The Evidence-Based Movement and Development

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I've been very involved in what's called the evidence-based movement and development, which has been around for some two decades or so. And basically just tries to subject all sorts of ideas in the development space to randomize the evaluations to figure out what works and what doesn't work in development. So that kind of idea, you can really test any kind of micro intervention using randomized evaluation. But one thing that's become increasingly clear, I don't want to speak for the movement, but certainly increasingly clear to me and to my colleagues is this translation from biomedical to poverty isn't super clean.

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Can giving people a sense of agency and dignity be better than giving them access to food, shelter, clothing, or cash? And what exactly can be done in practice to expand human agency? How does the value of agency-oriented interventions compare to the value of more tangible interventions? How robust are the findings about all of the above in light of the replication crisis? In general, how much confidence should we place (with or without the replication crisis) in the findings of social science research? How tight should the feedback loop be for organizations that do both research for and implementation of charitable interventions?

Richard Sedlmayr works with a private foundation called the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, where he funds research and innovation to promote pro-poor economic development. He is also involved in the setup of The Agency Fund, a philanthropic partnership investing in ideas and organizations that support people in the navigation of difficult lives. Richard's background is in behavioral, development, and financial economics, and he has a PhD in Public Policy from Oxford. Richard has lived in a dozen countries and is currently based in the Bay Area. You can get in touch with him on LinkedIn.

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