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Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in impact evaluations of development policies, and an increasing trend towards considering rigorous evidence while making policy decisions. But there is much greater scope for incorporating results from impact evaluations into policy decisions, even in the presence of political and administrative constraints. We discuss how evidence is currently incorporated into policymaking, the constraints on greater adoption of evidence-based policy, and suggest specific ways that stronger policy–research partnerships can help overcome these constraints. Recognising that there are many different channels to influence policy, we provide examples from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab's (J-PAL's) policy outreach work in the hope that this paper can help in greater sharing of best practices from the impact evaluation field on how best to use evidence to inform policy.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the comments they received from Rachel Glennerster, Mary Ann Bates and from Howard White who organised the panels where many of J-PAL's ideas in this paper were first presented. The authors gratefully acknowledge generous funding from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), for writing a previous version of this paper. All views expressed in this paper are the authors' personal views and do not necessarily reflect J-PAL's position.