Month: October 2024

The forest or the trees? What we know about Covid-19 advisory bodies

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Clemence Bouchat, Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé and Marleen Brans

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’.

The number of academic papers written about advice and policymaking increased following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When this kind of scholarship boom happens, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In our Evidence & Policy paper, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’, we clarify what actually came out of this new scholarship. We focus on the structures that formally provided policy advice to European governments during the pandemic, such as government agencies, ad hoc taskforces and research institutes.

Our review spanned 981 academic outputs published between 2020 and 2023. The review protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. In the end, a corpus of 59 publications informed our findings.. Our corpus was mostly composed of qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. We found that the academic community has mostly focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.

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Examining evidence-integrated codesign as a program quality assurance strategy

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Sarah Walker and Larry Norman

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Codesigning youth diversion programmes with community-led organisations: a case study’.

The equitable use of social science is a persistent governance challenge, particularly in applied social science and psychosocial treatment research. A common approach in applied social science is testing learning tools such as checklists, guides, manuals and trainings. These tools are developed to support behavior change at multiple levels and can be aimed at individuals, organisations or systems. To become evidence-based, these tools are tested against a control, ‘as usual’, or equivalent group. If effective in comparison, the package is then purveyed with the coveted ‘evidence-based’ moniker. Governments eager for tested approaches, as part of responsible governance, are then motivated to buy these tools and they are typically delivered by purveyor organisations as completed packages.

Some previous efforts focused on addressing both evidence-informed and community-engaged values have resorted to ‘list selection’ approaches in which community is involved in selecting a package from a pre-assembled list of programs. This approach engages community choice but limits the opportunity for community to contribute to more substantive design in the framing and content of these programs.

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