The democratization of evidence:  implementation of evidence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala

• In Event: Examining Public Policies, Curriculums, and Programs across the educational ecosystem in the LAC region

Proposal

A USAID-funded regional award seeks to engage key education stakeholders (KES), including youth, to identify gaps in their knowledge, execute focused search strategies for relevant evidence, and translate the results into actionable guidance for education programming and policymaking to ultimately prevent violence. Implemented by the prime organization and 12 local partners across El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the project's development objective is that KES in Northern Central America use knowledge and evidence in education processes and systems that contribute to the prevention of violence.

Since its inception, the design of the project has been influenced by the role of knowledge and gaps, a contested definition of evidence and research, and the analysis of context, decision-making, and power. Assuming that “evidence on its own is unlikely to foster change unless accompanied by effective campaigning, political mobilization and other forms of influencing,” (Mayne et al, 2018) the project’s Evidence to Action (E2A) practice uses evidence through three aspects:

Actively enabling KES to participate in the production of evidence to inform educational decisions. Providing opportunities for stakeholders to offer input on what questions are asked and answered should result in an evidence base that is more relevant to the concerns of stakeholders, including the communities served by educational institutions (Jackson, 2021). Greater transparency in the evidence development process and responsiveness to stakeholder concerns may increase the community’s desire to act on findings (Nelson et al., 2015), creating incentives for leaders to consider evidence in decision-making processes.

Readily analyzing the role of power and KES in each context. “Policy does not change simply because unequivocal evidence exists to demonstrate that practices ease or exacerbate human suffering. Rather, policy change is facilitated or hindered by powerful actors and factors reproducing the rules and dominant ideologies of political systems” (Mayne et al, 2018).

Methodologically, providing on-demand technical assistance to key education holders, specifically to respond to their knowledge and gaps around evidence use, (Newman et al, 2012), implies at least two overlapping factors: the capacity to access, interpret, evaluate, and use evidence, and the motivation or desire to use said evidence.

The objectives of this presentation is 1) To share the experience and lessons learned from the project regarding the use of evidence to improve educational programming and policy; and 2) to open a dialogue with session participants regarding the barriers, successes, and challenges of the democratization of evidence.

The presenter will briefly share with the audience the theoretical and practical discussions that resulted in the technical design of the project’s implementation. This session will review the key activities and lessons learned for the generation of available evidence on violence prevention in each country. This includes the mapping of KES for decision making on educational programming and policy. An element of interest to share in this exercise is the invisibility of young people in decision-making in violence prevention programs and policies that directly affect them. Another relevant aspect is the generation of local evidence. On the one hand, the project identified considerable gaps in prevention programs in the region, especially in areas such as: gender violence, LGBTQIA+, child pregnancy, racial violence, among others. From a historical perspective, evidence has responded to academic concerns and /or the values for the middle white class (Ming & Goldenberg, 2021). In the North Central American region, arguably, evidence responds to donor and/or financial entities concerns.

Additionally, the project capitalized the E2A practice to actively engage stakeholders in all central deliverables for evidence gathering, namely: Stakeholders Network Analysis, EGMs, knowledge products, and evidence synthesis. This practice allowed the technical team to identify the concerns of KES, as well as their priorities in terms of educational programming and policy for violence prevention. An essential component in this identification was the analysis of the context and particularly of the role that power plays in decision-making. While it is true that there is no consensus on what decision-making is or the factors involved (Tanner et al, 2020), the analysis of power and the priorities of the actors with power are crucial elements in the use of evidence.

The presenter will share the experience in the region in the implementation of personalized technical assistance, based on principles of democratization of evidence and its use, sharing highlights from diagnosis, design, implementation, and evaluation. The evidence used for the design of a technical assistance plan for the use of evidence will be discussed. Particularly, two findings of the systematic review on evidence use (Langer et al, 2016) will be shared and argued from the project’s experience and lessons learned:

Interventions facilitating access to research evidence, for example through communication strategies and evidence repositories, conditional on the intervention design simultaneously trying to enhance decision-makers’ opportunity and motivation to use evidence (reliable evidence). Interventions building decision-makers’ skills to access and make sense of evidence (such as critical appraisal training programs), conditional on the intervention design simultaneously trying to enhance both capability and motivation to use research evidence (reliable evidence).

To close, the presenter will then invite the audience to contemplate three guiding questions:

1. What is the relevance of the use of evidence for programming and public policy in your region?

2. What are the major challenges for the democratization of the use of scientific evidence?

3. What recommendations can we make to researchers and implementers to counteract these challenges?

References:

Jackson, C. (2022). Democratizing the Development of Evidence. Educational Researcher, 51(3), 209–215. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211060357

Langer L, Tripney J, Gough D (2016). The Science of Using Science: Researching the Use of Research Evidence in Decision-Making. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.

Newman,K., Fisher, C. and Shaxson, L. (2012). Stimulating Demand for Research Evidence: What Role for Capacity-building? IDS Bulletin. Volume 43, number 5. Institute of Development Studies.

Tanner, L., Mahajan, S.L., Becker, H., DeMello, N., Komuhangi, C., Mills, M.,Masuda, Y.,

Wilkie, D., Glew, L. “Making better decisions: How to use evidence in a complex world” (2020)

The Research People and the Alliance for Conservation Evidence and Sustainability.

Author

• Carmen Eugenia Avelar, International Rescue Committee IRC