EIS 2025 Summit themes
Fairer, faster, better - Realising the promise of evidence and implementation to improve lives
It is vital we bridge the gap between what we know from evidence and what we do in policy and practice.
Our key theme Fairer, faster, better is a reminder what this effort is ultimately for: to improve the lives of people facing adversity.
Six sub-themes delve into the challenges we face in closing the 'know-do' gap: centring our work in equity and inclusivity, working within diverse contexts, scaling and sustainment, the nexus of policy and evidence, how best to manage innovation in methods, and harnessing what we learn to drive more effective evidence uptake.
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With inequity and misinformation growing worldwide, closing the ‘know-do’ gap has never been more important or urgent.
2025 Sub-themes
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1. EQUITY: Change on whose terms? Centring equity in evidence and implementation
Good evidence and effective implementation can play a key role in addressing inequity. Yet our research and practice, however well-intentioned, can also exacerbate inequitable outcomes.
What perspectives and methods might better centre equity considerations in our work? What lessons can be learned from bringing together policy, practice and research with lived experience, Indigenous knowledge, and/or other ways of knowing, listening and learning?
What have we got right, when have we missed the mark, and what lessons were learned? How can we make our work more inclusive, fair and effective, for more people?
2. FIT: The norm not the exception – Embracing the messy complexity of cultures, places, and systems
Context matters. Evidence-informed solutions must be rigorous, yet flexible enough to ‘fit’ real-world use in a diversity of settings and cultures. This theme embraces the complexity of context.
We’ll deep-dive into contextual factors in evidence synthesis, evaluation and implementation – exploring how approaches such as common practice elements, community involvement and
co-design, and/or applying an intersectional lens might support better outcomes.
How can we best navigate our differences, divides and boundaries, to create a shared understanding that accelerates real-world change?
3. SCALE: Demystifying sustainment and scaling. Good enough, cheap enough, easy enough
Ensuring the best solutions reach the most people is the objective of many governments, donors and practitioners. Yet, despite our growing understanding of implementation in complex systems, few promising innovations successfully make the leap to large-scale impact.
The science of scaling is still relatively uncharted territory, bringing into focus other considerations (market dynamics, systems change). Why do scaling efforts so often fail, what makes an innovation scalable, and what supports and drives sustainment?
This theme offers new perspectives, tools, and examples: when scaling has worked, when it hasn’t, and what we’ve learned along the way.
4. POLICY: A meeting of minds? Evidence-informed policy and policy-informed evidence
Evidence-informed policy-making and policy-informed evidence generation and implementation are ideas that find a rare level of accord across the policy, research and practice communities. But, despite this spirited agreement, the evidence-to-policy and policy-to-evidence nexus remains a challenge.
How can we better integrate evidence and implementation research and practice into policymaking, and – likewise – how can we better consider the realities of policymaking in the generation and implementation of evidence?
5. METHODS: Innovation in methods for rigour, pragmatism and relevance. Can we have our cake and eat it too?
Innovation is accelerating – improving the way we generate and synthesise evidence, how we test both implementation effectiveness and the impact of our policy, programs and services, and our monitoring and evaluation approaches.
AI is an obvious tool supporting methodological innovation, but there are others in our scientific approaches, study designs and methods that have resulted in improved evidence uptake and implementation.
What is the applicability, opportunity and potential pitfalls of these new approaches? And can any method offer rigour, relevance and pragmatism – can we have our cake and eat it too?
6. LEARNING: The L word – Using what we learn to drive effective implementation
Implementation science and practice is thriving. What are we learning from all this effort, about the uptake and implementation of evidence? And can we bring these deeper insights to life, so they can influence real-world change?
What we learn from monitoring and evaluation should be more useable and implementable, and what we learn from implementation should improve evidence uptake. What tools, approaches and mindsets can help close the evidence-to-action, action-to-evidence loop, to create an integrated learning system?