Evidence and policy: discourses, meanings and practices

Excerpt

The attention for the use of evidence in the policy process has received renewed attention in recent years with explicit calls for ‘evidence-based policy’ (EBP). This idea is not new and goes back at least to Lasswell’s call for a ‘policy science’, which would explicitly apply interdisciplinary research to policy problems (Lasswell 1951, 1970). The problématique of evidence use raises a number of questions on how knowledge is recognised and mobilised in the policy process. These questions were addressed in a panel on EBP at the Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Tilburg, the Netherlands, in July 2012. The panel was grounded in the study of policy making as practice (Colebatch 2005, 2006; Colebatch et al. 2011). Some of the papers from this panel have already been published (Pearce et al. 2014); four more are presented here. Three of the papers in this special issue are case studies of contemporary policy practices in UK, Sweden and Australia, and the fourth investigates the way in which the demand for EBP is mobilised by a movement that advocates randomised controlled trials as the preferable form of knowledge in policy practice. We briefly introduce these four articles, discuss what we learn from them and suggest what questions remain to be investigated. We conclude by arguing that while the EBP discourse is inherently naive about the realities of public policy, its dominance continues to exert real influence on policy practices, academic research and democratic participation. …