How can the US federal government bring new perspectives of evidence generation and evaluation to improve programs and policy? I’m Matt St. John, Program Evaluation Specialist with Guidehouse and Evidence Act advisor to the US Department of State (DOS), and I would like to share one initiative that I am working on with my colleagues to address this question.
Now in its fifth year, the Evidence Act promotes a vision for how federal agencies collect data and collaborate with stakeholders in the implementation of learning agendas that focus on priority policy issues. To further that vision, OMB stated that learning agendas create “opportunities for collaboration with external stakeholders to answer some priority questions.” What could DOS do to take advantage of these opportunities and establish research partnerships to help fill knowledge gaps critical to achieving the agency’s priorities?
The call to collaborate and engage with diverse voices of outside experts to help DOS think through policy issues resonated with the team I work with. In response, I worked with them to establish an evaluation and research partnership program with the purpose of facilitating collaborations between DOS bureaus and external research institutions to address questions from the agency’s learning agenda. The result is that the team stood up a new and innovative program for the agency to access expert research support at no cost.
How did we do this?
The team and I first analyzed the legislation and OMB guidance on stakeholder engagement and overlaid it to DOS’s learning agenda knowledge gaps. Then, we matched general sectors of research institutions based on those evaluation and research needs. This resulted in a list of prospective institutions. We then conducted outreach to institutions and think tanks that had research expertise in areas outlined in the DOS’s Learning Agenda. From these conversations, we were able to discern whether the organizations could enter into a partnership and identify their capabilities to narrow the list of possible partners.
We then acquired approval to enter into an agreement with each organization and matched bureau research needs with learning agenda questions.
Cool Tricks
Upon approval from DOS, the team moved quickly on implementation and designed and rolled out:
- New standard operating procedures
- Online collaboration website
- Scopes of Work template
- Recommendations on handling sensitive data
- Application form
- Flexible agreement templates according to research need
Lessons Learned
There are numerous benefits to both the research entity and the government. External entities can benefit from insights into the government foreign policy-making process to improve the accuracy and applicability of their research and analysis. Also, external entities can contribute knowledge to critical foreign policy problems.
For DOS, engaging with external foreign policy focused entities will strengthen DOS’s evidence-to-policy processes providing specialized research advice on critical policy areas.
Together, DOS and external researchers benefit from a wider array of high-quality information, research, and analysis than each entity could achieve on their own and the collaborations reduce redundancy across research portfolios.
Today, the DOS has five partners participating in this research and evaluation partnership program, and DOS is actively working to expand it. By this summer, they expect to add seven more partners, and I hope to be able to tell you concrete examples of collaborations during our presentation at AEA this October. I look forward to engaging and hearing about similar initiatives in the public sector evaluation space!
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