Evidence for effective policy

Throughout the entire policymaking journey it is important to move beyond limited assumptions about what counts as evidence. Rigorous, evidence-informed policymaking remains essential to effective policymaking. Public servants must ground their policy advice and program design in robust evidence to ensure government interventions are effective, accountable, and serve the public good. However, our understanding of what constitutes valid evidence has evolved significantly, particularly as we confront complex, place-based challenges that demand local knowledge and contextual understanding. Althaus (2020, p. 510) argues that the quest for evidence-based policymaking has sometimes created an unhelpful “disconnection between evidence and argument” when in reality, public servants need both technical knowledge and the capacity for persuasive reasoning that connects empirical information with human values and community needs. Rather than viewing evidence simply as objective facts separate from values, effective policymaking recognises that evidence and values are inherently connected—the challenge is not to eliminate values from policy analysis, but to make explicit how different forms of knowledge help us understand complex problems and identify promising solutions. Traditional western hierarchies of evidence—with systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials at the apex, descending through expert opinion to anecdotal observation at the base—emerged from specific Enlightenment-era philosophical assumptions that privileged reductionist, compartmentalised, and quantitative approaches. While valuable in certain contexts like clinical medicine, these hierarchies struggle to accommodate holistic, place-based, relational, and qualitative understandings when applied universally across all policy domains. They favour knowledge that can be decontextualised and expressed quantitatively, inadvertently excluding legitimate forms of local, experiential, and culturally-embedded knowledge. As policy challenges become increasingly complex—addressing climate change, regional inequality, social cohesion, and community resilience— the limitations of narrow frameworks become apparent. Place-based policymaking recognises that effective solutions must be tailored to local contexts, cultures, economies, and relationships, requiring us to privilege local knowledge alongside broader evidence bases. The importance of contextual knowledge has been demonstrated across diverse settings: from Indigenous land management practices that successfully address biodiversity and bushfire challenges, to ground-level information from Ukrainian communities that proves essential for humanitarian response and cannot be replaced by satellite imagery or distant analysis alone. Public servants must develop sophisticated frameworks for incorporating diverse evidence sources while maintaining critical discernment. This means recognizing that different communities and cultures have developed legitimate systems for producing, validating, and transmitting knowledge (Althaus, 2020)—whether through oral tradition, embodied practice, community memory, or local expertise. Knowledge may be expressed through different mediums and privilege different values: relationality over extraction, ongoing responsibility over one-time consultation, holistic understanding over compartmentalised analysis. Incorporating such evidence requires institutional reforms including genuine co-design partnerships, respecting community agency over knowledge sharing, and valuing local expertise (Althaus, 2020). However, epistemological openness must be balanced with rigorous critical analysis, particularly in an era of misinformation, disinformation, and deliberate manipulation. The challenge is remaining open to non-traditional evidence sources while asking: Who holds this knowledge? How was it generated and validated? What power dynamics are at play? Is this shared in good faith? Does it align with or contradict other reliable sources? Public servants must be vigilant against fake news and coordinated disinformation campaigns masquerading as “local knowledge” or “alternative perspectives”. A path forward is toward what Althaus (2020, p. 190) calls “contextual public administration”—being attentive to culture, context, and timing while celebrating multiple types of knowledge as holding value. The antidote to misinformation is not retreating into narrow scientism, but cultivating broader evidence literacy that recognises multiple valid knowledge systems while developing critical capacity to distinguish genuine wisdom from manufactured narratives. This does not mean abandoning rigorous standards or accepting all claims uncritically— rather, it means expanding our definition of rigor to include different forms of validity and recognising that the best policy emerges when diverse knowledge systems inform each other (Althaus, 2020). For place- based initiatives, environmental management, health, justice, regional development, and many other domains, incorporating diverse forms of evidence is essential for effective, legitimate, and sustainable outcomes. We suggest public servants should approach this work with both intellectual humility and genuine curiosity, recognising that respectfully and critically engaging with local and diverse knowledge can transform our capacity to address complex policy challenges. One practical tool for operationalising contextual public administration’s approach to diverse forms of evidence is the Impact Gaps Canvas, developed by Daniela Papi-Thornton at Oxford’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (Papi-Thornton, n.d.). The canvas provides a structured framework that explicitly values multiple types of evidence and knowledge systems when understanding policy challenges. In mapping the challenge landscape, it requires public servants to consider not only quantifiable impacts but also systems dynamics, power relationships (who holds the status quo in place), historical context, and potential unintended consequences—forms of evidence often excluded from traditional hierarchies. When mapping the solutions landscape, the canvas directs attention to practitioner knowledge, community experience of what has and hasn’t worked, and the relational connections between efforts (Papi- Thornton, n.d.). This approach directly addresses Althaus’s (2020) critique that narrow evidence frameworks favour decontextualised, quantitative knowledge while inadvertently excluding legitimate forms of local, experiential, and culturally-embedded understanding. The Impact Gaps Canvas embodies contextual public administration by treating evidence gathering as inherently place-based and systems- oriented rather than universal and reductionist. At the macro level, it asks public servants to identify what knowledge is missing across entire policy ecosystems, whose voices are absent from problem definitions, and how diverse evidence sources and solution efforts might be better connected and learned from (Papi-Thornton, n.d.). At the micro level, it encourages deep exploration of why specific initiatives failed—often revealing gaps in understanding local contexts, community needs, or cultural factors that traditional evidence hierarchies might dismiss as “anecdotal.”