'The Culture and Sport Evidence Programme: New forms of evidence and new questions for cultural policy'

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O'Brien, David. 2012. 'The Culture and Sport Evidence Programme: New forms of evidence and new questions for cultural policy'. Cultural Trends, 21(4), pp. 275-280. ISSN 0954-8963 [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/095489...

Abstract or Description

There is often a difficult balance in academic work between responding to immediate questions and taking a longer term perspective on any given issue. This is especially true of policy oriented work, which faces the temptation of pronouncing on headlines or else dismissing specific developments as mere distractions from historical trends.

The corollary to this difficult balance comes with the question of evidence in government, which often has an uncertain and difficult status in public policy. Even during the height of New Labour's attempts to foster a culture of evidence based policy making within Whitehall, there were numerous critiques of the very idea that policy making was about evidence, rather than electoral concerns, party ideologies or responses to individual ministerial pressures or personalities (O'Brien, in press). Indeed Stevens (2011 found policy making suffused with evidence of differing and competing forms, all incorporated into policy decisions in complex and sometimes diffused ways.

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2012.726788