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| US Think-Tanks: Casualties in the War of Ideas |
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Because much of the money coming into think-tanks has been donor defined project specific grants, these institutions have been forced to narrow their research agendas and time horizons to meet the dictates of donors. Project-specific grants are most damaging when the donor directly or indirectly uses targeted funding to influence the research agenda of an institution, or worse, the research findings. Even more insidious are donors who try to distort the magnitude of a problem or attempt to alter the course of politics by flooding the marketplace of ideas with money that funds their issues or world-view.
These distortions in the free market of ideas are hindering the ability of think-tanks to produce innovative ideas and new research on truly important emerging issues. Think-tanks now have a tendency to move away from the kind of research that focuses on understanding problems and toward an increased emphasis on prescription, so that they can demonstrate their impact to donors. While many donors operate in the public interest, there are those partisans on the right and the left who serve as the paymasters in the war of ideas. Why should donors, who are neither the users or producers of policy research, and who may not be acting in the public interest, determine the research agendas of think-tanks?
What should be done
In order to be effective, think-tanks must preserve their independence and objectivity,they must continue to support active participation without being drawn into the partisanship and the ideological battles that are currently consuming American politics.
Think-tank scholars must be allowed to conduct their research without having donors looking over their shoulders trying to dictate
the scope and nature of their work. Donors must develop more transparent mechanisms for evaluating and making grants to think-tanks, and think-tanks must be more transparent about where their money comes from and how it is used.
Change, however, must not come from funders alone.The think-tank community should be proactive in developing industry-wide
standards in order to ensure that the credibility and independence of their research is not jeopardised. It can be assumed that if donors witnessed liberal, conservative, and centrist think-tanks collaborating to help funders understand how their current funding policies undermine the effectiveness of policy research, they may be more likely to alter their funding guidelines.
Donors and the think-tank community, in other words, need to explore ways to foster greater synergies, collaboration and consolidation among the more than 1,500 publicpolicy think-tanks in the United States. A broad cross section of the donors, as well as citizens' groups, policymakers, media and think-tanks need to engage in a constructive dialogue that is more positive, innovative and interdisciplinary - most importantly a dialogue that acknowledges these new developments and challenges.
It is through this type of synergy and collaboration that the changes in Washington's political environment can be utilised positively and channeled in such a way that the integrity, independence and scholarly character of think-tank research is not jeopardised, but
instead empowered by change. This partnership between the funders, producers and users of public-policy research is critical and
must be forged now if we want the light of well-reasoned analysis to prevail over the heat of partisan warfare.
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