Think Tanks and Global Politics

THINK TANKS
AND GLOBAL
POLITICS
Key Spaces in the Structure of Power
Edited by
Alejandra Salas-Porras and Georgina Murray
Think Tanks and Global Politics
Alejandra Salas-Porras · Georgina Murray
Editors
Think Tanks
and Global Politics
Key Spaces in the Structure of Power
Editors
Alejandra Salas-Porras Georgina Murray
National Autonomous Griffith University
University of Mexico Nathan, QLD
Mexico City Australia
Mexico
ISBN 978-1-137-57493-0 ISBN 978-1-137-56756-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939097
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Preface
We are very excited to be able to bring you our controversial book about
think tanks and their machinations. We have worked from a broad defi-
nitional base of what a think tank is, which includes those organizations
that specialize in researching and disseminating public policy ideas. But
our lens focuses on the world of politics through the eye of power: who
has it, who uses it, and who controls it. This takes our definition of think
tanks further than the standard meaning to elaborate on the role they
play in constructing, reproducing, and (in a few cases) challenging pre-
vailing relations of authority and influence. So we add to our queries a
question about their roles in key organizational networks that enable
them to produce and disseminate policy ideas to assist elites in the con-
struction and exercise of, as well as challenges to, power—particularly
through knowledge production, concentration, and mobilization. They
are, we suggest, the permanent [but covert] persuaders.
We move from the existing “liminal” position occupied by think tanks
in the literature, which makes them look neutral, objective, and inde-
pendent, distanced from particular interests, to a new perspective that
focuses on their relationships with structures of power (at the global,
regional, and national levels). Traditional analytical distancing from sites
of power may have enhanced the think tanks’ ability to persuade, as it
allows them to disguise, or at least make less obvious, their connections
and commitments to power, power elites, and particular interests in gen-
eral. We have taken it upon ourselves to look forensically at these covert
v
vi Preface
institutions and their relations with power, to assist with the academic
process of examining their accountability.
We do not suggest that all think tanks take the same paths or have the
same objectives or interests. They do not. They follow different paths,
and this is where the expertize of our international authors from Mexico,
Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom are able to provide
us with unique insights into how think tanks operate in different loca-
tions. They give us a drone-like comparative look across their different
locations, functions, and order—thus one group of think tanks special-
izes in neoliberal persuasion on policy makers in executive or legislative
branches, while a second group targets the way public opinion is targeted
to produce a groundswell impact that ultimately makes their bargaining
position more effective. A third group—more internally oriented—aims to
persuade members and participants of a particular idea or policy approach,
to develop forms of cohesion and solidarity among elites, reconciling divi-
sions, mobilizing members, and projecting a unified vision to increase
their leverage vis-à-vis policy makers, labor and government officials.
Some think tanks combine to different degrees these and other mecha-
nisms to convince or put pressure on policy makers. Opposing the right
are the alternative policy groups and left-wing think tanks that devise simi-
lar strategies to gain credibility, but are focused instead on rolling back the
neoliberal agenda; they operate from opposing activist communities.
In short, this book focuses in all those organizations that create ideas
to influence policy and activist communities, particularly think tanks and
employer (business) associations.
We would like to thank all the authors (and their partners) who gave
us their valuable time and expertize to complete this book. We would
also like to thank Prof. Heidi Gottfried, president of the ISA Economic
Sociology branch that financed the workshop for the authors in this
book to meet in Vienna in 2016. This workshop was the basis on which
this work was produced and we are grateful for her support.
Finally, we want to dedicate this book to working people everywhere
when they are subject to unfair duping by these factories of persuasion
that make the fight for equity just so much more difficult but that much
more necessary.
Mexico City, Mexico Alejandra Salas-Porras

Nathan, Australia, Georgina Murray
October 2016
Contents
1 Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key Spaces in the

Structure of Power 1
2 Think Tank Networks in Mexico: How They Shape

Public Policy and Dominant Discourses 25
Alejandra Salas-Porras
3 The Australian Think Tank: A Key Site in a Global

Distribution of Power? 53
Georgina Murray
4 Power Without Representation: The Coherence and

Closeness of the Trilateral Commission 81
Matilde Luna and José Luis Velasco
5 The Bilderberg Conferences: A Transnational Informal

Governance Network 107
Aleksander Miłosz Zieliński
6 The Rise and Decline of the Business Roundtable? 133

Bruce Cronin
vii
viii Contents
7 Neoliberal Think Tank Networks in Latin America

and Europe: Strategic Replication and Cross-National
Organizing 159
Karin Fischer and Dieter Plehwe
8 Counter-hegemonic Projects and Cognitive Praxis in

Transnational Alternative Policy Groups 187
William K. Carroll and Elaine Coburn
9 From Research to Reality: Developing a Radical Left

Think Tank in New Zealand as Counter-Hegemonic
Praxis in a Previously Empty Space 219
Sue Bradford
10 Why Establish Non-Representative Organizations?

Rethinking the Role, Form and Target of Think Tanks 245
David Peetz
Index 265
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Alejandra Salas-Porras Professor at the National Autonomous

University of Mexico (UNAM), Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
where she has been working during the past 20 years. Her professional
experience has concentrated in the academic sphere, combining teach-
ing and research activities. Her interests revolve around the following
topics: Elites and development on the national, regional, and global
levels; the political economy of development and business and corpo-
rate networks.
Georgina Murray has research interests in areas of political economy
that include networks of corporate capitalism, work, gender and social
inequality and its relationship to neuroscience. Her books includeCapi-
talist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand (Ashgate,
2006),Women of the Coal Rushes (co-written with David Peetz, UNSW
Press 2010) and Financial Elites and Transnational Business: Who Rules
the World? (co-edited with John Scott, Edward Elgar, 2012). And she
has just published a co-edited book Gender Gaps: Regulation and Labor
Segmentation (with David Peetz, Springer Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Griffith University, Queensland,
Australia.
ix
x Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Sue Bradford is a community-based political activist and former Green

Member of Parliament (1999–2009) who recently completed a doctor-
ate exploring issues around the absence of any major left think tank in
New Zealand and what it might take to set one up. Since graduation
in 2014, she has coordinated a major project to establish Economic
and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA) which was formally launched in
September 2016, a new think tank involving many left academics and
activists from across New Zealand.
William K. Carroll’s research interests are in the areas of the political
economy of corporate capitalism, social movements and social change,
and critical social theory and method. His books include Expose, Oppose,
Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice, A
World to Win: Contemporary Social Movements and Counter-Hegemony,
The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class and Critical Strategies for
Social Research. His current project, “Mapping the power of the carbon-
extractive corporate resource sector” is an interdisciplinary partnership
of several universities and civil-society organizations which traces various
modalities of corporate power and resistance within the global political
economy, focusing particularly on carboniferous capitalism in western
Canada https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/wcarroll/.
Elaine Coburn is an assistant professor, International Studies, Glendon
Campus, York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the editor of More
Will Sing Their Way to Freedom: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence
(Fernwood 2015) and on the editorial boards of the Canadian Review of
Sociology and Socio, the French-language social science journal.
Bruce Cronin is a Professor of Economic Sociology and Director of
Research at the University of Greenwich Business School in London. He
specializes in the study of corporate elites, particularly the role of busi-
ness networks in strategy and innovation within and across organiza-
tional and national boundaries. He has been Director of the University’s
Centre for Business Network Analysis since its establishment in 2006.
He is secretary of the UK Social Networks Association, board member of
the European Social Networks Association, treasurer of the Association
for Heterodox Economics and World Economics Association, subject
editor for Connections and member of the editorial boards of the Forum
Editors and Contributors xi
for Social Economics, and The Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change.
He recently co-edited with, the late‚ Fred Lee‚ The Handbook of Research
Methods in Heterodox Economics, Edward Elgar.
Karin Fischer teaches development studies and global sociology at
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. She heads the Department
for Policy and Development Research at the Institute of Sociology. Her
research interests are uneven development, neoliberal transformation,
and class formation from at ransnational perspective. She has published
numerous books, book chapters, and articles on north-south relations.
Her monograph on the history of class formation in Chile (Eine Klasse
für sich, 2011) was published in Spanish by Ediciones Universidad
Alberto Hurtado 2017.
Matilde Luna is a researcher at the Institute of Social Research of the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a
Ph.D. in Political Science and is a member of the National System of
Researchers. Her academic work has focused on business and politics,
the generation and diffusion of knowledge, and associative performance.
Recently, she has co-edited the books ¿Quién gobierna América del
Norte?: Elites, redes y organizaciones (Mexico: UNAM/SITESA, 2012)
and ¿Cómo se gobierna América del Norte? Estrategias, instituciones y
políticas públicas (Mexico: UNAM/SITESA, 2014).
David Peetz is a Professor of Employment Relations in the Centre for
Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University, Queensland,
Australia. He previously worked at the Australian National University
and in the then Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations,
spending over 5 years in its Senior Executive Service. He has been
a consultant for the International Labour Organisation in Thailand,
Malaysia, Geneva,and China, and has undertaken work for unions,
employers, and governments of both political persuasions. He is a co-
researcher at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and
Work (CRIMT) based in Canada. He is on the Board of the Union
Education Foundation and has written on union training, membership
and delegates, gender, working time, workplace relations, wages and
industrial Relations policy, individualism and collectivism, sustainability,
and many other topics. He is the author of Unions in a Contrary World
(Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Brave New Workplace (Allen &
Unwin, 2006), co-author of Women of the Coal Rushes (UNSW Press,
xii Editors and Contributors
2010) and co-editor of Women, Labor Segmentation and Regulation:

Varieties of Gender Gaps (with Georgina Murray, Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), as well as numerous academic articles, papers, and reports.
Dieter Plehwe is a senior fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center
Department Inequality and Social Policy. His research is mainly in the
field of international political economy, comparative capitalism, his-
tory of economic ideas, and public policy. He serves as an editor of the
Journal Critical Policy Studies and has recently co-edited “Roads from
Mont Pèlerin” (Harvard University Press) and “Liberalism and the
Welfare State” (Oxford University Press). He has launched the collabora-
tive research platform on think tank networks (www.thinktanknetworkre-
search.net).
José Luis Velasco is a researcher at the Institute of Social Research of
the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He holds
a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University. He is the author
of several articles and book chapters on associative systems and of two
books: Insurgency, Authoritarianism, and Drug Trafficking in Mexico’s
“Democratization” (New York: Routledge, 2005) and El debate actual
sobre el federalismo mexicano (Mexico: Instituto Mora, 1999).
Aleksander Miłosz Zieliński University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
Acronyms and Abbreviations
ABC Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC)

ACCI Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions
AHIP America’s Health Insurance Plan
AIG Australian Industries Group
AIIA Australian Institute of International Affairs
ALP Australian Labor Party
APG Alternative Policy Group
ARENA Alianza Republicana Nacionalista
ASI Adam Smith Institute
ASM Arbeitsgemeinschaft für eine Soziale Marktwirtschaft
BCA Business Council of Australia
BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
CAS Complex Associative System
CCS Centre for Civil Society
CDESL Centro de Estudios Sobre la Libertad
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CED Committee for Economic Development
CEEY Centro de Estudios Espinoza Yglesias
CEO Chief Executive officer
CFR Council on Foreign Relations
xiii
xiv Acronyms and Abbreviations
CIEN Center of National Economic Studies

