n the last decades the theoretical framework of EBPM has been used as a basis to set up many policy-making processes. Typologies of evidences that have been considered in the past are broader than merely research evidences (Nutley et. al 2002) with the idea that evidences that are needed concerns the likely effectiveness of policy but also problems and needs requiring public intervention (Sanderson, 2002). With regard to the policy process, the evidence based approach is strong in assessing that each stage can benefit from the exposure to data and information and that this can lead to policy making that is forward looking, outward looking, innovative and creative (Sanderson, 2009). Moreover, different styles concerning the use of information and different stages of evidence utilization have been discussed (Nutley and colleagues, 2002; Six, 2002).
EBPM research has long discussed about the effectiveness of this approach in influencing the policy making process (Sanderson, 2002) and about mechanisms and tools that can help in spreading its adoption (Biesta, 2007). Only few contributions investigate the issue of how EBPM is implemented in the dynamic perspective of policy formulation (Sanderson, 2009). With our work we want to contribute to this stream of literature providing an insights on EBPM into action, through the study of a considerable number of local public authorities in the field of social care. We are interested in the issue of how evidences are used differently in the elaboration of the policy discourse and presentation of policy plans. With these premises, our research question is: Can we detect different evidence uses in the policy framing activities?
This is the prelude of different corollary research questions that can help researchers and policy makers in supporting and understanding EBPM, such as: Do different typologies of evidences lead to different uses in policy framing? Can we detect specific uses for specific policy framing activities, or on the contrary different approaches for the process as a whole?
To answer our questions, our research design is based on discourse narrative analysis of the policy plans of 98 local social authorities in Lombardy, Italy (equal to 100% of the potential sample in the Region) adopting the policy framing perspective (Goffman, 1974) defined as the “complex activity of making sense and transmitting assumptions, understandings and meanings”(Benford and Snow, 1992). We adopt the policy framing perspective (Vogel, 2012) since we are interested in understanding how evidences are used to provide argumentation for the adoption of new or revised policies. To do that we perform a narrative analysis supported by the software Atlas.ti in order to isolate sentences showing evidence uses in relation to the framing activities. To distinguish between different uses we rely on a codebook of keywords from the existing literature (Nutley et al. 2002).
Our work can contribute in describing chains of uses in the processual development of the three policy framing activities (representing different approaches of using evidences to argument and develop policies) and understanding how uses are linked one another in a dynamic view of EBPM.
Evidence use in government – its contribution to creating public value
