Everyday citizens

Citizens and citizen-led organizations are critical and often over-looked components of the evidence-demand side of the evidence-support system. Yet citizens can hold government policymakers accountable for using evidence and them may make many decisions every single day, whether as individuals or community leaders. 

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 Forum’s continued efforts to operationalize the Global Evidence Commission’s work, including with:

resources for ESN-CA evidence-synthesis teams to use in working with citizen partners
• living evidence profiles about each of the five ways to put evidence at the centre of everyday life
• citizen brief and citizen panel summary about putting evidence at the centre of everyday life in Ontario.

ESN-CA strongly supports the ‘ citizen call to action’ prepared by four citizen partners that were key contributors to the Evidence-Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) planning process.

For a richer understanding about how we can support ‘everyday’ 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. educate citizens about AI and advocate for approaches that encourage its safe and responsible use in supporting decision-making by citizens and citizen-led NGOS
6. push for a seat for citizens and citizen-led organizations in decisions about how the evidence-support system can better meet their needs.