Civil servants were given legal protection against being fired without a show of cause in order to

4 What do Civil Servants Do?

Civil servants are in charge of a rich menu of government activities ranging from artificially ‘seeding clouds’ in the sky to induce rainfall, to operating schools, or administrating programs for the increasing number of aged people. In between, civil servants, as in ancient times, continue to collect taxes and perform state functions that cannot be trusted to, or done by, social (voluntary) or private market institutions. These various activities can be grouped under the following headings: shaping and implementing public policy decisions; providing services to individuals, groups and organizations; and administrating regulatory schemes in areas such as aviation, drugs, and election financing.

The main structural entities for carrying out these activities could be divided roughly into three (a) the regular civil service departments and agencies—responsible for the generic governmental functions; (b) the special statutory agencies, authorities, commissions, etc.—responsible for specific tasks removed from the regular civil service, (e.g., the USA Securities and Exchange Commission); and (c) government corporations entrusted with running utilities and other commercial enterprises regarded as natural monopolies or in some other way related to national interests (e.g., postal services, public broadcasting, electricity companies, and regional development projects). The combinations of the various types of activities and the different structures reflect the myriad and ever-changing scope of civil service responsibilities.

It is impossible to prescribe the right number of civil servants per capita, given the differences in their functions, and in the number of intra-state governmental levels in different states. In economically developed states, the tendency is to cut down the scope of civil service activities (and consequently its size too) through privatization, outsourcing, etc. In new states the pressure still exists on the civil service to do much more for their hard-pressed societies.

Civil Servants

Civil servants were long thought not to be employees, but the position now seems to be that they enjoy a relationship similar to that created under a contract of employment, subject to the right of the Crown to dismiss its servants at its pleasure. This is not as harsh as it sounds, as many of the legal protections accorded to other employees, including the ERA 1996 provisions for unfair dismissal, apply equally to Crown servants. The main exceptions are the right to a minimum notice period and statutory redundancy period. Police officers and prison officers are exceptions to this, however, and cannot claim unfair dismissal. Similarly, members of the armed forces are specifically excluded from statutory protection.

What Do Civil Servants Do?

Civil servants are in charge of a rich menu of government activities ranging from artificially ‘seeding clouds’ in the sky to induce rainfall, to operating schools, or administrating programs for the increasing number of aged people. In between, civil servants, as in ancient times, continue to collect taxes and perform state functions that cannot be trusted to or executed by social (voluntary) or private market institutions. These various activities can be grouped under the following headings: shaping and implementing public policy decisions; providing services to individuals, groups, and organizations; and administrating regulatory functions in areas such as aviation, drugs, and election financing.

The main structural entities for carrying out these activities could be divided roughly into: (1) the regular civil service departments and agencies – responsible for the generic governmental functions; (2) the special statutory agencies, authorities and commissions (e.g., the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) responsible for specific tasks removed from the regular civil service, increasingly including regulatory tasks; and (3) government corporations entrusted with running mainly utilities and other commercial enterprises regarded as natural monopolies (e.g., electricity companies; regional development projects), or in some other way related to merit public goods and national interests (e.g., national forests, postal services, public broadcasting). The combinations of the various types of activities and the different structures reflect the myriad and ever-changing scope of civil service responsibilities, including ‘joined-up government’ or ‘collaborative governance’ (Bogdanor, 2005; Donahue and Zeckhauser, 2011) – aimed at bringing together different government agencies and private and voluntary bodies, thus blurring the previous boundaries of the civil service.

It is impossible to prescribe the right number of civil servants per capita, given the differences in their functions, and in the number of intrastate governmental levels in different states. In economically developed states, the tendency is to cut down the scope of civil service activities (and consequently its size as well) through privatization, outsourcing, and delegation of responsibilities to nonprofit civil society organizations. In new states, the pressure still exists on the civil service to do much more for their hard-pressed societies.

