Sam Freedman speaks at ResearchED 2013 - Part 1 of 5
The relationship between policy and research.
Sam Freedman reflects on how government can use evidence better in policy making.
He acknowledges that evidence based policy as a concept is quite a complicated one. What works is just one of the factors to think about. Other considerations are the constraints that are bearing on you:
* How much money is there to spend?
* What is the number one priority?
* Can you transplant solutions from one field to another?
Evidence based policies can only take you so far. There can never be total agreement about what works just because evidence is being used more methodically.
Sam traces the emergence of evidence based policy in British politics. He cites Blair as using it as a piece of political positioning in the centre ground to be represented as a pragmatist. This proved to be very valuable for policy making as a whole. Evidence based policy became mainstream, in part, due to this.
However it also caused ideology and the values that underlie ideology to become tarnished as somewhat of a pejorative term.
"Everyone has narratives and values that they base their decisions on and it is quite helpful to pretend that there is some position one can get to where one is not doing that."
Sam references Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind ([ Ссылка ]) which is about the underlying morality that sits behind where we are politically on the spectrum between left and right.
Haidt has a theory that there are five moral receptors in the same way people might have tastebuds...
The potential for evidence based policy is limited but nevertheless (it is) really important that we do our best to have to have, at least, a shared conversation about agreed findings.
What is the process of how we can do it better in the current system?