CIS Centre for Independent Studies
CIWG Consumer Issues Working Group
CNE Centre for a New Europe
CPA Consumer Protection Agency
CPS Centre for Policy Studies
CUAIR Construction Users Anti-Inflation Round Table
DAWN Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era
EC European Commission
EIN European Ideas Network
EJOLT Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade
EO Erhvervenes Oplysningsråd
EPAC Economic Planning Advisory Council
ESEADE Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration
(Buenos Aires)
ESRA Economic and Social Research Aotearoa
EU European Union
FAES Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis
FEE Foundation for Economic Education
FIEL Fundación de Investigaciones Económicas Latinoamericanas
FIL Fundación Internacional para la Libertad
G20 Group of 20
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GEA-ISA Grupo de Economistas Asociados
GEEJ Gender, Economic and Ecological Justice
HACER Hispanic American Center for Economic Research
IEA Institute of Economic Affairs (UK and Australia)
IEA International Energy Agency
IESM Instituto de la Economía Social de Mercado
IfG Institute for Critical Social Analysis
IFG International Forum on Globalization
IISS International Institute for Strategic Studies
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPA Institute of Public Affairs
IPEA Instituto de Pensamiento Estratégico Ágora
IPN International Policy Network
LI Liberal International
MPS Mont Pèlerin Society
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NAG North American Group (of the TC)
NAM National Association of Manufacturers
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Acronyms and Abbreviations xv
NDF New Direction Foundation

NFIB National Federation of Independent Businesses
NGO Non-Government Organization
NILS National Institute of Labour Studies (Flinders University)
NZBRT New Zealand Business Round Table
PC Productivity Commission
PRIA Participatory Research in Asia
PRO Propuesta Republicana
RELIAL Red Liberal de América Latina
RosaLux Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
SN Stockholm Network
TAPG Transnational Alternative Policy Group
TC Trilateral Commission
TIGN Transnational Informal Governance Network
TNI Transnational Institute
UAP United Australia Party
UN United Nations
UPLA Unión de Partidos Latinoamericanos
WTO World Trade Organization
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Mexican think tank network in 2015 38

Fig. 3.1 Partisan or independent think tanks 2015 56
Fig. 6.1 Business Roundtable—registered annual expenditure
on lobbying, 1998–2015 137
Fig. 6.2 Advocacy network Q3, 1999 153
Fig. 7.1 Think tank networks in Latin America 166
Fig. 7.2 Think tank networks in Latin America: interlocks
(two or more positions) 168
Fig. 7.3 SN and NDF networks, interlocks 174
Fig. 7.4 Think tank networks in Europe: Interlocks
(two or more positions) 176
Fig. 10.1 Distancing and controversy 252
Fig. 10.2 Directions of influence 258
xvii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks 30

Table 2.2 The most central Mexican think tanks, 2014 39
Table 3.1 Examples of central Australian think tanks 63
Table 4.1 The TC’s executive committee: Members’ affiliations
by region and sector 92
Table 4.2 Countries and regions analyzed in the TC annual meetings 100
Table 5.1 Participants in the inner circle by sector 113
Table 5.2 Participants in the inner circle by country 113
Table 5.3 All participants 2003–2015 by sector 117
Table 5.4 Participants in the inner circle 2003–2015 by country 118
Table 6.1 Outcomes of Roundtable policy advocacy 148
Table 6.2 Business Roundtable relative centrality, 1999–2015 155
Table 7.1 Latin American networks: number of think tank
personnel by category (staff, board, leadership) 169
Table 7.2 Stockholm network and New Direction Foundation
(NDF): number of think tank personnel per category
(staff, board, leadership) 175
Table 8.1 Projects and constituencies of eight TAPGs 191
xix
CHAPTER 1
Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key Spaces

in the Structure of Power
Think tanks—broadly defined as organizations that specialize in research-

ing and disseminating public policy ideas—have become increasingly
important in integrating and rearticulating private, state, media and aca-
demic elite interests to advance their public policies and preferences. This
type of organization first emerged at a national level (Blach-Ørsten and
Kristensen 2016; Lingard 2016; Stone 1996), but spread as cloned ver-
sions (Beder 2001; Pusey 1991) from the core to operate transnation-
ally (Carroll 2010; McGann 2016); and they are now influencing global
populations (Drezner 2015).
The term itself was not widely used until the 1970s, when this type of
organization expanded enormously in the United States to cover differ-
ent areas of policy research (Medvetz 2012; Plehwe 2015). Until then,
most of these organizations were viewed as centres or institutes that car-
ried out research and provided advice from several ideological perspec-
tives, depending on the country or region in which they were located.
In England, for example, both the Fabian Society (founded in 1884)
A. Salas-Porras (*) 
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico
G. Murray 
Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia
© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Salas-Porras and G. Murray (eds.), Think Tanks and Global Politics,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_1
2 A. Salas-Porras and G. Murray
and the Policy Planning Institute (founded in 1931 as the Political

and Economic Planning Institute) contributed to the construction of
the welfare state. Apart from the Institute of Economic Affairs (that is,
London based started in 1955), right-wing think tanks did not appear
until the 1970s (Denham and Garnett 2004). In Germany, party-affil-
iated centres like the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (created in 1925)
and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (created in 1964) were among
the earliest organizations to carry out policy research (Thunert 2004).
In the United States, conservative right-wing tanks like the Heritage
Foundation, CATO and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research did
not appear until the 1970s. Before that time, research centres were com-
mitted to scholarly research and improving the process of policy-making
(Abelson 2004).
From the 1970s onwards, the presence of neoliberal conservative think
tanks expanded rapidly throughout the Global North and increasingly
appeared in the Global South, as can be seen from James McGann’s
(2014) lists. These think tanks advocated free trade, low taxation, tight-
ened labour market discipline and privatization, as well as low levels of
state intervention—particularly in relation to government spending on
welfare and the regulation of market interests. These originally few and
sparse think tank institutions are now numerous—over 6500 according
to McGann (2014)—and globally hegemonic in their highly successful
marketing of neoliberal ideas. Neoliberal is defined here as a commit-
ment to the market to maintain social and economic society through a
small state with privatized welfare and state assets. This thinking applied
from their think tank beginnings in the pre-Keynesian period (e.g.
Institute of Political Affairs 1924) to their initial blossoming at the
beginning of the Keynesian period (e.g. Mont Pèlerin Society 1945) and
then their popularization after the 1970s, when their thinking was acti-
vated by wealthy individuals like Antony Fisher, who set up the Institute
of Economic Affairs on the advice of Friedrich von Hayek (see Cockett
1995).
It was not until the 1990s that any real counter-hegemonic think
tanks were established to resist and counteract the neoliberal global
advance (e.g. Compass in 2003; New Matilda in 2010; Terra Nova in
2003). According to Carroll and Coburn (see Chap. 8 of this book),
the projects behind these organizations usually have a regional stretch
that challenges ‘the common sense of neoliberal forms of capitalism and
1 THINK TANKS AND GLOBAL POLITICS … 3
sometimes the capitalist system as a whole, for its politico-economic ine-

qualities and ecological irrationality’.
However, in the United States several progressive, left-wing think
tanks were created before the 1990s; among the most important were
the Institute for Policy Studies, founded in 1963, the members of which
were actively involved in popular movements such as the civil rights
and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the women’s and environmen-
tal movements of the 1970s, and the peace and anti-intervention move-
ments of the 1980s. In 1986, economists Jeff Faux, Robert Reich, Ray
Marshall, Barry Bluestone, Robert Kutter and Lester Thurow, among
others, founded the Economic Policy Institute as a labour-affiliated think
tank with the aim of improving the living conditions of working families
(Trumka 2016).
The expansion of neoliberal think tanks was an accelerated trend for sev-
eral reasons, but two in particular. On the one hand, as the economy and
public administration become more complex, highly educated and thirsty
for more sophisticated scientific information, bureaucracies looked to think
tanks to provide it. And on the other hand, the smaller state meant pub-
lic sector institutions became relatively underfunded and in some cases this
meant that the state was forced to out source policy research activities to
private, autonomous or semi-public institutions. The state was being rolled
back to the minimum and Think Tanks walked gladly into the gap.
Small government as part of the neoliberal mantra played an impor-
tant ideological role in persuading previously Keynesian states of the
rightness of this ‘new’ right-wing politics, spreading ideas of welfare
dependency and personal or individual responsibility, together with other
philosophies that tended to undercut the social principles underlying the
welfare state. Think tank publications and lobbying was charged with the
neoliberal necessity to find new efficiencies and enable the market greater
freedom in its practices, along with the means and ability  to turn their
thinking into common sense or taken-for-granted thought.
As this book shows, such popularizing roles for neoliberal think tanks
and their networks become dominant especially when alternative policy
initiatives challenge the status quo or where critical situations and/or
political constraints (e.g. violence and security problems) demand new
policy ideas and knowledge. This ideological role has become particu-
larly powerful, and at times belligerent—for example, in Latin America
as think tanks try to transform the pink tide nations (la marea rosa) and
delegitimize left-wing politics that have grown increasingly influential in

this region since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Think tanks are thus often used to create and articulate new policy
ideas (or repackage old ones), frame and push forward policy agen-
das and engage in public policy debates following rather diverse strat-
egies. They often concentrate enormous expertise, channel funds into
their organizational resources, and function as nurseries for technocrats
and public officials. In order to embark on these activities, they have to
interact in different ways with state agencies, particularly in the execu-
tive and legislative apparatus. But, once created, they weave networks
at the national, regional and global levels, within which public and pri-
vate interests are redefined and discussions are organized to reach ideo-
logical consensus, and tight teams of technocrats are brought together
with public officials to push their agendas forward. However, they are
far from homogeneous as they espouse different ideologies—even within
the broad neoliberal/conservative nexus, with different social purposes,
issues and contradictions, and divisions within their networks. They are
also very differentially funded, but generally not forthcoming about who
does fund them and in whose interests they are consequently aligned.
This aspect is one that makes this book particularly interesting.
Capital is not homogenous, so why should we view think tanks that
largely represent the interests of different fractions of capital as homog-
enous? They are not. Competition and conflict within and between think
tank networks exist as they confront alternative ideas, defend and further
their different policy projects, order their preferences and shape their
compromises. Think tanks can contribute decisively to the polarization
of inequalities associated with the neoliberal reforms and policies they
recommend and defend, or they can come from the opposite direction to
recommend alternative strategies to benefit the environment and to help
humanitarian struggles. Although there are fewer of the latter type of
think tanks, they have been more or less successful in constructing alter-
native strategies to the most acute problems facing society, including the
distribution of social, economic and security rights.
Our perspectives on think tanks look at them across the political spec-
trum; our writing (like the think tanks themselves) focuses on those
dominated by the market-led agenda, rather than those that resist market
forces—although this smaller number of alternative think tanks area is
explored in Chaps. 8 and 9. Our aim is to go beyond the largely descrip-
tive accounts of think tanks that at present dominate the current think
tank literature. We look analytically from a radical, socialist or Marxist