5.6 The political power of civil servants

Brazilian civil servants earn more than their counterparts in the private sector. Many studies (see Barbosa and Barbosa Filho, 2012; Belluzo et al., 2005; Bender and Fernandes, 2006) show that, when comparing Brazilians with the same socioeconomic characteristics (level of education, place of residence, gender, race, work experience, etc.), those employed in the public sector earn more. In the most recent estimate it was estimated that male civil servants earn, on average, 12.8% more than their counterparts in the private sector. The differential between women was even higher, 18%. In addition to this, civil servants enjoy other substantial advantages, such as higher-paying retirements (despite the recent reforms in Social Security) and job tenure. (For Social Security reforms approved between 1998 and 2012 see Afonso, 2005; Pinheiro and Giambiagi, 2006; Caetano, 2006; Amaro, 2011; Caetano, 2008, 2011a, 2011b; Tafner and Giambiagi, 2011.)

In terms of income level, civil servants, for the most part, are considered members of the middle and upper classes. Table 5.4 shows that public-sector employees represent about 30% of upper-class workers (daily per capita income above US$50 per day) and only 5.5% of the poor (less than US$4 per day). The profile is inverted in the private sector, where participation decreases as income increases.

Table 5.4. Public and Private Employment by Class: Workers between 25 and 65 – 2009 (%)

Source: Ferreira et al., 2013, p. 153. Note: Poor = daily per capita income less than US$4; Vulnerable = daily per capita income between US$4 and US$10; Middle Class = daily per capita income between US$10 and US$50; Upper Class = daily per capita income greater than US$50. Values expressed in US$ in 2005 by purchasing power parity.

Notice that the income stratification presented in Chapter 2, proposed by Ferreira and co-authors, and used in Table 5.4, is the one that establishes higher limits to define the middle and upper classes. Even using this classification, which raises the minimum remuneration necessary to classify a person as middle or upper income, civil servants still maintain a significant presence at the top.

Here is another example, using a different measure of income stratification. Remember that in Chapter 2, Section 2.7, it was seen that, using Family Budget Research based on 2002 values, the upper class begins with a monthly per capita household income of R$1661.00 (about US$722). A three-member family with a single source of income would move from being middle class to upper class with an income of about R$5000 (about US$2200). Consulting the wage structure of federal civil servants, rarely does one find a middle- or upper-level career position with remuneration inferior to this amount (Statistical Personnel Bulletin, http://www.servidor.gov.br/index.asp?index=65&ler=s712). An upper-level professional in the Central Bank, for example, receives a lower salary when compared to other similar careers. Their beginning wage is R$5100 and goes to R$8900. There are, however, many gratifications that accumulate over the course of their career that can double their basic income. It is easy to find careers on the pay charts with gross salaries, before gratifications, of over R$12,000 thousand (about US$5200) a month.

This result is consistent with findings by Pedro de Souza and Marcelo Medeiros, reported in Chapter 2, Section 2.2, according to which the remuneration of civil servants has an intense regressive effect on income distribution. This means it is received in large part by people at the upper levels of income distribution.

A full-time university professor in the United States earns, on average, US$135,000 per year (The Economist 2013). Frequently, they do not possess tenure and work in a highly competitive market where thousands of earned doctorates are added yearly. They must regularly publish papers in high-reputation periodicals and are under constant evaluation by their students and peers. In a Brazilian public university, the professors are civil servants with tenure and very little pressure to produce. Their salaries can reach US$85,000 per year, not counting the innumerable gratifications added to their base salary (Ministry of Planning. Statistical Personnel Bulletin, 2013).

The difference in remuneration between a North American professor and a Brazilian, according to the numbers above, is only 60%, while the difference in per capita GDP between the two countries is 377% (Penn World Table versão 7.1.).

Another category of civil servants, Brazilian judges, are among the best paid in the world. A report published by the Secretary of Judicial Reform (Secretaria de Reforma do Judiciário), a department in the Ministry of Justice, states that:

Brazilian federal judges of the first level have salaries superior to all countries, with exception of Canada. Magistrates of the second level have salaries higher than all other countries, with the exception of Colombia and Canada (Brazil Ministry of Justice, 2004).

