Article by Anjana Ahuja: “Modern life is full of urgent questions to which governments should be seeking answers. Does working from home — WFH — damage productivity? Do LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods) cut air pollution? Are policy ideas that can be summed up in three-letter acronyms more palatable to the public than those, say Ulez, requiring four?
That last one is tongue-in-cheek — but the point stands. While clinical trials can tell us reasonably confidently whether a drug or treatment works, a similar culture of evaluation is generally lacking for other types of intervention, such as crime prevention. Now research funders are stepping into the gap to build “evidence banks” or evidence syntheses: globally accessible one-stop shops for assessing the weight of evidence on a particular topic.
Last month, the Economic and Social Research Council, together with the Wellcome Trust, pledged a total of around £54mn to develop a database and tools that can collate and make sense of evidence in complex areas like climate change and healthy ageing. The announcement, Nature reports, was timed to coincide with the UN Summit of the Future, a conference in New York geared to improving the world for future generations.
Go-to repositories of good quality information that can feed the policy machine are essential. They normalise the role of robust evidence in public life. This matters: the policy pipeline has too often lacked due diligence. That can mean public money being squandered on ineffective wheezes, or worse.
Take Scared Straight, a crime prevention scheme originating in the US around 40 years ago and adopted in the UK. It was designed to keep teens on the straight and narrow by introducing them to prisoners. Those dalliances with delinquents were counterproductive. A review showed that children taking part were more likely to end up committing crimes than those who did not participate in the scheme…(More)”.