Evidence-Based Policy

Origins

The evidence-based policy movement in various public policy issues and other areas of practice originated in the United Kingdom, according to the preponderance of published work, in the context of medical practices (although at least one source traces its origins, without attribution or designation of place, year, or issue, to the United States; the reference may be to an earlier call in the United States to provide experimental evidence for prescribing particular drugs that were claimed to cure certain illnesses). The problem appears to have been, and currently to be, the professional practice of administering various medical treatments whose application and use are not necessarily grounded in empirical research—specifically, in the randomized controlled trials (RCT) that serve as the basis for experimental testing in medicine and other such areas.

As the movement has spread beyond medicine to other policy issue areas and beyond the United Kingdom to the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, various policies and practices have come under attack for their lack of grounding—as their critics claim—in empirical research. In some sense, the evidence-based movement might be seen as a reiteration of the 1960s and 1970s call for enhanced accountability by public-sector organizations—especially in policy implementation by local governmental organizations—that led to institutionalizing various forms of assessment within the policy cycle a desire to know that governmental funding—taxpayers' sterling or dollars or euros—was achieving desired ends. The evidence-based movement would seem to be a renewed call for accountability through a particular kind of policy and program evaluation, although using different terminology and instituted before implementation rather than during or after it.

The effort to connect social scientific knowledge with policy programs and practices is certainly desirable. Policy evaluation efforts have had their own difficulties, however, including problems in measurement and problems in determining what is capable of being assessed. The periodic expression of frustration with seemingly intractable or insoluble social problems appears now to be turning to questions of knowledge and its management, a current concern within organizational and management studies, expressed in policy arenas through the language of evidence. There has, however, been little reflexivity in the midst of these debates: Proponents of evidence-based policy have, on the whole, used the term uncritically, as if there were only one sort of evidence that can produce scientific results. The kind of evidence they adduce is experimental evidence expressed through statistical analyses—not surprising, perhaps, given the movement's origins in medical practices where experimentation is much at home. However, the experimental and statistical character of evidence assumed in this usage excludes observational evidence derived from local knowledge that emerges from the lived experience of participants in the situation under study, such as might be obtained through clinical or field research.

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