Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems: the origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias

Abstract

Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their 'intractability', whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for 'Evidence Based Policy' (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoliticizing political decisions. This paper aims to help resolve these conflicts and, in doing so, consider how to address this particular feature of problem wickedness. Specifically the paper delineates two forms of evidentiary bias that drive intractability, each of which is reflected by contrasting positions in the EBP debates: 'technical bias'-referring to invalid uses of evidence; and 'issue bias'-referring to how pieces of evidence direct policy agendas to particular concerns. Drawing on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology, the paper explores the ways in which competing interests and values manifest in these forms of bias, and shape evidence utilization through different mechanisms. The paper presents a conceptual framework reflecting on how the nature of policy problems in terms of their complexity, contestation, and polarization can help identify the potential origins and mechanisms of evidentiary bias leading to intractability in some wicked policy debates. The discussion reflects on how a better understanding about such mechanisms could inform future work to mitigate or overcome such intractability.

Studying Evidence Use for Health Policymaking from a Policy Perspective

“…Contestation between groups who have different sets of values or beliefs in many ways is at the heart of many theories of policy change which perceive policymaking as a competitive process rather than a technocratic one (Sabatier 2007;John 1998). Yet it has been argued that the level and nature of these competitive environments can incentivise the manipulation of scientific or empirical evidence to achieve desired political goals (Parkhurst 2016). As a result, strategic, rather than instrumental uses of evidence appear commonplace in many policy arenas where political interests exist -often decried as 'policy-based evidence-making' and seen as a fundamental challenge to the ideal rational use of evidence that many social sector stakeholders champion (Marmot 2004;Strassheim and Kettunen 2014).…”

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“…412)." In this way, decisions about which data to collect, the identification of a research agenda and the choice of research topics can be seen to be inherently political as it shapes the topics that enter the agenda, and thus which pathways of policy action can be followed (see also: Parkhurst 2016Parkhurst , 2017.…”

Not a Security Issue: How Policy Experts De-Politicize the Climate Change–Migration Nexus

“…Science and policymaking are different realms characterized by a very different culture, styles of reasoning, and methods (Löblová 2018). As several authors have pointed out, the implications of evidence are less straightforward when applied to contested political problems (Parkhurst 2016(Parkhurst , 2017). An interesting direction for future research can be exploring how the science of complex problems (climate change and migration) can be advised to policymakers, under the condition of the uncertainty of knowledge.…”