Building Capacity for Evidence-Informed Policy-Making
Lessons from Country Experiences
This report analyses the skills and capacities governments need to strengthen evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) and identifies a range of possible interventions that are available to foster greater uptake of evidence. Increasing governments’ capacity for evidence-informed is a critical part of good public governance. However, an effective connection between the supply and the demand for evidence in the policy-making process remains elusive.
This report offers concrete tools and a set of good practices for how the public sector can support senior officials, experts and advisors working at the political/administrative interface. This support entails investing in capability, opportunity and motivation and through behavioral changes. The report identifies a core skillset for EIPM at the individual level, including the capacity for understanding, obtaining, assessing, using, engaging with stakeholders, and applying evidence, which wasdeveloped in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre.
It also identifies a set of capacities at the organisational level that can be put in place across the machinery of government, throughout the role of interventions, strategies and tools to strengthen these capacities. The report concludes with a set of recommendations to assist governments in building their capacities.
Building capacity for evidence-informed policy-making: the need to connect supply with demand for evidence
This chapter discusses the need to connect supply with demand of evidence in a complex political context characterised by a global over-supply of knowledge. The chapter discusses the contribution that evidence-informed policy-making can make to good public governance, which requires building new skills and capacity in the public sector. There is a need to address the elusive connections between evidence and policy-making, while acknowledging the importance of cognitive constraints and bias. This highlights the rationale for focusing on the demand of evidence, at the level of individual skills, as well as at the structural and organisational levels.
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