This article critically reviews the approach to evidence based policy-making (EBPM) advanced in the Labour government's modernisation agenda. The article contends that EBPM must be understood as a project focused on enhancing the techniques of managing strategic policy-making as opposed to improving the capacities of the social sciences to influence the ‘practices of democracy’ as envisaged by Lasswell, or facilitating the kind of systems thinking advocated by Schon and by more recent students of ‘complexity’.
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