Evidence-Based Policy and Sustainable Translation of Knowledge: A Perspective for Health Promotion in Germany

This article proposes to shift the focus of our view on evidence-based policy towards a comprehensive "policy orientation". While previous contributions on policy making in public health have already recognised that the evidence-based medicine paradigm is inappropriate for the specificities of the policy context, they still have primarily dealt with evidence of the policy content, i.e. with research to inform policy makers about "what works" in public health (e.g. evidence-based interventions on health determinants). However, they have widely neglected issues pertaining to the policy process, i.e. knowledge concerning "what works" in policy making (e.g. key determinants of policy development and policy implementation in order to build policy capacities and to improve policy outcomes). A broader perspective including the policy process will allow us to contextualise theory and research in a way more appropriate to the process of policy making and will help improve approaches of applied science and knowledge translation in public health. We will illustrate the differences between a content orientation and a policy process orientation in public health by reviewing previous discourses on 3 closely related topics: (1) the production of evidence for policy making, (2) the conditions for the utilisation of evidence in policy making, and (3) the translation of evidence into policy making. We conclude that future public health theory and research, while continuing to broaden the evidence base on health determinants and health interventions, should increasingly focus on research concerning processes of public health policy development and implementation, building frameworks, developing methodologies, and conducting the necessary empirical research.