Ethical Evidence And Policymaking

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This important book offers practical advice for using evidence and research in policymaking. The book has two aims. First, it builds a case for ethics and global values in research and knowledge exchange, and second, it examines specific policy areas and how evidence can guide practice. The book covers important policy areas including the GM debate, the environment, Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. Each chapter assesses the ethical challenges, the status of evidence in explaining or describing the issue and possible solutions to the problem. The book will enable policymakers and their advisors to seek evidence for their decisions from research that has been conducted ethically and with integrity.

This Open Access book provides illustrative case studies that explore various research and innovation topics that raise challenges requiring ethical reflection and careful policymaking responses. The cases highlight diverse ethical challenges and provide lessons for the various options available for policymaking. Cases are drawn from many fields, including artificial intelligence, space science, energy, data protection, professional research practice and pandemic planning. Case studies are particularly helpful with ethical issues to provide crucial context. This book reflects the ambiguity of ethical dilemmas in contemporary policymaking. Analyses reflect current debates where consensus has not yet been achieved. These cases illustrate key points made throughout the PRO-RES EU-funded project from which they arise: that ethical judgement is a fluid enterprise, where values, principles and standards must constantly adjust to new situations, new events and new research developments. This book is an indispensable aid to policymaking that addresses, and/or uses evidence from, novel research developments.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This important book offers practical advice for using evidence and research in policymaking. The book has two aims. First, it builds a case for ethics and global values in research and knowledge exchange, and second, it examines specific policy areas and how evidence can guide practice. The book covers important policy areas including the GM debate, the environment, Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. Each chapter assesses the ethical challenges, the status of evidence in explaining or describing the issue and possible solutions to the problem. The book will enable policymakers and their advisors to seek evidence for their decisions from research that has been conducted ethically and with integrity.

The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: ‘rational’ ways to gather enough evidence, and ‘irrational’ decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.

This book gathers an expert group of social scientists to showcase emerging forms of analysis and evaluation for public policy analysis. Each chapter highlights a different method or approach, putting it in context and highlighting its key features before illustrating its application and potential value to policy makers. Aimed at upper-level undergraduates in public policy and social work, it also has much to offer policy makers and practitioners themselves.

This open access book provides a set of conceptual, empirical, and comparative chapters that apply a public policy perspective to investigate the political and institutional factors driving the use of evidence to inform health policy in low, middle, and high income settings. The work presents key findings from the Getting Research Into Policy (GRIP-Health) project: a five year, six country, programme of work supported by the European Research Council. The chapters further our understanding of evidence utilisation in health policymaking through the application of theories and methods from the policy sciences. They present new insights into the roles and importance of factors such as issue contestation, institutional arrangements, logics of appropriateness, and donor influence to explore individual cases and comparative experiences in the use of evidence to inform health policy. Justin Parkhurst is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (the LSE)'s Department of Health Policy, UK. He has conducted research on a range of global health policy issues and on the politics of evidence. He served as the Principal Investigator of the GRIP-Health programme of work. Benjamin Hawkins is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. His research focuses on the role of research evidence and corporate actors in health policy making. In addition, he works on European integration, multi-level governance international trade and political economy approaches to health policy. Stefanie Ettelt is Associate Professor at the Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Her work examines the tensions between structure and agency in explaining the influence of evidence and research on policy-making and health system governance, particularly from a comparative perspective.

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.

This handbook is a ‘one-stop shop’ for current information, issues and challenges in the fields of research ethics and scientific integrity. It provides a comprehensive coverage of research and integrity issues, both within researchers’ ‘home’ discipline and in relation to similar concerns in other disciplines. The handbook covers common elements shared by disciplines and research professions, such as consent, privacy, data management, fraud, and plagiarism. The handbook also includes contributions and perspectives from academics from various disciplines, treating issues specific to their fields. Readers are able to quickly source the most comprehensive and up-to-date information, protagonists, issues and challenges in the field. Experienced researchers keen to assess their own perspectives, as well as novice researchers aiming to establish the field, will equally find the handbook of interest and practical benefit. It saves them a great deal of time in sourcing the disparate available material in these fields and it is the first ‘port of call’ for a wide range of researchers, research advisors, funding agencies and research reviewers.The most important feature is the handbook’s ability to provide practical advice and guidance to researchers in a wide range of disciplines and professions to help them ‘think through’ their approach to difficult questions related to the principles, values and standards they need to bring to their research practice.