25 April 2022

The Data Driven Policy Cluster is pleased to announce the second of three joint policy briefs, Policy Prediction, the Future of Evidence-Based Policymaking?, an output from the inaugural event organised by the cluster in December 2021, the Evidence Based Policymaking in Europe Summit 2021.

The policy brief is a result of the Future with Policy Impact Analysis & Prediction Track of the Evidence Based Policymaking in Europe Summit 2021, which tackled Evidence-based policymaking (EBP) and its rapid change mainly driven by factors such as evolving meaning of evidence, i.e. data- driven insights drawn from modelling and simulations coming from a multitude of data types and sources; new actors coming into play, including open to data scientists and data savvy public servants; more attention for agenda setting and policy design,  and different relation between policy and evidence: from reactive and ex-post to proactive and ex-ante.

Further, in the policy brief are discussed the critical roles of interoperability and data sharing for the advancement of policy prediction, practical policy prediction cases, and challenges encountered by stakeholders. Finally, a number of policy recommendations based on the experience gathered within the different projects are presented:

  1. Start small, experiment, then scale fast through co-creation
  2. Foster a culture of innovation building on successful experiments and pilots
  3. Leverage European data sharing infrastructures to increase data availability and accessibility across policy areas and government levels
  4. Create trusted data spaces to facilitate data sharing by citizens and businesses
  5. Secure the necessary multidisciplinary resources
  6. Ensure European building blocks for data-driven policy prediction

Two other joint policy briefs will be published based on the other tracks covering Governance Ethics, and Co-Creation and Stakeholder Engagement.

The policy brief has been published openly on Zenodo here

About the Data Driven Policy Cluster

Five H2020 e-governance projects have joined efforts in the Data Driven Policy Cluster to promote the use of European cloud infrastructures for public administrations and policy making. The Cluster is made up of AI4PublicPolicy, Decido, DUET, IntelComp and Policy Cloud.