The Art and Science of Promoting Evidence-Informed Decision-Making: A Global Living Evidence Map

Technical Report

(access the report here)

Effective policy design and implementation are central to socioeconomic development and reduction of inequities. The systematic use of data and evidence to guide decision-making for policy and practice is a major pathway to arriving at more effective policies, programmes, and practices. A range of interventions are applied to enhance such evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM). Little is known, however, about the relative effectiveness of different EIDM interventions resulting in an evidence gap on the evidence for supporting the use of evidence.

To address this gap, we set out to systematically collect, organize, and visualize all the available empirical evidence on what works to support EIDM globally. This evidence map aimed to assess the existing evidence on interventions that support decision-makers' use of evidence to examine the size and nature of the existing evidence base. The evidence map followed a transparent and systematic methodology to curate and visualize the included evidence. This report presents a comprehensive global living evidence map designed to support evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) across various sectors. Created by the Pan-African Collective Evidence (PACE) in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the report provides a robust resource for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to better understand the nature and size of interventions to enhance the use of evidence in decision-making.

Visualisation of the evidence: The evidence is presented in an interactive, user-friendly evidence map, making exploring key insights tailored to specific needs easy. This living evidence map will be regularly updated, ensuring that new research and evolving evidence continue to inform policies worldwide.

Key findings:

• We identified a total of 617 studies meeting the inclusion criteria of our evidence map, on global EIDM interventions to support the use of evidence by decision-makers.

• There is a huge research gap in evaluations assessing whether EIDM interventions have an impact on development outcomes, such as reductions in childhood mortality

• A lack of rigorous counterfactual-based impact evaluations, indicating another research gap.

• The included studies are clustered around three intervention mechanisms: providing access to evidence, interactions between researchers and decision-makers, and building capacity to use evidence.

• The evidence base being dominated by the health sector, by high-income countries, and by the English literature.

Normative gaps identified:

• The EIDM space lacks a shared conceptual framework, a taxonomy of interventions and outcomes, and an agreed set of key indicators and outcome measures of evidence use. and indicators.

• While the current evidence base includes over 600 studies, large knowledge gaps on supporting EIDM remain; more coordination on research commissioning and production on EIDM is needed.

• Collating the evidence base on EIDM to inform intervention design should be a routine process for EIDM advocates. The practice of supporting evidence use should indeed be evidence-informed in its own right.