe how relationships between policy makers, researchers and land managers were built, the methods researchers introduced into the process to build capability and support participation, and the outcomes in terms of the key opportunities and challenges for policy co-design. We conclude that it is possible to move policy design beyond user focused research and into co-design. However, this relies on adequate time and resources required to build trust and fully engage all parties in a meaningful way, including the development of tools and techniques that include experimentation, different knowledge types, and moving from research and evidence collection into design. Having policy makers with participatory mindsets in the same space as land managers was important to facilitating active learning between all of those involved in the collective. Researchers played a critical role in the co-design, balancing the views and understandings of the policy community with those of the land manager community, facilitating learning, and selecting tools and techniques to make design options explicit. We conclude that policy co-design in the land-based and environmental sector is a real opportunity at an early stage of realisation, but the effectiveness and range of positive and negative outcomes and impacts will need to be evaluated in the future.