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International Forum >> The Democracy Forum for East Asia>> Improving Governance and Accountability through Research: The Role of East Asian Think Tanks in the Policy Process
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Introduction
Session I: Think Tanks in East Asia: Who They Are and What They Do Session II: Think Tanks as Participants in the Policy Process Session III: The Role of Think Tanks in Improving Governance and Deepening Democracy Agenda Participants |
Session I: Think Tanks in East Asia:
Who They Are and What They Do Moderator: Larry Diamond (International Forum for Democratic Studies, NED) The first session began with an overview of the public-policy research sector in East Asia today. Moderator Larry Diamond invited each participant "to talk about who we are and what we do" by describing briefly his or her institute, including its size and staffing, the types of research that it conducts, and its role in the policy process. Following these self-introductions, participants from Korea and Thailand presented more detailed overviews of think tanks in their respective countries. Chang Soo Jin, a fellow of the Sejong Institute, summarized the findings of a 2002 study of 89 Korean think tanks that he had conducted with several other Sejong scholars. The largest and most securely established think tanks were those funded by the government, Mr. Jin and his colleagues found. This category included most of the large institutes that did economic research, plus well-known centers that focus on national security and Korea's international relations. The second type, privately funded institutes, were relatively new in Korea. Many privately funded institutes relied on grants for specific projects and did not have sustainable budgets. A notable exception, he said, was the Sejong Institute itself, which had a secure endowment, an independent board of directors, and a large full-time staff. The third main category of Korean think tanks was university-based centers that typically have loose organizational structures, small budgets, and predominantly part-time staffs. Virtually all Korean think tanks publish their findings in books and academic journals, maintain Web sites, and sponsor conferences and public meetings. Unfortunately, Mr. Jin said, "it is hard to create a policy dialogue in Korea." Policy research is concentrated on subjects for which funds are most readily available, such as the Korean economy or North-South relations. As might be expected, government-funded institutes play the leading role in policy development, and most privately funded or university-based research centers have weak relationships with policy makers, Mr. Jin concluded. Thawilwadee Bureekul, director of the research and development department at King Prajadhipok's Institute (KPI), reviewed the policy-research sector in Thailand and concluded that, "although there are many think tanks, only a few of them have real impact." She described her own institute as involved in the Thai policy process at every level. KPI not only conducts policy research, organizes workshops, and tracks the progress of legislation, but its researchers and managers meet regularly with parliamentarians and agency officials. KPI distributes its publications to all lawmakers and has an extensive free distribution system for others in the policy community. It maintains regional centers and sponsors an annual congress, to which many officials and parliamentarians are invited. And it provides training for members of parliament and government bureaucrats. An important element of KPI's success, Ms. Bureekul believed, was that "KPI uses a peaceful, nonconfrontational approach" in its relations with policy makers, the media, and other researchers. Jose Luis MC Gascon, executive director of the National Institute for Policy Studies, said that most research institutes in the Philippines also fall within the three categories that Mr. Jin had identified in Korea. He provided examples of several autonomous institutes that had been created by the government to serve its research needs, including the Development Academy of the Philippines, which originally provided training for bureaucrats but which now studies governance and economic planning, and the Philippines Institute for Development Studies, which continues to receive government funding. The second category includes independent institutes, often those affiliated with NGOs, whose staffs consist primarily of academic researchers or activists. And the third category consists of university-based centers, such as the Ateneo School of Government and the De La Salle University Institute of Governance, which typically draw on the faculty from the universities at which they are located to fill their small research staffs. As in other countries, think tanks in the Philippines compete for scarce resources, Mr. Gascon said. Unfortunately, he concluded, "most NGOs and think tanks in the Philippines are marginalized and remote from the policy process." MAO Yushi, chairman of the Unirule Institute of Economics, believed that China had made "good progress toward democracy" since the harsh crackdown in Tienanmen Square in 1989. Chinese citizens have more personal freedoms; there is greater labor mobility; many students study abroad; and scholars regularly travel for research or to participate in conferences. Nonetheless, all of China's historic universities remain under government control, and restrictions remain on academic publishing. "I have written several books that still cannot be printed," he noted. Still, "the Chinese government is coming to appreciate private think tanks," Mr. Mao believed. Mr. Diamond noted that, by his count, participants had already identified seven distinct types of think tanks: government-affiliated, independent but funded by the government, university-based, political-party based, economic-interest group based, corporate-based, and independently funded and managed. Taik-Young Hamm, a professor of political science at Kyungnam University, acknowledged that many think tanks did not have direct channels to government officials. But he also noted that there were many other ways to influence public policy, including working through the media and with political parties, as many domestic think tanks were doing in the run-up to the December 2002 Korean presidential election. But Jong Wan Kim, a Sejong Institute fellow, questioned why there was no Korean think tank that could match a major U.S. research center like the Brookings Institution in resources, staff, and