Think tanks do not appear from nowhere. Their founding dates leave a trace, a record of the political, economic, and institutional conditions that made their creation possible or necessary.
In this article, I use data from the Open Think Tank Directory (OTTD) to examine global and regional patterns of think tank formation from the early twentieth century to the present. The data reveals that think tanks are overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the last three decades: more than 63% of all organisations in the OTTD were founded in the thirty years between 1990 and 2019.
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But the global picture masks very different regional stories. Each region has its own trajectory, its own timing, and its own drivers. This article maps those trajectories and, drawing on historical data on economic growth and international aid flows, proposes five working hypotheses to explain them.
The analysis is deliberately presented as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. As Enrique Mendizabal argues in Exploring Think Tanks: Diverse Origins, Evolving Futures, the emergence of these organisations has been cyclical, fluid, and shaped by political forces, economic crises, international aid flows, and both democratic and authoritarian regimes. They come in waves.
Diane Stone similarly traces distinct national and regional think tank traditions that resist any single explanatory framework. This article tries to contribute to that conversation by grounding it in data.
The global picture: A phenomenon of the last thirty years
The oldest organisation in the OTTD is the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), founded in the United Kingdom in 1753. For most of the following two centuries, think tank creation was rare and geographically concentrated in the Anglosphere and Western Europe – although, as Enrique has argued before, the RSA’s model was copied in Spain and across Latin America, with one of the oldest think tanks in the Americas being the Sociedad de Amantes del País (Lima, 1790). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of newly established organisations remained limited.
It was only after the Second World War, and especially after the end of the Cold War, that the ecosystem expanded meaningfully globally. The founding rate peaked in the 2000s and then declined sharply in the 2020s — a decline that partly reflects data lag for recently founded organisations, but also a genuine contraction of the structural conditions that drove earlier growth.
Regional trajectories: similar peaks but different drivers
When global data are disaggregated by region, using OTTD’s own geographic classification, a more nuanced picture emerges. Across almost all regions, the curve follows a broadly similar shape: slow growth until the mid-twentieth century, acceleration from the 1980s or 1990s, a peak in the 2000s or 2010s, and a subsequent decline. But the timing and amplitude of each regional wave differ significantly, and those differences are analytically meaningful.
1. Anglosphere
The Anglosphere shows the earliest sustained growth in think tank creation of any region, with acceleration beginning in the 1960s and peaking in the 2000s. The United States dominates this group and drives the pattern: the political economy of U.S. policy research — characterised by ideological pluralism, philanthropic funding, and a revolving door between government and research institutions — generated demand for expert organisations at every stage of the political cycle.
In the first half of the 20th Century, new think tanks emerged around and after big crises: the Wall Street Crash, the First World War and the Second World War. New think tanks sought to make sense of what had happened in the run-up to the crisis, why existing think tanks had failed to raise the alarm and offer new ways of averting future crises.
The Kennedy administration is often cited as a turning point: Kennedy drew systematically on think tank expertise, bringing researchers from Brookings and RAND into government. This new form of demand encouraged the formation of new think tanks. The subsequent decades saw big policy drives and challenges — the Great Society, the civil rights movement, the energy crises of the 1970s, and the conservative counter-mobilisation of the 1980s — and produced successive waves of ideologically diverse organisations driving or resisting reform. The more recent decline may reflect a structural shift: the rise of super PACs has arguably displaced think tanks as the preferred vehicle for political influence, particularly on the right.
2. EU and EFTA
The EU and EFTA region shows an initial wave of think tank creation in the 1940s, a plateau through the 1970s, and a strong acceleration from the 1990s onward. The 1940s context matters: Western Europe received substantial US Marshall Plan aid between 1948 and 1952, which funded institutional reconstruction and created conditions for the growth of policy research organisations. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 further stimulated demand for expertise in integration.
The acceleration in the 1990s is more directly explained by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the deepening of European integration. European governments and the EU itself became major funders of think tanks — a pattern that ties the growth of EU and EFTA think tanks more closely to institutional funding cycles than to domestic GDP performance.
Both the Anglosphere and the EU and EFTA think tank stories align with a sector whose growth is driven by politics.
3. East and South-East Asia
East and South-East Asia present a two-phase trajectory: a first wave of think tank creation in the 1950s, driven largely by U.S. Cold War strategic investment; and a stronger second wave beginning in the 1970s and peaking in the 2010s. The second wave is notable because it correlates more strongly with economic growth. The take-off of the Asian Tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — from the late 1960s generated domestic resources and institutional demand that drove the formation of think tanks.
China represents a special case. Mendizabal (2025) identifies four distinct waves of state-directed think tank creation in China — under Mao, under Deng-era reformers, after Tiananmen, and under Xi Jinping’s explicit demand for think tanks with Chinese characteristics. China’s weight in the regional aggregate partially obscures the more organic growth patterns of ASEAN states.
