Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policymakers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality - of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyse evidence the right ones? This book explains that the dominant methods which are in use now - broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine, like randomised control trials - do not work. They fail because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective.