This report is a comprehensive examination of the current state and future recommendations for the global evidence ecosystem. Focusing on the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada, it outlines the need for better evidence-informed public policies across several sectors, such as education, health, and criminal justice. The report emphasizes the uneven investment in evidence generation, with healthcare and defense receiving the most funding, while other areas such as education and social protection lag behind. Key challenges include the slow production of high-quality evidence, its lack of relevance to pressing policy needs, and barriers to adoption by policymakers.
The report calls for increased international collaboration to address these challenges and proposes several strategic initiatives. These include the establishment of a Shared Evaluation Fund to support cross-national evaluations of promising interventions and recommendations for more streamlined reporting protocols to facilitate the sharing of policy-relevant research. By leveraging collective resources, the report argues that countries can close evidence gaps, reduce research waste, and improve public service delivery globally.
Authors
- Pages
- 84
- Published in
- United Kingdom
Table of Contents
- Foreword 2
- Table of contents 5
- Executive Summary Strengthening the Global Evidence Ecosystem 6
- Acknowledgements 11
- Introduction 12
- A Framework for Evidence 13
- Methodology 14
- Limitations 15
- Structure of this Report 15
- Section 1 The Supply of Evidence 17
- Global Spending on Evidence Production 17
- The Quantity and Quality of Evidence 19
- Primary evidence 19
- Secondary evidence 21
- An overall assessment of evidence strength 24
- Summary 25
- Section 2 Barriers to Adoption 27
- Relevance 29
- Timeliness 31
- Clarity and Context 31
- Rigour 32
- Capability and Resource Constraints 33
- Skills 33
- Cost 34
- Sources of evidence 34
- Section 3 The Case for Collaboration - our recommendations 37
- Primary Evidence Increasing Production and Dissemination 39
- Recommendation 1 Establish a Shared Evaluation Fund to evaluate important and novel interventions 10-50 million 39
- Recommendation 2 Promote standardised reporting and publication protocols for policy-relevant research and trials 0.5 - 1 million 41
- Secondary Evidence Advancing Quality and Relevance 42
- Recommendation 3 Conduct evidence gap maps across priority policy areas 10-30 million 43
- Recommendation 4 Conduct evidence syntheses in the form of meta Living Evidence Reviews meta-LERs for high priority policy areas 50-100 million 45
- Boosting Evidence Adoption 49
- Recommendation 5 Strengthen international professional networks and institutions focused on accelerating the transfer of knowledge between countries 5-20 million 50
- Recommendation 6 Research on applied research translation and adoption 1-5 million 52
- Section 4 Options for Delivery - Institutions and Program Cost 56
- Institutions 56
- 1. Loose collaboration 57
- 2. Task an existing institution 57
- 3. Create a new institution 58
- Costs options 59
- Full High intensity model 59
- Medium intensity model 60
- Low Intensity model Minimum Viable Product 61
- Summary Institutional form and funding 62
- Conclusion 64
- Next steps 64
- Appendices 65
- Appendix 1 Terms of reference 65
- Objectives as agreed with the four partner countries 65
- Role of the steering group 65
- Appendix 2 Methodology 65
- Semi-structured interviews 65
- Survey with policy makers 66
- COFOG Level 2 re-categorisation 67
- Appendix 3 RD compared to total expenditure including the top 10 charities 70
- Appendix 4 Diagnostic of policy areas 72
- Appendix 5 Glossary of terms 84