impact. Mr. Kim also wanted to know why so much policy research focused on economics: "We need more study of democracy and the rule of law," he said. "Taiwan appears to be just like Korea," said Raymond Wu, a trustee of the Chinese Eurasian Education Foundation. He too could identify Taiwanese government-supported centers (including a new academy of political science), university-based institutes, and research organizations affiliated with political parties, policy-advocacy groups, and even opinion-research firms. As in the Philippines, all Taiwanese think tanks compete for funding and for the attention of lawmakers and the media. Taiwan also has one issue of overriding importance: its relations with mainland China. While he acknowledged the crucial importance of this issue, Mr. Wu also believed that the focus on mainland relations meant that "many other policy issues get short shrift." Noel M. Morada, executive director of the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies in the Philippines, said that the acceptance of government funding did not necessarily compromise the scholarly objectivity of the recipient. "We work with-but not for-the government," Mr. Morada said. "We have a clear idea of our independence." And he noted that a number of Filipino research institutes that were not explicitly devoted to the study of democracy-such as the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the Asian Institute of Management-did nonetheless focus on governance issues that were of crucial importance to democracy. Ryrat Suwanraks, assistant to the president of the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), agreed with both of Mr. Morada's main points. Unlike the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, TDRI does not receive funding from the government, but 70 percent of TDRI's research clients are government agencies. Nonetheless, Ms. Suwanraks said that the Institute was still "independent in funding and structure" and that it had no government officials sitting ex officio on its board of directors or on its council of trustees. Despite this independence, TDRI has developed good working relationships with government officials. The TDRI's mandate is to provide policy and technical analysis that supports the formulation of policies with long-term development implications. The Institute sends its TDRI Report to the legislature; key members of its 120-person research staff sit on governmental and parliamentary committees and participate in ministry policy-planning meetings. The TDRI also organizes an annual conference on topical issues with medium- to long-term impact that brings together policy makers, government leaders, members of parliament, civil-society representatives, and the media. And although most of TDRI's work is principally about economics, "much of our work touches on governance," Ms. Suwanraks concluded. "It appears from this description," Mr. Diamond said, "that TDRI is like the RAND Corporation," an independent American research organization that does much of its work for the U.S. government. Haksoon Paik, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute, wanted to clarify the place of his Institute in the typology of think tanks. In his view, "Sejong is the only independent research organization in Korea." And Kie-Duck Park, vice president of the Sejong Institute, added that Sejong has only had two projects funded by the government. The first of these was the Democracy Forum for East Asia (the Sejong-NED partnership project that sponsored this conference) and the Community of Democracies NGO Forum, a large international gathering of democracy activists that had just concluded in Seoul. "All of the other work of our twenty full-time scholars and fifty support staffers is funded by our endowment," Mr. Park stressed. Ghia Nodia, chairman of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development, said that while he recognized the challenges that think-tank scholars in East Asia face, he believed they might find some satisfaction in comparing their situations with those in the former Soviet republics. During the time when his native Georgia was part of the Soviet Union, for example, most major policy decisions were made in Moscow, not in Tbilisi, so there was no real need for locally produced policy research. To the extent that there was any policy research, its focus was fully determined by the government, and it was mainly conducted by academic research institutes that were not established to conduct policy research. Today, Mr. Nodia said, many of these old institutes continue to operate on limited state budgets, staffed by aging communist-era scholars whose ranks diminish with each passing year. Most younger scholars either give up careers in research altogether or create nongovernmental organizations that usually combine activism with policy research. NGO reformers had tried to create a new legal category for nonprofit think tanks when the Georgian civil code was rewritten in 1997, but this effort had failed. As a consequence, there is no clear distinction between activist NGOs and public-policy institutes. Ironically, Mr. Nodia said, "although the government usually does not provide money to independent think tanks, it does ask them to do research out of a sense of 'patriotism.'" Nonetheless, a few ministries have commissioned research from independent groups or have supported ad hoc task forces, such as a recent working group on fighting corruption. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, most think tanks in Georgia do not receive funding from business firms, Mr. Nodia said. This leaves foreign donors as the primary source of support for policy research. Mr. Nodia said that while most Georgian scholars appreciated foreign support, they were also often frustrated when changes in donor funding priorities left local researchers scrambling to develop projects on refugees, the environment, and other frequently changing issues of the day. LIU Junning, senior fellow at the Institute for Chinese Culture Research, agreed that China's research institutes could also be classified as affiliated with government, universities, corporations, labor organizations, and the Communist party. But he thought that this formal classification was less important than the fact that "we only have institutes as tools of the government. We do not have groups that do independent research." Mr. Liu said that only independent or semi-independent institutes qualify as real think tanks. And he predicted that independent think tanks would eventually contribute to ending one-party