Evidence-Based Policy-Making: From Data to Decision-Making

Programme Description

In times of increasing populism and contestation of politics, reliable information play a vital role for well-informed policy-making based on evidence rather than emotions and fake news. The popular legitimacy of any political system around the world today, maybe more than ever, hence depends on its effective capacity to successfully deliver good and targeted outcomes as a policy-shaper and lawmaker based on facts. These outcomes have to be based on reliable data in order to make political decisions understandable, assessable, sustainable and future-oriented. Within the preparatory and scrutiny processes of policy-making, policy proposals, legislative acts and implementation arrangements are increasingly assessed and evaluated on the basis of factual evidence and statistical data. Such evidence-based monitoring is increasingly recognised as a complex steering mode in itself that resulted from changing governance patterns supranationalisation and globalisation. In this view, evidence-based policy-making reflects the need to re-structure the interaction of political actors of different institutional origin and political levels and represents an influential policy instrument at the border of the politics and policy dimensions of multilevel political systems. While the demand for independent sources of evidence and expertise in policy-making has hence grown enormously in the past, the landscape of data sources and the ways how to best inject evidence into policy-making have grown exuberantly and became easily confusing for any non-data scientist. The Executive Training Seminar contributed to a better understanding of different modes and instruments of evidence-based policy-making. It examined recent developments in evidence-based policy-making, data science and policy evaluation, including various tools of impact and implementation assessment, scientific evaluation, strategic foresight, the policy-oriented use of large data resources and data visualisation. The main purpose of the Executive Training Seminar was to provide fresh ideas on how to develop a convincing toolbox for providing evidence for policymakers, including critical assessments of the limits of empirical and data evidence in defining new policies. Through presentations, case studies, and ‘hands on’ work, attendees gained a greater appreciation and understanding of main issues related to evidence-based policy-making.