Download or read book The Politics of Evidence Based Policy Making written by Paul Cairney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: ‘rational’ ways to gather enough evidence, and ‘irrational’ decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.
Download or read book Decision Making for the Environment written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the growing number, complexity, and importance of environmental problems come demands to include a full range of intellectual disciplines and scholarly traditions to help define and eventually manage such problems more effectively. Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities is the result of a 2-year effort by 12 social and behavioral scientists, scholars, and practitioners. The report sets research priorities for the social and behavioral sciences as they relate to several different kinds of environmental problems.
Download or read book The Politics of Evidence written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.
Download or read book Evidence for Policy and Decision making written by George Argyrous and published by UNSW Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to base policy on evidence has placed pressure on decision-makers to support proposals with well-grounded research and information. However, no practical guide with a focus on public sector policy and decision-making for doing this exists. This edited text fills the gap by providing a practical and comprehensive manual for people working in policy areas. It is aimed at practitioners with little or no experience in research and analysis but who require skills in managing, assessing and critically evaluating evidence use in the public sector. This first part of the book covers a range of broad frameworks within which evidence is used to arrive at decisions. These include evaluation, cost-benefit analysis, multi-criteria analysis, economic modelling and forecasting, and scenario planning and futures analysis. The second part of the book then discusses the specific methods used to gather and analyse evidence within these frameworks, including secondary data sources, sample surveys, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The emphasis throughout is not on technical knowledge, but critical understanding. George Argyrous is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and is an Adjunct Faculty member of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.
Download or read book Using Evidence in Policy and Practice written by Ian Goldman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks how governments in Africa can use evidence to improve their policies and programmes, and ultimately, to achieve positive change for their citizens. Looking at different evidence sources across a range of contexts, the book brings policy makers and researchers together to uncover what does and doesn’t work and why. Case studies are drawn from five countries and the ECOWAS (west African) region, and a range of sectors from education, wildlife, sanitation, through to government procurement processes. The book is supported by a range of policy briefs and videos intended to be both practical and critically rigorous. It uses evidence sources such as evaluations, research synthesis and citizen engagement to show how these cases succeeded in informing policy and practice. The voices of policy makers are key to the book, ensuring that the examples deployed are useful to practitioners and researchers alike. This innovative book will be perfect for policy makers, practitioners in government and civil society, and researchers and academics with an interest in how evidence can be used to support policy making in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007043, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Download or read book Educational Goods written by Harry Brighouse and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-24 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, jointly authored by two distinguished philosophers and two prominent social scientists, has an ambitious aim: to improve decision-making in education policy. First they dive into the goals of education policy and explain the terms "educational goods" and "childhood goods," adding precision and clarity to the discussion of the distributive values that are essential for good decision-making about education. Then they provide a framework for individual decision-makers that enables them to combine values and evidence in the evaluation of educational policy options. Finally they delve into the particular policy issues of school finance, school accountability, and school choice, and they show how decision makers might approach them in the light of this decision-making framework. The authors are not advocated particular policy choices, however. The focus instead is a smart framework that will make it easier for policymakers (and readers) to identify and think through what they disagree with others about.
Download or read book Community Perspectives on Obesity Prevention in Children written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the public health threat of childhood obesity has become clear, the issue has become the focus of local, state, and national initiatives. Many of these efforts are centered on the community environment in recognition of the role of environmental factors in individual behaviors related to food and physical activity. In many communities, for example, fresh produce is not available or affordable, streets and parks are not amenable to exercise, and policies and economic choices make fast food cheaper and more convenient than healthier alternatives. Community efforts to combat obesity vary in scope and scale; overall, however, they remain fragmented, and little is known about their effectiveness. At the local level, communities are struggling to determine which obesity prevention programs to initiate and how to evaluate their impact. In this context, the Institute of Medicine held two workshops to inform current work on obesity prevention in children through input from individuals who are actively engaged in community- and policy-based obesity prevention programs. Community perspectives were elicited on the challenges involved in undertaking policy and programmatic interventions aimed at preventing childhood obesity, and on approaches to program implementation and evaluation that have shown promise. Highlights of the workshop presentations and discussions are presented in this volume.
Download or read book Evidence Based Policy written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.
Download or read book Evidence Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences written by Stoker, Gerry and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers an expert group of social scientists to showcase emerging forms of analysis and evaluation for public policy analysis. Each chapter highlights a different method or approach, putting it in context and highlighting its key features before illustrating its application and potential value to policy makers. Aimed at upper-level undergraduates in public policy and social work, it also has much to offer policy makers and practitioners themselves.
Download or read book Building Capacity for Evidence Informed Policy Making written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond Evidence Based Policy in Public Health written by K. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex relationship between public health research and policy, employing tobacco control and health inequalities in the UK as contrasting case studies. It argues that focusing on research-informed ideas usefully draws attention to the centrality of values, politics and advocacy for public health debates.