perspective at the place in society occupied by think tanks; their control
of global resources, both in economic and political policy fields; and their
inroads into structures of power. We do so by addressing the follow-
ing questions. How have think tanks reached these positions of power?
Has the Northern core produced neoliberal clones that have colonized
the globe? Who funds and controls these think tanks and for what pur-
pose? How is policy-making knowledge created? How are new policy
ideas propagated and validated? How do think tanks become dominant
sources of knowledge in public spheres, including the media?
To answer these questions, we will explore the dynamics of think tank
networks in specific regions and countries, the coalitions they generate
to advance the social purpose they implicitly or explicitly endorse and,
in particular, the spaces they occupy in the structures and fields of power
at the national, regional and global levels. We will argue (albeit in differ-
ent ways) (1) that think tanks are controlled by networks of public and
private interests; (2) that in the centre of each network is a very reduced
group of experts, policy ‘wonks’, political intermediaries and members
of corporate elite that can be identified; (3) that think tanks influence
public policies in several ways, including the concentration of knowledge,
information and other resources, executive and legislative lobbying and
a strong presence in the media to define agendas, construct and dissemi-
nate an ideological or political discourse and validate knowledge; (4) that
their need for funding can create a symbiotic relationship between fund-
ing and the research produced (see Mulgan 2006); and (5) that, in order
to integrate new ideas and knowledge with policy-making, think tanks
mix in different ways and degrees in their research, analysis, advising,
lobbying, persuasion, deliberation and advocacy, although there may be
a more or less acute tendency to specialize in one or more of these tasks,
depending on the particular think tank, country or region.
Conceptual Framework
The literature on think tanks (e.g. Kandiah and Seldon 2013; Medvetz
2012; Shaw et al. 2014; Stone and Denham 2004) has struggled to
reach a broadly accepted definition of the concept due to the hybrid and
ambivalent character of these organizations, which adopt very diverse
forms, roles and characteristics. The differences in the definition of think
tanks refer to the level of autonomy of these organizations, not only
from the financial and organizational groups  they may be affliated with
(e.g. NGOs, Business Lobby Groups or Labour Assoications) but also
from the ideological viewpoint: how overt are the think tank’s affini-
ties and commitments within the economic and political interests and
doctrines, and to what degree do these doctrines lead to activism, the
construction and definition of agendas, and the shaping of public opin-
ion? Yet all think tanks combine in different ways to do varying degrees
of research activities, advocacy and activism, and they all compete to
voice their ideas to a community of public officials, legislators and politi-
cal elites. On the one hand, this combination entails an intermediate role
in the structure of power, where several fields interlink and overlap, mak-
ing their situation elusive and murky. On the other, the multiple roles
played by these organizations (research, advocacy, dissemination and
defence of policy ideas, production and legitimation of knowledge) make
a clear-cut definition more difficult (Plehwe 2015).
The line that divides think tanks focusing on scientific and academic
research from those that emphasize dissemination of ideas or politi-
cal activism becomes increasingly faint, although in one way or another
they all try to connect knowledge with public policy, and their experts
with politicians. The knowledge they produce has varying ideological
content, depending on the social agenda pursued by each think tank. In
other words, knowledge is produced in organizations with strong aca-
demic objectives, approaching policy problems from diverse theoretical
perspectives but with a keen eye on their ability to impact on the process
of policy-making.
Think tanks constitute spaces where public policies are designed, dis-
cussed, planned and evaluated. But the knowledge produced by think
tanks is influenced closely by their special links to business, labour or
other interest groups, putting forward and defending policies in their
favour and building consensus around such policies. Therefore, these
spaces cannot be understood as isolated from particular interests and
preferences, exhibiting a neutral commitment to scientific knowledge as
might be the case with scientific research centres—although even those
are often linked to public policy networks, either at the level of individual
researchers or the institutions themselves.
The dominant narrative, very much influenced by Weberian and lib-
eral theoretical approaches, contends that think tanks respond to changes
in the economic model, which in turn generate changes in public admin-
istration and the bureaucratic and legislative apparatus. As rationalization
permeates broader and broader spheres of society, the narrative goes,

society requires an increasingly specialized knowledge and set of techno-
cratic capabilities. The (small) state can no longer perform all the special-
ized services it requires in house, so these must be outsourced to think
tanks or other private or semi-private research centres. This trend intensi-
fies as the state retreats from the public sector economy. Once they are
created, think tanks try to shape public policies, engaging in the most
important public policy debates, following rather diverse strategies and
interacting in different ways with state agencies.
However, as several reviews (e.g. Medvetz 2012; Tevelow 2005)
reveal, there are additional tensions in the literature. On the one hand
there are those  scholars who argue from Marxist or elite theory per-
spectives that think tanks are instruments of domination and control
(see Domhoff 1980, 2014; Mills 2000); and on the other, those com-
ing from a pluralistic perspective, who contend that think tanks represent
only one type of pressure group among many (Dahl 1989). Think Tanks
are therefore just another competing voice in a democracy.
Both elite theory and Marxist perspectives stress the role of think
tanks in the political debates and typify them according to their ideo-
logical and political affiliations, the origin of their funding and the role
they assume (persuasion, advocacy, dissemination), as well as the interests
they represent and defend. Burris (2008), for instance, examines the net-
works articulated by the boards of twelve of the most important policy
planning organizations in the United States.1 He distinguishes between
those with liberal, moderate and conservative orientations, and exam-
ines changes undergone between 1973 and 2000 in the position each of
them held in the network. While liberals occupied a central position in
the 1960s, in the 1980s conservative organizations moved to the centre
of the network, coinciding with changes in the policies promoted by the
right-wing political movement.
From a pluralist perspective, James McGann (1995) and David
Newsom (1996) argue that think tanks compete with labour, business,
non-government organizations (NGOs) and other associations to get
attention and influence policy-making. However, as Donald E. Abelson
(2002) contends, this approach does not identify the characteristics of
think tanks, much less their connections to public officials and legislators,
or the degree to which such connections increase their chances of being
heard.
Over the past two decades, institutionalism (e.g. Powell and DiMaggio
2012) has become increasingly important in the study of think tanks,
raising additional tensions between those who try to find the connections
of ideas to institutions and those who link knowledge, power and insti-
tutions. From this perspective, Abelson (2002) asks about the relevance
of think tanks and how they become involved in the definition of public
policies. He assesses their influence on their ability to help define public
policies by weighing their presence in the media (citations) and hearings
before Congress, concluding that their influence varies notably through-
out the process: from the definition of the agenda, the formulation of
particular policies and the formation of a favourable public opinion. This
institutionalist approach also focuses on the history of each think tank
and the changes think tanks undergo over time. Their narratives tend to
be descriptive, except when they explicitly try to account for the emer-
gence of these organizations in different countries or regions.
Another analytical line of the institutionalist approach focuses on
the involvement of think tanks in policy communities, and in particular
how they produce knowledge and the mechanisms whereby they shape
knowledge–power relations. This line of research draws on the concept
of epistemic communities introduced by Haas (1992), which can help
us understand how think tanks build knowledge communities in areas of
public interest, as well as the ways in which such communities are pro-
duced and reproduced in the multiple venues, meeting and discussions
of an increasingly intricate network. This network greatly facilitates the
circulation of elites. As they design and evaluate public policies, they
generate inter-subjective processes, breeding consensus. The ideas and
visions of public policy are elaborated and re-elaborated in the interac-
tions that integrate national, regional and international actors. Within
the context of these networks, think tanks create spaces of discussion and
reflection where epistemic communities emerge—that is, communities
of experts, policy wonks, technocrats, academic, intellectual and business
elites, concentrating on the knowledge and information relevant to the
most important issues of public interest. This is how a common vision of
the different policy problems happens, but more importantly, patterns of
reasoning and mutual understandings among elites become increasingly
homogeneous and naturalized (Salas-Porras 2012).
In a similar constructivist vein of institutionalism, Rich (2011, 2004)
and Campbell and Pedersen (2011) argue that think tanks not only
produce ideas but also reflect and elaborate on this dominant thinking.
Specific ideas on public policies (education, health, energy and finance,

among others) stem from the dominant vision permeating expert prefer-
ences—for example, those aligned with free market, anti-state ideologies,
versus those more aligned with equality and justice. However, to influ-
ence public preferences, expert believers are not sufficient. An organi-
zational and intellectual infrastructure is required, one with the capacity
to finance projects, publish research results and promote discussions in
the media and other forums (Mulgan 2006). Without such infrastruc-
ture, think tanks would not be able to propagate and legitimize the ideas
that they consider to be best state and social practices. In his analysis,
Rich (2011) writes  that liberal and conservative ideas have a differen-
tiated effect on the orientation of think tanks: conservative think tanks
privilege ideas whereas liberal2 or, in Australian parlance, left think tanks
prefer academic knowledge. The former think tanks are predominantly
ideological; the latter are divided among those dedicated to academic
research and only marginally to the dissemination of the ideas they pro-
duce, and progressive think tanks who tend to be activists clearly com-
mitted to the interests they represent and defend (Rich 2011).
Recently, some scholars have become more interested in the ways
think tanks interact with and transform the knowledge regime. Campbell
and Pederson (2011), in particular, claim that the level of independ-
ence and autonomy of think tanks depends on the knowledge regimes
to which they belong. These two scholars define such regimes as the
set of institutions and organizations (mainly think tanks) that are dedi-
cated to generating the knowledge needed for designing, defining and
evaluating public policies. They contend that the characteristics of think
tanks, and of the links they form with the state, depend on the political
economy of each country—that is, on the way the relationships between
economics and politics are structured. Of the four types of regimes that
these authors identify, two correspond to states with a predominantly
decentralized political structure, more open to civil society—such as the
United States and Germany—while the other two regimes correspond to
states with centralized political structures more closed to civil society—for
example, the United Kingdom and France. Thus we have several typical
cases. The first is a market-oriented regime that prevails in the United
States, in which private interests fund think tanks where they may pursue
different objectives—either academic or a promotion of interests that rep-
resenting diverse ideological preferences. The process of knowledge pro-
duction associated with this type of political economy is usually highly
confrontational, partisan and competitive. The second type of regime

