Governments are facing growing pressures to deliver public services to citizens and businesses in a complex, fragmented and unpredictable environment. Evidence-informed policy making has a crucial role to play in designing, implementing and delivering better public policies, and thus the potential to improve public sector performance. However, in reality, connecting evidence and policy making remains a constant challenge. Institutional gaps, insufficient skills and capacity, and a lack of an effective knowledge brokering function are common barriers to the use of evidence in policy making. In response to these challenges, many governments are strengthening the ‘evidence ecosystem’ by investing in strategies to build capacity for policy design and ex ante and ex post evaluation.

The Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Services (IGEES) supports an integrated approach to policy formulation and implementation in the civil service based on economic and analytical skills. IGEES was created in March 2012 with the aim of expanding analytic capacities for evidence-informed policy making following the budgetary pressures created in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. IGEES’s role was to build and extend capacity to achieve value-for-money in policy making across all government departments. The goal is to ensure that a range of public interventions and public expenditure decisions are informed by quality economic analysis and contribute to better outcomes for citizens. This is achieved by placing IGEES staff in all government departments, as well as through specific recruitment, learning and development processes. The IGEES launched a Medium-Term Strategy (MTS) for 2016-2019 to improve the quality of its output, increase the impact of policy analysis process and better inform the policy debate as well as to further develop IGEES as a whole-of-government service.

This chapter presents the key findings from the review, together with an assessment of the achievements and remaining challenges. It underlines the role that IGEES has made to strengthening policy making in Ireland and offers suggestions for achieving greater coherence in the governance of IGEES, for broadening the development of people and skills, for leveraging IGEES to further the quality and use of evaluation in Ireland, and also for furthering the scope of dissemination and sharing processes. The chapter also presents the machinery of government involved in EIPM and discusses the distribution of policy analysis resources across departments as well as their relations with statistical resources and data.

This chapter analyses the processes that support evidence informed policy making in Ireland and the contribution of IGEES resources, including people to these processes. The chapter addresses recruitment and progression as well as learning and development. It also discusses the tools that are supporting EIPM, including the role of frameworks and guidelines and highlights the need for broadening the analytical framework beyond the spending code. It also underlines the role of the departments’ programme of work, and discusses the balance of work conducted internally versus externally.

This chapter discusses the remaining barriers to evidence informed policy making, including data availability and use, as well as recruitment and retention of staff. The chapter highlights opportunities to strengthen the full range of policy analysis, the options for strengthening capacity for social research and for evidence synthesis. The chapter offers options for moving from knowledge management to knowledge brokerage to build the use of results into policymaking as well as for strengthening communications and branding.