What changed
Outside the aid sector, the decade brought a more sober view of how evidence enters policy. The "what works" movement (the UK What Works Network from 2013, the US Evidence Act of 2018 with its mandatory learning agendas and evaluation officers, behavioural insights units running trials inside government) institutionalised experimentation in domestic policy.
At the same time, political scientists such as Paul Cairney and Kathryn Oliver argued that the "evidence-based policy" ideal misreads how policymaking works, and that evaluators should think in terms of evidence-informed policy, framing and timing. The OECD's 2020 Improving Governance with Policy Evaluation mapped how member states institutionalise evaluation and found the weakest link to be use rather than supply.
The Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges (2022) drew the pandemic's lessons for evidence systems. Standards-of-evidence hierarchies (Nesta, the UK Education Endowment Foundation) spread from health into social policy and philanthropy, while critics noted they encode the RCT hierarchy discussed in section 3.
Frameworks and tools
- What Works centres
- learning agendas and evaluation officers
- behavioural-insights trials
- OECD's evaluation-policy typology
- Nesta standards of evidence
- EU Better Regulation evaluation toolbox
- evidence-use frameworks (Cairney, Oliver
- Langer, Tripney and Gough's 2016 review of what works to increase research use)
Vocabulary to recognise
- Evidence-informed (not evidence-based)
- what works
- evidence hierarchy
- standards of evidence
- policy window
- evidence broker
- knowledge mobilisation
- learning agenda
Live controversies
Whether evidence hierarchies distort what governments choose to fund; the gap between evaluation supply and use; the politicisation of evaluation offices (and, in the United States after 2025, the abolition or hollowing-out of several federal evaluation and statistical functions); and the claim that behavioural "nudge" evaluations produce small, publication-biased effects.
Further reading
- Paul Cairney and Kathryn Oliver, Evidence-based policymaking is not like evidence-based medicine, so how far should you go to bridge the divide between evidence and policy?, Health Research Policy and Systems, 2017.
- Laurenz Langer, Janice Tripney and David Gough, The Science of Using Science: Researching the use of research evidence in decision-making, EPPI-Centre, 2016.
- OECD, Improving Governance with Policy Evaluation: Lessons from Country Experiences, 2020.
- Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, The Evidence Commission report, McMaster Health Forum, 2022.
- UK Government, What Works Network.
- Nesta, Standards of Evidence, 2013.
- US Office of Management and Budget, Evidence and Evaluation — the Evidence Act framework for learning agendas and evaluation policies.