Background: COVID-19 accentuated an evergreen dilemma in evidence-informed policy making--the imperative to synthesise the best available evidence with limited time to produce high quality synthesis. The pandemic prompted the adaptation of evidence synthesis practices to match the urgency of the crisis, and heightened demand by policy makers,…

Background: In an era of increased polarisation, identity politics and growing reliance on using evidence to make disability policy decisions - evidence-based policymaking - how much do we know about the process by which disability policy decisions are made and the use of evidence therein? Aims and objectives: The objective of this Practice Paper…

Background: Understanding knowledge utilisation in policymaking is a core task for the social and political sciences. However, limitations and biases abound in commonplace approaches to measuring such use. Consequently, we have little systematic evidence of the extent to which knowledge sources are used in policy decisions. Aims and objectives:…

Background: Elected members of the US Congress rely on staff, including fellows with scientific and engineering expertise, to find and interpret information for use in policymaking. Factors that impede, or facilitate, the communication of scientific information within the institution thus can play a critical role in legislative capacity, but there…

Background: Knowledge brokering plays an important role in the evidence-to-policy system, but little is known about whether and how it occurs within government departments. Aims and objectives: Using empirical evidence from one UK government department, this article analyses how knowledge brokering takes place inside the policy making process and…

Risk-based decision-making is widely considered to be the best means of presenting the science of climate change and for developing and presenting climate change evidence for policymaking. This paper examines some of the justifications provided by climate and decision scientists for their preferred approach, and argues that, although risk-based…

Background: Seeing how governments formulate decisions on our behalf is a crucial component of their ability to claim democratic legitimacy. This includes being seen to draw on the knowledge and evidence produced by their civil service policy advisers. Yet much of the advice provided to governments is being increasingly withdrawn from public…

Knowledge co-production is a solution-oriented approach to analysing real-life problems such as making the right decision in a given scenario. The most popular examples come from evidence-based policymaking contexts. Political decisions made in this way rely on specialist expertise co-produced in organisations that can be characterised as Hybrid…

The use of robust research findings in public health policy has been strongly encouraged for bridging the evidence-policy gap. To assess and further promote evidence uptake, understanding how research evidence is being used by decision makers is very important. This systematic review examined primary studies exploring the use of research evidence…

Background: Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction. Aims and objectives: We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers'…

There is continuing interest in using the best available research evidence to inform public health policy. However, all too often efforts to do so rely on mechanistic and unrealistic views of the process by which public policy is made. As a result, traditional dyadic knowledge translation (KT) approaches may not be particularly effective when…

Nudge is an approach to public policy that changes the decision-making environment to encourage citizens to make a particular choice. The approach has been eagerly adopted by administrations around the world, with some governments establishing dedicated nudge units to advance their use. One reason proposed for nudge's popularity is that it…

Background: Indonesia's growth and prosperity as a lower-middle-income country hinges on the ability of policymakers to develop effective public policies based on evidence. Yet Indonesia's policy and regulatory environment does not support the production of high-quality evidence and its use in policymaking. Key points for discussion: This article…

Despite claims that we now live in a post-truth society, it remains commonplace for policy makers to consult research evidence to increase the robustness of decision making. Few scholars of evidence-policy interfaces, however, have used legislatures as sites of study, despite the fact that they play a critical role in modern democracies. There is…

Participating in the growing scholarly attention to the roles of rhetoric and argumentation in policymaking, we examine how the use of research evidence operates in explicitly argumentative legislative hearings characterised by partisanship and polarisation. Conducting a rhetorical analysis of three legislative hearings in the US state of…