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WE like to invoke the phrase “evidence-based policy” as if evidence itself were a political actor capable of persuading, mobilizing and governing by sheer force of rigor. It is a comforting illusion. Evidence does not vote, does not appropriate budgets and does not survive legislative bargaining on its own. Evidence only acquires power when it is translated into a language that citizens can understand and politicians can act upon.
That translation is not a cosmetic exercise. It is political work. And yet, our academic and science bureaucracies remain structurally hostile to those who do it.
If we are serious about evidence-based governance, then we must confront an uncomfortable truth: science without a political constituency is weak science, no matter how impeccable the methodology or prestigious the journal.
The problem today is not the absence of data. On climate change, public health, biodiversity loss, disaster risk, education and inequality, the evidence is overwhelming. What is missing is not knowledge, but traction. Evidence repeatedly loses to misinformation, populism and short-term political incentives not because it is wrong, but because it is politically illegible.
And here lies the contradiction. We expect scientists and scholars to “inform policy,” but we punish them when they step outside the narrow confines of peer-reviewed discourse to do exactly that.
Within many universities and research agencies, public engagement is still treated with suspicion. Writing op-eds, briefing legislators, speaking in mass media or translating research for civic audiences is often dismissed as “popularization,” or worse, as advocacy. The unspoken message is clear: Serious scholars publish; public intellectuals are indulged at best and penalized at worst.
Promotion, reward and tenure systems remain stubbornly focused on metrics that speak only to other academics. These include impact factors, citation counts, journal rankings. These metrics have value, but they have also created a perverse incentive structure. Scholars quickly learn that time spent engaging the public is time taken away from the outputs that “count” in their academic careers. Early career researchers, in particular, are implicitly and explicitly taught that engagement beyond the academe is risky to their careers.
The result is predictable. We produce generations of highly competent specialists who are absent from public life, while those who attempt to bridge the gap are quietly marginalized. Translation becomes a side activity, relegated to the margins of “community service,” rather than recognized as scholarship with democratic value.
This is a profound institutional failure.
Translation is not dilution. It is not the betrayal of rigor. It is re-coding, the disciplined act of converting complex evidence into narratives, frames and policy options that can survive contact with real political institutions. If a finding cannot be explained in plain language without losing its integrity, the problem is not the public’s intelligence. The problem lies in how knowledge is being produced and communicated.
Worse, the marginalization of public-facing scholars weakens science itself. In democratic systems, legitimacy does not flow automatically from expertise. It flows from recognition, trust and relevance. When citizens do not see science as speaking to their lived realities, they will not defend it when it is attacked or defunded. When politicians cannot translate evidence into politically actionable terms, they will default to ideology, expediency or pressure from organized interests.
Budgets are not allocated by peer review. Laws are not passed by citation counts. Regulations are not defended by methodological appendices. Without a constituency, science becomes advisory at best, and disposable at worst.
This helps explain why we are perpetually surprised when overwhelming evidence fails to shape outcomes. We blame “anti-intellectualism,” misinformation or bad politics, and all of these are real. But we rarely interrogate the institutional design of academia itself. We rarely ask whether we have built systems that actively discourage scientists from doing the civic labor necessary to make evidence matter.
The irony is that we often demand “neutrality” from scholars, as if silence were a virtue. But silence in the face of policy debates is not neutrality. It is abdication. Refusing to translate evidence into public language does not protect science from politics; it simply cedes the political arena to those with fewer scruples about accuracy.
Creating a political constituency for science does not mean turning scholars into partisans. It means acknowledging that evidence always enters political systems through institutions, narratives and power relations. Ignoring this does not preserve purity; it ensures irrelevance.
What needs to change is not rhetoric, but structure.
First, universities and funding agencies must redefine academic merit. Policy briefs, legislative testimony, credible media engagement and sustained public education should be formally recognized as scholarly outputs when they demonstrably translate research into public value. These should not be treated as optional “service,” but as legitimate forms of knowledge work.
Second, institutions must protect public-facing scholars. This includes defending them from bad-faith political attacks, drawing clear lines between evidence-based advocacy and partisan campaigning, and recognizing that public engagement entails risk that should be borne institutionally, not individually.
Third, we must train scientists politically, but not partisanly. Scholars need to understand how policy windows open, how bureaucracies function, how narratives shape public opinion and how evidence actually travels through legislative and executive systems. This is not “selling out” science. It is ensuring that science survives contact with power.
Ultimately, this is an accountability issue. Publicly funded science cannot justify speaking only to itself while lamenting public ignorance. Democratic legitimacy requires intelligibility. Engagement is not an add-on to rigor. it is part of it.
If academia continues to marginalize those who do the hard work of translation, then calls for “evidence-based policy” will remain hollow slogans. We will continue to generate excellent research that arrives too late, in the wrong language, and without a constituency to defend it.
What is at stake is not merely the standing of science in policy debates, but whether democratic decision-making can remain tethered to reality in an era of manufactured doubt and strategic ignorance.
Science does not need to be louder. It needs to be institutionally allowed to speak, without punishment.
Disclosure: I am a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTV Network Inc.
