There is a widespread and understandable misconception about how policy gets made in America. Most people picture it as something that happens behind closed doors in Washington or in state capitols, driven by elected officials, lobbyists, and lawyers. Something distant. Something that requires credentials most people do not have and access most people cannot get.
Mai Sistla spends her professional life dismantling that misconception.
As Senior Climate Policy Advisor at the Aspen Policy Academy, Sistla works at the intersection of expertise and civic action, helping scientists, technologists, communications professionals, nonprofit leaders, and engaged citizens understand not just what policy is, but how to shape it. In a recent conversation on The Intelligence Report Podcast, she laid out a vision of civic participation that is at once more accessible and more urgent than most people realize.
What Policy Actually Is
Before you can engage with policy, you have to understand what it is. That sounds obvious, but it is a step most civic education skips entirely.
Policy, in its simplest form, is a decision made by a governing body about how to address a problem or achieve an outcome. It can be a law passed by a legislature, a regulation issued by a federal agency, an executive order, a municipal ordinance, or a set of guidelines adopted by a public institution. It exists at every level of government, from the U.S. Congress down to a local school board, and it touches every domain of life, from energy and water to education, housing, and healthcare.
What makes policy genuinely powerful, and genuinely underappreciated by most people outside of government, is that the decisions embedded in it are almost never made by elected officials alone. They are shaped by the research that gets submitted to agency comment periods, by the testimony delivered at hearings, by the reports commissioned by legislative staff, and by the relationships that practitioners in a given field build with the people responsible for governing it. Expertise matters enormously in policy. And most of the people with the most relevant expertise are not in government.
That gap, between the people who understand the problems most deeply and the people who have the authority to act on them, is exactly where the Aspen Policy Academy works.
The Aspen Policy Academy and the Environmental Policy Accelerator
Founded on the premise that policy literacy is a civic skill that can be taught, the Aspen Policy Academy runs training programs designed to bring professionals from outside government into the policy process in a structured and effective way.
Its upcoming Environmental Policy Accelerator, launching ahead of Earth Day, is specifically designed for climate scientists, technologists, communications experts, and others working in the environmental space who want to move from their area of expertise into genuine policy influence. The program covers how environmental policy is made, how to identify points of entry for outside expertise, how to communicate technical knowledge in the language policymakers use, and how to build the relationships that make sustained influence possible.
The curriculum also addresses a significant shift in the legal landscape for environmental advocates. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine, which had for decades required courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes. That ruling fundamentally changed the terrain for regulatory advocacy. Organizations that built their strategies around agency rulemaking now face a different set of risks and opportunities. The Aspen Policy Academy’s workshops for nonprofits navigating advocacy in this post-Chevron environment are a direct response to that shift, helping organizations adapt their approaches to a changed legal reality.
When Training Becomes Law
The most compelling evidence that this model works is not theoretical. It is the story of what happened in Utah.
In 2024, Aspen Policy Academy fellows Jonathan Gilmour, Rebecca Kilberg, and Mary-Clare Bosco were working on a project focused on data center water consumption. Data centers, which power the digital infrastructure that underlies everything from social media to artificial intelligence, consume enormous quantities of water for cooling. As the technology sector has expanded, so has its draw on water systems in regions that can least afford it, including the American West, where the Great Salt Lake has been shrinking for decades.
The fellows developed a concrete policy recommendation: water efficiency targets for the tech sector, submitted to the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner. Their work was specific, technically grounded, and framed in terms that policymakers could act on. It helped inform H.B. 76, the Data Center Water Transparency bill, which was signed into law by Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox.
That is not a story about politicians or lobbyists. It is a story about trained professionals who understood both a technical problem and a policy process, and who knew how to connect the two.
How Anyone Can Get Involved
One of the most important things Sistla communicates, both through her work and in conversations like the one she had on The Intelligence Report Podcast, is that policy engagement is not reserved for people with law degrees or government experience.
The most effective advocates are often people who bring deep subject matter expertise to a policy conversation, not people who have spent their careers navigating legislative procedure. A climate scientist who understands exactly how a proposed regulation will or will not achieve its stated goals is an extraordinarily valuable voice in a policy process. So is a water engineer, a rural farmer, a public health researcher, or a technology professional who understands how data infrastructure actually works.
What those people often lack is not expertise. It is the policy literacy to translate their expertise into a form that decision-makers can use. That is the gap the Aspen Policy Academy is designed to close.
For those who are not professionals in a relevant field but simply care about the issues, the entry points are different but no less real. Submitting comments during federal and state agency rulemaking periods, engaging with local government on land use and environmental decisions, supporting organizations that do policy advocacy, and staying informed on how specific decisions are made in your area are all forms of genuine participation. They are not glamorous. They are often tedious. And they work.
Why This Matters Now
The Environmental Policy Accelerator is launching at a moment when the relationship between scientific expertise and federal policy is under unusual strain. Agency authority has been curtailed by the courts. Funding for environmental research and regulatory enforcement has faced political pressure. And the challenges that policy is supposed to address, from water scarcity to energy transition to agricultural sustainability, have not paused to wait for the political climate to improve.
In that context, the Aspen Policy Academy’s work is not just educational. It is a form of institutional resilience, building a broader base of people who understand how to engage with policy at the state and local level, where a significant amount of consequential environmental decision-making actually happens, and who can sustain that engagement across changes in federal administration.
Sistla’s own path into this work is a reminder that the policy world is not populated exclusively by people who set out to work in government. It is populated by people who cared about a problem, learned how the relevant systems worked, and found a way in.
The arena, to borrow a phrase that Theodore Roosevelt made famous and that feels newly relevant, is open. The Aspen Policy Academy is teaching people how to step into it.
To learn more about the Environmental Policy Accelerator and the Aspen Policy Academy’s upcoming programs, visit their website. The full conversation with Mai Sistla is available now on The Intelligence Report Podcast.
