Evidence-based policy and practice

Abstract

There is growing interest in the UK and elsewhere in the use of evidence to improve policymaking and public service delivery (Boaz et al., 2008; Shuller et al., 2006). Of course, researchers and analysts have long worked with and in governments. However, in the UK, the Labour government in 1997 revitalized interest in the role of evidence in the policy process – in setting out his modernizing agenda, Prime Minister Tony Blair frequently asserted: ‘What matters is what works’. Internationally, a recent report (Baron and Haskins, 2011) has concluded that ‘the Obama administration has created the most expansive opportunity for rigorous evidence to influence social policy in the history of the U.S. government’.