Post Communist Think Tanks: making and faking influence

This article reflects on the role and performance of the independent policy institutes in Central and Eastern Europe. This article suggests that post-communist think tanks have entered the process of re-inventing themselves. The conditions that made them the fashion of the day are no longer present. For instance:

• Governments have improved their own research capacities
• Political parties have invested in policy research.
• Western financial support is on its way home
• The rhetoric of Washington consensus is exhausted
• Words like market and reform have lost their power

However, in the wake of the demise of old paradigms, post-communist think tanks are seizing new opportunities. In the early years of transformation, think tanks capitalised on the their ideological proximity and informal access to the new reform governments in promoting ideas and policy solutions. For a long period of time, think tanks did not educate the public but simply changed the framework in which post-communist societies debated their problems. All this is history.

Recommendations:

• Think tanks should cross the border of the nation states and free themselves from their intellectual arrogance in order to initiate global networks and advocacy groups
• Going global is the only way to rediscover the art of locality. And re-discovering the local context is the only way for think tanks to make difference with the power of their knowledge

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