Exploration or Exploitation of Evidence? How the Systematization of Evidence Arrangements Within Government Shapes How Evidence is Used.

The goal of enhancing the use of evidence, such as policy evaluations, in processes of policymaking has long been high on the agenda of governments and international bodies as well as within the research community. In recent decades, processes of evidence production and dissemination has become increasingly systematized and embedded within the organizational structures and processes of government as a way of enhancing evidence use. Similarly, the scholarship on evidence use has recently taken a greater interest in the organizational aspects of expertise and evidence – highlighting several organizational factors inducive to a greater uptake of evidence by policymakers. However, while existing scholarship has aptly shown that organizational factors influence whether evidence is utilized in policymaking, we still know little of the way specific organizational factors influence how evidence is used? That is, whether certain ways of organizing the production and dissemination of evidence within government is inducive or conducive to certain types of evidence use? This paper addresses this gap by proposing a framework for studying the relation between the organization of evidence and different types of evidence use. We develop this framework by reviewing and bridging the two hitherto rather separated literatures on organizational learning and evidence use as well as drawing on the illustrative case study of the organization and systematization of policy evaluations within the central administration of the Netherlands and Denmark. From the organizational learning literature, we borrow the concepts of knowledge exploitation and exploration to distinguish between two overarching and distinctively different ways of using evidence in processes of policymaking. Through the analysis of existing literature on evidence use we conceptualize four dimensions of regulating and systematizing evidence production and dissemination within government: 1) The relational dimension concerning the regulation and systematization of the actors involved in evidence production and dissemination (e.g. who has the overarching responsibility for evidence production and dissemination); 2) The temporal dimension concerning the regulation and systematization of the timeframe of evidence production and dissemination (e.g. the frequency and permanence of policy evaluation activities); 3) The spatial dimension concerning the regulation and systematization of where evidence travels (e.g. the internal channels through which knowledge is shared); and 4) The epistemological dimension concerning the regulation and systematization of the content of evidence production and dissemination (e.g. Systems and procedures for synthesizing and accumulating the results of policy evaluations). We then use our study of the Danish and Dutch case to illustrate how specific ways of systematizing evidence production and dissemination within each of these dimensions can further or impede either the exploitation or exploration of evidence. Our paper thus contributes to existing research on the relation between organizational factors and evidence use by elucidating how the regulation and systematization of evidence within government is not merely a question of furthering evidence use. Instead we find that specific regulatory arrangements further a certain form of evidence use while impeding another – and vice versa.