Citizens

We often forget how important ‘everday’ people and citizen groups are in demanding real evidence. Yet citizens can hold government policymakers accountable for using evidence and they may make many decisions every single day, whether as individuals or community leaders. The evidence-support system should also respond to their needs. 

Building upon the work of the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges – including a dedicated chapter in its 2022 report and dedicated sections in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 updates – ESN-CA promotes five key ways to ‘make evidence part of everyday life:’

  1. help citizens to judge what others are claiming
  2. make evidence available to citizens when they are making choices
  3. engage citizens in asking questions and answering them
  4. make evidence-based choices the default option
  5. give citizens a bigger role in system transformation.

ESN-CA is building on the McMaster Health Forum’s continued efforts to operationalize the Global Evidence Commission’s work, including with:

ESN-CA strongly supports the ‘citizen call to action’ – formally called ‘Putting evidence at the centre of everyday life for citizens: A call to action’ – prepared by four citizen partners who were key contributors to the Evidence-Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) planning process.

For a richer understanding about how we can support citizens and citizen-led NGOs with the best available research evidence, consider reading ESN-CA brief 3. It lists six possible next steps:

  1. advocate for citizen and community insights and experiences to be treated as valued inputs to decision-making alongside research evidence, and for the continued engagement of citizens and communities in research and in evidence support
  2. hold evidence intermediaries accountable for translating research evidence on ‘issues that matter’ into accessible formats for citizens
  3. identify ways to better engage citizen-led organizations in the process of identifying priority questions to be answered by the evidence-support system
  4. participate in efforts to build a shared misinformation-response infrastructure, including fact checking and research-literacy supports that help citizens judge claims for themselves
  5. promote AI literacy by providing citizens and citizen-led organizations with the knowledge and skills to safely and responsibly use AI to support their decision-making
  6. push for a seat for citizens and citizen-led organizations in decisions about how the evidence-support system can better meet their needs.