evidence-based policy

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an approach to the design, selection, and evaluation of government interventions that prioritises empirical research, systematic review of programme outcomes, and rigorous causal inference over ideological commitment, political intuition, or anecdotal experience; evidence-based policy emerged from the evidence-based medicine movement of the 1990s and seeks to apply randomised controlled trials, natural experiments, quasi-experimental methods, and systematic meta-analyses to policy questions, with the goal of identifying interventions that reliably produce intended outcomes at acceptable cost; critics note the difficulty of applying experimental methods to complex social systems, the political selectivity with which evidence is invoked, and the risk of excluding relevant local knowledge that cannot be quantified