Transforming evidence for policy and practice: creating space for new conversations

For decades, the question of how evidence influences policy and practice has captured our attention, cutting across disciplines and policy/practice domains. All academics, funders, and publics have a stake in this conversation. There are pockets of great expertise about evidence production and use, which all too often remains siloed. Practical and empirical lessons are not shared across disciplinary boundaries and theoretical and conceptual leaps remain contained. This means that we are not making the most of vast and increasing investment in knowledge production. Because existing lessons about how to do and use research well are not shared, funders and researchers are poorly equipped to realise the potential utility of research, and waste resources on—for example—ineffective strategies to create research impact. It also means that the scarce resources available to study evidence production and use are misspent on overly-narrow or already-answered questions. Patchy and intermittent funding has failed to build broadly relevant empirical or theoretical knowledge about how to make better use of evidence, or to build the communities required to act on this knowledge. To transform how we as a community think about what evidence is, how to generate it, and how to use it well, we must better capture lessons being learned in our different research and practice communities. We must find ways to share this knowledge, to embed it in the design of our research systems and practices, and work jointly to establish genuine knowledge gaps about evidence production and use. This comment sets out one vision of how that might be accomplished, and what might result.