ABSTRACT
Today’s world is faster paced and more dynamic than ever before. Given the increase in availability of complex information, it is no surprise that there has been a concurrent increase in organizations with the primary goal of generating research and distributing information. Indeed, think tanks have enjoyed massive growth both in number and in their role in global policy-making over the last decade. As policy-makers have come to rely on think tanks for the thoughtful research and analysis needed for the generation and implementation of successful policy responses to global issues, think tanks have expanded and diversified, rising to meet the challenge of an increasingly informed and globalized world. In this way, think tanks have sought to fill the ‘operational gap’ caused by policy-makers’ lack of access to the information and tools needed to respond to contemporary issues (see Witte et al. 2000; McGann 2010, 2011). To be sure, the information is available, but what is relevant and what is only noise is not always clear. It is here, in part, that think tanks are so important, filtering, sorting, and synthesizing information that they then provide to policy-makers.
