The Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) programme was a £15.7 million initiative aiming to improve the use of evidence in decision making in low and middle-income countries. The evaluation was commissioned to establish not just whether BCURE worked but also how and why capacity building can contribute to increased use of evidence in policymaking in the very different contexts in which the programme operated.
The paper, in a special issue of the journal on causal mechanisms, argues that using mechanisms helped provide nuanced and robust insights into these questions, while also strengthening the usefulness and policy relevance of the evaluation.
Read an open-access pre-print version of the paper here.
You can find the full issue of New Directions for Evaluation on the Wiley Online Library (paywall).
