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Collaboration Between Think Tanks and Government in the Development of Public Policy
and regulations that enable and promote the development of the
private sector.
In figure 2, the government effectiveness and regulatory quality indexes
are displayed for 29 countries in Latin America. The countries are
organized in relation to the number of think tanks they have, which is
indicated in the horizontal axis in parenthesis together with the name
of the respective country. The government effectiveness and regulatory
quality indexes have values between -2.5 and 2.5, which means, the
higher the score on the index, the better the governance of a country.
Argentina is the Latin American country with a greatest number of
think tanks, with a total of 131 organizations, however, the country
scored low in both government effectiveness and regulatory quality on
the index as compared to countries with fewer think tanks, such as
Brazil. A similar situation is seen in the case of Bolivia, a country that
has more think tanks than Chile, but a lower index in both areas.
Although the size of the country and size of the population have a
significant relationship to the number of think tanks in a country, what
this graph clearly illustrates is that the simple creation and presence
of think tanks does not result in better governance. The capacity of
individual think tanks to contribute to the development of a country
and strengthen democratic governance is dependent not only on the
strategic and concrete actions taken by think tanks, but also on the
political reality of the countries they operate in. Although think tanks
are not immune to pressures of the political environments in which
they operate, the public policy focus of these organizations should be
for the long term and reach beyond the government in power.
In sum, we need to go beyond thinking of ways to create more think
tanks in Latin America. The more relevant question to consider is
how to improve the capacity of the many think tanks already present
so that these organizations strengthen democratic governance in their
respective countries.