characteristic of decentralized and open states (such as Germany and, to a
lesser extent, the Netherlands) will essentially aim to generate social con-
sensus around public policy; this may involve the need to generate more
willingness to negotiate. Even if they are financed by the state this type of
regime think tanks produce non-partisan knowledge. The third kind of
knowledge regime characteristic of the United Kingdom, and to a lesser
extent Australia, is also related to liberal market economies operating
from a centralized and closed state with greater autonomy from pressure
groups. In this type of regime, funding may come from either the public
or private sector, and a better balance is achieved between the interests
of parties, businesses and labour associations, resulting in a less intense
confrontational scenario. The final type is the statist technocratic knowl-
edge regime, which prevails in France; it is common in coordinated mar-
ket economies and is characterized by large think tanks that are financed
mostly by the state. The knowledge generated in these think tanks tends
to be technocratic and non-partisan—meaning that the think tanks delib-
erately try to separate economics from politics (Campbell and Pedersen
2011, p. 186).
As political economies undergo changes that put more emphasis on
the market and large corporations,3 with much narrower states, the land-
scapes of think tanks often undergo important changes too. As a conse-
quence, independently financed think tanks acquire greater significance
in the knowledge regime, without totally abandoning the paths followed
previously. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Campbell and Pederson
(2011) avoid using the concept of think tanks; in their view, the term
was coined to suit the pattern followed by these organizations in the
United States, which does not correspond to the experience of knowl-
edge-producing organizations in other countries.
Along the same lines, Medvetz (2012) argues that, despite many
efforts, the definition of think tanks remains vague, largely due to their
ambivalent position. In trying to discover the essence of think tanks,
he focuses on the space they occupy in the US structure of power. In
his view, such space—which, following Bourdieu (2005), he regards as
a field of power4—has become a boundary space, ‘a hybrid subspace of
knowledge production’ where experts affiliated with think tanks, who
have more or less academic, political, corporate, media and scientific
backgrounds, meet, interact and struggle for different purposes. Two
roles of think tanks, in particular, are crucial to the dynamics of this field
of power: first, redefining the institutional rules that certify and legiti-
mize the knowledge they produce and disseminate; and second, con-
structing dominant policy discourses on the basis of this knowledge.
According to Medvetz (2012), the dynamics of the field of think tanks
revolves around the tension between, on the one hand, a universalist
claim to reason and intellectual proficiency and, on the other, the pur-
suit of worldly power. He highlights that the inherent difficulties in
accurately defining think tanks stem from the intermediary position they
hold, the various roles they simultaneously play and the murky charac-
teristics of the space they control. They achieve a stronger position in
the field of power when they accumulate the right combination of dif-
ferent kinds of capital: academic prestige and credentials, argumentative
proficiency, fundraising ability, quasi-entrepreneurial styles, presence and
access to the media.5
Despite some differences between Campbell and Pedersen (2011) and
Medvetz (2012), they agree on the key role played by think tanks in the
production and reproduction of knowledge. But whereas Campbell and
Pederson use a comparative approach to understand the role of think
tanks in the context of different knowledge regimes, Medvetz concen-
trates on the US experience, and how think tanks change as they com-
pete to control the norms required to produce and legitimize public
policy knowledge. Although they agree on some of the most important
characteristics of American think tanks, Campbell and Pederson high-
light their tendency to compete for funds and demonstrate the superior-
ity of the ideas and policy proposals they put forward, as well as to gain
credibility and legitimacy from public officials, legislators and the public
opinion in general, whereas Medvetz argues that coordination between
American think tanks only occurs as they struggle to define the rules
needed to produce, disseminate and legitimize public policy knowledge,
in the process changing their affiliations and level of autonomy or het-
eronomy (i.e. dependence on certain interests). In addition, according
to Medvetz, think tanks and experts invent new ideas and articulate pol-
icy discourses. In this way, they cut across the arbitrary division between
practical and scientific knowledge. As a result, think tanks construct the
norms and conventions that connect intellectual and political practices,
besides regulating the circulation of knowledge, delimiting the ideas
valid for public policies, and encouraging their experts to cross the fron-
tiers between different social spheres (political, economic and media).
To participate in public debates, it is necessary to follow the rules
predominating in this space of intermediation, including recognition

by public officials, sponsors, the media and public opinion in general.
Logically, all of this limits liberty to challenge the premises of debates,
address interesting questions and offer proposals that may endanger such
recognition. Medvetz argues that think tanks and their experts construct
a field of power overlapping with academic, intellectual, media and cor-
porate fields, wherein they compete to control social capital.6
The increasingly important role of think tanks in the production of
ideas and knowledge has revived the discussion about knowledge itself:
is it practical or scientific, applied or academic, utilitarian or holis-
tic orientation (Bleiklie and Byrkjeflot 2002; Nowotny et al. 2003)? In
this debate, the ideas produced by think tanks represent a new form of
manufacturing knowledge that responds to concrete needs and inter-
ests of political and social agents. But the line separating scientific and
practical knowledge (Mode 1 versus Mode 2) can be bridged. Stone
(2015), for example, stresses the capacity of think tanks to communi-
cate the results of academic research to an informed public, translating
complex theoretical and academic studies to a more common language
easier to grasp by policy-makers, regulators and the public at large. The
contribution of think tanks, according to this scholar, depends on their
capacity to ‘connect academic research with the real world, knowledge
and power, science and politics’ (2015, p. 3). Interestingly this is now a
role being undertaken by academics themselves in their publication The
Conversation.7 In Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom,
France and Africa academic writers in The Conversation work to con-
dense and simplify academic research into easily publicly accessible hyper-
linked online broadsheets.
Following Gramsci, Carroll (2013) elaborates further on the connec-
tion between knowledge and power, arguing that neoliberal think tanks
were successful in expanding the policies centred in the market, weaken-
ing the welfare state and disseminating antisocialist ideas. In his view, the
success of these think tanks from the 1970s onwards can be explained by
their capacity to produce and mobilize knowledge, whereby they con-
structed a neoliberal discourse that penetrated policy-making, in this way
linking knowledge and power. Conventional think tanks, he argues, ‘not
only produce knowledge that informs and legitimizes neoliberal govern-
ance, they also mobilize that knowledge through extensive elite network-
ing, thereby helping to form a strategic consensus within the dominant
class’ (2013, p. 693).
From the previous discussion, an additional question arises regarding

the extent to which think tanks produce new ideas in their public policy;
or do they generate arguments that give old ideas a sense of credibility
and respectability, making them socially acceptable, valid and legitimate?
In other words, how important is the role of policy wonks and other
elites throughout the think tank networks and policy fields to the build-
ing of consensus around those arguments with greater potential to push
policies in a certain direction?
Making Sense of Global Politics

As highlighted here, a common thread in the literature on think tanks
is to acknowledge and scrutinize the role played by think tanks in struc-
turing relations of power. And this is how this book fits into this dis-
cussion. We want to make explicit and further elaborate(in the light of
several concrete experiences) on the strategies followed by think tanks to
shape global politics in favour of particular interests—usually large cor-
porate interests. To advance in this direction, the authors contend in dif-
ferent ways that think tanks have become a key piece in the structure
of power at the national, regional and global levels. Due to their inter-
mediary role, they occupy the most dynamic spaces, where economic
and political interests overlap and intertwine by means of an intensive
circulation of corporate, cultural, intellectual and political elites. The
questions addressed throughout the introduction are investigated at the
level of countries, regions, particular think tanks and/or networks. At
the country level, the cases of Mexico and Australia are examined; at the
regional level, the networks of European and Latin American think tanks
are analyzed and compared. In addition, three powerful policy-making
organizations of national, regional and global scope are scrutinized—
the Business Round Table, the Trilateral Commission (TC) and the
Bilderberg Group, each overlapping with other organizations. Finally,
contra-hegemonic think tanks and experiences are explored.
In Chap. 2, Alejandra Salas-Porras’s findings reveal that think tanks
in Mexico are a relatively new phenomenon associated with the retreat
of the state from the economy. However, they have rapidly built net-
works that play a key role in coordinating elites in the country in order
to influence the public policies and strategies promoted during the past
two decades, in particular, those associated with NAFTA and the reforms
this agreement has entailed. This chapter examines the most important
characteristics of Mexican think tanks, who controls them, the networks

they have constructed in the past decade, the strategies they pursue to
influence policy-making, the most influential ideological orientations and
the extent to which the Mexican think tank network is linked to regional
or international networks. A combination of trends feed back into one
another to rapidly transform the landscape of think tanks in recent
years, leading towards: (1) an increasingly greater presence of independ-
ent think tanks, and private consultancy firms that undertake not only
research on public policies, but executive and legislative lobbying too;
(2) a more challenging advocacy role of academic and business think
tanks that actively participate in the media and multiple forums to build
consensus around, and acceptance of, neoliberal reforms; (3) the dis-
appearance or fading away of former state research centres, particularly
those promoting developmentalist tasks; (4) the concentration of state
research in autonomous agencies requiring very specialized informa-
tion; (5) new and more complex forms of collaboration and cooperation
between business-affiliated, academic and other think tanks—national,
regional and global; and (6) the emergence of think tanks (or NGOs)
with alternative policy ideas stressing social and economic justice, gender
issues, transparency, security and collective rights.
On the other side of the world, Australian think tanks are also seen
as the permanent persuaders who are waging a successful frontline war
of insinuation—a battle to get their ideas into the popular consciousness
as a common ‘fair dinkum’ understanding. Although Australian think
tanks cover the left–right political spectrum, there are more of them on
the right, where the dominant ideology is neoliberalism. Thus Georgina
Murray discovers in Chap. 3 that the central role played by think tanks
is to produce and reproduce the material wealth and ideas of the ruling
class—ideas that educate all classes into agreeing with the overarching
need for society to be organized around elite vested capital interests and
the elite need to operate a free market. The ideas that explain and legiti-
mate these concepts in Australia are also called neoliberalism, or some-
times colloquially referred to as economic rationalism. This chapter looks
at the hegemonic integration of neoliberalism into Australia and its dis-
semination through think tanks. It describes what Australian neoliberal
think tanks look like, their theoretical focus, their key staff, boards of
directors, their ‘experts’ and their sources of funds. It also looks at a rela-
tively new phenomena—the growth of counter-hegemonic think tanks
and their relative power in changing elite policy-making.
In Chap. 4, Matilde Luna and José Luis Velasco assess the extent to
which transnational governance networks really represent a global pub-
lic opinion. In the absence of institutions that sustain and guarantee this
claim, they must constitute themselves and act in accordance with two
opposing principles: coherence and openness. Both their legitimacy and
efficacy depend on their ability to strike an appropriate balance between
these principles. To analyze the practical challenges stemming from this
requirement, they focus on the Trilateral Commission (TC), a network-
like think tank that brings together leaders of several influential think
tanks and outstanding personalities from business corporations, political
organizations, and academic institutions and media firms. The TC has
been an important player in the transnational arena. The analysis shows
that this think tank is highly coherent but excessively endogamous:
rather than reflecting the diversity of the global public opinion, it only
reunites an exclusive group of pro-US leaders, members of transnational
corporations and partisans of free trade. Thus, the TC is a coherent but
closed network, very powerful but scarcely representative. Ironically,
a network that promotes the idea of ‘soft power’ in the international
arena—a power founded on persuasion rather than force and material
interests—heavily depends on the hard power of established hierarchies.
The closed European Bilderberg Conferences also give us another
marker regarding the direction of elite think tanks’ organization and
coordination, an issue analyzed in Chap. 5 by Aleksander Miłosz
Zieliński. The Bilderberg meetings are examined to highlight the impor-
tance of informal governance for elite cohesion. Zieliński contends that
in order to analyze the intersection between economy and politics, it is
necessary to take into account formal and especially informal institutions,
like the Bilderberg meetings, in which powerful people from both fields
interact with each other. Using original material, which provides a list of
participants of Bilderberg meetings at two points in time, he compares
the characteristics of the group attending in the years 1954–1959 with
those of the group meetings in the period 2008–2014. He describes the
composition of these groups according to national origin, age and gen-
der, as well as the professions and sectors of industry from which they
come, and the positions of political power they hold. He later exam-
ines the changes that have occurred regarding the dominant industries,
nationality, gender and the age of the participants.
The US Business Roundtable—which is analyzed by Bruce Cronin
in Chap. 6—provides an interesting extension on the legitimizing claim
that think tanks have as the representatives of particular interests for

