Paper short abstract:

There has been an increase in experimental trials conducted into public health interventions across South Asia. This paper draws on case studies to explore issues around their conduct and how institutions collaborate to run these.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on material from a project spanning India, Nepal and Sri Lanka this paper explores a number of collaborations around the conduct of experimental public health interventions. These are run by assemblages of organisations (universities, hospitals, donor agencies, local non-governmental institutions, research institutes, and government clinics for example) and we explore the tensions in these institutional relationships, as a balance between the need to generate both evidence and provide services is negotiated. We propose that health development programmes increasingly structure their interventions with the generation of diverse forms of evidence in mind. We ask the questions: What kind of evidence is necessary? What networks are developed to undertake this? A range of case studies will be presented as we develop our argument.