Obviously there are poorly paid categories in public service and much inequality between professions. For example, Moriconi (2008) states that elementary teachers, who are college graduates, can find better paying employment in the private sector. Even in these cases, however, remuneration in the private sector may not be better. Teachers who are beginning their careers, who are not graduates or are female, earn more in the public sector than in the private sector. One must also consider the additional advantages of higher retirement salaries and job tenure.

In Brazil, one must pass exams to be hired as a civil servant. The high salary and advantages offered by public employment have made those exams a national fever. The civil servant exam for the Public Attorney’s Office in 2013, for example, had over 800,000 applicants for only 147 openings. That is almost 5500 candidates per opening (http://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/noticias/maior-concurso-do-pais-mpu-registra-800-mil-inscritos/). There is an ample market of tutoring classes for these exams as well as the sale of preparatory study materials. Radio broadcasters present special programs with tips for these competitions. The electronic versions of the main newspapers in the country have popular blogs regarding the theme. The National Congress was forced to pass a general law to establish rules that guarantee fairness in exams for civil servant hiring due to the great amount of social interest in the subject. The search for public employment has taken on such a social dimension that it came to inspire a very successful theater comedy: In “How to Pass a Directed Civil Servant Exam” (Como passar em concurso público), the actors parody the routine common among young people of studying for years to obtain the dream job. A topic to be researched is the economic impact of the time dedicated to preparatory studies (and not other more productive activities) by millions of youth at the peak of their productive age, including those very talented people who have just graduated from university.

Civil servants are able to reach this privileged position due to a combination of factors that allow them a politically strong position to voice their demands. In the terms proposed by Robinson in his oft-cited work on redistributive policy (Robinson, 2008) some groups of civil servants are near the decision-making center and are in the same professional and social environment as politicians. Other groups have the great ability to use collective action by means of unions and associations. Together, they are able to pressure politicians for Cell B type policies, shown in Figure 5.1: concentrated benefits in their favor and costs diffused to all society by means of taxation.

As with any place in the world, there are groups of civil servants who take advantage of their great proximity to political decision making. They advise politicians on salary increases, opening new job positions, etc. They are therefore able to exercise their influence in topics of interest to them. Others detain power due to their professional activities. For example, if those responsible for collecting taxes decide to strike, the flow of revenue is placed in check and the state may find it difficult to honor its commitments.

This typical type of privilege was reinforced by devices in the 1988 Constitution, which increased civil servant ability to use collective action. The constitution gave government employees the right to strike (Federal Constitution, Article 37, Clause VII), which prior to this was not only prohibited but was considered a crime. At the same time, civil servant job security was preserved (Federal Constitution, Article 41). Limits on the right to strike must be regimented by a specific law, which yet awaits approval.

The combination of these factors made striking profitable for civil servants. They can strike with no fear of being fired. The inexistence of a law defining limits and conditions for strikes leaves room for long strikes with no significant restrictions or punishment. It also allows for strikes in services considered essential, such as health services and police. Neither are there limiting rules for strikes, such as a minimum number of servants to provide services, advanced notice of an impending strike, discounting pay for days on strike, etc.

In September 2007, the Supreme Court, faced with the inexistence of regulations for civil servant strikes, determined that the law in force governing the private sector be followed (Court Injunction 670) in “what applied.” Based on the legislation, it would be possible to deduct pay or restrict the length of strikes. In practice, however, the political pressure of the civil servants and the fact that the lawyers who were supposed to act in favor of the government in this case, are themselves civil servants (and therefore not interested in enforcing the rule), has resulted in the non-application of the judicial determination.

The consequence is that civil servants proportionally strike more than the private sector and their strikes last much longer. Table 5.5 reflects this reality. Even though public servants represent 25% of the formal workforce, they are responsible for 44% of the strikes held in 2012 (Brazil Ministry of Work and Employment, 2013). What is surprising is the difference in respect to hours on strike: 74% of time away is attributed to civil servants. On average, a public servant strike lasts 172 hours, compared to only 46 in the private sector.

