Stop complaining about the trust deficit: the problem with telling think tanks what to do

The 2026 OTT conference theme was think tanks and trust. Research on think tanks consistently shows that trust is their most important and most fragile asset. Unlike governments, universities, or businesses, think tanks generally lack formal authority. Their influence depends largely on whether policymakers, journalists, funders, and the public perceive them as credible and independent. This was the framing of the parallel session on “stop complaining about the trust deficit,” convened by Margarita Beneke de Sanfeliú (FUSADES), Jorge Morel (IEP), and Rakesh Rajani (Just Systems) on 19th May 2026 in Rabat, Morocco.

In this blog post, I will focus on the presentation made by Rakesh Rajeni. 

We often talk about how other stakeholders perceive think tanks. In fact, Margarita’s and Jorge’s presentations were on how the public perceives civil society organisations in El Salvador and NGOs in Peru, respectively. But what if this is flipped around? How do think tanks perceive these actors? Rakesh began this session by asking the session participants, largely think tanks, who among these stakeholders they trust 

1. Faith-based and religious leaders.
2. Private sector and business leaders.
3. Elected officials and politicians.
4. Feminist advocates and leaders.
5. Artists and musicians.
6. The next generation of young activists.
7. Bureaucrats and public servants.
8. Think tanks and research academics.
9. Military generals and high-ranking brass.
10. Scientific researchers and scholars

There is surprisingly little research on whom think tanks trust, as most studies focus on whether others trust think tanks. However, patterns from think tank practice suggest that trust is distributed unevenly across stakeholder groups. And this is what was demonstrated in the room. The majority of the participants indicated that they trust their peers and scientific researchers and scholars most, and politicians, religious leaders, private-sector and business leaders, and military generals least. This was not an unexpected response, as think tanks generally place the highest level of trust in stakeholders with whom they have repeated interactions, shared professional norms, and long-term relationships.

This exercise raised a few questions: what shapes public perceptions? What assumptions, experiences, and mindsets do we bring into our interactions with institutions, experts, and evidence? As Rakesh put it, trust does not simply emerge from authority or expertise. It is built, negotiated, and continually reinforced or undermined through everyday experiences. Facts and data matter, but trust is shaped just as much by personal encounters, relationships, values, and the stories people tell themselves and others.

Thus, trust is contextual, as the presentations made by Jorge and Margarita showed. In Peru, the IEP survey found that citizens actually held civil society and think tanks in relatively high regard, even as the political class was collapsing in credibility, with the executive sitting at 6% approval and Congress at 8%. In El Salvador, the situation was nearly the opposite: high trust in the president, shrinking space for civil society, and growing suspicion of NGOs and research organisations. What works for building trust in one country will not work in another due to differing contexts. 

In explaining to the session participants on what to do and not do to build trust with policymakers, Rakesh offered the following tips;

Table 1: Tips for think tanks on building trust with policymakers

I agree with most of these, particularly on politics matters, as the discussion on thorny issues in evidence policymaking demonstrates the importance of politics in evidence uptake, but a few of these tips raise some questions, as I discuss below.

Let’s start with the do’s. 

“Stop offering solutions”

The raison d’être of a think tank is not neutral. The United Nations University’s Centre for Policy Research puts it plainly: think tanks exist to mobilise expertise and ideas to influence the policymaking process, and at their best, they bring practical and feasible options to the negotiating table. Anapoorna similarly describes think tanks as organisations that contribute to policymaking by providing actionable recommendations, sitting alongside governments in the process of formulating policy options.

The advice to stop offering solutions assumes that solutions offered before a government is ready to receive them are wasted. But this misreads how policy change actually happens. John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, one of the most influential models in policy studies, describes how policy change requires the convergence of three independent streams: a recognised problem, an available solution, and a favourable political moment. The critical insight is that the solution must exist and be worked through before the window opens. As Kingdon himself argued, policy windows open when the streams align, and within the policy stream, the solutions need to have already been worked through by academics, think tanks, and analysts ready at hand for the moment when the issue reaches the decision agenda.

A think tank that waits for a government to invite co-creation before developing its analysis will not have solutions ready when the political moment arrives. The official who ignores a recommendation today may reach for it in three years when the political calculus has shifted, a new minister has taken office, or a crisis has created urgent demand for a worked-through position. Leandro Echt makes precisely this point: effective think tanks plan their research and communication activities around anticipated policy processes, positioning themselves to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. That positioning requires pre-existing analysis, not analysis commissioned by the government at the moment.

This does not mean that think tanks should be indifferent to whether their work is relevant to the governments they are trying to influence. Indeed, think tanks should attempt to address the questions governments are asking and involve policymakers in the research process. As I previously noted, building relationships of trust with government departments by assisting with their ongoing work is crucial for evidence uptake. The question that should replace “have we co-created this solution?” is simpler: does this analysis address a problem that the people we are trying to influence actually recognise as a problem? If the answer is no, no amount of relational investment will make the solution land. If the answer is yes, the independent rigour of the analysis is what gives the solution its authority.

“It’s not about you. Give credit. Low ego, no logo.”

The advice to not take credit is in direct tension with almost everything else the think tank sector says about itself. The same conversations that produce the no-logo advice also produce sustained arguments about the importance of visibility, recognisability, and institutional presence. On Think Tanks’ guidance on finance and funding is explicit: think tanks are advised to increase their visibility through communications; websites, blogs, news outlets, seminars, public debates, specifically so that potential donors can know who they are, what they do, and what impact their work has. The communications function in most think tanks exists specifically to ensure that the organisation’s name is attached to its work. Donor reporting almost universally requires that funded outputs carry attribution. And the funding model of most think tanks depends on being visible enough that prospective donors can find them and assess their track record.

