Thursday, March 15, 2012

Think Tanks & Dysfunction - A UK Perspective

In The Guardian, Michael Harris, senior associate at the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), suggests that think tanks can lead to dysfunction in policymaking:
...Think tanks have contributed to this dysfunction. The UK has gained an international reputation for being rather creative and innovative in policy, but perhaps there's been too much innovation, leaving frontline practitioners feeling increasingly managed, measured, policed and pushed around. Thinktanks were originally created to professionalise policy-related research and analysis, and to make policy easier to implement and give it more impact; the irony is that they might have inadvertently served to de-professionalise policy by helping to distance it from the frontline of practise.