Ethical expertise and pandemic governance: (how) did the UK government include ethical guidance in their COVID-19 response?

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Theresa Sommer, Sarah Ball and Jessica Pykett

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Ethical moments and institutional expertise in UK Government COVID-19 pandemic policy responses: where, when and how is ethical advice sought?’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges for governments, policy advisors and citizens alike. Wide-reaching and contentious decisions had to be made at a moment’s notice while evidence about the virus was scarce, and at times involved conflicting knowledge claims. Under these conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, questions have emerged about how values and ethical advice played roles in the decision-making process.

In our Evidence & Policy article, we look beyond the discussion of scientific advice and ask where, when and how ethical advice was sought. The article is based on documentary analysis of policy papers and documents published by UK government advisory committees and a workshop with UK government ethics advisors and researchers. Our analysis focuses on both the temporal and spatial dimensions of ethical advice during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. By asking when and how ethical advice was sought, we set out to account for the (changing) role of ethics and point out distinct ethical moments and stages of how ethics were taken into consideration.

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The changing culture of evidence use in local government

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Mandy Cheetham

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘What I really want is academics who want to partner and who care about the outcome’: findings from a mixed-methods study of evidence use in local government in England’.

Background

It is recognised that closer interaction between those working in policy and practice and academic researchers increases the likelihood of evidence being used to improve outcomes, but progress remains slow. Policymakers and researchers continue to be seen (unhelpfully) as occupying separate worlds, with limited research undertaken into efforts to address this perceived division.

In this blog post, we outline the main messages from a recently published article in Evidence & Policy, which draws on a collaborative, mixed methods study funded by the Health Foundation: Local Authority Champions of Research (LACoR). We explore evidence use in the context of local government from the perspectives of those who work there.

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Understanding organisations that provide evidence for policy

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Eleanor MacKillop and James Downe

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge brokering organisations: a new way of governing evidence’.

New organisations have emerged in different countries to help inform policymaking. Different from think tanks and academic research centres, these Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) attempt to influence policy by mobilising evidence. Our research examines how their origins and roles are rooted in politics, and explores their need to build credibility and legitimacy in their policy community. Despite examining KBOs on different continents – the Africa Centre for Evidence, the Mowat Centre in Canada and the Wales Centre for Public Policy – we show how they have become a tool mobilised in similar ways by their respective governments.

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Entrepreneurship research makes a difference to policy, despite appearances to the contrary

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Steve Johnson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The policy impact of entrepreneurship research: challenging received wisdom’.

Conventional wisdom across the entrepreneurship research community is that policymakers take little notice of our research findings, preferring to follow the ideological inclinations and electoral ambitions of politicians and to take most notice of those who shout loudest. Policies are therefore not always evidence-based and as a result may not achieve their stated objectives.

This argument has some validity. There are many examples of research that questions the rationale for and impact of existing policies or makes policy recommendations that are subsequently rejected or ignored by policymakers. My recently published article in Evidence and Policy explores entrepreneurship research and policy in the UK over 30 years and finds that, despite appearances to the contrary, there are however grounds for optimism among those of us who believe that research can, does and should have some impact on policy.

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Meeting in brackets – how policy travels through meetings

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Sophie Thunus

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Meeting in brackets: how mental health policy travels through meetings’.

Meetings matter. They produce the policies for which they are organised. Yet meetings are taken for granted. We organise them, we participate in them, and we complain about them, especially when they do not achieve their purpose. However, we rarely question them: we continue to go to meetings that seem ineffective without asking why, and without wondering what these meetings might do to the policy process to which they relate, and to their participants.

The concept of meeting in brackets helps us to understand how meetings make policy. It has four implications, which have been derived from a multi-year sociological study of the implementation of a Belgian mental health policy.

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‘Non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation

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Adam Hannah, Jordan Tchilingirian, Linda Botterill and Katie Attwell

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research’.

The ability to locate, comprehend, and discriminate between competing sources of knowledge is a major challenge for policymakers, particularly in times of crisis.

