Recently I wrote a post about the Global Evidence Summit, which I attended in September. I commented that one thing I really liked about the conference is that it had some great plenary sessions. In this post, I highlight some of the key ideas that came from the fourth plenary of the conference, titled “Evidence in a Post-Truth World.”

The plenary started with Trish Greenhalgh, who is a Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. Greenhalgh’s bio for the conference lists three areas her work covers, one of which is the complex links (philosophical and empirical) between research, policy and practice. Her speech focused on these philosophical links. She started with Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, in which he lays out three means of persuasion for an orator. The first is logos, which we can think of as evidence. The second is ethos, which we can think of as credibility, and the third is pathos, which we can think of as emotion. Greenhalgh suggested that the post-truth world is one where logos – evidence – is no longer a useful tool of persuasion, leaving us only with the other two.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend the Global Evidence Summit (GES) in Cape Town, South Africa. GES was billed as being the first conference of its kind, jointly organized by the Cochrane Collaboration, the Campbell Collaboration, and several other groups to focus on evidence-based policy making across sectors. Those of us who attended the What Works Global Summit in London last September considered GES the second conference of its kind, and we were excited to reconnect with each other this year in Cape Town.

The conference brought together researchers and policy analysts in the fields of health, education, and international development to explore that long and often tortuous path between a single study and a policy or program that is evidence based. Sessions covered topics such as evidence mapping, systematic reviews, rapid reviews, standard and guideline setting, big data, and policy engagement. In this post, I report on what I learned about evidence networks in the first day’s plenary. For readers interested in learning more about the conference itself, I provide a quick review at the end of the post.