Evidence Production, Promotion and Pollution: Private Interests and Knowledge Brokerage in US Education Policy

• In Event: The rise of knowledge brokers: The translation of research evidence into policy and planning - part 2

Proposal

In an era where policymakers publicly laud “evidence-based” decision-making, it is imperative to understand the evolving institutional landscape through which “evidence” makes its way from knowledge producers to its supposed users. In particular,

While we are seeing a glut of “evidence” across the globe, this conceptual analysis focuses on the case of the United States for two reasons. First, the policy ecosystem in the US is saturated with resources from private interests seeking to advance their particular policy agendas. Second and relatedly, this advocacy is not confined to the US, but is in fact international in scale, as US interests often seek to export those agendas beyond US borders.

This analysis draws from a multi-year, multi-scalar study of the role of intermediaries in shaping policymakers’ use of evidence in the US. That study found not just a “hybridization” of the public-policymaking apparatus, as education governance shifts to a more heterarchical model of state and non-state actors, but even more so the “privatization of public policymaking,” as policymaking decisions themselves were contracted out or otherwise transferred to private organizations and interests.

In this context, the “surplus” of accessible evidence means that competing interests must find ways of distinguishing their preferred evidence. Thus, policy advocates are playing the role not just of broker, translator, or clearinghouse, but are increasingly in the position of salesperson. Moreover, organizations that formerly valued knowledge production are increasingly elevating evidence advocacy or sales activities in promoting their legitimacy to policymakers, for example, highlighting their traction in media rather than their acumen in producing new knowledge.

But the analysis notes not only the promotion of evidence to influence policy, but the “pollution” of the information ecosystem. As rivals deal in “evidence” to compete for the attention of policymakers in an overpopulated environment, they also engage in practices of dis-information to advance their own agenda even when more rigorous research evidence undercuts it, often simply to “muddy” the issue in the mods of less-informed users in the public and policymaking arenas — a strategy that was perfected by tobacco and petroleum (and now election) deniers. This puts the onus on knowledge producers not just to add more evidence to a glutted information ecosystem, but to hold information producers, advocates, and users accountable for their claims.

Author

• Christopher Lubienski