Evidence and policy in six European countries: diverse approaches and common challenges
Sandra Nutley, Sarah Morton,Tobias Jung and Annette Boaz
Delivered by Ingenta to: Univ. Rovira i Virgili
IP : 193.144.16.49 On: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:11:13
Copyright The Policy Press
Introduction
As previous contributions to Evidence & Policy indicate, there is international interest in the relationship between research evidence and the concerns of policy makers and practitioners (eg Mullen, 2005;Alexanderson et al, 2009; Ouimet et al, 2009;Widmer,
2009). Much of this interest has focused on documenting and debating various national efforts to promote more evidence-informed policies and practices within specific policy areas, such as education, healthcare and social work. Increasingly, there are also efforts to learn and draw broader lessons from these national endeavours. For example, in March 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) and the National Research Council of the National Academies of the
United States co-hosted a conference in Paris (France) entitled ‘Evidence-based policy: international experiences’. There are also programmes and projects to map and review national arrangements for promoting evidence-informed decision making within specific policy sectors.This is illustrated by the Centre for Education Research and Innovation’s (CERI) reviews of the extent to which the educational research and development systems within OECD countries are functioning as repositories of knowledge on which practitioners and policy makers can draw.1
This issue of Evidence & Policy contributes to these efforts to learn from international developments in the evidence and policy field. It draws together papers from a seminar series that considered developments in six European countries: Iceland, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Norway, Scotland and Sweden.The seminar series was funded through the New Opportunities for Research
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