📉🧠 Think tanks are in an intellectual recession

Frank, Natallia and I met for lunch a few months ago, and we lamented the predictability of so many policy recommendations. It seems like many of you feel the same.

What is the point in calling for a ‘whole of government’ approach when civil servants will tell you they are already talking to their colleagues? The problem usually isn’t that government isn’t talking to itself; it’s probably that a specific, logical blocker exists.

For as long as the recommendation remains at that superficial level and doesn’t address the blocker, there is little point in making it. And yet policy thought leaders continue to.

I recently read a paper written by an award-winning policy academic on reimagining how government operates. But if I had been a minister or official who wanted to do something, there was nothing in there for me to actually implement. We abstract our recommendations to the point of futility.

None of this is new. Dolly van Tulleken wrote about what needs to be present for policy recommendations to be implementable several years ago. Of the 689 policies she reviewed in her research, only 8% had the requisite information for things to be adopted. 🤦‍♂️

Frank is the perfect person to get stuck into this with—he’s a former political campaign director, government department non-exec, think tank leader, and now the Chief Policy Officer of a charity. I especially enjoyed his comments around think tank incentives being to secure policy wins, not social change, and idea of a political philosophy as a social Theory of Change. I hope you do too.

Tom

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The hackneyed policy recommendations we’re all guilty of

I should begin by confessing that I am a repeat sinner here, just in case anyone points the finger at me…

There were three from your LinkedIn post that stood out for me. One is suggesting something must be put on the national curriculum. There might be good reason for something to be on our national curriculum and taught in schools. 

But most people would also recognise that we spend a lot of time teaching children maths, English and foreign languages, and a lot of children still come out of school without the sort of knowledge we would hope they would have. 

So if you fix a lesson or two onto the curriculum, you've got to ask yourself: what difference will that make?

'National strategy' is another one. Calling for a national strategy is almost a way of saying, ‘We want a national strategy, as long as it contains all the things that we want the government to do.’

And then the final one won’t surprise you: a minister for something or other. Again, I have done this more than once. Or put another way, ‘We want a minister we can lobby to do all the things that we want to do.’ 

Government isn’t the only vehicle for change

One reason we congregate around the same kinds of policy recommendations is there are limited levers that any government machine can pull. So you will end up returning to the same old things if your focus is entirely on government as the only vehicle for change. 

We've got to question whether we need to take a step back and ask whether government is the only actor in making change, or actually, are there wider societal changes that would make a big difference, such as strengthening families or expectations around personal responsibility?

That might be harder than getting a bullet point in a national strategy, but it might be more effective, too.

Think tanks should be about 'big ideas', not civil service replication

Think tanks should have the space and capacity to think big ideas about big change. I would always caution against think tanks becoming an adjunct to the civil service, where you have hundreds of policy professionals inside a department servicing a minister with policy development.

Think tanks shouldn't replicate that function. Think tanks should have the freedom to challenge authority and orthodoxy and to say the things that no one else is saying. They need to give ministers what they cannot get from their civil service teams.

The problem is… they don’t

The question I think we need to ask is whether we are in a think tank recession. If you look at things like the introduction of Universal Credit 15 or 20 years ago, that was clearly a big idea that led to profound change, whether you think it was a good or a bad change. Is the think tank sector producing those kinds of big ideas today?

There are reasons for that. It’s extremely challenging in this country to fund think tank research, and it’s not the think tank director's fault that they have to pay the bills like the rest of us. 

But if you are focused on doing what you need to do to keep the lights on, there’s a danger that you don't leave space for saying the challenging thing that is unpopular. History tells us that often the unpopular thing becomes the popular thing.

It’s not just a question of funding–we need to ask questions about the career paths for people inside think tanks.

If the only route for advancement and a bigger salary is to go from a think tank and end up in government as a special adviser, well then naturally you’re going to be reticent to publish something that is controversial, is not what the government of the day wants to do, and might be initially unpopular but end up being accepted in five years’ time.

The sector chases ‘wins’, not social change

Unless you have a very benign and far-sighted donor or donor pool, any think tank needs to demonstrate its relevance and success through ‘wins.’

The language of wins is very embedded within the think tank world. It comes back to that conversation around securing a bullet point in a strategy–that is a ‘win’. Nobody’s life may change because of that bullet point, but you can put in an email to a donor.

The obsession with 'objectivity' is misplaced

Are think tanks objective? The question should be: does it matter if they’re not?

In the charity sector, people pay a lot of money for ‘Theories of Change.’ Well, in politics, our theory of change is ideology. It is a political philosophy on what makes successful change happen. 

It’s striking to me how having a political philosophy is frowned upon slightly in the think tank world. But in the charity sector, having a Theory of Change is something to be very proud of.

The thing that matters isn’t objectivity, it is credibility. 

You can have a clear political philosophy, but you must demonstrate that your research stands up to scrutiny. People can sniff out a partisan activist—someone who is just an adjunct to a political party producing subpar work—a mile off. That is self-defeating.

But having basic principles is not something we should be ashamed of.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.