The 5th Public Governance Forum in Greater China

Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) highlights the finding and use of evidence to empower and discipline public policy making. Scientifically collected and processed evidence shall be used to single out issues of policy importance and select appropriate policy instruments. EBPM has been widely deemed as a new path of policy making whose effectiveness and legitimacy is founded on instrumental rationalism, and as a new way to strengthen the capacities of government. Meanwhile, EBPM has been criticized as neglecting the institutional contexts that fundamentally shape the production and functioning of policy-related knowledge. Critics doubt that the systematic evidence that EBPM demands may be a product of either simplistic scientific formulas or complex processes of social manipulation, and may thus be far from true and useful. Recent public sector changes in the UK, the USA, and quite some other countries tended to demonstrate a disposition toward value-based policy making.

The EBPM approach and the debates over it echo the dilemma of policy making in China where scientification and democratisation have been the two officially-announced fundamental principles of policy making. Going through fast modernization, the Chinese society is in urgent need of high-quality policy supplies in response to complex socioeconomic issues such as economic and financial stabilization and innovation, domestic migration, population development, social welfare, environmental preservation, and regional development. China’s huge size and local variation make policy making and implementation more difficult. There is a need of research about how the two aforementioned principles are realized and reconciled.

In developed countries, the two principles of scientification and democratisation are called into question. The growing skepticism towards experts, the rise of anti-establishment politics within democracies, as well as with increasing contestation within many international institutions contribute to a deconsolidation of expertise supporting public policies, from science policy to economic and social policy. We need to better understand what determines the legitimacy of expert knowledge in policy making, to identify who are the trusted experts today and to analyze the threats of an independent expertise. In the current environment of ‘post-truth politics’, we need to better understand how new developments (such as inequalities and populism) interact with expertise, generating doubts about and providing alternatives to expert knowledge and EBPM.