📜 The key ingredients for policy change

There is often an emphasis on think tanks sitting, researching, and scratching one’s chin – the ivory tower side of things. I doubt there are many of my colleagues who spend all of their time with their noses in books. Our role is to get out, talk to people, and create that space for dialogue. If you’re just doing research, you’re at-the-most making recommendations. It’s much better if you can help bring people together so you have the recommendation, and a way of moving that forward. That feels like the sweet spot for me.

One of the real challenges of working in South Asia is how few spaces for dialogue there are. Through our media platform, South Asian Voices, we’re trying to establish a way for regional analysts to get their ideas out there and engage with one another. We’re facilitating but we’re not saying “say this, or say that”. 

No matter the geography, you get policy unstuck through relationships, by finding the right people in the bureaucracy who are both interested and able to move the needle. It often takes a whole lot of work to find them, but once you do then you can get the wheels moving. It can take quite some work and creativity to figure out how to communicate the issues with the right framing and stories that your counterparts can relate to. You also need a little bit of luck – and that can come from strange places.

One of my most memorable experiences was when working on preventing human trafficking in northern Iraq. We were doing a public service announcement on it, how it’s a problem and how to identify it. And my counterpart’s eyes just lit up. This whole thing is being translated into Kurdish, and so I’m sitting there thinking ‘we’re making some progress, this is great’. My counterpart goes on this monologue for five minutes about what an important issue it is and how nobody’s focused on it. Then I realise that the word ‘trafficking’ does not exist in Kurdish, and he thinks we are talking about road congestion. We were able to work something out because he was so embarrassed by the whole thing.