Recently, there’s been a surge of interest in and attention on work on the evidence-to-policy pipeline. Calling it a “pipeline” perhaps implies something too direct: the path by which evidence can affect policy is often circuitous and hard to pin down.
Nonetheless, I thought it might be a good time to share a round-up of related media links, based on work with Aidan Coville and Sampada KC.
First, at VoxDev, I summarize results from two sets of experiments run at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. This talk focuses more on what we learned about how policymakers interpret different kinds of evidence, i.e., what were the takeaways?
The next link, from a lecture given as part of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) College and University Fund Lecture Series, also highlights what we learned, but with more emphasis on how we learned it. It goes more in-depth on the experiments and draws some broader conclusions.
There remains plenty of fertile ground for further research in this area, and I’d encourage interested grad students or faculty to pursue it. Given the importance of the decisions policymakers make, small improvements in decision-making quality could potentially have large impacts.