Evidence and meaning in policy making

Abstract

In 2011, Sense About Science launched a campaign backed by various celebrities, academics and other public figures entitled Ask for Evidence, 'saying that consumers, voters and patients should demand evidence for scientific and medical claims to counter a tide of misinformation' (Sense About Science, 2011).The campaign website provides examples of people asking for evidence on public claims in such disparate policy areas as video game addiction, food waste among single people and the carbon footprint of recycling mobile phones (Sense About Science, 2014).Potential campaign participants are advised that '[w]hen you ask for evidence, ask them about the science behind the claim' (Peters, 2013).The campaign provides an example of the widespread support that the idea of evidence-based policy (EBP) now commands (Rutter, 2012).After all, using evidence as the basis for formulating public policy appears so uncontroversial as to be almost impossible to oppose (for an example to the contrary, see Pile, 2011).Taking EBP at face value in this way implies a rational-technical view of policy making, in which principles for selection, action and evaluation are shared amongst policy actors.Such a view assumes that the 'evidence' in evidence-based policy making is a given, and that if only politicians paid more attention to the evidence, society would see better policy.This special issue of Evidence and Policy follows the 'interpretive turn' 1 in the analysis of policy making to challenge this view: a shift in the object of attention (policy) from being an artefact -clear, fixed and created by 'policy makers' -to a process of meaning making between a range of participants (Hoppe, 1999;Majone, 1989).So if the interpretive approach leads us to focus on meaning, what might this mean for studying EBP? First, it highlights that actors may contest what is meant by 'evidence' as a factor in the policy process.One definition could be that evidence is policy-useful information (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979), but what makes information useful, and how does knowledge become useful information?How does the context in which the information is being used affect what counts as evidence?Second, even if a particular piece of evidence becomes accepted as justification for, or measurement of, a particular policy, it will still hold different meanings for different actors (Yanow, 1996).Third, the meaning of EBP as a paradigm guiding policy makers comes into