Table 5.5. Total Strikes and Hours of Work Stoppage in the Public and Private Sectors (2012)

Source: DIEESE (2013). Prepared by the author.

As an example, in 2012, there was a strike of federal university professors that lasted 120 days. At the time of writing, there was a public school teacher strike in Rio de Janeiro that had lasted for over 60 days. These are not isolated cases, but a simple fact of daily life in the many areas of public service.

Consequently, the state weakens and is incapable of imposing sanctions on striking civil servants, leaving little to do but attend the demands presented or see the popularity of government leaders fall during the time the servants are on strike and public services are discontinued. Even ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader, was exasperated at the excessive liberty of strikes in the public sector. He stated in an interview:

What is not possible, what no Brazilian can accept, is that someone spends 90 days on strike and gets paid for the days off. It then ceases to be a strike and becomes a vacation (Guerreiro and Zimmermann, 2007).

Parallel to this phenomenon is another characteristic of the new constitutional order. It granted political power to civil servants in the form of financial autonomy for the Judicial and Legislative Branches and the Public Attorney’s Office. To ensure that the autonomy of these institutions would not be threatened by the Executive Branch by means of funding rationing, the constitution gave them administrative and financial autonomy. Article 168 of the Constitution prohibits the curtailment of those institutions’ expenses, while other devices give them the liberty to determine the total amount of their own budgets.

This autonomy was used, in the best rent-seeking style, to raise salaries in those public institutions. Political and administrative leaders in the Legislative and Judiciary branch, as well as in the Public Attorney’s Office, are able to increase their institutional budget (and their own salaries) year after year. As consequence, some careers in the Executive Branch, which are well organized and work in strategic services (such as the revenue service or public security officials), take advantage of their strength and demand salary parity with the financially autonomous Branches. (Regarding this point, see Mendes, 2006.)

In Figure 5.2, one can see that in the initial years of the series, the Legislative, the Judiciary and Public Attorney’s Office had a more intense payroll increase than the Executive Branch. Up to 2003, the Executive Branch payroll remained nearly constant in real terms, while the other branches had substantial increases. After 2003, two facts occurred. First, the Worker’s Party (PT) gained control of the federal government, with the election of the President Lula da Silva. Since the PT has strong ties to the unions, Executive Branch employee unions took advantage of this situation to obtain pay raises (see Guerzoni Filho, 2006). Second, the country left a turbulent period of international financial crises (1997-2002) and entered the commodities boom, which increased the fiscal space of the public sector to pay higher salaries. With this, the demands for pay equality by the Executive Branch in relation to the other branches were met and expenses for the Executive began to rise more intensely.

Table 5.6 shows the great importance of personnel expense in aggregated public finances. Between 2001 and 2011, spending with federal employees grew 61% in real terms, almost the same as GDP growth. Expenses in states and municipalities grew at a much greater rate. (In Section 5.10, considerations will be made regarding the motives for rapid expansion in personnel expenses in the states and municipalities.) Considering the expense of the three levels of government, we see that expenses for personnel more than doubled in real terms, representing the equivalent of 46% of total tax revenues in 2011.2 This is, therefore, a high-cost expense that over time has been a determinant for the trajectory of high public expenditure.

Table 5.6. Expenses with Personnel in the Federal Government, States and Municipalities 2001 vs. 2011

Sources: Ministry of Planning. Statistical Personnel Bulletin (several issues) and Brazil Federal Revenue. Deflator: IPCA. Prepared by the author.

