Page 22 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS1931 Arman B. et al.
Those principles are bedrocks of national policies that are reflected in the
international conventions. At the same time, national statistical systems are
responsible to inform such policies and naturally should be guided by the
same underlying principles. When policy-data (or user-producer) dialogues
are taking place on the basis of only endorsed policies (rather than agreed
principles), it is likely that dialogues focus only on monitored policies (data
used) and “data gap” for monitoring existing policies. In a less realistic
situation, such dialogue may also focus on data and statistics that are
produced by not being used (or useful) for policy monitoring (data unused).
In all three cases, the focus of dialogue is on what we “know” about needs and
used of data. While there are obvious cases of lack of policy that is consistent
with agreed guiding principles; such as policies that explicitly assure equal
opportunities for members of society (non-discrimination) as recommended
2
by Universal Declaration of Human Rights ; or policies that are accounting for
the impact of economic activities on ecosystem and people’s healthy lives as
3
recommended by Rio Declaration on Environment and Development . It is
often seen that policy-data dialogue is taking place around what is already
reflected in the policy and hardly discuss what is NOT IN the policy. Ironically,
most of the vulnerable groups and social, economic, environmental and
institutional issues that relate to such groups are not acknowledged by the
policy documents and therefore are left out of both policy and data (policy-
data void). At the same time, statistical systems and planning organizations
spend Millions of dollars annually on collecting data that are never being used
or formulating policies that never been implemented (policy and data waste).
EPIC has been developed to help users and producers of data to expand
their knowledge space from “data used” to void and waste in both policy and
data by maximizing effective and structured policy-data interaction. In other
words, to cut the waste, close the gap and fill the void in an integrated and
participatory manner. The fundamental principle that is cornerstone in
development of EPIC is that every tool that aims to successfully facilitate
policy-data integration has to (a) focus on common interest of policy and data,
and (b) benchmark against neither policy nor data, but a set of principles that
are agreed up on by both data producers and decision makers. To achieve this
objective, EPIC is designed to focus on Issues for Action and Target Groups as
common interest of all stakeholders. Moreover, EPIC benchmarks the needs
against a set of core concepts that cut across four development domains
(Economic, Environment, Institutional, and Social), taken from internationally
agreed frameworks, and naturally the expected outputs are both policy and
data recommendations. Utilizing EPIC allows for a participatory process for

2 http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html
3 https://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm
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