example common or national interests. While explicitly advocating the
interests of the largest US corporations, the Roundtable simultaneously
embodies Charles Wilson’s popularly interpreted dictate ‘What’s good
for General Motors is good for the country’. With its origins in construc-
tion industry attempting to defend ‘right-to-work’ legislation in the face
of rising labour militancy, the Roundtable was formed in 1972 to reas-
sert the influence of business on federal government. It was created orig-
inally as a membership organization of chief executive officers (CEOs)
of the largest US corporations, and it engaged these CEOs in direct lob-
bying of Congress. In contrast to other broad-based business associa-
tions, such as the Chambers of Commerce or the National Association of
Manufacturers, which were unrelenting in opposing government restric-
tions in virtually any form, the Business Roundtable was much more
selective, pragmatic and ultimately effective through the 1970s, 1980s
and early 1990s (Useem 1984). Cronin challenges Mizruchi’s proposi-
tion, according to which the success of the Roundtable and other busi-
ness-based interest groups and think tanks during this period ultimately
undermined their ability to act collectively.
Previous research on corporate engagement with think tanks and
lobbying has concentrated on interlocking directorships, membership
of collective groups and contributions to political action committees as
indicators of corporate unity and proxies for government influence. But
lobbying disclosure returns, mandated over the last decade, provide
a large untapped source of data on the efforts of corporate representa-
tions to Congress in considerable detail. With the help of network analy-
sis, Cronin identifies the distinct channels of representation used by large
corporations to pursue a variety of issues with Congress. He discovers
that participation in think tanks such as that of the Business Roundtable
is one mechanism of representation that complements rather than con-
tradicts more direct political representation by individual corporations
themselves and that collective action is still evident with respect to con-
gressional lobbying by large corporations.
But national and/or transnational coalitions benefit from upload-
ing ideas, norms and values at both the European and Latin American
regions. In Chap. 7, Karin Fischer and Dieter Plehwe examine the neo-
liberal partisan transnational think tank networks in Europe and Latin
America and look at the political character of knowledge production.
The history and growth of neoliberal partisan think tank networks is the
core subject of this chapter, which discovers the links of these networks
to the Mont Pèlerin Society founded by Friedrich August von Hayek,
Milton Friedman and others in 1947. Partisan think tanks were founded,
and are run or directed, by hundreds of Mont Pèlerin Society members,
which have subsequently developed threads of informal and formal net-
work structures. This chapter compares five Latin American networks of
the neoliberal right, and the European Stockholm and New Direction
Networks. Commonalities can be explained partly by the strong pres-
ence of organized neoliberals in both networks. About two-thirds of
interlocks between think tanks in the networks are Mont Pèlerin Society
members. While the founding and networking as such can be considered
an example of ‘strategic replication’ necessary to advance discourses in
the global, regional and national knowledge power structures, cross-
national organizing ties the separate elements together, and allows the
transnational diffusion and translation of neoliberal ideas, concepts and
social technologies in policy-making. The authors find two different
types of think tanks in the networks: public policy-oriented institutes and
ideological class struggle organizations. Transnational partisan think tank
networks have become an institutional form, which needs to comple-
ment transfer and diffuse models that focus on national institutional con-
figurations or the mechanism of global elite planning groups.
In Chap. 8, William Carroll and Elaine Coburn present a comparative
analysis of eight transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs)—five
from the Global South and three from the Global North—along with a
basic conceptual framework for understanding them as sites of cognitive
praxis—that is, forms of collective action ‘focused primarily and strategi-
cally on producing and mobilizing critical-reflexive knowledge for social
transformation’. The groups examined in this chapter seek (1) to create
empirically grounded knowledge that challenges hegemonic narratives,
(2) to advance alternative social/ecological practices and policies and (3)
to build capacity for social change from below. In all these respects, they
differ sharply from conventional think tanks, even when they do not fully
realize their counter-hegemonic aims. Each group addresses and works
with a specific constituency—a combination of movements, counter-pub-
lics, general publics and subaltern communities—but also aims its com-
municative efforts at ‘targets’ that may include mainstream media, states
and intergovernmental bodies. As they have pursued their distinct pro-
jects, TAPGs have devised a wide array of approaches to (co-)creating
alternative knowledge (often in partnership with allies) and to mobilizing
that knowledge for social change. In this way, each group makes a dis-
tinctive contribution to alternative knowledge formation and transforma-
tive politics. Despite these distinctions in vision, practical priorities and
ways of producing and mobilizing alternative knowledge, on the whole
TAPGs converge around a ‘master frame’ that advocates and envisages
global justice and ecological well-being, and that resonates with the con-
cerns of global justice activism. These case studies shed light on an emer-
gent form of counter-hegemony that complicates the transnational field
of policy planning by introducing radical alternatives, both in theory and
practice.
In Chap. 9, Sue Bradford thinks left-wing, left-funded, non-corpo-
rate-funded think tanks are not only possible but are necessary to provide
a sensible balance. She writes interestingly as an activist turned politician
then turned back into activism again, to give us a perspective that pro-
vides an alternative forum with an alternative set of goals and material
proposals. Her detailed dream is a road map for ‘a major left-wing think
tank in Aotearoa [New Zealand]’, but this has implications for others
elsewhere in what she outlines as a plan for action for further non-par-
tisan think tanks. She has started a new left think tank, Economic and
Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA), launched in New Zealand, in 2016.
Conclusion
We began this introduction with a very broad definition of think tanks
as all those organizations that specialize in researching and dissemination
of public policy ideas. But looking at world politics through the lens of
think tanks has revealed that this definition needs further elaboration in
order to stress the role they play in constructing, reproducing and chal-
lenging prevailing relations of power. An all-encompassing definition
underscoring the connection between think tanks and power—either
coercive or consensual—should add that these organizations specializ-
ing in producing and disseminating policy-making ideas are also mecha-
nisms by which elites construct, exercise or challenge power, particularly
through knowledge production, concentration and mobilization. Given
this connection between knowledge and power, think tanks are especially
good at generating consensual power, becoming ‘permanent persuaders’
but doing so as inconspicuously as possible.
This is because this ‘liminal’ position occupied by think tanks in the
structure of power (at the global, regional and national levels) makes
them look neutral, objective and independent, distanced from particu-

lar interests. Distancing may be important in the role of persuasion, as
it allows them to disguise, or make less obvious, their connections and
commitments to power, power elites and particular interests in general.
Their status as bridge organizations operating in ‘hybrid zones’, where
corporate, state, academic and civil society actors regularly meet, facili-
tates their role as translators between different codes and languages,
making persuasion seem an almost natural pursuit.
Even if most think tanks ultimately aim to influence policy-making
processes and building consensus, they follow different paths. There is
therefore a group of think tanks who specialize in persuading policy-
makers in the executive or legislative branches, although they show dif-
ferences and contradictions along the liberal–neoliberal continuum (as in
the majority of the think tanks analyzed in Chaps. 2, 3, and 7); a second
group more directly targets the public opinion to produce a groundswell
impact that eventually makes their bargaining position more effective (as
revealed in some of the cases examined in Chaps. 2, 6, and 7). These
two overlapping groups are externally oriented research centres (some-
times affiliated with universities), producing reports and having an active
presence in the media, building networks of national, regional and global
scope, and organizing discussions and Congressional hearings.
A third group—more internally oriented—aims to persuade members
and participants about a particular idea or policy approach, developing
forms of cohesion and solidarity among elites, reconciling divisions, mobi-
lizing members and projecting a unified vision to increase leverage vis-à-
vis policy-makers, labour and government officials (as in the case of the
Trilateral Commission, the Builderberg Group and the Business Round
Table, analyzed in Chaps. 4, 5, and 6 respectively). This third group often
integrates media policy wonks to disseminate their policy vision and have a
larger impact on society at large, as can be seen in the case of the Trilateral
Commission and the Business Round Table (examined in Chaps. 4 and 6).
Some think tanks combine these and other mechanisms to convince
or put pressure on policy-makers. Alternative policy groups and left-
wing think tanks (like those examined in Chaps. 8 and 9) devise similar
strategies to gain credibility in the public arena, convince policy-makers
that their proposals are much better suited to solve the acute problems
of our time and roll back the neoliberal agenda. However, they clearly
and avowedly represent and defend specific interests and are more or less
grounded within activist communities.
In short, this book focuses on all those organizations that create ideas
to influence policy and activist communities, in particular, think tanks
and employer (business) associations. Trade unions and the state are
beyond the scope of this book, not only because they have been stud-
ied elsewhere but mainly because creating ideas is only a small part of a
wider repertoire of their action. We are interested in how these organi-
zations are established and resourced, how they create ideas, what ideas
they create, why they do it, in whose interests they act and how they
distance themselves from those interests, what effects they have and what
limitations they face. All of this occurs in a range of contexts, situations,
countries and regions.
The conclusions reached by this book will revisit our definition of
think tanks in the light of our findings, answer the general questions
addressed in the book and point to future avenues of research.
Notes
1. He does not use the concept of the think tank, but rather that of the pol-
icy planning organization.
2. Confusingly, American liberal means a left-leaning individual whereas in
Australia a liberal is a conservative on the right wing.
3. According to Colin Crouch (2011, p. 145), the defence of the neoliberal
model is based on arguments stressing the virtues of the market, but in fact
they give enormous power to large corporations, the interests of which are
at the centre of institutional reforms.
4. Bourdieu (2005) defines the field of power as the network of relations
between organizations and agents competing to control resources in dif-
ferentiated spaces (economic, cultural, social and symbolic). Thus the
structure in each field—that is, the pattern of relations predominating in
each field—guides the strategies followed by occupants (agent and organi-
zations) to maximize capital—social, economic, political and cultural. Each
field represents an arena of struggle, whereby the structure of power and
the predominant groups are reconstituted.
5. In Medvetz’s (2012, pp. 45–46) words, think tanks ‘seek to occupy a limi-
nal structural position by gathering and juggling various forms of capital
acquired from different arenas: scholarly prestige and credentials, compe-
tence in specifically political forms of expression, money and fund-raising
ability, quasi-entrepreneurial styles, and access to the means of publicity.
This game is won, not just by gathering large amounts of capital, but by
establishing the right mixture’.
6. Following Bourdieu (2005), he defines the field of power as a network of

relations between organizations and agents that compete for control over
resources within differentiated spaces of action (economic, cultural, social
and symbolic). The structure of each field—defined as the patterns of rela-
tions between the actors prevailing therein—guide the strategies of the
actors (organizations and agents) to maximize control over social capital
(economic, political and cultural).
7. The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/au.
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CHAPTER 2
Think Tank Networks in Mexico: How