In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we argue that to better understand these ‘knowledge challenges’, policy scholarship should also consider ‘non-knowledge’. Examining non-knowledge involves investigating the strategies, practices and cultures that surround what is not known. Non-knowledge can result from genuine lack of knowledge or strategic avoidance.

Three forms of non-knowledge are most relevant for studies of public policy: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation.

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Increasing the reach of science using tailored and targeted messages

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Taylor Scott and Jessica Pugel

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

We know that policymakers are most likely to use research evidence when the evidence fits what they need at that time, and that email is a cost-effective way of sharing such research. But researchers aren’t the only ones in legislators’ inboxes – constituents and special interest groups also seek out legislators’ attention and their inboxes. Thus, we need to understand how to better reach legislators with science so that we can cut through the noise and provide trustworthy research evidence at the right time. This is especially true during moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when our study occurred, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

Although the literature theorises that policymakers use research they deem as timely and personally relevant, there has been a lack of practical strategies for improving perceived relevance. Through four experimental trials with US legislators across four issue areas (COVID-19, violence, exploitation and policing), we found support for one such strategy: including the legislators’ name or state/district name in the subject line. In three of the four trials, tailored emails were engaged with more often.

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What is ‘evidence’? What is ‘policy’? Conceptualising the terms and their connections

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Sonja Blum and Valérie Pattyn

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How are evidence and policy conceptualised, and how do they connect? A qualitative systematic review of public policy literature’.

Are policies based on available evidence? Are academic experts willing to provide their expertise? What enables or constrains the effective use of evidence for policymaking?

Public policy scholarship has puzzled over such questions of the evidence and policy relationship for decades. Over time, ever more differentiated branches of public policy research have developed, which complement and enrich each other. However, they have also developed their own perspectives, languages, and understandings of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections.

Such differences in terminology and employed concepts are more than ‘just words’. Rather, attentiveness to careful conceptualisations helps to set clear boundaries for theory development and empirical research, to avoid misunderstandings, and enable dialogue across different literatures. Against that backdrop, in our article published in Evidence & Policy, we conducted a qualitative systematic review of recent public policy scholarship with the aim to trace different conceptualisations of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections. To be included in our review, the research articles needed to address some sort of evidence, some sort of policy, and had to deal with some sort of connection between the two (a list of all included research articles is available online). The review followed all steps of the PRISMA methodology.

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Call for papers: Evidence & Policy special issue ‘Learning from failure in knowledge exchange’

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Rationale and scope:

While the evidence base on successful practices in knowledge exchange is rapidly growing, much less attention has been given in the academic literature to documenting and reflecting on failures in trying to exchange different types of evidence between academics, practice partners and policy makers. However, learning from failures is just as important, if not more crucial, than celebrating successes.

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Framing the evidence on sugar taxes in Germany: lessons for public health

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Katharina Selda Moerschel, Peter von Philipsborn, Elizabeth McGill and Benjamin Hawkins

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evidence-related framing in the German debate on sugar taxation: a qualitative framing analysis and international comparison’.

Although sugar taxation is considered an important evidence-based intervention in the fight against obesity, some countries, such as Germany, have not yet implemented such a tax. While evidence does matter in policy processes, it does not speak for itself; it must be interpreted and used in specific contexts. What this context looks like, i.e. the framing of the underlying problem and the policy objectives, depends on the goals of the policy actor. To better understand how stakeholders in Germany argue for and against sugar taxation and how they utilised evidence, we examined how evidence was framed in 114 newspaper articles and compared our findings with similar studies from Mexico, the US and the UK.

German stakeholders demonstrated similar patterns of evidence use and evidence claims to those found in Mexico, the US and the UK. Tax supporters framed obesity as being (at least partly) attributable to sugar consumption and identified a reduction in sugar consumption as a key policy objective. They cited Mexico and the UK as main examples of successful reduction in sugar intake and framed sugar taxation as an effective means to tackle obesity in combination with other interventions.

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