Tensions between policy and evidence

Talk to any health and social care researcher or to any policy maker, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there are growing tensions in the relationship between policy and evidence. For policy makers, the stereotype of the ‘ivory tower’ academic is alive and well, writing his articles (and the stereotype probably is a ‘he’) for obscure academic journals that only three or four people across the world will ever read. Such individuals seem to ‘earn’ their research funding under a regime that frowns on accessibility and relevance (almost as if the fewer people who read a piece of research, the more prestigious it must be). These outputs are always long and impenetrable – why use one word when 8,000 will suffice? Ask an academic a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question, and the answer will invariably be ‘it depends’ – and even this answer might take three years to produce.

For academics, the typical policy maker is a charlatan, drawing only occasionally on research when it seems to suit a preconceived political end. Interests are only ever short term and change as rapidly as the personnel and as the front pages of the papers. Most of the policy officers involved are implausibly young and seem to lack any sense of history (as if the world somehow began in 1997 or perhaps now in 2010). Anyone engaging in long-term policy evaluations often finds that the questions posed at the start are rarely the questions that policy makers want answered at the end, that decisions are made well before the research reports and that most studies are obsolete long before they are even signed off. There is also nothing more dispiriting than completing a 500-page final report, only to be asked to produce a one-page bullet-pointed summary for ‘the Minister’.

Ironically, disillusionment with the relationship between policy and evidence seems to be growing at the very time that policy and practice are trying to be more ‘evidence-based’ (and at the same time as changes in research funding are prompting even reluctant academics to consider the ‘impact’ of their work).