National, multilateral, and bilateral policymakers make thousands of consequential decisions everyday about how to invest their resources.
In theory, they seek to maximize improvements in living standards and outcomes as part of the moral core of public policy (Levine 2017). In reality, shifting institutional and policy priorities, bandwidth limitations, and a focus on inputs deemed (but not known) to be effective make it difficult to learn about and achieve better outcomes (Gaarder and Bartsch 2015).
Organizational leaders rarely express or model sufficient commitment to learning and evidence use, and individual performance is often measured by approval and disbursement as opposed to actual results, which are typically available only after staffing changes between project cycles. At times, speed and confidence are rewarded over efforts to ask and answer questions about actual results. Further, COVID-19 has placed massive stress on officials’ abilities to collect, share, and use data and has laid bare just how insufficient existing evidence cultures often can be. More robust systems and incentives are needed to institutionalize the generation and use of rigorous evidence.