7.4.2 The Promotion Tournament

In explaining the diverse performances of fiscal decentralization in the world, some recent studies (e.g. Blanchard and Shleifer, 2001; Enikolopov and Zhuravskaya, 2007; Rodriguez-Pose and Ezcurra, 2011) have directed attention to the political institutions that accompany fiscal decentralization. In particular, Enikolopov and Zhuravskaya (2007) find in a cross-country study that the strength of the national parties significantly improves the performance of fiscal decentralization. However, administrative subordination (i.e. appointing local politicians rather than electing them) does not improve the results of fiscal decentralization. The first result falls in line with the Chinese reality. It is also consistent with Cai and Treisman (2007)’s argument that China’s economic success has to be explained by the growth-enhancing policies adopted by the central government. However, the second result is against China because subnational leaders are generally appointed in the country. To understand the Chinese case, we need to have a close look at how political institutions are interwoven with fiscal decentralization in the country. This leads us to study the Chinese bureaucracy and the promotion tournament embedded in it.

China’s civil servant system can be dated back to 1500 years ago when keju, a civil examination system, was established. The exam was mainly on the Confucian classics and as a result, the bureaucracy has been deeply influenced by the Confucian doctrines. Although keju was abolished in the early 1900s, its core ideas have been preserved. Among them, two have strong implications for contemporary China.30 The first is an elitist view of the bureaucracy, namely, to qualify as a government official, one has to be learned, capable, and virtuous. The second is a reciprocity view toward governance, namely, people are the subjects to be governed, and in return, government officials should take care of the people.31 That is, the Chinese bureaucracy has a strong flavor of meritocracy. In practice, it has two significant characteristics. First, government officials are selected from a long process in which they have to show that they are both capable and willing to serve the people and the party. For a young man who is determined to move to the very top of the hierarchy, he has to be prepared that it will take 20–30 years of hard work and a lot of luck for him to do so. Second, government officials are expected to take proactive moves to improve people’s welfare. This requirement is quite different from the accountability that a democracy imposes on its officials. Instead of holding government officials accountable to the law, the Chinese regime emphasizes the responsibility that government officials hold toward the people. There are balancing institutions, such as the legislative and law, but their roles are supplementary; the Chinese regime is clearly dominated by the bureaucracy.

Within the bureaucracy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) serves as both the controller and the selectorate (Besley and Kudamatsu, 2008). As the controller, the CCP sets the agenda and direction of the bureaucracy; as the selectorate, the CCP selects elites and determines their promotion inside the bureaucracy. A system has been developed to evaluate and promote officials. The party has a committee corresponding to each level of the government. Within each committee, the department of organization is in charge of the personnel in the jurisdiction of the corresponding government. Because the number of positions shrinks quickly when one moves up the hierarchical ladder, local officials are effectively engaged in an elimination tournament. Although the criteria of promotion are multi-dimensional, encompassing all the major concerns of the central government, such as economic growth, tax revenue, employment, social stability, and so on, what actually determine an official’s promotion invariably lie in two areas, namely, the ability to promote economic growth and the ability to solve the most urgent problem faced by the party. In light of the multi-tasking theory, this comes as no surprise: both are easy to measure and their effects are immediate.

Empirical studies have supported the role of economic growth in the promotion tournament. Li and Zhou (2005) is the first study to show the link between economic growth and promotion. They study provincial party secretaries and governors and find that those officials’ chances of getting promoted increase by 15% over the mean if their provinces’ average growth rate in their tenures is one standard deviation higher than the average. However, their results are challenged by other studies. For example, Wang and Xu (2008) find that provincial party secretaries and governors who are later promoted to the central government do not significantly outperform others; the provincial leaders who come from and then go back to the central government even underperform the average. One of the problems of studying the provincial leaders is that their promotion can be highly influenced by the center’s political preferences and political lineages. For example, Opper and Brehm (2007) construct an index of local leaders’ political connections to the members of the political bureau and find that it has a strong predicting power for their promotion whereas economic growth plays a highly insignificant role. In addition, economic growth may not be a sufficient statistic for the leaders’ personal abilities because local conditions, very diverse in China, may contribute heavily to local growth. One of the regularities observed for the promotion tournament is that top leaders in the CCP central committee are invariantly promoted from coastal provinces and the two powerful cities, Beijing and Shanghai; even if they originally did not work there, they would be first moved there to prepare for promotion. Therefore, using economic growth rates to predict their promotion may only pick up the effects created by the promotion process itself.

