[EQ] Evidence and Healthy Public Policy: Insights from Health and Political Sciences

Evidence and Healthy Public Policy: Insights from Health and Political Sciences

 

Patrick Fafard, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
 Research Fellow, Canadian Policy Research Networks

National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy - May 2008

 

Available online as PDF file [33p.] at: http://www.cprn.org/documents/50036_EN.pdf

 

“……This paper focuses on the requirements of healthy public policy, and more importantly the role of evidence, especially scientific evidence in the development of such policies. Simply put, this paper offers a critical account of the extent to which scientific evidence can have an impact on public policy. Drawing on health sciences literature on healthy public policy and political science literature on policy-making, this paper seeks to build a bridge between the worldview of health

sciences4 and the worldview of political (and policy) science in order to offer some insight into how policy gets made and thereby offer some guideposts to those who wish to develop and promote healthy public policy. In particular, this paper focuses on two linked questions.

 

First, in order to provide advice to those who might wish to promote healthy public policies, what do we know about how policy gets made and how and where evidence is most effectively used? Specifically, what are some of the available theories, or absent formal theories, models and frameworks, of the policy process and what role does evidence play in each?

 

Second, building on the contemporary preoccupation with evidence-based decision-making (and, at least in some quarters, evidence-based public policy), in thinking about how public policy is made, what constitutes “evidence” and what is the role of evidence in the policy process?.........”

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 MODELS OF POLICY-MAKING — THE VIEW FROM HEALTH SCIENCES 4

2 MODELS OF POLICY-MAKING — THE STAGES MODEL

2.1 Evidence and agenda setting

2.2 Evidence and policy formulation

2.3 Evidence and decision-making

2.4 Evidence and policy implementation

2.5 Evidence and policy-making in a stages model — General observations

3 MODELS OF POLICY-MAKING — THE ADVOCACY COALITION FRAMEWORK AND THE ARGUMENTATIVE TURN

3.1 Advocacy coalition framework

3.2 Evidence in advocacy coalition frameworks

3.3 The argumentative turn and a deliberative approach to policy-making

3.4 Evidence in discursive policy-making

CONCLUSIONS

REFERENCES

 

 

 

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