Sonja Blum and Valérie Pattyn
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How are evidence and policy conceptualised, and how do they connect? A qualitative systematic review of public policy literature’.
Are policies based on available evidence? Are academic experts willing to provide their expertise? What enables or constrains the effective use of evidence for policymaking?
Public policy scholarship has puzzled over such questions of the evidence and policy relationship for decades. Over time, ever more differentiated branches of public policy research have developed, which complement and enrich each other. However, they have also developed their own perspectives, languages, and understandings of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections.
Such differences in terminology and employed concepts are more than ‘just words’. Rather, attentiveness to careful conceptualisations helps to set clear boundaries for theory development and empirical research, to avoid misunderstandings, and enable dialogue across different literatures. Against that backdrop, in our article published in Evidence & Policy, we conducted a qualitative systematic review of recent public policy scholarship with the aim to trace different conceptualisations of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections. To be included in our review, the research articles needed to address some sort of evidence, some sort of policy, and had to deal with some sort of connection between the two (a list of all included research articles is available online). The review followed all steps of the PRISMA methodology.
Along which lines can the different understandings and conceptualisations be distinguished?
Understandings of evidence. Firstly, understandings range from broad to narrow approaches towards evidence. One part of the reviewed public policy research includes very different sorts of ‘evidence’ under a broad umbrella term (e.g. knowledge, information), whereas another part focuses on ‘scientific evidence’ more strictly defined – in some cases even very specific studies or numbers. Secondly, understandings range from more supply-side to more demand-side oriented approaches, and thus (although mostly implicitly) speak to a long-standing debate on the evidence and policy relationship: articles which take a supply-side perspective understand ‘evidence’ as being brought into policymaking, e.g. through different actors of policy-advisory systems. Other articles adopt a more demand-side perspective, characterised by understanding ‘evidence’ as something that is drawn on by the policymaking side, and integrated (or not) into political decision-making. A typically used concept here is that of ‘expertise’, with the notion of ‘expert status’ being granted or drawn on from.
Understandings of policy. The variations in understanding extend also to the ‘policy’ end of the evidence and policy relationship. This goes beyond an interest in varying aspects and dimensions of ‘policy’ (e.g. policy preferences, policy options, policy narratives, etc.), and also affects the core of ‘what policy is’. As with evidence, we can moreover discern broad to specific approaches towards policy: A part of the reviewed research investigates evidence input for policymaking generically (e.g., in a certain sector); another part is oriented at specific policy concepts (e.g. wicked policies, policy success).
Evidence and policy. Which conceptualisations and theoretical approaches did our review identify on the evidence and policy connections? Overall, there seem to be two broader orientations: a ‘use of evidence’ orientation as well as a ‘use for policy’ orientation. What unites the use of evidence oriented articles is that their point of departure seems to be an interest in ‘evidence’, and how it is either provided or taken up for policymaking. Vice versa, the use for policy oriented articles’ point of departure is rather the effect of evidence use or its functions for policy. That being said, quite different understandings populate these broad umbrella terms, which we lay out in the full article in more detail.
A finding that stands out from our review is that often no clear definitions on ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections are given in the reviewed articles. The lines of distinction in understandings that could be identified through our review may thus serve as a heuristic for future research, to guide and explicate conceptual choices. The heuristic may thereby also help to enable dialogue across the ‘languages’ of the different branches of public policy research on evidence and policy. Not least, also practitioners – for example, policymakers or knowledge brokers – interested in the evidence and policy relationship may benefit from clear conceptualisations, which can help them to keep a clearer overview of existing literature.
Sonja Blum is an Acting Professor of Comparative Politics and Public Policy at Bielefeld University (Germany). She is also affiliated to the FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany), and the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute (Belgium).
Valérie Pattyn is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration of Leiden University (Netherlands), and part-time affiliated at KU Leuven Public Governance Institute (Belgium).
Image credit: Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
You can read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Blum, S. and Pattyn, V. (2022) How are evidence and policy conceptualised, and how do they connect? A qualitative systematic review of public policy literature. Evidence & Policy, 18(3), 563-582. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/174426421X16397411532296
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