Yao and Zhang (2011) improve the literature by studying city party secretaries and mayors in 241 cities of 18 provinces for the period 1994–2008. They utilize the leaders who were shuffled between cities to construct a large connected sample of cities and leaders. Shuffling serves to make leaders comparable across borders. Without shuffling, leaders’ abilities are bundled together with the cities’ local conditions. Although leaders having served the same city can be compared because they share the same city fixed effect, a comparison across cities is impossible. Within the connected sample, comparisons can be made. From a leader who was moved from one city to another, one can identify the fixed effects of the two cities. Deducting the two fixed effects from the performances of the leaders having only stayed in one city, one can compare them across cities. Based on their connected sample, Yao and Zhang are able to rank all the leaders and find that the variation among the leaders is a significant contributing factor to the variation of economic growth within the sample cities. In addition, they find that leader ranking is a significant predictor for promotion: the leader of the highest ranking is 30% more likely to get promoted than the leader of the lowest ranking. However, this positive correlation is only found for mayors, not for party secretaries. This is consistent with the different roles they assume in the bureaucracy: the party secretary is in charge of the personnel, political stability, and other less economically related issues, whereas the mayor is in charge of the daily operation of the government, for which economic growth is one of the top priorities.

In summary, the CCP, through a meritocratic bureaucracy, has introduced strong career incentives to the rank of local officials so their conducts are molded to generally promote economic growth. In so doing, the CCP itself has transformed from a political party to the selectorate of the Chinese meritocracy as well as the controller of the country. What is left out is why the CCP has changed its course. In addition, the reliance on a meritocratic bureaucracy does not preempt the role of institutions. Today’s China is quite different from the country 30 years ago; much of the difference is due to institutional change as well as income growth. This is the topic of the next subsection.

Danwei: a mini welfare state

In urban areas, civil servants and SOE employees were regarded as members of a Danwei or work unit. The Danwei is designed to provide cradle-to-grave support for its employees. The combination of the Hukou system and the Danwei created a tightly controlled and extremely immobile labor force in which productivity was discouraged as individual performance had no bearing on an individual’s share of the profits.

China’s economic transition forced changes in government policy and the privatization of many smaller SOEs that were suddenly given a ‘sink or swim’ ultimatum. Nevertheless, in the public sector, including large monopolized SOEs, the Danwei still exists and continues to provide welfare state-style coverage such as housing, education, and medical services. The Danwei is thus recognized as another urban or governmental privilege which has caused inequality within Chinese society.

VI.B India

After a retired English civil servant, A. O. Hume, helped found the Indian National Congress in 1885, Indians were increasingly encouraged by liberals in London to prepare for the distant day when they would be self-governing. Nationalists of many castes and political outlooks started working for self-government, helped by the importation of ideas from the Western world and the growth of a free press that was also modeled on the West's. Indians were told that British laws should be their model, but many went back to the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution and the nationalist activity it set off. Mazzini's works were translated and a society called Young India was founded on the model of his Young Italy. There were setbacks, as in 1879, when sharp attacks on British rule in the vernacular press, most notably Amrita Bazar Patrika, of Calcutta, edited by Sisir Kumar Ghose, resulted in a more restrictive press law. But the following year, a Liberal government came into power in London and the Marquis of Ripon was sent to India to enact reforms. He ran into fierce opposition among the colonial administrators for a plan to treat Indians as equal before the law. Liberal British policies also encouraged nationalists in South Africa and Ireland, and their Indian counterparts took note of their successes and failures. When President Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points policy of post-World War I, which emphasized the right of self-determination, Indian activists adopted them as their own. Russian influences were also at play in the politics of Indian nationalism. Lev Tolstoy's teachings confirmed the beliefs of Gandhi, the towering figure in the Indian nationalist movement, in passive resistance and self-sufficiency; Russian Communists taught Indians how to build strong political organizations. Surendra Nath Banerjee was the leading journalist in the crucial period of Indian nationalism that was dominated by Gandhi. Banerjee founded the Indian Association in Calcutta and became the editor of the Bengali, the leading nationalist newspaper. In measured terms, Banerjee began to call for reform of the conditions of colonial rule. His influence on the new class of educated Indians who were attending a growing system of both British and native schools was enormous. By the end of his long career, Banerjee as well as his audience of Indian intellectuals had moved to a position of demanding the outright independence that Britain eventually granted many decades later.

