evidence-based policy making

A question about policy experiments and adaptive development

I have a question about policy experiments and adaptive development that came to me after reading this article by George Monbiot in the Guardian: We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup. He writes about Starbucks and Costa and that they have been thinking about replacing their plastic coffee cups with […]

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Can there be too much data to inform policy and what skills are needed for the policymaking of tomorrow

One of the things I enjoy doing during the summer in Finland is to work in the garden, in the late afternoon, and listen to a LSE public lecture podcast. Last week I listened to two really interesting ones. In the first podcast, Tracking the Rise in Global Economic Inequality: new evidence from the world inequality report

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Reference societies and adaptive development: a conversation with Daniel Suryadarma about Indonesia’s participation in the PISA educational assessment

During a seminar organised by the EduKnow research group at the University of Tampere on comparative education, I came across the interesting concept of reference society. In a nutshell, countries which, like Finland, find themselves at the top of the PISA ranking may become models or references for countries looking for ways to improve their education policies

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Knowledge, policy, and adaptive development in Indonesia. A discussion at UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti

I was recently in Florence to meet the team at the UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti and present & discuss some of the experiences of the Knowledge Sector Initiative in Indonesia. I was part of the implementing team during phase 1 from 2013-2017 leading the research and learning work of the programme. The Knowledge Sector Initiative is

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Serbia’s long journey to joining the EU and what the implications are for evidence informed policy making. A conversation with Nenad Čelarević

Eighteen years have passed since the big demonstrations that took place in the streets of Belgrade and which ultimately led to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević on 5th October 2000.  Today Serbia is on a new journey which is not without challenges. Ten years ago, the government applied for membership to the EU and in

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What joining the European Social Survey means for social science research and evidence-informed policy making in Serbia. In conversation with Professor Dragan Stanojević.

The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade has a long history. It was established in 1838 and today it is located in a modern building in downtown Belgrade. I went there to meet Dragan Stanojević, Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology. I wanted to meet him because he led the initiative that resulted

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Building state capability for evidence-informed policymaking in Albania: In conversation with Abi Dodbiba

Growing up in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, I remember Albania being geographically very close, just 150 kilometres across the sea from the harbour city of Brindisi. At the same time, closed and isolated by its communist regime, it seemed very far away. Many fleeing Albanians used small boats for the dangerous crossing to

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A conversation about policy experiments

The search for ways to design policies that help to solve societal problems is continuously evolving. The traditional evidence-based approach to policy making involves generating research results and using these to inform policy decisions. This blog post is based on an interview with Mikko Annala, Head of Governance Innovation at Demos Helsinki. It was originally posted on

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