By James Sumberg, Martha Awo, John Thompson, George T-M Kwadzo and Dela-Dem Doe Fiankor, Researchers, STEPS Centre Livestock project
Agricultural policy makers in Africa are now being dragged into the era of ‘evidence-based’ policy (EBP) making. But the quality and availability of evidence in some countries - and debates about what even counts as evidence - create some interesting challenges.
Globally the proponents of EBP have been criticised for adopting a simplistic, linear understanding of the relationship between evidence and action, and for their normative approach to the desirable relationships between research-based knowledge and policy formulation. However, the literature on EBP, and particularly that associated with the ‘realist synthesis’, increasingly recognises that there are in fact different ‘evidence bases’; that the notion of evidence can be quite slippery and contested; and that different kinds of evidence can be interpreted and valued differently by different groups and individuals. (That’s a theme that will be explored in detail at the STEPS Centre's
symposium on scientific advice in a couple of weeks' time.)
Despite the varied view of evidence in the literature, the idea that policy makers should take more account of ‘evidence’ (e.g. of what worked where, for whom and under what conditions) is now generally accepted. Many governments and donor agencies emphasise the central importance of EBP in improving development interventions and outcomes and in holding the policy actors to account. Of course, before the point of evaluating the impacts of various policy options, ‘evidence’ is also critical for establishing basic trends, constraints and dynamics within a sector or around a particular problem of interest.
But do African policy makers have access to good evidence? The challenges around the availability and quality of baseline data relating to food and agriculture in Africa (e.g. crop areas, yields, livestock populations and offtake levels) are long-standing and well recognised. More often than not, policy analysts, advocates and programme and project developers rely on national data series available through government statistics offices and FAOSTAT from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization because it is ‘the best data available’ (or more often because it is ‘the only data available’).
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