Why the impact agenda needs deeper roots

By Mark Reed

If you’ve ever seen me train or read my books (and increasingly my papers), you’ll know how much I foreground values in everything I do. Values shape what we do because they shape who we are. Sometimes it’s the values that drive us to engage with impact in ways that deepen our passion for research, something I explored in my impact culture paper with Ioan Fazey. Sometimes it’s the deep value we place on nature, which can be hard to articulate but profoundly shapes how we interact with the living world; a theme that has run through my longstanding collaboration with Jasper Kenter and my more recent work with Chris Raymond.

But what shapes those values in the first place? What lies behind why we prioritise impact, or any other mission? I’m glad to see more people acknowledging how culture and society influence what we do, including the unfair advantages given to older, white, male professors like me. Yet we tend to shy away from talking about how spiritual conviction and faith traditions shape who we are and why we do or do not prioritise impact. We are even less likely to ask how religion itself might have shaped the wider impact agenda.

That’s why reading Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World was such a revelation. Holland argues that many of the values we take for granted in Western culture are not products of secular modernity, but of Christianity: equality, compassion, dignity, human rights, and the very definition of impact - that we should seek to use our research to benefit others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves. Whether your values are shaped by a faith tradition or something else, it’s worth pausing to ask: where do your values come from, and how do they shape the way you think about and practise impact?

When the UK first introduced the impact agenda, it was framed as a way of demonstrating a return on investment. Taxpayers deserved proof that public money spent on research was generating measurable benefits. That language quickly took hold internationally, and the model spread to other systems, including Australia and some European countries. The principle of accountability is important, but the way it has been operationalised narrows what counts as valuable. Suppose impact is defined only by what can be audited. In that case, it risks missing the long-term, subtle and relational forms of change that matter most: shifts in culture, empowerment of communities, or transformations that defy neat causal chains. In my work on impact culture, I’ve argued that these slower, deeper shifts are often the most significant, yet they are also the hardest to measure.

Reading Holland’s book made me see how this reflects a much older story. Christianity itself has been repeatedly co-opted by systems of power. The faith that began with a man who sided with the poor and the excluded was entangled with empire, colonial expansion and, more recently, capitalism. The moral impulse was still there, but often buried beneath political or economic interests that led to the opposite of what Jesus would have wanted. I think the same thing has happened to impact. What started as a way of ensuring research genuinely served society has been captured by systems that prioritise short-term, quantifiable returns.

What struck me most in Holland’s book was the way Jesus’ life and teaching turned the values of the ancient world upside down. Where strength, wealth and power were celebrated, he dignified weakness, service and sacrifice. He consistently put people from the margins at the centre. He gave without expecting anything in return. He walked alongside people, listening and responding to their needs, rather than imposing grand programmes from above. That looks very different from an impact agenda rooted in investment logic, and it raises an uncomfortable question: what would our institutional cultures look like if we took those values seriously?

I tried to answer this in a recent paper with Hannah Rudman, where we showed how impact is never neutral: it is always shaped by context, voice and power, and what one group experiences as positive, another may experience as harmful. That reinforces Holland’s point about the distortions that creep in when good intentions are captured by systems of power. It also highlights why impact cannot simply be reduced to metrics: it requires attention to relationships, values and the lived experiences of those most affected.

I know talking about faith in this context may feel uncomfortable, but I think we need to start talking more openly about what shapes our values and how this underpins our work. For me, that means connecting with the spirit of Jesus’ ministry: compassion, humility and service. For others, it may mean drawing from different faith traditions or from personal values that guide their work. Wherever we draw from, the point is the same: if we only define impact in terms of metrics and instrumental returns, we miss the moral core of why we do research in the first place.

So here’s the challenge I want to put to you: what would happen if you reconnected the impact agenda to your deepest sources of value, whether faith-based or secular? If we each bring our own traditions and convictions into the conversation, perhaps we can start to move impact beyond box-ticking and back towards what it was always meant to be: research in the service of people, in all their complexity and dignity.

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