The Development of Think Tanks

Abstract

Development of the global society has entered into a new millennium, although the material wellbeing of most of the global people has been improved through progress of science and technology, improvement of economic system and also improvement of social side in certain system aspects. But the growth of these systems are very much unbalanced. Although U.S.A. ranked number one on its economy and capacity of science and technology, but there are series divide between the blue collar class and the white collar class. China, although ranked number two in the global economy and number one of its manufacturing capacity, but there are no shortage of social issues in health care, education, housing and bottom line of morality. Officials of governments globally are generally occupied in busy routine and urgent short term works, they have no spare time to think about long term issue. And also due to the specialization of discipline, every department concerns development of its own without coordination with other department or no consideration of secondary or negative effect of certain development. And also, due to their position of administration, they have vested interests to pursue short term results. The emergence of modern think tanks concentrated with experts of various disciplines, if they are not funded by government or business sectors, they can perform relatively better results of issues faced by the country or global society. But how such kind of think tanks can be existed is an issue to be explored. This chapter will give a brief discussion of role of think tanks, type of think tanks, its process of development etc. Relative detail case studies are given to several selective thanks with description of their organizations, histories, work on education and training, programmes etc. The authors of the book expect that these materials may be helpful to assist most of the developing countries to have the information how to establish a think tank. The authors suggest that if a think tank is well established with researchers known the real world politics, the think tanks can perform the role of national or other types of planning, while the planning organization of the government is responsible for implementation, coordination, monitoring feedback information in time and making corrective actions, the think tank is a consultative organization, while the governmental planning organization has administrative power in sense.