Just a few weeks ago, from the 10th to 13th September, around 1800 people gathered in Prague for the Global Evidence Summit (GES). Although it may feel as a distant memory, the energy and the conversation from the event continue to resonate. This year’s theme for the GES, ‘Using Evidence. Improving Lives’, captured a vision that connects with us all.
The GES provided a platform to discuss critical global challenges across sectors such as health, education, social justice, the environment, and climate change. Through six central themes – the sustainable development agenda, research integrity making evidence accessible, evidence synthesis and synthesis products, evidence translation and implementation, evidence communication and use, and global evidence to local impact – the discussions underscored the importance of collaboration in turning evidence into action.
In our personal reflections, we identified its successes, shortcomings, and areas for improvement to strengthen future evidence mobilisation efforts.
Pushing the boundaries: Focusing on the elephants in the room with respect to global discourse required participants to engage directly with sticky subjects. For instance, a focus on the issues of ethics lended a fresh lens on how we think about the evidence ecosystem and what we mean by “trustworthy evidence”. Similarly, evidence challenge sessions included a thrilling debate on the role of AI : “Should AI replace humans in evidence synthesis?” provided innovative ways to engage the audience.
Diversity: The summit made a strong effort to showcase diversity in its speakers, regions, and topics, especially in the plenary sessions, fostering a wide range of viewpoints and insights. However, many participants from underrepresented regions were unable to attend due to high registration fees, travel expenses, and visa costs, limiting the desired inclusivity, a recurring challenge with respect to conferences held in High Income Countries (HIC)s.
Opportunities for networking: Post-pandemic, this summit was among the few large-scale events that effectively united researchers, evidence-users, think tanks and funders to discuss evidence use across various sectors. It offered valuable face-to-face networking opportunities, with dedicated spaces and social events that fostered connection and collaboration, helping to reinvigorate relationships within the evidence community after years of virtual interactions.
Logistics/considerations/organisation: A particular highlight was the contribution of young volunteers, who played a crucial role in ensuring the event ran smoothly. From keeping the program on track to helping attendees navigate the venue, their efforts were essential to the event’s overall success, earning well-deserved praise from participants.
Unisectoral: While aiming to be diverse and inclusive of experiences from all sectors, the summit leaned almost entirely on the health sector. There wasn’t enough attendance, representation or engagement with the models, frameworks, experiences, or learnings from other sectors that could challenge the status quo and advance thinking in this area.
Epistemic homogeneity: The disproportionate attention to systematic reviews and syntheses crowded out the other forms of evidence that sought space at the GES. For instance, the role of big data, evaluations, tacit knowledge, lived experiences and citizen voice. The demand for other forms of evidence as well as other forms of knowledge sharing was clear however in terms of the audience response and appreciation for the fireside story-telling plenary on Advocating for greater evidence communication & use of evidence.
Silence on power: The dominance on technical solutions and methods left little room for the discussions around the political economy of evidence production, brokerage and use. We would have liked to see more on how AI has the potential to democratise voice and access to different forms of evidence. We would have equally been keen to hear more about implementation science and the processes of navigating power in the quest to ensure evidence is used in decision making.
Domination by the usual suspects: The value that experienced colleagues bring to the table is indispensable. However, the summit lacked the voice of the youth and of early career researchers. While it is likely that many of them might have been presenting posters, it is imperative for global summits such as these to deliberately bring fresh voices to the table. More plenaries and debates needed the perspectives of the next generation of evidence producers and users. We can’t ignore the fact that Gen Z is indeed causing quite the global ripple!
Production to the detriment of use: The science and the rigour behind evidence production is critical for the EIDM movement. However, mechanisms for encouraging its use are equally important. We would have liked to see more bold statements about localisation and differentiation of models and frameworks that too often assume a ‘one size fits all’ with respect to evidence utilisation.
Posters: Approximately 200 posters were presented each day, with the majority focusing on clinical and epidemiological research. This heavy concentration made it challenging to engage with other types of research, which were scattered among the dominant clinical topics. Additionally, the limited time allocated during lunch breaks as well as the location of the posters made it difficult to have in-depth conversations with the authors.
GES is not the only conference that needs to grapple with how to make conferences more accessible, inclusive and valuable to all those who invest in them, organise them and attend them. We urge funders and leaders that use conferences to amplify voice and knowledge to truly engage with learnings from others to plan and deliver better on these so that they do indeed serve the purpose for which they are designed.
Acknowledgment: with contributions from John De Maesschalck (ITM).
