Article by Mahvish Shaukat et al: “Many governments and policymakers rely on policy-advising organisations – international development banks, think tanks, ministries – to translate academic research into actionable recommendations. Yet better evidence does not automatically produce better policy. Even when high-quality research exists, it must travel through layers of hierarchy inside a policy-advising organisation, both upward and downward. A junior analyst may surface a finding that never reaches the decision-maker who could act on it. Equally, a senior leader’s review of the evidence may never filter down to the operational level. Each step in the chain is a potential bottleneck; accordingly, the evidence-to-policy pipeline increasingly impedes the use of rigorous research in practice (DellaVigna et al. 2024, Garcia-Hombrados et al. 2025, Bonargent 2024, Rao 2024).
A growing evidence base examines how policymakers engage with evidence (Vivalt and Coville 2023, Toma and Bell 2024), and how training can build capacity for evidence use (Crowley et al. 2021, Mehmood et al. 2024), but much less is known about what drives evidence diffusion within organisations. Who shares evidence with whom? Does it depend on where in the hierarchy evidence first lands? Do concerns about how peers might react shape whether sharing happens? These are the questions we set out to answer…(More)”.
