Overview

This project asks a practical question with increasingly high stakes for public health: how can evidence from model-based projections and social listening reports be more effectively integrated with contextual knowledge to inform policy? Using South African case material from the pandemic period, the project examines how new and influential evidence types were interpreted and used in real decision contexts, and develops guidance for more responsible, context-sensitive evidence use.

Why this matters

During the COVID-19 pandemic, certain evidence sources moved from supporting roles to justificatory roles. Mathematical models were often treated not merely as exploratory tools, but as grounds for major interventions. At the same time, social listening reports provided rapidly updated information about public concerns, misinformation, and barriers to policy success, yet were not always integrated systematically into decision-making. The project explores how these forms of evidence can be used well, what goes wrong when they are over-interpreted or under-used, and what practical norms can improve policy reasoning under uncertainty.

Approach

The project applies and extends the Evidence-Role-Maps Framework (ERMF) as a tool for analysing how evidence supports policymaking across the stages of design, implementation, and evaluation. Rather than treating “evidence-based policy” as a single threshold or label, the approach focuses on how evidence is used: what it is taken to show, what assumptions it depends on, how it connects to a policy’s underlying causal story, and what contextual conditions must hold for an intervention to work.

Core strands of work

1. Epidemiological modelling as evidence
A major strand analyses how epidemiological models came to function as “evidence” in justificatory settings, and develops a schematic framework for “evidence-based modelling”, including clearer specification of purpose and conditionality, methodological pluralism, and the importance of retrospective evaluation.

2. Social listening reports and contextual evidence
A second strand examines how social listening reports combine qualitative and quantitative elements, what they can legitimately support in policy reasoning, and how they can be evaluated and integrated alongside other evidence. A substantial practical contribution has been the preservation and curation of reports and associated materials that have disappeared from official sources, strengthening transparency and future policy learning.

Outputs and engagement

The project is producing a set of outputs intended to be useful across academic and policy communities, including:

• Case study analyses (papers and associated materials)
• Policy-facing guidance on interpreting and integrating these evidence types
• A refined ERMF/ERMF-based guide to support practical reasoning about whether policies can work “here”
• Practical resources supporting evidence integration and organisational learning
• A South Africa-based conference and dissemination programme, bringing together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and civil society

Partnerships

The project is delivered through collaboration between institutions in the UK and South Africa, with a commitment to equitable partnership, shared authorship, and capacity strengthening. It is designed to generate benefits that are meaningful within South African policy communities while also contributing to wider international debates about evidence, context, and public health decision-making.

Conference

A major engagement and dissemination milestone is the 2026 conference: Developments in Evidence-Based Public Health and the Future of HIV Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (25–27 February 2026, Gauteng, South Africa). The conference provides a forum to test and refine the project’s ideas with practitioners and decision-makers, and to support the development of shared principles for context-sensitive evidence use.