Download or read book EVIDENCE FOR POLICY DECISION MAKING written by GEORGE. ARGYROUS and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ethical and Scientific Issues in Studying the Safety of Approved Drugs written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An estimated 48 percent of the population takes at least one prescription drug in a given month. Drugs provide great benefits to society by saving or improving lives. Many drugs are also associated with side effects or adverse events, some serious and some discovered only after the drug is on the market. The discovery of new adverse events in the postmarketing setting is part of the normal natural history of approved drugs, and timely identification and warning about drug risks are central to the mission of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Not all risks associated with a drug are known at the time of approval, because safety data are collected from studies that involve a relatively small number of human subjects during a relatively short period. Written in response to a request by the FDA, Ethical and Scientific Issues in Studying the Safety of Approved Drugs discusses ethical and informed consent issues in conducting studies in the postmarketing setting. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to generate evidence about safety questions, and makes recommendations for appropriate followup studies and randomized clinical trials. The book provides guidance to the FDA on how it should factor in different kinds of evidence in its regulatory decisions. Ethical and Scientific Issues in Studying the Safety of Approved Drugs will be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry, patient advocates, researchers, and consumer groups.
Download or read book Tobacco Control Policy in the Netherlands written by Marc C. Willemsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments have known since the 1960s that smoking results in irreversible health damage. This open access book examines why governments have done so little to combat this when they have been aware of the problem and its solutions for decades. What are the strategies and decisions that make a difference, given that policy environments are often not conducive to change? Taking the Netherlands as an example, this book helps to understand the complex policy process at the national level and why it so often appears irrational to us. It is the most sophisticated analysis of tobacco control policy to date, applying insights from political sciences to the field of tobacco control.
Download or read book Evidence for Policy and Decision Making written by George Argyrous and published by . This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a focus on public-sector policy and decision making, this textbook, designed for masters-level courses in public administration, details the keystones of well-grounded research and information to support proposals. This is a comprehensive manual for people working in policy areas, and is useful for practitioners with little or no experience in research and analysis but who require skills in managing, assessing, and critically evaluating evidence-use in the public sector.
Download or read book Evidence Use in Health Policy Making written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides a set of conceptual, empirical, and comparative chapters that apply a public policy perspective to investigate the political and institutional factors driving the use of evidence to inform health policy in low, middle, and high income settings. The work presents key findings from the Getting Research Into Policy (GRIP-Health) project: a five year, six country, programme of work supported by the European Research Council. The chapters further our understanding of evidence utilisation in health policymaking through the application of theories and methods from the policy sciences. They present new insights into the roles and importance of factors such as issue contestation, institutional arrangements, logics of appropriateness, and donor influence to explore individual cases and comparative experiences in the use of evidence to inform health policy. Justin Parkhurst is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (the LSE)'s Department of Health Policy, UK. He has conducted research on a range of global health policy issues and on the politics of evidence. He served as the Principal Investigator of the GRIP-Health programme of work. Benjamin Hawkins is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. His research focuses on the role of research evidence and corporate actors in health policy making. In addition, he works on European integration, multi-level governance international trade and political economy approaches to health policy. Stefanie Ettelt is Associate Professor at the Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Her work examines the tensions between structure and agency in explaining the influence of evidence and research on policy-making and health system governance, particularly from a comparative perspective.
Download or read book Evidence Based Decision Making written by Andrew D. Banasiewicz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evidence-Based Decision-Making: How to Leverage Available Data and Avoid Cognitive Biases examines how a wide range of factual evidence, primarily derived from a variety of data available to organizations, can be used to improve the quality of business decision-making, by helping decision makers circumvent the various cognitive biases that adversely impact how we all think. The book is built on the following premise: During the past decade, the new ‘data world’ emerged, in which the rush to develop competencies around business analytics and data science can be characterized as nothing less than the new commercial arms race. The ever-expanding volume and variety of data are well known, as are the great advances in data processing/analytics, data visualization, and related information production-focused capabilities. Yet, comparatively little effort has been devoted to how the informational products of business analytics and data science are ‘consumed’ or used in the organizational decision-making processes, as the available evidence shows that only some of that information is used to drive some business decisions some of the time. Evidence-Based Decision-Making details an explicit process describing how the universe of available and applicable evidence, which includes organizational and other data, industry benchmarks, scientific studies, and professional experience, can be assessed, amalgamated, and funneled into an objective driver of key business decisions. Introducing key concepts in relation to data and evidence, and the history of evidence-based management, this new and extremely topical book will be essential reading for researchers and students of data analytics as well as those working in the private and public sectors, and in the voluntary sector.
