What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth

地方经济增长工作中心成立于2013年10月，是什么工作网络的一部分，以分析哪些政策在支持和促进地方经济增长方面最有效。该中心的总体目标是在设计和实施地方经济增长和就业政策时显著改进证据的使用，从而导致更有效的政策和政策制定。这项提议涵盖了新阶段的活动，将持续三年。它建立在过去六年在提供证据综合、向政策制定者传达证据基础以及改进和支持地方和中央政府对具体政策的评估方面取得的进展。在过去的六年里，我们学到了很多关于如何在不损失学术严谨性的情况下使我们的工作变得有用，以及我们的用户更喜欢什么形式的支持和建议。我们还为基于证据的政策制定建立了广泛的实践社区。这一经验对我们制定未来计划非常宝贵。该中心致力于帮助用户获取和了解关于什么是有效的证据。在最初的六年中，该中心开发了广泛的资源，以帮助实现这一目标。该中心的证据审查考虑了一种具体类型的证据--影响评价--力求了解政策干预的因果关系，并确定其成本效益。该中心将开展工作，确保我们的证据审查继续根据最有力和最适当的证据提供最有用的建议。除了证据审查外，我们还开发了许多工具包，旨在为政策设计的特定方面提供信息。它们旨在帮助政策制定者了解人们对每种方法的有效性、性价比和关键考虑因素的了解程度。中心将进一步开发我们的工具包，以确保它们利用现有的最新评价。我们正在规划一系列活动，旨在让更多的学术研究人员参与中心的工作，包括专题专家和那些在具体评价方法和数据集方面具有专门知识的人。我们提供一系列评价资源，包括我们的“如何评价”系列和评价案例研究，以帮助提高政策制定者产生可靠评价和在政策设计过程中使用证据的能力。我们会继续更新和发展一系列可供使用的资源，以满足使用者的需要。我们亦会举办工作坊，讲解证据基础，以及如何有效地试验和测试各项计划和投资。我们将继续目前的计划，每月举办一次定制会议，每季度举办一次开放访问会议。我们将开展额外的活动，通过以下方式扩大我们与用户的能力建设工作：-资助一些高质量的伙伴关系评估；-通过建立一个通过公开招募的评估专家小组，为我们目前的评估支持提供更好的资源；-让一组新的地方政府合作伙伴参与特殊项目。这些活动将通过新的200万GB刺激基金提供资金。刺激基金的总体目标将是促进更直接地参与和协作，以确定、制定和实施政策评价和其他特别项目，以支持中心的战略目标。我们建议通过各种活动处理每一个专题领域。

The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth was set up in October 2013 as part of the What Works network to analyse which policies are most effective in supporting and increasing local economic growth.The overall aim of the Centre is to significantly improve the use of evidence in the design and delivery of policies for local economic growth and employment - leading to more effective policies and policymaking.This proposal covers a new phase of activity to run over a further three years. It builds on the progress made in the last six years in providing evidence synthesis, communicating the evidence base to policymakers and improving and supporting the evaluation of specific policies by both local and central government. We have learned a great deal over the past six years about how to make our work useful without losing academic rigour, and what forms of support and advice are preferred by our users. We have also built an extensive community of practice for evidence-based policy making. This experience has been invaluable in setting out our plans for the future.The Centre is committed to helping users to access and understand the evidence about what works. During the first six years, the Centre has developed a wide range of resources to help deliver on this objective. The Centre's evidence reviews consider a specific type of evidence - impact evaluation - that seeks to understand the causal effect of policy interventions and to establish their cost-effectiveness. The Centre will undertake work to ensure that our evidence reviews continue to offer the most useful advice based on the most robust and appropriate evidence. There will be a focus on reviewing UK-specific evaluations in those policy areas where enough UK-specific studies are available.In addition to the evidence reviews, we have also developed many toolkits which aim to inform specific aspects of policy design. They are intended to help policymakers understand how much is known about effectiveness, value for money, and key considerations associated with each approach. The Centre will further develop our toolkits to ensure that they draw on the latest evaluations available.We are planning a range of activities aimed at getting more academic researchers involved with the work of the Centre, both topic specialists and those with expertise in specific evaluation methods and datasets.We provide a range of evaluation resources including our 'How to Evaluate' series and evaluation case studies to help improve the capacity of policymakers to produce robust evaluation and embed the use of evidence in the policy design process. We will continue to up-date and develop the range of resources available to meet user needs.We also run workshops about the evidence base and how to robustly pilot and test programmes and investments. We will continue the current programme, running bespoke sessions every month and open access sessions quarterly.We will undertake additional activities to expand our capacity building work with users by: - Funding a number of high-quality partnership evaluations; - Better resourcing our current evaluation support offer through the establishment of a panel of evaluation experts, recruited through an open call;- Engaging a new set of local government partners in special projects.These activities will be funded through a new £2m Stimulus Fund. The overall aim of the Stimulus Fund will be to facilitate more direct engagement and collaboration in identifying, developing and implementing policy evaluations and other special projects in support of the Centre's strategic objectives.The proposal identifies a number of broad thematic areas where national and local decision-makers will be in most need of new advice. We propose to address each of the thematic areas through a variety of activities.