Sectoral evidence-synthesis infrastructure hubs

Each hub will have the following capabilities:

1. develop and iteratively improve upon a sectoral taxonomy
2. produce living evidence maps underpinned by the sectoral taxonomy (or underpin and extend existing ones)
3. pilot standing up and iteratively improving sectorally focused and cross-sectoral, policy-scale AI-enabled living evidence syntheses (AI-LESs) on priority questions (and then move to a steady state of maintaining these AI-LESs, retiring those that no longer add value, and adding new ones to address emergent issues)
4. maintain a sectoral question bank informed by inputs from the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (e.g., multilateral processes) and regional hubs (e.g., evidence intermediaries supporting national governments and UN Country Teams and regional collaborative platforms), maintain a dynamic prioritization process for sectoral questions, and keep attuned to sectoral 'windows of opportunity'
5. establish a partnership with a local technology company to support contributions to and use of the open data system and AI-enabled digital evidence-synthesis tools
6. contribute to developing cross-sectoral standards for policy-scale AI-LESs and develop any required sector-specific variants
7. manage protocol registration, actively support movement to full coverage of the most important questions being asked, and provide feedback loops to support next-generation research and evaluation
8. be prepared to pivot to address local, regional or global crises, as well as to address cross-sectoral problems, polycrisis, and system change.

Sectoral questions will ideally always have a sub-question related to how the findings vary by groups and contexts (to support local contextualization) and a framing of ‘within planetary boundaries.’

These capabilities align to a number of ‘solutions’ proposed in the ESIC roadmap:

• capability 3 aligns to ‘delivering a vanguard suite of evidence syntheses’
• capability 4 aligns to what – in the roadmap – was called ‘co-production labs’ that were proposed to be developed in partnership with the regional hubs and the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (solution 1.3 in the roadmap)
• capability 5 aligns to our open data system, or what was called the ‘federated repository’ and proposed to be developed with the regional hubs (solution 2.1)
• capability 6 maps to our proposed methods transformation, or what was called ‘quality standards’ for different types of synthesis, and proposed to be developed with the regional hubs (solution 4.2)
• capability 7 aligns to what was called ‘coordination of ongoing synthesis projects to avoid duplication’ (solution 4.4).
  

Specific sectoral hubs may take the lead and/or work with others on the developmental work needed for some of these capabilities. For example:

• METIUS – with its ‘head start’ and nine-month planning process (October 2025 through June 2026) –may take the lead on advancing thinking about the hubs overall and about approaches to prioritization (e.g., requests from policymakers, availability of evidence, and scale of problem and/or potential impacts)
• new hubs – with more explicitly required capabilities – may take the lead on approaches to question banks and to protocol-registration management
• all hubs may work with existing methods leaders such as Cochrane to support a methods transformation that will move us to policy-scale, AI-enabled living evidence syntheses.