An important line of analytic development has been underway for a decade or more, with a new group of actors emerging. The primary differentiating characteristic of this emerging group is much greater involvement of intended beneficiaries and front-line programme administrators in public policy\/programme development and related assessments.<\/p>\n
Traditionally, think tanks identify the most desirable policy\/programme through a process in which a problem is defined qualitatively and quantitatively, options for addressing it are defined using both conceptual and empirical analyses, criteria for assessing the efficacy of all options defined and then applied to each alternative, and the most effective option tentatively identified.\u00a0 Fairly senior level officials in relevant government agencies and concerned public interest groups are consulted about the tentative results and the final choice is made.<\/p>\n
Generally, the process has included little consultation with intended grassroots organisations working with the intended programme beneficiaries or the front-line offices that would administer the programme.<\/p>\n
Over the years, a different, broader approach has evolved and has been adopted in various ways by a number of organisations, some with a think tank heritage. The policy design effort varies from the long-standing think tank model:<\/p>\n
The new approach is championed by some as producing more appropriately designed interventions, even though they may cost more in money and time to develop.\u00a0 They can argue that the higher initial costs are preferred to the expenditures of having to redesign interventions to achieve comparable levels of effectiveness.<\/p>\n
The in-depth consulting with a broader range of groups \u2013 actually engaging in co-creating<\/em> the intervention \u2013 is the heart of the process. This requires an organisational structure and activities that are different from that of classic think tanks. For example:<\/p>\n The goal is for policy options to be built from the ground up as information is gathered.\u00a0 Formal demonstration or pilot projects are a common tool, as noted.\u00a0 Multiple designs can be tested, perhaps fielded sequentially as lessons are learned are tested.<\/p>\n Consistent with the greater focus on programme design and administration, the related publications that think tanks produced under this new paradigm are less academic and much less frequently targeted at the traditional journals.\u00a0 Lucid descriptions accessible to the wide range of the parties involved more often become the format of choice.<\/p>\n Logically one would anticipate this type of co-creation approach<\/a> to be particularly effective for social programmes, including health and education, as well as client-targeted poverty reduction initiatives such as active labour market programmes \u2013 for example, training for unemployed workers. Indeed, most applications of this new model to date seem to be in such sectors. +<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n A decade ago, nearly all adopters would have been classified as think tanks.\u00a0 But some organisations in this group increasingly eschew the label as inaccurate. The word \u2018tank\u2019 has always had a closed connotation \u2013 the place where certain elites work and others get to look in from the outside.<\/p>\n It has been suggested that the label \u2018think tank\u2019 should be replaced with something more welcoming.\u00a0 Some think tank-like organisations call themselves \u2018labs,\u2019 for example, the Poverty Lab at MIT. But that still seems elitist to some.\u00a0 Some are using the phrase \u2018think-and-do tank\u2019 or \u2018think-and-action tank\u2019. \u00a0At this point no common moniker exists.<\/p>\n One attribute that organisations with this broader but deeper approach to policy development seem to share is that they are relatively young \u2013 created in the last 20-25 years.\u00a0 Two organisations that are clearly in this group are the Results for Development Institute<\/a> and the New America Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n The leader of the New America Foundation, Anne-Marie Slaughter, made a strong case for this approach in her keynote presentation, \u2018From think tank to change hub<\/a>\u2019 at the recent OTT Conference 2021: Think tanks and change.<\/p>\n One can obtain a good sense of the differences in approaches between these new organisations and traditional think tanks like the Brookings Institution<\/a> and NORC<\/a> at the University of Chicago, by contrasting the descriptions in the \u2018what we do\u2019 and the \u2018who we are\u2019 sections of their websites.<\/p>\n There is a parallel rapid development taking place by another group: \u00a0Global Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes<\/a>. \u00a0Here \u2018scaling\u2019 refers to increasing the number of persons or firms participating in a programme, i.e., expanding the programme\u2019s scale. \u00a0The Community, founded six years ago with a current membership exceeding 700 people from over 200 organisations, is fighting against isolated demonstration projects that are often conducted in privileged circumstances that cannot be replicated when the tested programmes are implemented on a larger scale with fewer administrative resources per participant. \u00a0The new approach is then often abandoned when it does not deliver the expected outcomes. The following statement in a recent posting<\/a> on the OTT blog makes the point vividly:<\/p>\n \u2018It is high time that the development community gets beyond the prevalent focus on one-off projects, beyond \u201cpilots to nowhere,\u201d beyond throwing everything we have at \u201cour\u201d project to make it work while forgetting what happen when it ends.\u2019 +<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Evidently, deeper consultation \u2013 actually, genuine partnerships would be much better\u2013 with beneficiary organisations and government agencies at all levels.+<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n How widely this rapidly evolving co-creational approach, with its extensive partnering, is adopted by traditional think tanks is an open question.\u00a0 Some, like the Urban Institute with its Research to Action Lab, already have teams dedicated to much deeper programme design partnerships with sub-national governments. Clearly, the trend toward co-creation is a development warranting wide dissemination and monitoring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An important line of analytic development has been underway for a decade or more, with a new group of actors emerging. The primary differentiating characteristic of this emerging group is much greater involvement of intended beneficiaries and front-line programme administrators in public policy\/programme development and related assessments. The long-standing model \u00a0 Traditionally, think tanks identify […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"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":[210,669,335,193,2689],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829213"}],"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\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2829213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2829213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2829213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Who is adopting this approach?<\/h2>\n
Going forward<\/h2>\n