The Challenges Facing Evidence-Based Policy Making in Canadian Agriculture

Several governments in Canada have made commitments to adopting evidence-based policy development. Several obstacles to the adoption of this approach have been identified in the policy literature. However, this literature has lacked an economic perspective. This is unfortunate, since economics has produced the most fully developed normative theory of government policy in the social sciences and humanities. The main elements of this theory are the theory of market failure and the theory of non-market failure, and the integration of those two elements in what Charles Wolf called implementation analysis. The Austrian economics tradition also offers the implications of what is often called Hayek’s knowledge problem and the lessons learned from the economic calculation debate as contributions to the understanding of the challenges facing the application of evidence-based policy. The authors propose adding four economic elements to the current model of evidence-based policy development: (1) providing sufficient and convincing evidence that a market failure has occurred; (2) providing sufficient and convincing evidence that a non-market failure is unlikely to occur or if it does occur the damages from the non-market failure will be less serious than the harm resulting from the market failure; (3) an appreciation of the distributed and conflicted character of social knowledge; and (4) the technical challenges involved in constructing a social preference order. The authors illustrate the application of the economic approach to evidence-based policy with an example from rural land use policy in Ontario.