Political crises and transitions, the received wisdom goes, open windows of opportunity. Think 1970s stagflation, the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the late 80s and early 90s, the 2008 crisis, the Arab Spring, or even Brexit. They open a space for new voices – or think tanks – to emerge, as old certainties fray and established institutions scramble for answers. Chile after 2011 is a good case study: a new political generation came of age, presenting new demands for a country undergoing rapid social change. Many new think tanks were founded around this period, of different political persuasions and taking advantage of new, unoccupied niches and nascent social media. Eight years later, in 2019, a political crisis that was even more acute also opened a space for new think tanks, but few emerged, and fewer remain.
The literature on Latin American think tanks, as in other regions, speaks of waves: brief periods (never lasting more than a few years) when clusters of new organisations are likely to appear. In Chile and much of the region, these coincide with periods before, during, and after key political transitions (i.e., dictatorships). The wave metaphor captures two key aspects of think tanks. First, these organisations are remarkably sensitive to the specific conditions that set them in motion. Second, and relatedly, these conditions are not the same as those that allow them to survive. Waves ebb.
Not only that, but one can only say in retrospect which moment is likely to birth a lasting wave. In a forthcoming article for the Latin American Research Review, I show that Chile’s think tank scene expanded in 2011, but by 2019 had “crystallised” and few new actors could emerge and remain for long.
Think tanks that appear during a window of opportunity, such as a political crisis or transition, often have visibility, energy, and genuine relevance. However, these are not substitutes for the structural conditions that can sustain it once that initial impulse wanes. Those conditions – stable funding, dense networks of contacts, succession planning – are rarely in place at founding and not provided by the crisis itself. Political crises reshuffle the deck, but do not determine who ends up on top.
Waves can erode incumbents too, particularly those who depend on political or economic circumstances that no longer exist. In Chile, a key condition for the emergence of traditional think tanks was international funding geared towards development and democratisation. That funding dried up as the country developed and democratised, without a mature philanthropic ecosystem emerging to take its place. What remained was an increasingly sparse set of project-based grants and core funding from a small pool of donors interested in certain policy agendas and not others. As OTT State of the Sector Reports have shown, organisations that are primarily reliant on short-term grants (which are a majority in middle-income countries like Chile) spend disproportionate time chasing survival rather than doing what a think tank is supposed to do.
The conditions that support the actors who produce policy ideas shape which ideas are more likely to be produced and to get a hearing. The most revealing paradox is then that the think tanks that best embody the ideal of “independence” and long-term thinking are often the ones most structurally dependent on a narrow (and mostly politically and sociologically homogeneous) donor base.
The lesson for practitioners is that opening a window is not the same as keeping it open. Political crises do create genuine space for new voices, but consolidating that space requires conditions most new entrants lack, almost by definition. The question for funders and sector-builders is whether anything can be done before or right after the window itself to change those conditions, to turn the stream into a wave. And the broader question concerns democracy itself and the quality of our public conversation. A robust public sphere and policy debate require not just the freedom to intervene, but also the conditions to keep intervening to be broadly available.