An ethnography of evidence-based medicine and evidence-based policy-making in the field of international maternal health

Getting "research into practice" has become a major focus of national governments, international donor agencies, and to a lesser extent, non-governmental organizations. Ensuring that government officials in charge of drafting and implementing new policies make productive use of scientific research is at least partially dependent on the accessibility and utility of that research, and on the way different forms of evidence are valued and interpreted.

The "evidence-based" movement, a movement that seeks to promote and disseminate empirical results into both the clinical and public policy realms, has been met with both strong support and avid resistance. These reactions have served to polarize and further divide the research and policy communities. In order to bridge the gap between research and policy, a better understanding of how scientific evidence can or cannot assist policy-making is needed, as is a thorough exploration of the nature and context of the social relationships that link those working in policy and science.

This ethnographic research proposal aims to explore these issues by focusing on recent polemic developments in the field of maternal health. Debates about the production and use of evidence have been at the forefront in this field, as actors have been struggling to issue conclusive evidence-based policies for the reduction of maternal mortality in developing countries, recently designated (2000) a "difficult to achieve" Millennium Development Goal by the United Nations General Assembly.

The main objective of the project is to describe the ways policy-makers, researchers and other stake-holders perceive and value different kinds of evidence, with the ultimate aim of understanding how these perceptions influence the use of evidence for policy and program development.

For a full executive summary of the project, including methods and results, click here (Word doc)

Duration:

October 2004 - April 2007

Funding:

ESRC (Small Research Grant RES-000-22-1039)

IDEU Staff/Students Involved:

Dominique Behague

Katerini Storeng