Indeed, visibility plays a big role in building trust. As Margarita explained in her presentation, the team at Fusades conducted a survey of 900 households across three regions of El Salvador, seeking to understand not just how much trust people had in civil society organisations, but why, and what could actually change it. Their first finding was that many citizens did not trust NGOs and think tanks because of their invisibility. A significant proportion of respondents had simply never heard of these organisations, or had no clear idea what they did. You cannot trust what you do not know exists.

The no-logo advice cites organisations that have exerted influence at scale without public recognition as evidence that visibility is unnecessary for impact. Yet, as the 2026 OTT conference session on branding by John Schwartz and Anapoorna Ravichander shows, visibility is important for think tanks. Organisations that can do work without taking credit have earned the kind of embedded trust that allows influence without public attribution precisely because they spent years building relationships before they needed the influence. The no-logo advice cannot apply to organisations that have not yet built those relationships, as though the suppression of the logo were what produces trust rather than a possible expression of it at a later stage.

There is also a legitimacy argument that the no-logo advice ignores. In politically contested environments, the public visibility of an independent research organisation is not primarily a branding exercise. It is a protection mechanism. The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of the closing of civic space documents how governments use foreign agent laws, regulatory harassment, and vilifying narratives to restrict civil society organisations and notes that civil society actors must maintain visibility precisely to be recognised as important players who cannot be easily removed from the political process. An organisation that operates without a recognisable public presence is more easily targeted, misrepresented, and closed down because there is no public constituency that knows what it does and why it matters.

The meaningful distinction should be between organisations that claim credit in order to build a profile and organisations that ensure attribution so that their work is traceable, their methodology is accountable, and the people who need to find them can do so. 

Let’s now examine the don’ts.

“Don’t publish so much!”

The argument against bombarding policymakers with evidence rests on a genuine observation: officials are overwhelmed, and adding more information to an already saturated environment rarely shifts behaviour. This is well-documented in the policy influence literature and is worth taking seriously. But this implies that think tanks should essentially produce less and relate more.

In contexts where think tanks are under pressure from governments that are hostile to independent research, the volume and rigour of published evidence are not primarily mechanisms of influence. It is a legitimacy mechanism. It is what think tanks may use to distinguish themselves from advocacy groups, what gives journalists something to cite, what gives international donors something to fund, and what gives peer organisations something to reference when they need to defend a position. 

The evidentiary output is the public good, regardless of whether any particular official reads the executive summary.

There is also a temporal dimension that the ‘don’t bombard’ argument tends to flatten. Policy change is rarely the result of a single well-timed brief reaching the right desk. It is the result of years of evidence accumulating in a space until the political conditions allow someone to act on it. The official who ignores a study today may reach for it in three years when the political calculus has shifted. Organisations that stopped producing because nobody seemed to be listening have nothing in the archive when the moment arrives.

Producing rigorous evidence and building trusted relationships are not in competition. Treating them as a trade-off imposes a false choice on organisations that need to do both.

“Do not prioritise making the case over building relationships.”

Rakesh argued that building relationships should be prioritised over making a case. However, I disagree. Making the case and building trust are not alternatives between which an organisation must choose. They are sequential activities that depend on each other.

The argument appears to be that think tanks over-invest in producing compelling evidence and under-invest in the relational work that would make that evidence receivable. Indeed, it is important to build the relationships that give the argument a context in which it can be heard, but here is the reality: 

• A think tank that has no relationships with the government has no channel through which its work can influence policy, regardless of the quality of that work. 
• A think tank that has strong relationships but produces weak or uncommitted analysis has nothing worth using to influence policy. 

Both the relationship and the analysis are necessary. The failure mode being described, in which organisations produce excellent research that nobody in government reads, is a failure of relationship-building, not a failure caused by the research itself.

The advice also misunderstands the function of public argumentation. Think tanks do not influence policy only through direct relationships with officials. They influence it by changing the terms of public debate and by providing journalists, legislators and civil society actors with evidence and frameworks that shift which positions are defensible. This kind of influence does not require a trusted relationship with the official who will eventually make the decision, but rather that the analysis is rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny and accessible enough to reach the people who will use it. Making the case publicly, even when no relationship exists, is part of how the conditions for policy change are created over time. This is not to say that building these relationships does not matter. Both the relationship and the case do. They are not mutually exclusive.

Conclusion

While I have disagreed with the practicality of some of the above tips offered to think tanks on how to build trust with the government, rather than keep on complaining about the trust deficit, the fundamental agreement is that think tanks should find ways of building this trust with their constituencies.

Trust is not static. Trust is built both through the relationships you build and the work you produce. It has to be earned separately with each constituency: the communities you work with, the officials you try to influence, the peer organisations, etc. But once built, it has to be sustained as it is also not permanent. It erodes when contexts shift, when governments change, when new narratives take hold. 

The crux of my argument is that, while think tanks should certainly strive to build this trust, there is no one-size-fits-all script that think tanks should follow. Operating in different contexts will require different tactics to earn and sustain trust. Even so, trust emerges not just from relationships but from the work that think tanks produce. It is therefore important for think tanks to invest in both and not prioritise one over the other.