context<\/a>\u00a0has a direct impact in think tanks\u2019 work, and it also affects collaboration. For instance, elections use to attract a big part of the attention of an organisation, diverting efforts from other projects. Moreover, social or military crisis have a direct impact on organizations\u2019 work and might difficult collaboration at least until things are partially solved.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\nAvailable funds.\u00a0<\/b>Collaboration is sometimes challenged by the fact that available resources for\u00a0think tanks or research are usually scarce. Moreover,\u00a0<\/b>international calls for proposals usually do not encourage collaboration between organizations.<\/p>\n
Official regulations.\u00a0<\/b>Countries\u2019 rules regarding donations or contracts with foreign partners, can challenge collaborations to the point that working with others becomes increasingly bureaucratic at the administrative level.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\nFeatures of the collaboration<\/h2>\n
Trust.\u00a0<\/b>Confidence between organizations may have to do with the history of the relationship between the parts (whether or not they have worked together in the past, and which were the results of that experience), with the reputation of parties, or with organizational cultures. Trust is very important, specially when collaboration implies sharing contacts, information regarding donors or know-how.\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Objective of collaboration<\/b>.\u00a0<\/b>Collaboration may have many different objectives: undertaking research, influencing policy, learning from each other or together, among others. As an example, at CIPPEC, alliances with Argentinean think tanks and civil society organizations usually take place\u00a0when facing a controversial national policy issue. In these cases, barriers to collaboration are related to the organizations\u2019 influence strategies. Typically, advocacy organizations are more radical in their actions, and do not consider potential relational costs with policy agencies. On the contrary, policy research organizations, which usually seek to build more collaborative links with the political system, are not willing to challenge their reputation on an advocacy campaign. However, in these cases, what is important and can affect the type of collaboration is the characteristic of the campaign: the sensibility to society or government, if the organization has a clear domain of the issue, the visibility of the campaign, etc. Another important issue to consider is that a public campaign might affect some internal policy teams while not affect others; for instance, your organization could develop a campaign to increase the transparency of subsidies to poor population, and this might have affect the relationship that a team working on social protection issue has with the Ministry in charge of assigning those subsidies.<\/p>\n
Term and size of the collaboration.<\/b>\u00a0<\/b>Long term collaborations are favorable to build trust between parties. However, they can become very transactional both in terms of decision making and administrative and budgetary issues. On another note, whether the collaboration is taking place between two organizations or a consortium of think tanks will affect the process. For instance, global consortiums usually imply complex governance structures. Regular virtual meetings and the need to validate almost each decision with the whole consortium make this kind of projects very costly at the transactional level.<\/p>\n
Top level support.\u00a0<\/b>Is collaboration supported by leaders in the organization? Moreover, is it an informal collaboration or is there a formal contractual commitment that could be claimed by any of the parties?\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Logistical aspects.\u00a0<\/b>Are we talking about a virtual relationship or does it include face to face meetings? Which are communications tools and channels? What about administrative support in each party?<\/p>\n
Taking into account these factors when planning collaborative projects will help think tanks to understand the potential success of the relationship or identify key challenges for it (but, should we define first what a succesful collaboration is?).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leandro Echt writes about the challenges involved in think tank collaboration. This post was originally written for the On Think Tanks Exchange, an initiative co-supported by the Think Tanks Fund, the Think Tank Initiative and On Think Tanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971"}],"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=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}