In the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, CIGI’s proposals for innovation in the G8 system helped lead to the creation of the G20 leaders’ group. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, led by its then president Raphael Lemkin, played a pivotal role in promoting the passage of the UN anti-Genocide Convention by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, spurred on by the need to prevent another Holocaust. For example, Leo Pasvolsky, a Brookings Institution expert, was instrumental in helping to rebuild Europe after World War II by putting forward concrete recommendations that helped shape the Marshall Plan.

Think tanks have made these kinds of contributions in the past. At their best, think tanks possess the ability to capture the political imagination by brokering ideas, stimulating public debate, and offering creative yet practical solutions to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. In a world facing many pressing problems that include extreme poverty, inequality, climate change, rapid urbanization, the spread of infectious disease, armed conflict, international terrorism, organized crime, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, good ideas that can be acted upon are essential. The raison d’être for most think tanks is to serve as important catalysts for ideas and action. The dominant understanding is that think tanks exist to mobilize expertise and ideas to influence the policymaking process.

The litmus test of a good think tank, according to Medhora, was not whether it was “right, left, liberal or not, but whether it was proposing evidence-based discussion.” In a thought-provoking conversation at the United Nations University with Rohinton Medhora, the President of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), I asked the question, “What Are Think Tanks Good For?” His answer was to the point, “influence peddling, in the best sense of the term.” He went on to stress that while one could question the tactics and motivations behind how and who think tanks influence, the bottom line was that they are in the business of pushing for change through ideas and networks. Photo by nhuisman.CC: BY-NC-SA Dr John de Boer speaks to Rohinton Medhora on what think tanks are good for and the need for them to stick to what they’re good at: influence peddling in the best sense of the term.

Do tanks serve a purpose in modern day