Shaxson, Louise, Hood, Rick, Boaz, Annette and Head, Brian (2024) How do policy officials allocate their resources to support evidence-informed policymaking? Towards a research agenda. (Working Paper) Kingston upon Thames, U.K. : Kingston University. 27 p. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Background: Studies from a range of countries and from different bodies of public policy scholarship have improved our understanding of evidence-informed policymaking as a complex political process. It is shaped by relations between policy officials and evidence providers, by relations between different groups of policy officials, and by organisational and administrative mechanisms. Aims and objectives: There has been little analysis of the resource implications of this complexity: how officials in government departments manage their human, financial and other resources to improve how they use evidence to inform policy decisions. Our study investigates this apparent gap in the literature. Methods: A three-stage ‘hourglass’ review was used to search for empirical research on how policy officials allocate their resources to support evidence use. Stage 1 mapped contributing literatures, Stage 2 used the PRISMA protocol to search seven databases and Stage 3 reviewed a wider range of studies. Findings: The Stage 2 review found no studies which used empirical data to analyse how effectively resources are managed to support evidence use in policymaking. However, the Stage 3 review, which relaxed two of the PRISMA criteria, identified sixteen studies that contributed to an iterative, reflexive exploration of the research question. Discussion and conclusion: The issue of how policy officials allocate their resources to support evidence-informed policymaking appears to have been overlooked, but the Stage 3 review uncovered a set of interlinked issues worth of further study. We propose four themes that could shape a research agenda to deepen our understanding of how evidence-informed policymaking is practised inside government departments.
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