The Illusion of Evidence-Based Policy: Climate Change and Migrant Women in the MENA Region

Abstract Is climate-induced migration addressed by policies and projects aimed at protecting women from being more vulnerable to poverty? In the last decade there is a growing understanding of the phenomenon of climate change induced migration, also with a gender perspective, in the MENA Region and above. Increased knowledge and understanding however, scarcely impact the policy domain in transit countries and therefore hardly generate social change in development and humanitarian contexts. This leads to what we call the illusion of evidence-based policy. An evaluation in Jordan conducted by the author serves as a case to reflect on what mechanism can facilitate the link between knowledge, evidence and policy making, providing explanatory cases in which research generates a positive impact on the lives of migrants in certain circumstances, and cases and circumstances in which impact is hindered. This article suggests that there is a missing link between research on climate-change induced migrations and social change that lies in the “distance” between those who promote research and the policymakers and in the absence of a diplomacy space where researchers, policy makers and humanitarian actors gather and take decisions grounded on evidence and needs, in the best interest of the vulnerable. The article concludes that when conducted with an open-ended approach to discover the dynamics of social change, evaluation can produce knowledge useful for reading climate change phenomena with a gender perspective, providing policy directions for international cooperation and local governance, and contributing to improving the lives of migrants, particularly women. In addition, evaluative research can facilitate the creation of a diplomacy space for its proximity to institutional stakeholders in humanitarian and development contexts, and for being at the intersection between sound evidence-based research and the policy domain.