Building capacity for evidence-informed policymaking in governance and public administration in a post-pandemic Europe

The project "Building capacity for evidence informed policymaking (EIPM) in governance and public administration in post-pandemic Europe" supports seven European Union (EU) member states in building capacity to improve the effectiveness of their public administrations, through greater capacity for supply and uptake of scientific knowledge, evaluation, and evidence in policymaking. The expected long-term impact of this project is the reinforced institutional integration of the use of evidence, science and evaluation for policymaking in the participating member states, of which the Netherlands is part of. This integrated report presents the results of a substantive number of interviews, focus groups, workshops, document analyses, desk research and a survey conducted over the course of 2023 and 2024, which ultimately resulted in a roadmap containing concrete steps to improve the use of evidence in policymaking in the Netherlands. It contains three sub-reports in chronological order of their writing: the diagnostic report (chapter 4) and the needs and gaps assessment (chapter 5) which both informed the final roadmap (chapter 6). All three reports focus on the supply and demand side of the Dutch EIPM ecosystem as well as the brokerage level where supply and demand meet. The term 'supply side' refers to organizations supplying the evidence to be used in policy processes. These can be governmental advisory bodies, think tanks, and universities. 'Demand' refers to those using evidence and scientific knowledge in their policy processes. In this project, this term mostly refers to ministries, but also to executive agencies, parliament and local governments. Additionally, 'evidence' is interpreted broadly in the sense of 'knowledge'. Knowledge is a concept with many possible meanings. In the context of this project, knowledge refers to "data, information, and knowledge from multiple sources, including quantitative data such as statistics and measurements, qualitative data such as opinions, stakeholder input, conclusions of evaluations, as well as scientific and expert advice." Different settings may require the use of different types or combinations of such knowledge, but for brevity this report will not go into detail on those.