{"id":1791,"date":"2012-06-25T13:13:59","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T18:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/articles\/\/"},"modified":"2016-01-24T13:15:01","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T18:15:01","slug":"who-took-the-think-out-of-think-tanks-from-the-berkeley-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/articles\/who-took-the-think-out-of-think-tanks-from-the-berkeley-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Who took the \u201cthink\u201d out of think tanks? from The Berkeley Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.berkeley.edu\/author\/dfarber\/\">Dan Farber<\/a>, professor of law asks:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.berkeley.edu\/2012\/06\/04\/who-took-the-think-out-of-think-tanks-2\/\">Who took the \u201cthink\u201d out of think tanks?<\/a>\u00a0He visited several (US) conservative think tanks&#8217; websites and found little research on climate change; lots of opinions but no research:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I did find some interesting policy papers on their\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.aei.org\/policy\/energy-and-the-environment\/climate-change\/\">webpage<\/a>\u00a0on the topic of climate policy. But here\u2019s the surprising part: the latest paper on the subject is dated June 23, 2010.\u00a0 Of course, AEI has continued to produce a stream of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.aei.org\/policy\/energy-and-the-environment\/climate-change\/\">op-eds<\/a>\u00a0on the subject, but no actual research.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Why? Is it because these centres have stopped doing any research or, as he suggests, that doing any research on the subject would lead to a rather uncomfortable situation. He considers several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>it would mean taking the climate change science seriously;<\/li>\n<li>their agendas are reactive; and<\/li>\n<li>they are being driven by headlines and visibility.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of these are critiques that can be made about other think tanks. I have often criticised that most international development think tanks stay away from the aid debate because of the same reasons.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, this is a good indicator of intellectual autonomy that donors could consider when assessing think tanks. Are there any great absentees -and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Farber, professor of law asks:\u00a0Who took the \u201cthink\u201d out of think tanks?\u00a0He visited several (US) conservative think tanks&#8217; websites and found little research on climate change; lots of opinions but no research: I did find some interesting policy papers on their\u00a0webpage\u00a0on the topic of climate policy. But here\u2019s the surprising part: the latest paper [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[571,489,492,313],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}