Full Description
Contributors to this highly original book address the many questions raised by researchers and policymakers about the complex and often uneasy relationship between evidence and policy from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. They explore both the institutions acting as evidence brokers and the different methods used to collect, assess and use evidence in a variety of national and international settings, by drawing on their experience of working in international contexts and in different disciplinary and policy environments, and in some cases analysing their own involvement in the evidence-based policy process. The policy areas covered range from national and state level economic and social policies more generally to specific areas of intervention, such as EU bio-fuels targets, the Active Ageing Index, mental health and media, the construction of second-language learning policies, microfinance and alcohol policy. The authors highlight the strengths and weaknesses, the use and abuse, or successes and failures, of different institutional and methodological approaches to evidence-based policy. They consider what elements of the lessons learned might be transferable across national and cultural boundaries, and if so under what conditions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.
Contents
Foreword 1. Evidence-based policy: exploring international and interdisciplinary insights 2. Institutionalising evidence-based policy: international insights into knowledge brokerage 3. Using evidence to improve policy and practice: the UK What Works 4. Evidence-based policy as iterative learning: the case of EU biofuels targets 5. Creating and using the evidence base: the case of the Active Ageing Index 6. Media and evidence-informed policy development: the case of mental health in Australia 7. Using evidence to reconstruct second-language learning policies in Estonia 8. CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis: Dutch (economic) policy-making 9. Evidence and the policy process from an Indian perspective 10. (Mis)use of evidence in microfinance programming in the global south: a critique 11. Evidence and alcohol policy: lessons from the Italian case 12. Evidence-based research, epidemiology and alcohol policy: a critique
