I.: EVIDENCE-BASED INTERVENTIONS

Move from faith-based to evidence-based interventions.

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I. MOVING FROM FAITH-BASED TO EVIDENCE-BASED INTERVENTIONS -- Governance—how institutions analyze information and make decisions to solve collective problems—is broken. Around the world, we face increasingly complex challenges ranging from widespread poverty to serious ecological crises that threaten our planet's future. Yet trust in traditional institutions of governance is at an all-time low. At the same time, we are living through the greatest era of disruptive innovation and rapid experimentation since the Industrial Revolution. Tremendous progress in information and communication technologies, including big data and social media, are empowering individuals to engage with one another—and with traditional institutions of governance—to tackle problems collectively. Groups of individuals with diverse social, intellectual, and professional backgrounds can now use technology to collaborate in new ways that can drive progress more rapidly and effectively than ever before. From local and federal governments to leading universities and Fortune 500 companies, institutions have an opportunity to reevaluate how they solve problems in the networked age.   While there is good reason to believe that breakthroughs may come from recent innovations such as communitybased problem solving, behavioral economic insights about human behavior, or predictive analytic experiments, there are limited studies measuring exactly how productive it is to use these kinds of new governance techniques. Without a deeper understanding of whether, when, why and to what extent an intervention has made an impact, any initiative we design will be sub-optimal and will produce less than the desired results. If we are going to accelerate the rate of experimentation in governance and create more agile institutions capable of piloting new techniques and getting rid of ineffectual programs, we need research that will enable us to move away from "faith-based" engagement initiatives toward "evidence-based" ones.

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