1.3.2 UNFCCC—Secretariat

A secretariat staffed by international civil servants supports the UNFCCC and its supporting bodies. The secretariat is at Bonn, Germany, which is known as the Climate Change Secretariat. The secretariat is institutionally linked to the United Nations without being integrated in any program and is administered under United Nations Rules and Regulations. It employs around 200 staff including short-term staff and consultants from all over the world. Its Head, the Executive Secretary, is appointed by the Secretary General of the United Nations. The secretariat makes practical arrangements for meetings, compiles and distributes statistics and information, and assists member countries in meeting their commitments under the Convention.

In View of Trade-offs, Why Care About Evidence?

While almost all politicians and civil servants say that they appreciate how useful evidence is in building policy solutions (Andrews, 2017; Talbot and Talbot, 2014) and are often ready to support ‘evidence-based policy’, the perception often remains that the uptake of research knowledge in government is low (Head et al., 2014). The recent ‘post-fact’ debate also appears to have devalued the place of science in policymaking, with some politicians pointing to the alleged citizens’ fatigue with expertise, although others saying this is exaggerated (Institute for Government, 2016; Jasanoff and Simmet, 2017).

There is no growing trend in the high incidence of policy being uninformed, and the insufficient use or misuse of science is nothing new (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Nonetheless, our democratic system, underpinned by the values of the rule of law and enlightened decision-making, assumes that the policy process is at least to a large degree rational. Politicians have at least paid lip-service to the value of expertise and rationality. In more and more countries, more radical views on the role of facts in policymaking appear to gain acceptance. There is also some evidence of acute disinformation on politically salient (or politicised) questions, like migration or vaccines. Hence, there is some urgency to strengthen the thinking and capacities of advocates for evidence-informed policy. Scientists and their organisations are natural contenders for that title.

Using evidence in policymaking clearly is a choice, given multiple other bases for policy interventions and decisions (Newman, 2017). But if we acknowledge that the policy decisions are legitimately influenced by a mix of factors and result from a political trade-off, why should we care about a strong role of evidence in this process? In our view, two arguments make a pragmatic case for evidence-informed policymaking, not reducible to values and simple preferences: 1) the complexity of global policy problems and the interconnectedness of global policymaking/governance systems and 2) the challenging environment that they create for development of robust, successful policies. The object and environment of policymaking are so complex that without evidence, we are at high risk of unintended consequences (Chalmers, 2003).

In the era of the ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973), the solutions developed without sufficient expertise and evidence are likely to fall short of success. The scale and inevitability of unintended consequences are too large to risk a nonevidence-informed decision. Costly regulatory or investment errors would likely follow. Equally, the interconnectedness of the global governing systems means that the spill-over effects of one policy action often bring consequences for other actors, on a global scale. Real responsibility can rarely be assumed only for the area directly under one’s formal jurisdiction, and the price of action extends beyond direct consequences in a local context. Complex governance also brings with it many actors with particular interests and often unequal power, which create ground for ‘proxy wars’: situations in which facts – and ‘alternative facts’ – are then exploited to back up value-based positions.

Using knowledge in a structured way can help distinguish values and power dynamics from facts in these debates. Even though science will not resolve the underlying value conflicts, it can help disentangle facts and values and refocus the debate. This can be achieved when science moves from periodical advising to participating on equal terms throughout the entire process. Advocating for the incorporation of scientific knowledge in the policy process is a value choice, even if it often seems like an obvious choice to scientists. There are no guarantees that an evidence-informed solution will inevitably be successful, but given the complexities, it may be the best bet.