Opening up evidence-based policy: exploring citizen and service user expertise

Abstract

Evidence-based policy (EBP) and public participation often seem to sit in uneasy tension in democratic systems. Geoff Mulgan (previously advisor to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) argues that in democratically elected countries, ‘the people, and the politicians who represent them, have every right to ignore evidence’ (Mulgan, 2005: 224). While a dilution of the agenda towards ‘evidence-informed policy’ (Hunter, 2009) reduces this tension, it sidesteps some important intellectual debates with which Evidence & Policy is centrally concerned. How can, and should, we judge the credibility of ‘evidence’ for policy? And what role is there in this for knowledge generated, not through scientific process (however defined), but through the everyday experiences of publics at the ‘sharp end’ of public policy? Since 2016, when ‘post-truth’ was proclaimed by some as the word of the year (Braun and Dodge, 2018), rhetoric from some prominent politicians, including the President of the United States, has caused some to argue that the involvement of experts in politics has reached its zenith; that we are witnessing the ‘death’ of expertise (Nichols, 2017). While this view is contested (Dommett and Pearce, 2019), there remain clear and pressing tensions between commitments to EBP, and the need for citizen engagement with those policies (Saltelli and Giampietro, 2017)