Our Work
Overview
EGAP’s work is centered around four thematic areas and main activities advancing our understanding of governance.
EGAP members include academic researchers across multiple social science disciplines studying governance innovations as well as institutions working on governance innovation implementation. Our members include leading experts in the fields of governance and politics, centered around four main thematic areas: 1) Institutions & Governance; 2) Mitigation of Societal Conflict; 3) Reducing Poverty & Inequality; and 4) Elections, Representation, & Political Participation.
Our goals are to increase the quality and quantity of policy-relevant research, make new methodological tools and debates more accessible to a wider audience, and create more opportunities for collaboration and debate that improve the quality of research in the social sciences. To this end, our four main activities include: 1) linking research and practice; 2) building the capacity of scholars in the Global South; 3) improving methods and standards; and 4) addressing the challenges of scientific credibility.
Linking Research & Practice
EGAP’s work addresses challenges of producing and sharing rigorous evidence on governance interventions to help make policy-relevant recommendations.
EGAP fosters relationships between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners through EGAP membership and meetings; policy fora including dissemination of research findings and policy briefs; partnerships with EGAP institutional members to generate productive streams of research; and matchmaking between academic researchers and practitioners.
EGAP recognizes the ongoing underrepresentation of researchers from the Global South to lead and fully participate in rigorous research as Principal Investigators.
The lack of engagement of Global South PIs can weaken legitimacy, exacerbate inequalities, and increase the risk that research uptake will not occur. In response, EGAP has fostered the development of a global experimental research community through its Learning Days Workshops, intensive experimental methods trainings aimed at junior and future principal investigators based in the Global South. EGAP is sharing the Learning Days curricula in multiple languages, funding promising research designs from the Learning Days workshop participants, and launching a fellowship program at UC Berkeley to build a cohort of Global South research scholars.
An RCT (randomized controlled trial), as its name suggests, randomizes an important element of the study or program–this makes for greater confidence that a particular intervention caused an outcome. By randomizing who receives a program or intervention researchers can be very confident that there is no systematic relationship between the assignment of treatment and control.
Susan Hyde, Former EGAP Executive Director
Improving Methods &
Standards
EGAP contributes to critical debates of methodological importance through work on standards and methods.
EGAP members develop and disseminate resources aimed at increasing the rigor of impact evaluations in the realm of governance and politics through our methods guides, standards debates, and standards grants. EGAP works to bring new methods to the forefront and facilitate debates around methodological best practices.
Addressing the Challenges of Scientific Credibility
As an experimental methodological leader in the social sciences, EGAP is uniquely positioned to address challenges of scientific credibility.
EGAP’s work continues to innovate the field as a leader in three key areas: addressing the crisis of external validity through the Metaketa Initiative; ethics as they relate to field experimental research; and pre-registration and design-stage feedback as a strategy for increasing the transparency and credibility of research findings. Tools for pre-registration and design-stage feedback include the EGAP registry, the online peer response tool, and design feedback sessions at EGAP meetings.
Our Solutions
The Metaketa Initiative
