The art and science of promoting evidence-informed decision-making: a global living evidence map

Overview

Effective policy design and implementation are central to socioeconomic development and reduction of inequities. The systematic use of data and evidence to guide decision-making for policy and practice is a major pathway to arriving at more effective policies, programmes, and practices. The present evidence map aimed to assess the existing evidence on interventions that support decision-makers’ use of evidence to examine the size and nature of the existing evidence base in the area. Despite the large number of studies found, a number of gaps and inequities in the evidence base were identified. These included the dominance of evidence from the health sector and high-income countries, as well as five countries that on their own contributed 41% of the total identified evidence base.

The developed evidence map and its included studies present a resource for policy-makers, researchers, and practitioners to identify research and practice gaps. It can be used to inform research commissioning, with the commissioning of more evidence synthesis on EIDM interventions being regarded as the most pressing evidence gap. The map also shines a spotlight on the absence of a shared conceptual framework, taxonomy of interventions and outcomes, and an agreed set of key indicators and outcome measures of evidence use. This presents a further fertile area for EIDM research.