Institutionalizing evidence use

congressional or government building
Many organizations, including governments and large NGOs, have institutionalized processes for rigorously evaluating innovations and incorporating evidence into decision-making.

When organizations are involved in the process of generating evidence, they are more likely to apply the results. To do so, one increasingly common model is creating dedicated units and processes within organizations to identify and test promising interventions. Contributing to this broader movement of innovation and evidence use, J-PAL-affiliated researchers and staff have built long-term partnerships with governments and large NGOs and collaborated on a range of innovative models to institutionalize the use of evidence in policy decisions and close the gap between piloting, testing, and scaling effective policies. J-PAL also supports these kinds of collaborations through the Government Partnership Initiative, which aims to make it easier for researchers and governments to work together to increase the use of evidence in policymaking.

For example, in Peru, J-PAL and IPA collaborated with the Ministry of Education to establish MineduLAB, a laboratory for innovation that identifies, evaluates, and scales up cost-effective solutions to educational challenges in Peru. MineduLAB has launched several randomized evaluations and begun to scale three programs shown to be effective. MineduLAB is now fully government-run and its success has inspired the design of other such collaborations in Latin America.

In December 2018, J-PAL published Creating a Culture of Evidence Use: Lessons from J-PAL's Government Partnerships in Latin America, a report that draws together key insights from both the MineduLAB experience and other evidence partnerships with governments in the region.

OES Office | Shutterstock.com

A federal office to bolster evidence-based policymaking

J-PAL staff and affiliates contributed to the creation of the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) to improve the capacity of US federal agencies to build and use rigorous evidence and continue to partner with OES to aid this mission.
Building a government innovation lab to improve education in Peru

A government innovation lab to improve education

With support from J-PAL and IPA, the Ministry of Education in Peru created a dedicated unit to identify, test, and scale low-cost interventions to improve educational outcomes.
Health measurements are collected for elderly panel survey

Institutionalizing a culture of evidence-informed policymaking in Tamil Nadu

A long-standing partnership between the Government of Tamil Nadu and J-PAL in India has helped institutionalize the use of evidence in decision making and build a culture of evidence-informed policymaking.