By Barend ter Haar.
On January 22 2015, the University of Pennsylvania published its annual ranking of think tanks: the Global Go-To Think Tanks Report. Many readers might have gone directly to the lists, to see how their think tank is ranked among the 6681 think tanks in the world. But if they did so, they missed the much more thought-provoking first part of the report.
The good news is that think tanks are becoming a worldwide phenomenon. The best think tanks are still to be found in the United States and Europe, but the quality of think tanks in other parts of the world is growing steadily. In more and more countries the need of independent thinking is recognized. This development is of course closely connected with the demise of autocratic governments that pretend to have a monopoly on the truth.
The worrisome message of the report is that as funding becomes scarcer, think tanks are increasingly tempted to take the views of their funders into account. As a result it is now difficult “to tell the difference between truly objective advice on the one hand, and high-priced advocacy for political or private profit on the other”. As “many politicians choose to focus on short-term issues and crises rather than addressing the large looming crises that are just ahead”, think tanks “are increasingly viewed as part of the problem in not forcing policymakers to address these issues”.
The report also warns against the tendency of specialisation. When all think tanks are looking for their own niche, who is keeping the overview? Everybody seems to agree that health, development, environment and education are linked, but who is trying to put these links into perspective?
Apart from Clingendael, that moved from the 15th to the 11th place on the list of the best of the west-European think tanks, eleven other Dutch think tanks are mentioned in the report. Two of them are newcomers:
– The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (no 79 on the list of Top Defense and National Security Think Tanks)
– The Hague Institute for Global Justice (for its report on The Hague Approach: six guiding principles for achieving sustainable peace in post-conflict situations).
The following list of the other nine Dutch think tanks that are included in the report illustrates the problem raised in the report: their fields of enquiry clearly overlap, but do they even read each other’s reports?
– Centraal Plan Bureau (CPB)
– Socires (Education Policy)
– Stichting Natuur en Milieu
– Philips Center for Health and Well-Being
– Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
– European Center for Development Policy Management
– Wiardi Beckman Foundation
– Max van der Stoel Foundation/Evert Vermeer Foundation
– European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relations
A final sobering thought is that the influence of think tanks should not be overstated. The World Bank recently revealed that nearly one third of its reports had never been downloaded, not even once.