4. Latin America and the Caribbean
Latin America displays perhaps the most analytically provocative trajectory in the dataset. The growth of think tanks creation accelerates in the 1980s and peaks in the 2000s, but when compared with GDP growth data, a striking inverse relationship emerges. The 1980s were precisely the Lost Decade, with debt defaults, hyperinflation, and deep recessions across the region. Think tanks multiplied not despite the crisis, but in significant part because of it.
The paradox resolves when international aid flows are taken into account. The Alliance for Progress, from 1961, channelled substantial resources to Latin American civil society. The CEPAL planning tradition, which has been building since the 1950s, created a culture of state-supported policy analysis. As the economic crisis deepened in the 1980s and the state retreated, international donors stepped in to fund organisations that could monitor adjustment and build democratic capacity.
Chile is the paradigmatic case: after Pinochet’s 1973 coup expelled academics from universities, organisations like CIEPLAN and the Grupo de los 24 were created as safe harbours — funded by foreign donors, protected by the Catholic Church, and used to plan the eventual democratic transition. The pattern repeated, in different forms, across the continent.
5. Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa shows the strongest and most direct correlation between international aid flows and think tank formation among all regions in the dataset. Growth in think tank foundations accelerates sharply in the 1990s and peaks in the 2010s, later than most other regions by one to two decades. The explanation lies in the timing of the international development community’s engagement with African civil society.
In the decades when Latin America was already receiving substantial funding for civil society, the development industry was focused elsewhere. It was only as Latin American countries graduated to middle-income status that the development industry began its large-scale reorientation toward sub-Saharan Africa — and with it came the democracy promotion agenda of the 1990s, which explicitly targeted civil society organisations and think tanks as vehicles for governance reform.
6. South Asia
South Asia shows a distinctive two-peak structure: a first wave of think tank formation around the 1950s, corresponding to independence and the Colombo Plan (1950); and a second, larger wave from the 1990s onward. India dominates the regional aggregate: the Nehruvian planning state created substantial demand for policy research, and the 1991 economic reforms opened the country to more market-oriented analysis. Bangladesh and Nepal, with persistently high ODA dependency throughout the 2000s, exhibit think-tank formation patterns more closely resembling those of Sub-Saharan Africa than of India.
7. MENA
The MENA region peaks in the 2000s, but the regional aggregate obscures important internal variation. Oil-producing Gulf states are net donors, not recipients of ODA; for these states, think tank formation appears correlated with economic growth and deliberate state investment in policy capacity. For non-oil MENA (Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories), the story is closer to the Sub-Saharan Africa model, with international aid flows and democracy promotion funding as important drivers.
The notable absence of a think tank boom following the Arab Spring of 2011 is worth reflecting on. The political mobilisation was intense, and the structural conditions for durable, well-funded policy research organisations may have been disrupted rather than created by the upheaval.
8. Non-EU Europe and the Caucasus
The trajectory here is among the most dramatic in the dataset: near-zero think tank creation until 1990, followed by a sharp acceleration peaking in the 2000s. This pattern is almost entirely explained by a single historical event: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. Western foundations (such as the Open Society Foundations), U.S. democracy promotion programmes, and the EU’s PHARE and TACIS initiatives channelled substantial resources into civil society development in the former Soviet bloc. The ODA data confirms the story: from essentially zero before 1990, total aid flows to the region rose sharply through the 1990s.
The subsequent decline reflects two converging forces: many countries either joined the EU (ending ODA eligibility) or experienced democratic backsliding that made independent think tanks untenable.
9. Central Asia
Central Asia’s think tank creation trajectory superficially resembles Non-EU Europe — near-zero activity until 1991, followed by a sharp boom — but the drivers diverge significantly after the initial post-Soviet opening. Where Eastern Europe experienced a sustained democratic transition supported by Western foundations and EU accession incentives, Central Asian governments consolidated authoritarian rule through the 1990s and 2000s, limiting the space for genuinely independent policy research.
As Mendizabal noted, new think tanks have emerged, sponsored by or permitted by states as instruments of international engagement — closer to the Chinese “think tanks with Chinese characteristics” model than to the European civil society model. Natural resource wealth in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan has provided an alternative domestic funding source that reinforces, rather than challenges, state authority.
Five hypotheses to explain the waves
The regional trajectories above suggest there is no single explanation for the global boom in think tank formation between 1990 and 2019. What the data does support is a set of regionally differentiated hypotheses — working propositions offered in the tradition of Mendizabal’s think tank waves and Stone’s think tank traditions.
1. The end of the Cold War opened global political space.
The most parsimonious explanation for the global simultaneity of the think tank boom is geopolitical: the dissolution of the Soviet Union reshaped the political landscape in ways that directly facilitated the formation of think tanks. A wave of democratisation reduced barriers to independent civil society; the end of ideological certainty paradoxically created more space for policy ideas; and Western governments and foundations redirected resources from strategic containment toward civil society development.
This hypothesis has strong explanatory power for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and helps account for the broadly simultaneous acceleration in the 1990s across regions as diverse as Sub-Saharan Africa, the MENA region, and Latin America and the Caribbean. It has weaker explanatory power in East and South-East Asia, where the boom preceded 1990, and in the Anglosphere, where growth has been sustained since the 1960s.