rule in China. Byung-Kook Kim, the founding director of a new think tank called the East Asia Institute, replied to Jong Wan Kim's question of why there was no Brookings Institution in Korea or elsewhere in East Asia. The most important reason, Byung-Kook Kim said, is the absence of large philanthropic foundations that could endow or support such a venture. Rather than lamenting this fact, Mr. Kim said, policy researchers in Asia should take this financial constraint as a given and create institutes that make the most of what limited funds are available. The lack of resources could actually force systematically and strategically minded NGO leaders to establish a clear set of priorities and agendas, which would also help the development of NGOs as institutions. Mr. Kim also considered government funding a mixed blessing, since it often came with onerous regulations and reporting requirements. In any case, "the most crucial condition for success is your concept, a clear idea of what you want to do." And the most important assets of any research center are quality and credibility, Mr. Kim stressed. And Thomas Skladony, senior program officer at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, said that the Brookings Institution was but one model of a successful American think tank. The Brookings Institution had a large endowment but also received corporate and philanthropic support for its large research and publications programs. Another model was the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which received most of its funding from the annual contributions of business firms attracted to its pro-business orientation. Mr. Skladony noted that while some of AEI's business contributions were dedicated to specific economic research projects, most of its corporate contributions were considered general support that could be used to fund research on political and social issues. Mr. Skladony also said that while AEI was generally regarded as a more conservative think tank and Brookings as a more liberal one, the two organizations tried to position themselves at the center of the political spectrum. Both AEI and Brookings were home to scholars typically identified as liberal or conservative, and scholars from both institutes regularly participated in each other's conferences and wrote for each other's publications. A third think-tank model, he said, was the Heritage Foundation, whose staff consisted primarily of younger researchers who prepared brief summaries of current policy issues that were widely distributed on Capitol Hill and to government agencies. An important source of Heritage Foundation funding, Mr. Skladony said, was contributions from thousands of small donors who shared the Foundation's unambiguous conservative ideology. Eui-Young Kim, professor of political science at Kyung Hee University, said he believed insufficient attention had been paid to the role of governmental think tanks, such as KDI (Korea Development Institute) and KIEP (Korea Institute for International Economic Policy), and corporate think tanks, such as KERI (Korea Economic Research Institute) and SERI (Samsung Economic Research Institute); all are large and well-funded organizations that attract top scholars to their staffs. Despite their scholarly credentials, Mr. Kim believed the primary role of such institutions is to serve as "a lobbyist for the corporate sector." "In Indonesia," according to Nanang Pamuji Mugasejati, a research fellow at the Center for Security and Peace Studies, "we do not have a hostile government but we do have a stubborn government." Policy making is primarily political bargaining, he said, and the role of academic research in policy making is minimal. The real question, for which Mr. Mugasejati said he did not have an answer, was whether one could improve government without input from think tanks or whether one could improve think tanks without there being a more receptive government. And, for Damba Ganbat, executive director of the Political Education Academy in Mongolia, the underdeveloped state of policy research in his country could be attributed to "the weakness of the civil society sector overall." "The average citizen in China has no idea what a think tank is." So said XIA Yeliang, an associate professor of economics at Peking University. Almost all academic-based policy research in China is funded by the government, Mr. Xia said, adding that Mao Yushi's Unirule Institute was a rare example of successful institute run by nongovernmental scholars. Many of the best known Chinese research centers-such as the China Center for Economic Research and the National Economy Research Institute-focus on the economy, and there are no established groups that study political reform or ideology. Some institutes had secured project grants from foreign donors or survived on consulting or training fees. But most groups that had tried to establish an independent existence eventually found it necessary to affiliate with the government or with a university. Mr. Xia said that he and Mr. Liu were planning to launch what they called a "virtual think tank" that would not require established offices or a staff of employees. Instead, their new venture would enable like-minded individuals to debate policy ideas and to publish their work through the Internet. "The greatest contribution of independent policy research is not just policy ideas, it is new thought, Mr. XIA concluded. But WANG Juntao, a Chinese democracy activist currently pursuing graduate studies in political science at Columbia University, cautioned his Chinese colleagues about the difficulty of their proposed undertaking. Mr. Wang said that he had been involved with several Chinese think tanks back in the 1980s. "We tried to shape public opinion first, then policy," Mr. Wang said. But he also explained that the very idea of an independent policy-research institute, which developed in Western democracies, has no legal basis in a country like China. Many young Chinese activists who wanted to create such institutes in the 1980s sought out what Mr. Wang called a "Godfather," a powerful political or business figure who could provide support and protection for what was, in effect, an illegal enterprise. Mr. Wang's own project, he said, included two correspondence schools with 260,000 students, two high-tech institutes, a print factory, an opinion-polling center, a newspaper, and several commercial companies-all of which provided cover for a think tank that introduced what he termed "hot issues" into public debates. |
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