They Shape Public Policy and Dominant
Discourses
Alejandra Salas-Porras
Although think tanks have spread throughout the Global North since
the beginning of the twentieth century, they are a relatively new phe-
nomenon in Mexico. Since the 1990s, however, they have proliferated
rapidly, building networks that now play a key role in coordinating
elites in the country in order to influence public policies and strategies.
Particular policies that have been promoted over the past three decades
include those associated with the retreat of the state from the economy,
privatization and other neoliberal reforms, NAFTA and the set of new
rules this agreement has entailed. Policy experts affiliated with these
think tanks have become increasingly visible in the news media, and have
drawn together closely intertwined policy groups that decide on the
standards required to create and legitimize policy knowledge in different
areas.
Despite the greater visibility of these organizations and policy
experts in the news media, as well as in the most relevant public dis-
cussions, along with their influence on planning the economic and
A. Salas-Porras (*) 
National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_2
26 A. Salas-Porras
political reforms of the last three decades and the growing literature on
think tanks in both the Global North (Abelson 2000; McGann 2007;
Medvetz 2012; Rich 2004, 2011; Stone and Denham 2004) and Latin
America (Fisher and Plehwe, in this volume; Mendizabal and Sample
2009), little academic work has been undertaken on Mexican think
tanks. This chapter seeks to fill this void by analyzing their most impor-
tant characteristics: who controls them; the networks they have con-
structed over the past 25 years; the strategies they pursue to influence
policy-making; the most influential ideological orientations; and the
extent to which the Mexican think tank network is linked to regional or
international networks. I argue that the landscape of Mexican organi-
zations undertaking policy research has undergone a profound transfor-
mation over the past three decades, partly due to a political economy
increasingly centred in the market. Furthermore, these organizations
have become particularly visible during public debates aimed at accel-
erating and legitimizing the neoliberal reforms of the past 25 years.
However, as these reforms have increased poverty, the concentration of
wealth, insecurity and other problems, alternative policy ideas and think
tanks have appeared.
Adapting the Concept of Think Tanks

When the concept of the think tank is translated into other languages,
several angles of the conceptual discussion are missed.1 Although their
role in producing, disseminating and shaping policy agendas is gener-
ally acknowledged, their part in structuring relations of power is usually
ignored. The ambivalence of these organizations, already highlighted in
the Introduction, makes a clear-cut definition difficult to achieve. Several
scholars (Burris 2008; Campbell and Pedersen 2011; Carroll 2013)
have consequently opted for the concept of ‘policy making organiza-
tions’, which makes a comparative analysis feasible and does not take for
granted the independent character of think tanks claimed, among others,
by McGann (2007) and Rich (2004, p. 11). On the contrary, it makes
this independence an object of inquiry (Medvetz 2012) or variability
(Campbell and Pedersen 2011), depending on the knowledge regime
and fields of power across time and countries.
According to Campbell and Pedersen (2011), the level of independ-
ence of think tanks is determined by the political economy of each coun-
try—that is, on the way the relationships between economics and politics
2 THINK TANK NETWORKS IN MEXICO … 27
are structured—which in turn shapes the knowledge regime, made up of

the set of institutions and organizations producing public policy knowl-
edge. In contrast, Medvetz (2012) contends that the level of independ-
ence (autonomy versus heteronomy) of think tanks varies over time as
the experts (and the think tanks with which they are affiliated) struggle
to control the process of knowledge production. In this way, he argues,
think tanks create a field of power that is very dynamic as they try to
define the rules that certify and legitimize knowledge, constructing on
the basis of this knowledge a dominant policy discourse.2
Following on from the Introduction, this chapter underscores the
essential connection between think tanks and power. It argues that the
key role played by think tanks in knowledge production, concentration
and mobilization makes them an ideal mechanism to structure rela-
tions of power, challenge or validate dominant policy discourses, and
constitute the rules of a Mexican knowledge regime and field of power.
Their sources of authority and legitimacy depend on the quality of their
research and the capacity to communicate the results and persuade an
informed public. They persuade policy-makers directly through lobbying
strategies and indirectly through the media and active participation in the
most important policy debates.
In this light, the following additional questions are addressed: First,
how do Mexican think tanks constitute a knowledge regime and a field
of power? Second, what are the main changes experienced by these
think tanks as the political economy increasingly becomes centred in the
market? And third, how is the field of think tanks constructed to wield
power in the process of policy-making?
I argue that neoliberal strategies implemented in Mexico from the
1980s have rolled back the frontiers of the state from many different
economic and social spheres, and made it more decentralized and open
to pressures from different interest groups. Several consequences follow.
First, planning research, monitoring and evaluation tasks that formerly
were undertaken in-house by the state are increasingly being outsourced
to think tanks and other private research centres, opening many points
of access and pressure in both the executive and legislative apparatus.
Second, as the number of think tanks grows more rapidly, the knowl-
edge regime becomes increasingly confrontational, partisan and competi-
tive, following trends similar to those seen in the USA. Hence, the field
of think tanks becomes more powerful within the national structure of
power as the organizations involved in the field weave an increasingly
28 A. Salas-Porras
dense network, and as the production and legitimation of policy knowl-

edge and policy discourse are controlled by a smaller group of experts
(policy wonks and hacks), political intermediaries and large corporate
leaders who have become key links connecting the most influential elites
in the region. Both think tanks and experts influence policy-making in
several ways, notably the concentration of knowledge and information,
as well as the means to process and monitor data; executive and legis-
lative lobbying; and an overwhelming presence in the media to define
the agenda, and construct and disseminate an ideological and politi-
cal discourse—especially one that responds to the most pressing issues
for regional elites. All these tasks are carried out via a complex mix of
research, analysis, monitoring, advising, lobbying, persuasion, delibera-
tion and advocacy, although the emphasis changes over time and across
specific think tanks.
Structure of the Chapter and Methodology

This chapter is structured around three questions, which will be
addressed in different sections: What are the main characteristics and
types of Mexican think tanks? Who controls them? And what are the
main mechanisms they use to shape public policies, dominant discourses
and economic reforms?
The research strategy followed several steps to examine Mexican
think tanks and how they constitute a knowledge regime and a field of
power. First, a sample was assembled that included the majority of the
Mexican think tanks in McGann’s (2014) list, but other think tanks not
included in this list were added because they are equally important in
terms of the research they undertake and their influence in the most rel-
evant policy debates. In this way, I have tried to ensure that the most
representative think tanks of the types put forward in the following sec-
tion have been included. That said, it must also be noted that the list
is not exhaustive, many NGOs that carry out research on public poli-
cies were not considered mainly because activism, rather than research,
is their main focus of attention, as in the case of the Mexican League
for the Defense of Human Rights (Liga Mexicana por la Defensa de los
Derechos Humanos), Mexican Transparency (Transparencia Mexicana),
Equipo Pueblo and the Mexican Network of Action Facing Free Trade
(Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio), among many oth-
ers.
Second, a database was constructed that included all the directors

of the boards of these think tanks, all the experts affiliated with these
organizations and, in the case of more academic think tanks, the most
outstanding researchers or fellows, because it is they who often effect
the connections since they are frequently invited to sit on the boards of
independent think tanks, participate in the media and decide the lines of
research. All of these actors cooperate to decide the strategies and gener-
ate interlocks among themselves and with other interests.
Third, formal network analysis was carried out in order to examine
the patterns of connections and groupings between think tanks, their
centrality and the tensions or divisions emerging from the ideologies
they espouse, or from the technocratic knowledge produced. The pat-
tern of connections and grouping between these think tanks was dis-
covered with the help of two network analysis programs, UCINET and
PAJEK, which can measure the centrality of think tanks, directors and
experts, the intensity of connections, the formation of groups and the
extent to which these groups correspond to groups with similar ideologi-
cal or political orientations. The network of interests is in itself the most
important mechanism of coordination, cohesion and control, but other
mechanisms will be considered. The information comes from the think
tanks’ websites, biographies of directors, experts and academics, as well
as hemerographic and other secondary sources.
Types of Mexican Think Tanks

Considering several criteria, but in particular affiliation and the origin
of funding, six types of Mexican think tanks have been identified: those
affiliated with academic institutions, business associations, state agencies,
parties, consultancy firms and non-affiliated or independent think tanks.
All of them undertake research in different ways and try to influence the
process of policy-making following different strategies. Of the 56 think
tanks in our sample, 20 (almost 37%) are independent think tanks, 11
(almost 20%) are academic, eight (more than 14%) are think tanks affili-
ated with business associations, six are consulting firms that undertake
public policy research and compete to influence policy-makers, six are
think tanks affiliated with national or international parties and five are
think tanks affiliated with state agencies (see Table 2.1).
As Medvetz (2012) points out, the line dividing these think tank
types is not clear-cut, as they share some common traits and tend to
30 A. Salas-Porras
Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks
Affiliation Total % Presence in Lobbying Created

the media activities
Total 56 100.0 40 30 –
Independent 20 35.7 12 8 1984–2013a
Academic 11 19.6 9 7 1930–1974
Business associations 8 14.3 8 8 1917–1999
Consulting firms 6 10.7 3 2 1990–present
Parties 6 10.7 4 4 –
State agencies 5 8.9 4 3 1925–1986
aExcept FMDR, which was founded in 1963
converge in certain practices. Thus consulting firms, independent think

tanks and often academic think tanks undertake research on a contract
basis, which consequently responds to specific public or private inter-
ests. Advocacy and activism through a more intense use of the media
and participation in different events also cut across several categories—
whether independent or affiliated think tanks (business, academic or
partisan institutions)—as they try to sway preferences and public opin-
ion in favour of specific public policies. Out of the 56 think tanks in our
sample, at least 40 are present in the media, either wielding institutional
positions or represented by affiliated experts.
Table 2.1 shows that, until the 1980s, planning, research and evalu-
ation of public policies were concentrated in think tanks affiliated with
academic institutions, business associations (such as CEESP),3 political
parties (IEPES) or public think tanks, following trends similar to those
in France, although with predominantly corporatist forms of economic
coordination, as in Germany (see Campbell and Pedersen 2011 and the
Introduction). From that point onwards, new trends converge, overlap
and together reinforce a reconfiguration of the landscape of think tanks
that increasingly privatizes public policy research. Among these trends,
several are particularly outstanding:
• There has been a proliferation of independent think tanks and con-

sulting firms undertaking public policy research and lobbying, and
gaining a multifarious and visible presence in the media and multi-
ple public debates.
• The profile of independent and academic think tanks and experts

(especially those affiliated with ITAM and CIDE) has become more
activist and adversarial, producing knowledge, not for its own sake
(i.e. scientific or basic knowledge) but aligned to specific interests
and preferences—that is practical or applied knowledge (Bleiklie
and Byrkjeflot 2002; Nowotny et al. 2003).
• There has been a disappearance or waning of public research cen-
tres formerly affiliated with ministries or other state agencies, which
tend to outsource research needs to independent think tanks, aca-
demic institutions or consulting firms.
• Public research has been concentrated in the so-called autono-
mous agencies, such as Banco de México, INEGI, la CNBV and
Coneval—all of which offer statistics and analysis in their specific
areas of knowledge.
• New and more complex forms of cooperation and collaboration
have emerged between think tanks affiliated with business associa-
tions, academic institutions and consultancy firms.
• Former business research centres have not disappeared, but have
tended to incorporate more sophisticated analytical methods to
evaluate public policies and lobby not only the executive but
increasingly also the legislative apparatus, as the latter becomes
more relevant in the definition of public policies.
• Think tanks have emerged with alternative policy ideas and propos-
als that stress social and economic justice, transparency, security and
collective rights.
Out of 17 independent think tanks with information available, at least

