Uncovering and understanding the practices of evidence-informed policymaking

In this thesis I set out to uncover and understand how evidence-informed policymaking is practiced inside a UK government department. The concept is well established in academic discussions of public policymaking. However, much of the analysis has focused on processes of communicating evidence to policy rather than on developing an internal perspective on evidence use in policy. I present an inside view of the daily activities that comprise evidence-informed policymaking inside government departments through five research papers, presented in two themes. My data is a mix of document analysis and empirical evidence gathered from twenty five interviews I conducted between 2019 and 2021 with senior officials from the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

In the first theme I analyse how government departments manage the human and financial resources allocated to them to acquire, assess, interpret and use evidence in the policymaking process. Effective resource management is a key concern for the officials responsible for a department’s evidence base, but managing Defra’s evidence budget was a complex, constantly negotiated, contentious process because it influenced what evidence was available to each policy team and shaped the institutional structures which facilitated the relationships between Defra’s evidence specialists and its policymakers.

In the second theme I explore where evidence and policy interact inside government departments and how that interaction is performed by the officials responsible for ensuring that policies are evidence-informed. Inside Defra, many of the relationships between its evidence specialists and its policymakers aligned well with our understanding of knowledge brokering, creating many opportunities for interaction between evidence and policy. My findings suggest that brokering could be a similarly important function in other government departments.

I found a close relationship between the two research themes because how Defra managed its evidence base laid the foundations upon which brokering relationships developed. Evidence informed policymaking has been theorised as a political and a relational process: my evidence suggest it is also an organisational one. I conclude the thesis with suggestions for a programme of collaborative research, conducted with policy officials, to further expand our understanding of the organisational factors shaping evidence use inside the policy process.