2. In the Anglosphere, think tanks follow the political economy of policy influence.
The Anglosphere’s think tank growth pattern cannot be explained by the end of the Cold War, since it predates it. Instead, think tanks in the United States and the United Kingdom grew in response to the particular structure of the Anglo-American policy process: adversarial politics, ideological competition, philanthropic funding, and a revolving door between government and independent research. The Kennedy model of expert-government exchange established a template that successive ideological movements — liberal and conservative alike — replicated and adapted. Similar “mini-booms” would likely be seen around the time of the Thatcher/Reagan years, later on with New Labour and its retractors, Brexit, etc. The recent decline may reflect the supersession of think tanks by electoral vehicles and social media as tools of political influence.
3. In Europe, institutional funding was the primary driver.
European think tank growth — in both Western and post-communist Europe — is more closely tied to institutional funding cycles than to domestic economic performance. The Marshall Plan funded the first wave of institutional capacity-building in Western Europe. The European integration process created sustained demand for policy analysis and funded organisations to meet it. In Eastern Europe, the causal chain is almost mechanical: the availability of transition funding from the EU, Open Society Foundations, and bilateral donors directly preceded the boom in think tank formation. The hypothesis implies a degree of institutional fragility: organisations created by donor funding may not survive the withdrawal of that funding, particularly where domestic funding for independent policy research remains thin.
4. In East and South-East Asia, domestic economic growth was the dominant driver.
The contrast between East and South-East Asia and Latin America is the most analytically interesting finding in this dataset. Both regions reached comparable levels of development in the 1950s and 1960s, but their think tank trajectories diverged sharply: Asia’s boom closely tracks the Asian Tiger growth period of the 1970s and 1980s, while Latin America’s boom occurred in precisely the opposite economic conditions — during the Lost Decade. This suggests that in Asia, domestic economic growth generated the resources and institutional demand that drove the formation of think tanks, with international aid playing a secondary role. The Asian model is one of state-directed development combined with the growth of private-sector capacity, not aid dependency.
China (and Vietnam) may deserve a separate hypothesis. The role of the Communist Party and the State cannot be underestimated. Chinese waves of formation and closure have been driven by political decisions as much as economic imperatives.
5. In Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, international aid flows were a key driver, but with different timing.
The clearest evidence for the aid-driven hypothesis comes from Sub-Saharan Africa, where the correlation between ODA and think tank formation is near-direct and temporally well-aligned. The 1990s democracy promotion agenda — channelling substantial resources toward civil society, governance reform, and accountability mechanisms — preceded and closely tracked the regional peak.
Latin America’s story is more complex. Early Alliance for Progress funding and the CEPAL planning tradition created the first wave, but the 1980s boom coincided with economic crisis and aid flows. Total ODA to the region rose precisely as GDP collapsed, suggesting that international donors stepped in to fill the institutional gap left by retreating states. Crisis-driven demand for policy expertise, combined with continued foreign foundation funding, was the operative mechanism. Think tanks served as safe harbours amid state withdrawal, repression and economic woes.
In fact, many Latin American think tanks in this period were formed by researchers leaving academia in search of a decent livelihood; universities in the region were being hit by economic crises, political polarisation, or State repression.
Southern Asia presents a hybrid: India’s post-1991 trajectory is more consistent with the growth-driven model, while Bangladesh and Nepal more closely resemble the aid-driven pattern of Sub-Saharan Africa. The lag hypothesis — that Africa’s think tank boom follows Latin America’s with a delay of one to two decades, reflecting the later arrival of the international development community — is consistent with the OTTD data and deserves further quantitative testing.
India, too, deserves further analysis. The Indian State, at both the national and sub-national levels, has also played a key role in the formation of think tanks. And these same actors could be behind the increasingly complex environment for think tanks today.
What this tells us, and what we still don’t know
Think tank waves are not random. They are responses to structural conditions: political openings, economic crises, international funding cycles, and the deliberate strategies of states, donors, and political actors. The five hypotheses proposed here do not exhaust the explanatory space — the role of technology, the internal organisational logic of think tanks, and the question of durability beyond donor funding all remain open. But the data does suggest that the conventional linear account of think tank evolution does not adequately capture the diversity of the global experience.
Think tanks have emerged from crisis as often as from prosperity; from authoritarian contexts as often as from democratic ones; from donor strategies as often as from domestic political demand. Any adequate theory of think tank formation will need to be pluralist about causes, sensitive to regional context, and willing to live with complexity.
We welcome corrections, regional expertise, and alternative interpretations. The data is in the OTTD. The conversation is open.
About this article
This article is based on data from the Open Think Tank Directory (OTTD), maintained by On Think Tanks, as of February 2026 (3,055 organisations with founding year data).
Economic growth data: Maddison Project Database (2023) and World Bank WDI. +
Aid flow data: ODA figures are total net disbursements to the region in constant 2022 USD (OECD DAC). +
They include all aid sectors, not only civil society funding. Read them as proxies for the broader international development engagement with each region, not as direct funding for think tanks. Regional classifications follow the OTTD 2025 country classification.