The transforming landscape of think-tanks

When governments want to reshape foreign policy, carve out a budget or pass a bill on gay marriage, they regularly turn to think-tanks to provide expertise. Once the domain of academia, think-tanks have transformed into a different animal in today’s global village of information access and sharing.

The remarkable rise in the number of think-tanks reflects a growing need for ‘independent’, readily available information, some analysts say. Critics complain that think-tanks are moving onto a partisan playing field from which they should hastily retreat.

Others hope that the surge in think-tanks will restore to higher education some of the values that have fallen by the wayside in the last half century.

The number of think-tanks has become overwhelming, with almost every country in the world boasting at least one, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s recently-released Think Tank and Civil Societies Program annual report, Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings.

In the early 20th century, a handful of think-tanks in the United States helped policy-makers shape decisions. Much of the New Deal was carved out by scholars, whose input helped the country recover from the Great Depression, notably the Brookings Institution, established in 1916 and named the world’s best think-tank for the second year running by the report.

Today, America has 1,800 think-tanks and worldwide more than 6,000 were ranked by the Global Go-To Think Tank report. As a marker, the programme received 25,000 nominations last year, said its director James McGann at the launch of the fifth annual ranking at the United Nations last month.

The report describes a rankings exercise that involved, among others, nearly 800 expert panellists from all the world’s regions, 120 academic institutions, 55 current and former directors of think-tanks, and 150 journalists and scholars with expertise in politics, think-tanks and civil society.

Think-tank trends

Besides ranking research groups across 30 categories, the report showed a dramatic rise in new think-tanks, starting in the 1970s and with more than 160 new groups emerging in 1996 alone.

McGann said that the main reasons for the rise included a growing demand for independent information and analysis, technological advances including social networking and file sharing, and globalisation and an information revolution.

In addition, increased democratisation, the end of governmental monopolies on information and the increasing complexity and technical nature of policy problems have fuelled their growth.

Further, he said, the size of government and a crisis of confidence in them have triggered interest in fact-finding and analysis of situations. There is also a need for timely and concise information as well as the emergence of transnational issues and politics.

“Think-tanks are knowledge brokers and policy sherpas,” McGann said. He warned that the world was facing trends that would have devastating impacts in terms of human life. Instead of focusing on forensic analyses of situations such as escalating armed conflicts, he suggested trying to perform analyses that would prevent human tragedies.

“There is now a need to identify trends, connect them and try to form a response to them,” he said. “That is one of the important roles think-tanks can play.”

Twenty-five years ago, many countries had no think-tanks, but today 85% have them. Among those highly ranked this year were Google, the Rand Corporation and a number of non-academic institution-based groups.

Evidence of the changing focus and aim of think-tanks can also be seen in the programme’s new ranking categories, which include groups operating on a budget of less than US$5 million, and new sub-regional divisions, reflecting the growing presence of developing country think-tanks.

Even though North American and European think-tanks, which make up 60% of the global total, topped the charts, many developing countries appeared on the report’s radar, including a number of new groups from the Middle East.

Over the last three years, McGann’s programme has received 14 requests from the Middle East to establish think-tanks, preluding the Arab Spring, and two new Moroccan think-tanks were ranked in the category for best think-tanks established in the last 18 months.

The topics most often studied include security and international affairs, international development, the environment, domestic and international economic policy, social policy and science and technology.

Drifting away from academia

One disturbing trend is the number of new think-tanks that are being set up outside the academic environment, and that fewer are using researchers with PhDs.

After World War II, 45% of think-tank researchers held doctoral degrees and that figure was 53% in think-tanks that existed before 1960. But the proportion of researchers with PhDs has dropped to 13% in think-tanks formed since 1980, according to Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, in an article in the latest edition of National Affairs.

“Today, think-tanks are highly influential in our politics,” he wrote. “Their research and scholars are heavily consulted and relied on by our elected leaders. And in a time of both daunting policy challenges and highly polarised political debates, there is every reason to expect that think-tanks will grow only more important in Washington.”

However, the decline in the percentage of PhDs “does signal that the more recently created Washington-based think-tanks are no longer adhering to the ‘university without students’ model,” Troy wrote.

“So does the fact that their glib, TV-friendly and often partisan spokesmen tend to eschew serious research in favor of analysing every issue through a political lens. Thus, while think-tanks have come a long way, it is far from clear that their evolution of late has been for the better.

“As they become more political, however, think-tanks – especially the newer and more advocacy-oriented institutions founded in the past decade or so – risk becoming both more conventional and less valuable,” Troy continued.

“At a moment when we have too much noise in politics and too few constructive ideas, these institutions may simply become part of the intellectual echo chamber of our politics, rather than providing alternative sources of policy analysis and intellectual innovation.”

While some people believe that non-academic research groups could diminish the public voice of universities in policy areas, others believe think-tanks and their recent proliferation could help to improve higher education.

Konrad Osterwalder, rector of the United Nations University, which hosted the rankings report launch at the United Nations, said that “200 years ago, the main goal of higher education was to educate good citizens for society and government. In the second half of the last century, the focus of universities changed. Their main task is to educate future leaders in the economic sector.”

That development was part of a crisis in the political sector, he said, hoping that think-tanks and their proliferation would make up for “what got lost”. At the end of the launch, he asked: “Will think-tanks bring back knowledge in the political world?”

Troy concluded in his National Affairs article that every indicator – political, financial and professional – pointed towards the further politicisation of think tanks.

“The countervailing force would probably need to come from policy-makers themselves. If elected officials, alert to the depths of the policy challenges they confront, were to actively demand from think-tanks more rigorous, innovative research and less communications strategy, they might just get what they asked for.

“Of course, if we had political leaders inclined to such thinking, we might well have avoided our troubles to begin with.”

An analysis of the shape and structure of think-tanks would be a worthy venture, said McGann. At the launch he said the Global Go-To ranking currently contained basic information compiled by the “sweat equity” of his interns.

With more money, he would like to include analysis of the results in future rankings. His wish list includes a paid research assistant. “It would be helpful to do more sophisticated statistics and analysis.”

McGann said that if he had the money to set up a think-tank, “it would be truly interdisciplinary. The tyranny of academic disciplines is out of step with the world’s problems and they are the principal feeders of think-tanks. You cannot look at or solve the world’s problems without an interdisciplinary approach.”

As McGann continues his global think-tank rankings, he might end up with a think-tank on think-tanks.