The following can be read in full at Duncan Green’s Oxfam blog. 

First, from Rosalind Eyben and Chris Roche, two of the organisers of April’s Big Push Forward conference on the Politics of  Evidence:

In the 1930s Africa was seen as ‘a living laboratory’ to achieve improvements in the welfare of the populations. Evidence-based approaches are reviving the development-as-laboratory idea. In 2012 the World Bank established a Gender Innovation Lab to design ‘innovative interventions to address gender inequality and to develop rigorous research projects in order to produce evidence on what works and what does not’.  Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages have been framed as  ‘laboratories to lift people out of poverty’. The most well-known is the J-Pal Poverty Action Lab whose mission is to reduce poverty ‘by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence’.

In the absence of political debate, this approach can exacerbate the tendency to see people as subjects requiring treatment, rather than as citizens with political voice. Power silences any challenges to the technical framing of ‘the problem’, foreclosing discussion of the structural causes and consequences of inequity and how these should be tackled. To act ‘technically’ in a politically complex context can make external actors pawns of more powerful vested interests and therefore by default makes them, albeit unintentionally, political actors.In the 1930s Africa was seen as ‘a living laboratory’ to achieve improvements in the welfare of the populations. Evidence-based approaches are reviving the development-as-laboratory idea. In 2012 the World Bank established a Gender Innovation Lab to design ‘innovative interventions to address gender inequality and to develop rigorous research projects in order to produce evidence on what works and what does not’.  Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages have been framed as  ‘laboratories to lift people out of poverty’. The most well-known is the J-Pal Poverty Action Lab whose mission is to reduce poverty ‘by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence’.

In the absence of political debate, this approach can exacerbate the tendency to see people as subjects requiring treatment, rather than as citizens with political voice. Power silences any challenges to the technical framing of ‘the problem’, foreclosing discussion of the structural causes and consequences of inequity and how these should be tackled. To act ‘technically’ in a politically complex context can make external actors pawns of more powerful vested interests and therefore by default makes them, albeit unintentionally, political actors.

Here is the response from Chris Whitty (left), DFID’s Director of Research and Evidence and Chief Scientific Adviser and Stefan Dercon (right), its Chief Economist, respond. 

Rosalind and Chris’ key criticism is that evidence-based approaches “deflect attention from the centrality of power [and] politics […] in shaping society”, and they offer “power analyses” as an apparent alternative to assessing rigorously what works. This creates a false dichotomy, as if a choice has to be made between a “technical, rational and scientific approach to development” and an approach that recognises politics and the role of power. It is easy rhetoric, but troubling and, if taken much further, even dangerous. Understanding power and politics and how to assist in social change also require careful and rigorous evidence, and again, results are not simply what experts would have expected a priori. Recent studies on the positive impacts of female leadership quotas in rural India are for many of us rather surprisingly good news, even if one can fairly worry about its applicability in other settings, while the struggle to find systematically a positive impact of decentralisation and community-driven development programmes is important to internalise in our actions for change, and highlights the importance of understanding contexts and politics. In these cases, it is not a matter of just RCTs, but of rigour, and of combining appropriate methods, including more qualitative and political economy analysis.

Strong analysis of politics and power without offering much in terms of what can be acted upon is similarly unhelpful. They criticise an evidence-focused agenda by stating that “to act ‘technically’ in a politically complex context can make external actors pawns of more powerful vested interests and therefore by default makes them, albeit unintentionally, political actors.” But all actions by external actors will interact with political forces and vested interests. In many of the settings where development actors want to make a difference, power and political institutions are biased against the poor. Being able to act on strong evidence of what works in constrained political settings is crucial.