11 were founded after 2000, two were founded in the 1990s, three
in the 1980s and only one before that time. Most of these think tanks
are very active in the media, and often they devote special teams and
resources to organizing and participating in the most relevant discus-
sions. In some cases, this type of think tank receives a mix of public and
private funds—for example, ETHOS, INSYDE, COMEXI and IMCO;
in other cases, they only receive private funds, either from corporations
or foundations (CIDAC, IPEA, CASEDE and CEEY). Among the lat-
ter, you can find contributions from Hewlett-Packard, MacArthur, Open
Society, Kellogg’s and Ford. Six of the independent think tanks carry
out very diversified research, covering economic, political and social
issues (FUNDAR), while eight tend to focus on specific problems, such
32 A. Salas-Porras
as security (INSYDE), human rights (CASEDE), rural development

(FMDR), women and gender (GIRE), training (CIEP), foreign policy
(COMEXI) and competitiveness (IMCO), although within these areas
they may expand to other issues affecting their area of interest (IMCO,
for example, covers a wide range of problems affecting competitiveness,
such as transparency, education and public spending). Other differences
among independent think tanks relate to their philosophical orientation
and whether or not they carry out lobbying. At least eight independent
think tanks are very active in lobbying legislative agencies to promote
(or block) reforms, depending on their preferences. However, of all the
characteristics of independent think tanks, it is the philosophical orienta-
tion that weighs more strongly on the structure of the network, as will
be seen later.
Some of the Mexican independent think tanks have received acknowl-
edgements by the Think Tanks and Global Society program led by
McGann at the University of Pennsylvania. Of the 20 independent
think tanks in our sample, 13 are included among the most important in
McGann’s 2014 list. Special mentions have been granted to the follow-
ing think tanks:
• FUNDAR—whose agenda focuses on policies affecting equal-

ity, access to justice and transparency, among others—has been
mentioned ten times by the peers interviewed by the pro-
grammes as, among other things, one of the Top Transparency
and Good Governance Think Tanks, one of the Best Institutional
Collaboration Involving Two or More Think Tanks, Best Managed
Think Tanks, Best Use of Social Networks and Think Tank with
Outstanding Policy-Oriented Public Programs.
• CIDAC—with an agenda focusing on individual liberties, free mar-
ket and liberalizing policies—obtained nine mentions in McGann
lists, in particular Best Institutional Collaboration Involving Two or
More Think Tanks, Best Managed Think Tanks, Best New Idea or
Paradigm Developed, Best Policy Study/Report Produced and Best
Think Tank to Watch.
• ETHOS—with a strong liberal orientation—was mentioned as
achieving Best Advocacy Campaign, Best Use of Social Networks,
Best Think Tank to Watch and Think Tank with the Best Use of
Internet. McGann’s lists have become references that the think
tanks openly brandish as providing evidence of the good quality
of their research. Moreover, sponsors evaluating and qualifying

the performance of the think tanks they support also use these
rankings.
Some think tanks working strictly under contract (mostly consult-

ing firms) were included in our sample (McGann does not include this
type of think tank) because, even if they are private firms, they pro-
duce knowledge on public policies and try to influence policy-making
processes. Although the number of these think tanks has increased and
diversified enormously in the past few years, only six were included in
the sample because they were founded by ex-public officials who played
a key role in the introduction of neoliberal reforms and have become
very conspicuous in the most relevant public debates. Experts affiliated
with these firms appear frequently in the media, and they offer very spe-
cialized information and analytical services to public and private clients,
profiting from the political capital accumulated throughout their careers
in the state apparatus, and often from privileged information too. Several
cases evidence how these consulting firms have become research cen-
tres—most notably, the group GEA-ISA, created by Jesús Reyes Heroles,
and Protego-Evercore, created by Pedro Aspe. Protego-Evercore, offers
financial advice to different state agencies at different levels of the admin-
istration. Jesús Reyes Heroles not only advises large oil corporations,
notwithstanding his high-profile positions as director of Pemex (2006–
2009), Secretary of Energy (1995–1997) and Mexican Ambassador
to the United States (1997–2000). He also participated actively in the
debates of 2013 leading to the energy reforms. Other influential con-
sulting firms that undertake research on public policies are SAI, created
by Jaime Serra Puche, Secretary of Commerce under the presidency
of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and IQOM, presided over by Herminio
Blanco, Secretary of Commerce under Ernesto Zedillo. These two for-
mer state officials played an outstanding role in the negotiations and
administration of NAFTA, and they now offer advice on international
trade disputes, international agreements, strategic planning and cor-
porate legal issues. IQOM, in particular, counsels several governments,
international organizations, corporations and business associations on
issues related to foreign investment and international trade.
As has previously been mentioned, the number of state centres gen-
erating information, knowledge and research has diminished consider-
ably since the 1980s. Some of them have disappeared,4 while others have
34 A. Salas-Porras
reduced their research activities considerably, particularly the Instituto

Mexicano del Petróleo (affiliated with Pemex). Those state centres that
are still undertaking research activities have become formally and some-
times legally autonomous. At least three of them (INEGI, Banxico and
Coneval) have experienced constitutional reforms that grant them legal
autonomy, although in some cases the degree of independence from
the acting president is still dubious. This problem is especially acute in
the case of INEGI, whose information on employment and unemploy-
ment is often questionable. In addition, the reforms to this institute have
not modified the faculty of the president to appoint the members of the
board (see Ackerman 2008; Leal 2008). The central bank, Banxico, also
works as an autonomous entity, offering statistics and analysis on the
economic performance and forecasts, in addition to its role in defining
monetary policies and managing interest and exchange rates. Except for
Coneval, which specializes in poverty and social policies in general, and
to a lesser degree INEGI, which offers a wide array of indicators and sta-
tistical information and forecasts on demography, unemployment and
geographic distribution of economic activities, among other things, the
remaining state think tanks openly endorse pro-market and liberalizing
policies, both on the national and international fronts.
Although most academic think tanks undertaking research on public
policies were created in the first half of the twentieth century, they  have
undergone a profound transformation, especially regarding an increas-
ingly more conspicuous presence in the media, and at public discussions
where experts compete to get the attention of politicians and the gen-
eral public. This dynamics was quite noticeable in the events organized
throughout 2013 and 2014 around the privatization of the energy sec-
tor. During these events, experts from different academic institutions
confronted policy recommendations more or less aligned with a free
market, anti-state ideology.
Almost all the academic think tanks in our sample are active in the
media (see Table 2.1), and experts affiliated with these think tanks are
not only invited to participate in media discussions but often preside
over influential TV programmes and regularly write columns in the most
prominent newspapers. Furthermore, as will be seen later, they effect a
great number of links among themselves, with independent think tanks,
consulting firms, regional and global think tanks playing an increasingly
prominent role in the coordination of the think tank network, and con-
sequently in the construction of the dominant policy discourse and the
definition of the rules designed to certify and legitimize public policy

knowledge. Most of them have different kinds of connections with the
legislative apparatus in order to lobby and disseminate their philosophi-
cal and policy preferences, as well as analytical results around financial
policy, employment, human rights, elections, property rights and many
other issues. They shape policy-making through these and other mecha-
nisms. Experts from CIDE have become particularly active in the media,
and since the 1990s the institution has deliberately planned strategies to
expand its presence in key media programmes—especially those exert-
ing greater influence on public opinion. But other private academic think
tanks (such as UI, ITAM and CEDAN) are following the same course of
action.
Apart from think tanks affiliated with business associations, which will
be examined in more detail in another section, a brief mention should
be made of think tanks affiliated with political parties. The three most
relevant Mexican parties—PAN, PRI and PRD—have created their
own think tanks: Fundación Rafael Preciado, Colosio-ICADEP and
INIFPCPPG, respectively. These centres do not just undertake research
on public policies; they also educate and tutor political cadres, offering
training and educational activities. In addition, two international foun-
dations affiliated with German parties—Ebert and Konrad Adenahuer,
affiliated with the Social Democratic and the Christian Democratic Party
respectively—have a representative organization in Mexico that carries
out some public policy research and supports projects undertaken by aca-
demic or independent think tanks.
Cooperation and collaboration between think tanks affiliated with
business associations, academic institutions and consultancy firms
become increasingly common, reinforcing in different ways the process
of knowledge production, dissemination and assimilation. Thus, IMEF
has been sponsored not only by academic institutions (such as ITAM,
UI, Tecnológico de Monterrey and IPADE), but also by prestigious
national and international consultancy firms specializing in financial
issues. Similarly, the independent think tank México Cómo Vamos is
governed by a panel of experts, including those of several academic insti-
tutions like ITAM (seven experts in the board), UNAM (four experts)
and Harvard (one), in addition to the participation of experts from
other independent think tanks such as IMCO, México Evalúa, CIDAC
and CEEY). A total of 40 experts, according to its website, cooperate to
bridge academic knowledge and public debate.
36 A. Salas-Porras
Nonetheless, cooperation between different types of think tanks

can best be illustrated by the joint efforts undertaken during 2015 and
2016 to push forward anti-corruption legislation and to encourage
more open parliamentary practices. These efforts have intertwined inde-
pendent think tanks (particularly IMCO, FUNDAR and México Cómo
Vamos), academic think tanks (CIDE and ITAM), as well as several
NGOs (among others, Transparencia Mexicana and Arena Ciudadana).
A group of 12 organizations coordinating multiple activities and discus-
sions to enhance political participation, promote transparency and create
an Alliance for an Open Parliament (Berain 2015).
Cooperation is increasingly transcending national borders, as in the
case of COMEXI, a Mexican think tank specialized in foreign policy,
which actively participated with think tanks from many other countries
to create Think 20. This global think tank network pulls together think
tanks from several G20 countries that meet regularly to harmonize for-
eign policies and, according to Stone (2015, p. 11), ‘its major achieve-
ment has been to cultivate a consensus within national policy research
communities of the contemporary need for global coordination on eco-
nomic and financial management’. In this way, cooperation not only
entails legitimation and consensus building but also subtle mechanisms
of control, as shown in the next section.
The trends analyzed in this section can be interpreted in the con-
text of the economic and political reforms experienced by the country,
which rolled back most of the research formerly carried out in-house
by the state and developmentalist technocrats. Thus, the production of
information, knowledge and policy ideas for different purposes is out-
sourced to specialized think tanks, academic institutions or consult-
ing firms. Another factor shedding light on these trends is the political
reforms empowering legislators, and making them the object of lobbying
and political pressure. Although the number of academic research centres
is not growing, they remain very important in the field of think tanks,
not only because they are a source of authority and legitimacy but also
because they feed independent think tanks’ research teams.
Who Controls Mexican Think Tanks?

