What is evidence-based policy and practice?
Print version
The evidence-based approach to public and social policy is built around the belief that better quality decisions will be made in public and social policy if the process is informed by a good knowledge of the issue in hand. This simple idea has proved to be very complex in practice, and EBPP covers a wide range of issues, including:
- What constitutes good evidence?
- What part does (and could or should) it play in decision making?
- How best can rigorous new evidence be generated?
- How can existing evidence be found and reviewed for its policy and practice lessons?
- How best can evidence be transferred from reviewers to policy makers and practitioners?
- How can we discover whether evidence has made an impact?
Where to find more
The literature in the EBPP bibliography, including contributions from our peer reviewed journal, Evidence & Policy, covers these and many other related issues.