Since the 1970s the Swedish government has been promoting social work based on research into methods which work in practice for practitioners and patients. In 2015, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment (SBU), a government agency instigated in 1987, was commissioned to expand its remit, to review empirical research on social work interventions and to disseminate the results to stakeholders. SBU was then renamed The Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services (SBU). This article describes the fusion of health technology assessment (HTA) and Social Intervention Assessment (SIA), including advantages and challenges.

The body of scientific knowledge accumulated by the scholarly disciplines such as Developmental Psychopathology can achieve meaningful public impact if wielded and used in policy decision-making. Scientific study of how policymakers use research evidence underscores the need for researchers’ policy engagement; however, barriers in the academy create conditions in which there is a need for infrastructure that increases the feasibility of researchers’ partnership with policymakers. This need led to the development of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration model, a systematic approach for developing “boundary spanning” infrastructure, which has been experimentally tested and shown to improve policymakers’ use of research evidence and bolster researchers’ policy skills and engagement. This paper presents original research regarding the optimization of the RPC model, which sought to better serve and engage scholars across the globe. Trial findings shed light on ways to improve conditions that make good use of researchers’ time for policy engagement via a virtual platform and enhanced e-communications. Future directions, implications, and practical guidelines for how scientists can engage in the political process and improve the impact of a collective discipline are also discussed.

Researchers and practitioners are increasingly embracing systems approaches to deal with the complexity of public service delivery and policy evaluation. However, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes a systems approach, conceptually or methodologically. We review and critically synthesize systems literature from the fields of health, education, and infrastructure. We argue that the common theoretical core of systems approaches is the idea that multi-dimensional complementarities between a policy and other aspects of the policy context are the first-order problem of policy design and evaluation. We distinguish between macro-systems approaches, which focus on the collective coherence of a set of policies or institutions, and micro-systems approaches, which focus on how a single policy interacts with the context in which it operates. We develop a typology of micro-systems approaches and discuss their relationship to standard impact evaluation methods as well as to work in external validity, implementation science, and complexity theory.

There is an increasing gap between the policy cycle’s speed and that of technological and social change. This gap is becoming broader and more prominent in robotics, that is, movable machines that perform tasks either automatically or with a degree of autonomy. This is because current legislation was unprepared for machine learning and autonomous agents. As a result, the law often lags behind and does not adequately frame robot technologies. This state of affairs inevitably increases legal uncertainty. It is unclear what regulatory frameworks developers have to follow to comply, often resulting in technology that does not perform well in the wild, is unsafe, and can exacerbate biases and lead to discrimination. This paper explores these issues and considers the background, key findings, and lessons learned of the LIAISON project, which stands for “Liaising robot development and policymaking,” and aims to ideate an alignment model for robots’ legal appraisal channeling robot policy development from a hybrid top-down/bottom-up perspective to solve this mismatch. As such, LIAISON seeks to uncover to what extent compliance tools could be used as data generators for robot policy purposes to unravel an optimal regulatory framing for existing and emerging robot technologies.

Although the amount of policy-relevant academic research has grown in recent years, studies still find that policy practitioners seldom employ such research in their decisionmaking. This study considers potential methods for increasing government officials’ use of academic studies (impact evidence). We investigate how administrative accountability mechanisms as suggested by principal-agent approaches – screening, monitoring, autonomy and sanctions – correlate with practitioner engagement with impact evidence. Original survey data from 300 government officials in two developing countries, Peru and India, suggest that all four mechanisms are correlated with self-reported interest in or use of impact evidence. When we measured the actual use of such evidence on a website we created to facilitate that outcome; however, we found that only sanctions (income) correlate with actual use. These findings highlight the potential of administrative accountability to increase bureaucrats’ use of impact evidence but also warn of possible limitations.

We evaluate whether people will outsource their opinion on public policy to consensus conference participants. The ideal consensus conference brings together a representative sample of citizens and introduces them to the range of perspectives and evidence related to some policy. The sample is given the opportunity to ask questions of experts and to deliberate. Attitudes about each policy are queried before and after the conference to see if the event has changed minds. In general, such conferences do produce opinion shifts. Our hypothesis is that the shift can be leveraged by simply communicating conference results – absent substantive information about the merits of the policies discussed – to scale up the value of conferences to the population at large. In five studies, we tell participants about the impact of a consensus conference on a sample of citizens’ opinions for a range of policies without providing any new information about the inherent value of the policy itself. For several of the policies, we see a shift in opinion. We conclude that the value of consensus conferences can be scaled up simply by telling an electorate about its results. This suggests an economical way to bring evidence and rational argument to bear on citizens’ policy attitudes.

