The policy agora: how power inequalities affect the interaction between researchers and policy makers

This paper examines notions of power in relation to evidence-informed policy making and explores four key areas. First, I outline contemporary conceptualisations of how power operates in society; second, I spotlight the implications of power inequalities for how evidence is used by policy makers (and present the policy 'agora'; a discursively controlled paradigm of ideology and epistemology which serves to distinguish between the types of evidence that policy makers will and won't engage with); third, I then define what I consider as evidence 'misuse', before finishing with an analysis of why evidence misuse materialises and how its enactment might be minimised.