Policy labs within governments institutionalize and increase capacity to generate and use evidence—enabling them to better adopt and sustain effective solutions. Governments are the primary providers of many essential services that work to reduce poverty. More effective public services can improve people’s well-being. Yet government processes and timelines can make it difficult to test new approaches or apply lessons from evaluation findings. Evidence-backed changes are most likely to stick when they are a part of, or build on, existing systems and government organizations' day-to-day operations.

Policy labs work within established systems to encourage a culture of innovation and learning. While, policymakers often value research findings, limited access to relevant findings can hinder the adoption of effective policies. Meanwhile, research co-developed with policymakers is substantially more likely to result in policy change. By creating a government unit in charge of sharing evidence, developing impact evaluations, analyzing administrative data, and supporting how to apply findings to decisions, policy labs enable testing and learning. Policy labs create dedicated space and resources for long-term learning aligned with government priorities–so that policymakers can more regularly use findings to improve public policies affecting millions of people.

Policy labs can accelerate learning on priority topics. In France, for example, the Innovations, Data and Experiments in Education (IDEE) Lab, in collaboration with J-PAL Europe and led by the federal government via the French National Research Agency, has already supported many projects with the Ministry of Education at national and local levels—from literacy and numeracy development to parental support interventions to tutoring programs.

Long-term partnerships between governments and organizations with expertise in research, evidence-based policy, and capacity building can be a promising approach to supporting policy labs. Policy labs can benefit from partnerships with organizations with large research networks, training resources, and experience setting up embedded labs. Long-term commitments allow for investing the time to understand the context, design relevant pilots, and run evaluations and follow-ups to assess the impacts of programs. For example, the IDEE model in France is an eight-year commitment, while J-PAL’s decade-long partnership with India’s Tamil Nadu state government has allowed evidence to inform programs across nine departments. Integration of the Egypt Impact Lab into the training institute of the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and Economic Development is another example.