“Evidence banks” can lead to better decisions in public life

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The writer is a scientific commentator

Modern life is full of pressing questions to which governments should seek answers. Does working from home – WFH – hurt productivity? Do LTNs (Low Traffic Neighborhoods) Reduce Air Pollution? Are policy ideas that can be summarized by three-letter acronyms more acceptable to the public than those, say, that require four?

This last point is ironic – but the point remains. Although clinical trials can tell us with reasonable certainty whether a drug or treatment works, a similar culture of evaluation is generally lacking for other types of intervention, such as crime prevention. Today, research funders are filling the gap by creating “evidence banks” or evidence syntheses: globally accessible one-stop shops for assessing the weight of evidence on a particular topic.

Last month, the Economic and Social Research Council, together with the Wellcome Trust, pledged a total of around £54 million to develop a database and tools that can collate and make sense of evidence in complex areas like climate change and healthy aging. The announcement, Nature reports, was timed to coincide with the United Nations Future Summit, a conference in New York aimed at improving the world for future generations.

Indispensable repositories of good quality information that can feed the political machine are essential. They normalize the role of hard evidence in public life. This is important: the policy pipeline has too often lacked due diligence. This could mean public money being wasted on ineffective ruses, or worse.

Take Scared Straight, a crime prevention program that originated in the United States about 40 years ago and was adopted in the United Kingdom. It was designed to keep teenagers in line by introducing them to prisoners. These alliances with the delinquents were counterproductive. One study showed that children participating in the program were more likely to commit crimes than those who did not participate.

As Stian Westlake, executive chairman of the ESRC, told me, there is “a really tragic lack of evidence available to governments and policymakers on which policies actually work…”. . . (so) when governments spend taxpayer money or try to solve big problems, they are shooting in the dark.” In contrast, he cites the work of the United Kingdom’s Youth Endowment Fund, which evaluates policies that prevent young people from becoming thugs. The fund joined the What Works network, launched by the government in 2013 to refine policymaking in sectors such as crime, education and homelessness.

The network is a wonderful resource. When I was a school principal, I often turned to one of its centers, the Education Endowment Foundation, to inform my views on issues such as homework. But a decade after the creation of the network, more can be done. Evidence can only make a difference if planners know where to look for it and how to apply it to their own work.

The newly announced money adds to the efforts of the renowned Campbell Collaboration, a global nonprofit that brings together social science findings. Artificial intelligence will also play a role. Evidence synthesis involves searching databases for studies; refine them according to their relevance, quality and reliability; extract important data; and boil it all down to a concise conclusion. It can take several months between asking a policy question and receiving a usable answer – in other words, too much time. AI, under human supervision, can speed things up.

Fascinatingly, government officials are experimenting with an AI tool called Redbox Copilot to analyze and summarize government documents. One possibility, an ESRC researcher told Nature, is that Redbox has these evidence banks. AI also allows for continuous updating, enabling summaries of so-called “living” evidence that are perfectly up to date.

As well as creating evidence-based one-stop shops, ministers and civil servants should be expected to use them, with training where necessary.

This echoes the Nolan Principles of Public Life, which implore individuals to “act and make decisions impartially, fairly and based on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias”. Searchable databases also make it possible to identify knowledge gaps and commission research to fill them.

Putting evidence at the forefront of policymaking does not usurp the role of values ​​in how we live, nor does it undermine democracy. Rather, it illuminates possible paths across the decision-making landscape and helps those we elect avoid known impasses.