April 10, 2018Article

Advancing evidence-informed policymaking: What’s culture got to do with it?

by Abeba Taddese

Global/ Results for All/ 2018/

Results for All recently published this blog – Advancing evidence-informed policymaking: What’s culture got to do with it? – on Apolitical.
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Apolitical is a global platform for policymakers, where public servants can read about what’s working elsewhere and connect with peers and colleagues around the world. It has a particular specialism – and a newsfeed – on government innovation, as well as public servant members from more than 120 countries.

The blog presents some of Results for All’s research to assess the demand for a global network of policymakers who want to share what they’re learning about using evidence in their work.

In the blog, Results for All Executive Director Abeba Taddese writes, ‘In every conversation, we heard about the importance of building or shifting the culture of evidence use. While we expect and assume that organizational culture will be different in varied contexts, we observed an interesting tendency in the policymaking community to speak about culture and evidence use in a way that suggested some universality across policy areas and levels of government. We noted further that in the context of evidence use, culture was often spoken of in broad and vague terms, such as “the culture is not developed enough,” “there is no culture of producing data,” or “mid-level technocrats have a lot of influence, and the ability to shift government culture.”’