Introduction: the crisis of ‘evidence-based policy’

The past two decades witnessed the international re-emergence, following the disappointment of earlier US and UK efforts (Rein, 1980), of an extremely persuasive idea – the notion that policy decisions should be ‘evidence-based’. From early official government commitments to ‘evidence-based policy’ (EBP) in the UK (Cabinet Office, 1999), the emergence of ‘boundary organisations’ spanning research and policy in the Netherlands (for example, Bekker et al, 2010; Van Egmond et al, 2011), and the creation of a new position of Chief Scientific Adviser by the European Commission President (Barroso, 2009) – examples of efforts to achieve a better relationship between science and policy are ubiquitous. These efforts have stimulated a wealth of studies explicitly concerned with better understanding the relationship between research, knowledge and policy, as evidenced in the pages of journals such as Evidence & Policy and Implementation Science. Despite this, there are very few successful examples of EBP (Smith, 2013). For many observers, this failure simply reflects the primacy of politics in policy making (for example, Bambra, 2013; Pawson, 2006). Yet, as Geoff Mulgan (previously adviser to then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) argues, in democratically elected countries, ‘the people, and the politicians who represent them, have every right to ignore evidence’ (Mulgan, 2005: 224). There are, in short, crucial tensions between the desire to use the best available evidence in policy and the need for sufficient citizen engagement in or, at the very least, support for policies.

The weaknesses of EBP are currently being magnified by rising public disillusionment with traditional elites, as epitomised in a recent declaration from a British politician that people have ‘had enough of experts’ (Gove, quoted in Mance, 2016; Pisani-Ferry, 2016). Such assertions, combined with the rise of populist political parties across Europe, suggest that efforts to enhance the consideration given to scientific evidence in decision making (which have been particularly strong in public health, as discussed below) are now facing serious challenges. For Saltelli and Giampietro, the solution is radical and ‘implies abandoning dreams of prediction, control and optimization’ associated with EBP ‘and moving instead to an open exploration of a broader set of plausible and relevant stories’ (2015: 1). This chapter takes a somewhat less radical perspective.