Think Tanks: Staying Relevant in Today’s World

However, what I did not see coming was Covid-19 - the black swan for think tanks. The pandemic has intensified and accelerated trends in a way that presents an existential challenge for many think tanks. In North America and in Europe, the vast majority of the institutions will survive. However in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and above all in Africa, that might not be the case. The disruptions and the failure to adapt will result in tremendous loss. I had predicted that around 25% of African think tanks would disappear for a variety of reasons, but mostly due to the end of financial support. Nordic countries shifted their support away from supporting think tanks to responding to the humanitarian crisis, further reducing funds for think tanks. Simultaneously, the World Bank shifted its funding to the African Capacity Building Foundation creating a perfect storm for African think tanks. These developments, along with the intensification and acceleration of trends (shifts in funding, fragile institutions, high staff turnover and lack of capacity building) and the impact of Covid-19 will push that 25% of think tanks at risk even further (possibly 30-40%).

Surely Covid-19 has been the great disruptor and the terminator for many think tanks who have not strengthened their management and operations, developed new funding streams, diversified and digitized their product lines and developed strategic marketing and communications strategies. This is truly an existential crisis for many organizations. The think tank and donor communities need to mobilize the resources to address the existential threats facing many think tanks around the world. 

That is the dismal picture, but I firmly believe that every crisis and challenge is an opening to seize opportunities. The whole effort is to mobilize the global community to understand this crucial point. For institutions that developed new management systems, effective communication, strategic marketing, and that managed to harness technology, they will be ahead of the curve. A remaining challenge consists in having innovative ideas and solutions to what will increasingly be very turbulent, complex, unpredictable, and interconnected problems. 

According to your observations, what do think tanks need to do to stay relevant amidst disinformation and distrust of science and expertise?

What we see now is that governments’ near absolute monopoly on information has ended with the advent of the internet, cell phones, and other technologies. People have access to more information than they even had 15 or 20 years ago. The attempts of authoritarian governments to close down the free and open access to information has failed and the world is still an open global marketplace of ideas. In many respects the problem is not too little information, but rather too much on a daily basis: we are faced with an avalanche of information that we have to sort through. 

One of the disconnects in the US is that a majority of think tanks are located in either the economic center or the political capital. In Europe in contrast, it is slightly different. Historically most of the top ones are located in cities with major universities, such as Oxford and Munich where there are a high number of think tanks. And they produce an inordinate number of books and journal articles relative to other regions of the world. However, they do not necessarily produce what people read. As a matter of fact, the reality is people read less and less, our attention span is only getting shorter, and information is consumed in bite-sized pieces. What is increasingly noticed is that people get information through electronic devices. If you are not producing and disseminating what you do in a new and different way, your message will be lost as well. 

This problem facing think tanks and scholars stems from the academic and policy cultures clashing with each other. There is a struggle in many think tanks who must convince their scholars to reduce their weighty tomes to one or two pages, and to digitize. The struggle is legitimate, but think tanks that do not make their work accessible and relevant do so at their own peril. As I have pointed out many times, today "it doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn't have that swing": in an information-rich, highly competitive marketplace of information, great ideas must be in the right form, at the right time and in the right hands to make a difference in today’s world.