The thing we call evidence: Toward a situated ontology of evidence in policy

In this chapter, the authors outline a situated ontology of evidence in policy, disrupting how evidence has hitherto been characterized as being used for policy. The authors put forward an “evidence-making intervention” approach for conceptualizing how the thing we call evidence is done and relationally made, doing away with delimiting assumptions underpinning “evidence-based policy” which have conventionally conceived of evidence and policy as separate domains to be “bridged” through “translation.” Applying this approach, the authors attend to how the thing we call evidence is enacted in events of policy deliberation, and not merely before it. Evidence translations therefore constitute transformations of evidence into different things. The authors take as case for analysis the deliberations surrounding the United Kingdom's COVID-19 response, including the use of mathematical modeling. Through this analysis we notice how evidence is performed as a thing “followed,” emerging as a thoroughly political and public concern, and as “evidence-enough” in the face of uncertainty. Attending to evidence as a situated achievement, a thing made in an event, brings to the fore ethico-political matterings that might ordinarily be obscured. This is not merely a conceptual challenge, but a practical and political one.