How do experts judge the legitimacy of technical policy processes, and do their ideas change as these processes are opened to other stakeholders and the public? This research examines the adoption of public and patient involvement in pharmaceutical assessment in Canada. It finds tensions between scientific legitimacy that prioritizes rigor and objectivity, and democratic legitimacy that values inclusion and a broader range of evidence. In response to policy change, experts incorporate new ideas about democratic inputs and processes, while maintaining scientific policy goals. The research responds to calls for more precise measurement of ideas and ideational change and more evaluation of public and patient involvement in health policy. It helps us understand the significance of, and limits to, ideational change among experts in health policy domains that are highly technical and publicly salient. Understanding the way democratic and scientific legitimacy are negotiated in policy decisions has a wide applicability in health, but is particularly relevant during a global pandemic when evidence is being generated rapidly, decisions must be made quickly, and these decisions have a significant, immediate effect on the lives of all citizens.

Much of public policy-making has in recent decades been driven by the idea of evidence-based policy – policy rooted in the principles of social science and, more specifically, empirical validation based on social and behavioural science. This article argues that evidence-based policy, while helping to improve the design of policies aimed at changing individual behaviour, lacks a recognition that individual and group choices are embedded in social relationships and institutions. There is a risk of over-relying not only on probabilistic models that under-state our condition of ‘radical uncertainty’ but also on data and metrics that are disconnected from the everyday experience of workers and citizens whose needs and interests cannot always be measured or managed. Since uncertainty is a fundamental reality of both the economy and social life, policy-making needs robust conceptual narratives to make sense of numbers and provide a sound basis on which to make decisions allied to ethical judgements.

In this paper, we develop a framework to analyze the relationship between evidence and policy. Postulating a normative criterion based on cost–benefit analysis and the value of a piece of information, as well as a topology of the policy space defined by three characteristics (epistemic uncertainty, interests, and the degree of value conflicts), we identify the (Nash) equilibria of an interaction between experts and citizens in providing information to a decision maker. In this setup, we study three institutional arrangements (evidence-based policy, deliberative governance, and negotiated conflict) that differ in terms of reliance on experts and citizens for providing information. We show that different degrees of uncertainty, interests, and value-relevance surrounding the issue at stake result in vastly different arrangement performances; hence, to foster efficiency, rules should be contingent.

Proponents of evidence-based policy (EBP) call for public policy to be informed by high-quality evidence from randomized controlled trials. This methodological preference aims to promote several epistemic values, e.g. rigour, unbiasedness, precision, and the ability to obtain causal conclusions. I argue that there is a trade-off between these epistemic values and several non-epistemic, moral and political values. This is because the evidence afforded by standard EBP methods is differentially useful for pursuing different moral and political values. I expand on how this challenges ideals of value-freedom and -neutrality in EBP, and offer suggestions for how EBP methodology might be revised.

There has been a growing trend in recent years towards the adoption of evidence-based policy in a variety of fields, including criminal justice. The purpose of evidence-based policy is to guide the activities of organisations based on scientifically verified facts, enabling the development of effective and efficient policies. In this article, we introduce the commitment of the Israel Prison Service (IPS) to the implementation of evidence-based policy by detailing the processes and development of a large-scale research programme in the IPS. We illustrate how the cooperation and commitment of key individuals, including successive IPS Commissioners, have enabled the implementation of evidence-based policy in a hierarchal organisation. Within this context, we demonstrate how human agency is a key factor in the successful implementation of the policy in criminal justice settings. By following the different stages of development and implementation, the example of the IPS also highlights the importance of agencies taking ownership of science. We conclude by arguing that the road to evidence-based policy is a ‘winding road’, highlighting the key turning points that influenced the institutionalisation of the policy in the IPS.

This paper argues that evidence-based policy has clearly made a worldwide impact, at least at the rhetorical and institutional levels, and in terms of analytical activity. The paper then addresses whether or not evidence-based policy evaluation has had an impact on policy formation and public service delivery. The paper uses a model of research-use that suggests that evidence can be used in instrumental, conceptual and symbolic ways. Taking four examples of the use of evidence in the UK over the past decade, this paper argues that evidence can be used instrumentally, conceptually and symbolically in complementary ways at different stages of the policy cycle and under different policy and political circumstances. The fact that evidence is not always used instrumentally, in the sense of “acting on research results in specific, direct ways” (Lavis et al., 2003, p. 228), does not mean that it has little or no influence. The paper ends by considering some of the obstacles to getting research evidence into policy and practice, and how these obstacles might be overcome.

In common with other developed countries at the end of the 20th century, modernising public services was a priority of the United Kingdom (UK) Labour administration after its election in 1997. The modernisation reforms in health and social care exemplified their approach to public policy. The authors were commissioned to examine the evidence base for the modernisation of social care services for older people, and for this purpose conducted a systematic review of the relevant peer-reviewed UK research literature published from 1990 to 2001. Publications that reported descriptive, analytical, evaluative, quantitative and qualitative studies were identified and critically appraised under six key themes of modernisation: integration, independence, consistency, support for carers, meeting individuals' needs, and the workforce. This paper lists the principal features of each study, provides an overview of the literature, and presents substantive findings relating to three of the modernisation themes (integration, independence and individuals' needs). The account provides a systematic portrayal both of the state of social care for older people prior to the modernisation process and of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base. It suggests that, for evidence-based practice and policy to become a reality in social care for older people, there is a general need for higher quality studies in this area.