This blog was written by Dr Sreehari Ravindranath, Director – Research and Impact, Dream a Dream, India.
Across global education and development ecosystems, evidence-informed policymaking has emerged as a powerful imperative. Donors are investing in synthesis platforms and technical support. Multilateral organisations are prioritising knowledge translation. National governments are increasingly encouraged to adopt interventions validated through rigorous research. The ambition is clear. Education systems should be shaped by deliberate learning rather than by intuition or political expediency. In many parts of the Global South, this movement is welcomed as it promises transparency, effectiveness, and cumulative learning across reform cycles.
However, as momentum builds around evidence uptake, a deeper structural concern must be acknowledged. Where is the global evidence produced, and who defines what counts as credible knowledge? Multiple studies reveal that scientific research and academic publishing remain dominated by institutions located in the Global North. According to the UNESCO Science Report (2021), over 70 percent of global research outputs originate from high-income countries, with significant concentration in the United States, Western Europe and parts of East Asia. The editorial boards of most high-impact journals, the databases that determine research visibility and the institutions that control large-scale funding continue to be unequally distributed across the global research landscape.
This asymmetry is not merely about numbers. It has serious implications for the shaping of education policy in the Global South. As highlighted in BMJ Global Health, there is persistent geographical bias in academic publishing, with research from low- and middle-income countries under-represented in high-impact journals and global indexing systems.
Peer-reviewed literature, particularly that which makes its way into synthesis reports and international evidence repositories, disproportionately favours studies conducted in or by researchers affiliated with institutions in the Global North. Journals published in the Global South face significant barriers to indexing, prestige and funding. Southern scholars, particularly those working in languages other than English or in under-resourced contexts, face structural disadvantages in accessing high-impact publication spaces. These challenges are not just technical; they reflect and reproduce longstanding power imbalances in knowledge production.
Evidence synthesis platforms and ‘what works’ repositories tend to draw heavily from studies that meet strict methodological hierarchies, often privileging randomised controlled trials and quantitative impact evaluations. While these methods have undeniable value, they are more feasible in well-resourced systems with stable infrastructure, consistent implementation environments and reliable data. In contrast, education systems in the Global South operate under more complex and volatile conditions. Large class sizes, multilingual classrooms, bureaucratic instability and social inequalities shape how policy plays out in practice. In such contexts, long-term ethnographic research, participatory methodologies, and narrative-based inquiry often provide more relevant and actionable insights. Yet these approaches are less visible in global evidence reviews, in part because they fall outside the dominant models of scientific validation.
This leads to a second concern. Evidence does not circulate in a neutral form. It travels embedded within systems of validation, power and history. The constructs we measure, the tools we use and the frameworks we apply are shaped by particular institutional and cultural world views. For example, the global expansion of competency-based education, teacher effectiveness frameworks or social-emotional learning models is often backed by research conducted in high-income, culturally-specific contexts. When these frameworks are promoted globally as universally effective, they risk displacing alternative ways of knowing, teaching and learning that are more aligned with local realities.
Scholars have raised this concern across disciplines. Sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) describes how “metropolitan” knowledge becomes universalised while theories emerging from the “periphery” are treated as context-bound or anecdotal. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) calls this dynamic “epistemicide,” where dominant epistemologies erase or marginalise others. These critiques are not anti-evidence. Rather, they challenge us to examine how the global architecture of evidence production privileges certain voices, methodologies and contexts over others.
To move forward, the evidence-to-policy movement must embrace a new orientation. The focus should not only be on increasing the uptake of global evidence in Southern contexts, but also on creating reciprocal systems in which knowledge from the Global South can reshape global theory, policy and practice. Education systems across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East are innovating under pressure. They are responding to demographic changes, political transitions, digital divides and climate crises. These experiences generate insights into resilience, negotiation and community leadership that have much to offer to the global conversation.
A more equitable evidence ecosystem would invest in research capacity within low- and middle-income countries, support regionally-led evidence synthesis, reform authorship and citation practices in international collaborations and broaden the range of accepted methodologies within global repositories. It would question who sets the standards for rigour and whose questions are deemed worthy of investigation. Without such changes, evidence-informed policymaking risks becoming a mechanism by which dominant institutions continue to shape others’ priorities.
The promise of evidence is real. It can support fairer systems, strengthen accountability and make policymaking more transparent. But to realise this promise, we must address the underlying geography of evidence production and use. The Global South must not only be seen as a site for pilot projects and field trials. It must be recognised as a generator of theory, of methodology and of imagination. Only then can we create an education future where knowledge travels not one way, but in many directions, grounded in reciprocity, justice and mutual respect.