This section explores who controls Mexican think tanks, both through
the boards of directors and through the network of connections
generated by these and other governing and research bodies. This
network—analyzed with the help of two software programs, UCINET

VI and PAJEK 2.0—entails and furthers subtle and complex mecha-
nisms of coordination and governance that must be uncovered in order
to be able to understand how public policy decisions are made and who
benefits from them. This means examining the composition of the gov-
erning structures and the interlocks they produce, with members par-
ticipating in two or more of these bodies, identifying the most central
actors according to the number of positions they hold in the network,
the interlocks they produce and the capacity to mediate between think
tanks and groups, transmit information, knowledge and points of view
and, consequently, to foster policy and epistemic communities that are
capable of defining public policy agendas and disseminating new ideas.
Governing bodies vary greatly, depending on the type of think tank
and also on the history of each research centre. Some have a very sim-
ple governance structure, with only a board of directors (CIDAC and
IMCO), while others combine different governance structures, includ-
ing academic councils and coordinating structures (CIDE, COLMEX,
ITAM and most academic research centres). All the members of these
structures were included, along with the experts and rank and file
researchers, because they often make the connections. Therefore, the
main criterion was not to leave out anybody with the potential of gen-
erating interlocks, since a member of the board in one think tank may
be an expert affiliated with another.5 In this way, the most active mem-
bers of the network were counted in, particularly those producing two or
more connections—that is those capable of communicating information
and knowledge relevant to the process of policy-making. But, as will be
seen in the following paragraphs, very few individuals have accumulated
the social capital associated with these positions.
Considering all of these criteria, a total of 2831 positions in the 55
think tanks of the network are held by a total of 2555 individuals. Out of
these, only 156 hold two positions, 23 hold three positions, 14 individu-
als hold four positions, four have five, two have six and only one indi-
vidual controls seven positions. That is, 200 persons (151 men and 49
women) participate actively in the network with two or more positions,
and 44 individuals hold three or more positions (of whom only eight
are women). These are the big linkers, having a greater control over the
social capital and the dynamics of the network as a whole. For this rea-
son, only those with two or more positions were considered when cal-
culating centrality measures (degree and eigenvector), the articulation of
38 A. Salas-Porras
Fig. 2.1 Mexican think tank network in 2015. Source Own research. Numbers
in parenthesis indicate the group to which the think tank belongs. The thickness
of the line indicates the number of directors and/or researchers in common
groups and intermediation positions, and the characteristics of the net-

work in general (see Fig. 2.1). A total of 12 components were found in
the network, with the largest component including 44 think tanks and
2396 individuals. This means that 11 think tanks and 159 individu-
als were isolated from the main component. All 44 think tanks in the
main component (Fig. 2.1) are connected either directly or indirectly,
although the distance between them varies.
Thirteen groups of think tanks have been identified in the main com-
ponent of the network. They are constituted according to the number of
affiliations in common  and the distance between the think tanks, often
revealing a common social purpose and research agenda, as in the follow-
ing cases:
• The six think tanks constituting Group 1 share a strong commit-

ment to a free market ideology and individual liberty.
• Group 2 is made up of three think tanks (two independent and one
academic), converging around security concerns.
• The four members of Group 3 (one independent, two business affil-
iated and a consultancy firm) have a strong business orientation.
• The main common concerns of the six think tanks integrating

Group 5 (three academic, two independent and a state think tank)
are social justice, gender and civil rights.
• Four think tanks in Group 6 (three independent and one consul-
tancy firm) share an interest in economic growth and performance,
transparency and accountability.
• Three think tanks belonging to Group 7 converge around problems
of social justice, transparency, political rights and the rule of law
(see Fig. 2.1 with the number in parentheses indicating the group
to which the think tank belongs).
In short, while some groups defend and promote a free market, indi-
vidual liberties and economic liberalism in general (Groups 1, 3 and 6),
other groups cohere around social equality and justice (Groups 5 and
7). Only Group 1 is basically committed to disseminating the neoliberal
doctrine, while the remaining groups focus on influencing policy-making
in different spheres, corresponding to Fischer and Plehwe’s classifica-
tion (see Chap. 7 in this volume). However, these and the rest of the
groups are all connected by those think tanks that have high centrality
and intermediation measures, as can be seen in Table 2.2, which shows
the ten most central think tanks of the largest component controlling the
main connecting nodes between all groups. Seven of these think tanks
are independent and three (CIDE, COLMEX and CEDAN) are aca-
demic think tanks. Except for Groups 2, 11, 12 and 13, all the groups
are present in this core. Group 6 is represented twice (see Fig. 2.1) by
two think tanks (México Cómo Vamos and México Evalúa) created in
Table 2.2 The most central Mexican think tanks, 2014
Group Think tank Degree Nearness Intermediation Eigenvector
10 COMEXI 60.465 68.254 27.143 52.239

5 CEEY 60.465 70.492 30.711 51.512
6 MEXCVAMOS 41.86 61.429 8.919 43.698
9 IMCO 34.884 57.333 3.964 39.964
7 CIDE 32.558 58.108 5.637 37.391
1 IPEA 30.233 53.75 8.774 33.234
6 MEXICOEVALUA 27.907 53.086 5.029 33.06
8 COLMEX 27.907 54.43 14.765 29.086
3 FUNSALUD 18.605 50.588 0.169 27.242
4 CEDAN 23.256 53.75 4.67 25.889
40 A. Salas-Porras
the past few years (2013 and 2009, respectively) but have moved rapidly
to the centre of the network.
Although there is not sufficient space here to analyze all the groups
identified in the network, three in particular are worth examining in
more detail, since they are representative of the trends taking place in the
field of power of Mexican think tanks.
Group 1 pulls together six think tanks, five of which are independ-
ent; two (Fundación FIL and RELIAL) are part of Latin American net-
works (see Chap. 7) with one (Banxico) a state think tank. All endorse
a free-market ideology and strongly advocate individual liberty. The
most central think tank of the group is the Instituto de Pensamiento
Estratégico Ágora (IPEA), founded in 2008 and self-defined as ‘a pri-
vate, independent, apolitical and non-profit think tank’. The activities of
IPEA are preoccupied with defending the rule of law, economic devel-
opment, high standards in education, governability, democracy and civil
society, and social cohesion, focusing on the development of youth,
research and public policy proposals. The board of trustees includes the
CEOs of large Mexican companies and subsidiaries of foreign corpora-
tions (for example, Bimbo, Concord, Yakult, Cinépolis and FEMSA).
The list of foreign partners includes the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the
Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Institute of International and
European Affairs, the Europa Institute and the Acton Institute (from
Argentina). Since 2009, this think tank, together with the Ludwig Von
Mises Institute, has presented the Legion of Liberty award for those
‘individuals who have proven to be the absolute defenders of individual
liberty in any given part of the world’6; 66% of funding comes from pri-
vate corporations.7
For the six think tanks comprising Group 5 (three academic, two
independent and a state think tank), social justice, civil rights and gen-
der are the most important issues in their agendas. Centro de Estudios
Espinoza Yglesias (CEEY), sponsored by the Espinosa Rugarcía
Foundation, has the highest centrality in this group. It was created in
2005 as a ‘private, independent, apolitical and non-profit think tank’
with the purpose of generating ideas through research and the improve-
ment of public debates and policy-making. Although it values the free
market as the best mechanism to achieve economic development, it
acknowledges its limitations and the need for public intervention when
necessary. It has faith in education, gender equality and economic pros-
perity as the keys to social mobility; individual property rights are just
as important as collective rights for achieving economic growth and a

peaceful coexistence; and democracy based on the rule of law and divi-
sion of powers is considered essential to advance economic, political and
social development.8 In short, this is a social version of liberalism rooted
not only in the set of relations with other think tanks in the group and
beyond but also in its research agenda. In contrast to the other groups,
the think tanks in Group 5 all follow an agenda focused on social justice,
gender equality and equality of rights. GIRE, for example, was founded
in 1991 to defend women’s rights and has become increasingly active
in the media and lobbying legislatures at the state and national levels to
educate and offer information, decriminalize abortion and support vic-
tims of sexual abuse. Coneval was founded in 2005 as a research cen-
tre focusing on poverty, economic inequality and wealth distribution.
Although it was founded as a state think tank, it has become increasingly
autonomous. The remaining three think tanks in this group are academic
institutions.
Group 6 integrates four think tanks, three of them independent, with
one (CMM) a consultancy firm. Although recently founded (2013),
México Cómo Vamos has become the most central think tank of this
group, closely followed by México Evalúa (founded in 2009). These
two think tanks are densely interlinked, sharing six members, and they
have become watch groups generating statistics to monitor economic,
social and political processes. CIDAC, which was created in 1984, has
a more marginal position, but it is also quite influential. These three
independent think tanks are connected to free-market global networks,
among others the Atlas Network and the Emerging Economies Think
Tank Alliance for High Quality Growth. They all share a commitment to
economic liberalism that permeates their research agenda; in particular,
the main purpose of México Cómo Vamos is to contribute to economic
growth, generating statistics to measure growth, competition and com-
petitiveness, employment, inflation, investment and access to capital, as
well as identifying the main obstacles to growth (problems related to the
rule of law, corruption and trust, among others). Closely connected to
the network (see Fig. 2.1), México Evalúa aims to generate new ideas,
knowledge and evaluation models in order to improve the efficiency and
quality of public administration through a continuous monitoring and
evaluation of the process of policy-making (design, implementation and
results). The research team of this think tank is integrated by 12 young
academics, six of whom graduated from ITAM and five from CIDE.
42 A. Salas-Porras
UNAM is only present in the administrative staff. This composition is

quite common in other independent think tanks, and it shows how cer-
tain academic think tanks hold a central place in the network not only as
a source of authority and legitimacy regarding the knowledge produced
on different policy areas (from gender, justice and poverty policies to
economic policies, transparency and accountability) but also as a source
of recruitment for independent think tanks and, consequently, validation
and reproduction of the views prevailing in these academic institutions.
Research teams of think tanks with a more neoliberal orientation tend to
be controlled by alumni from CIDE, ITAM, Tecnológico de Monterrey9
and other private universities, whereas think tanks endorsing social liberal
views tend to integrate more plural academic teams.
The tensions in the Mexican think tank network and field of power
are complex and manifold: right-wing think tanks tend to endorse a
very radical version of neoliberalism focusing on free markets, private
property, free trade, individual liberty and responsibility, which they
claim should be considered universal values. Out of these only one—
COPARMEX—promotes neoliberal values and policies in the economic
domain, but is conservative in the social domain, particularly regarding
family and sexual values. These think tanks reflect and elaborate on the
dominant ideas of an economic laissez-faire liberalism dating back to the
eighteenth century. But liberal think tanks are very heterogeneous, repli-
cating many of the contradictions of the liberal philosophy (see Bellamy
1992). While some of these think tanks privilege individual rights and
freedoms, private property and a small state, others give greater weight
to social and political rights and values (economic, social and political
equality), public goods and, when necessary, state intervention. In addi-
tion, some favour academic research and intellectual proficiency, but have
become increasingly vocal when promoting the ideas and analysis they
produce. Other more progressive think tanks and experts have become
activists, clearly committed to the interests they represent and defend.
New ideas on specific public policies (on education, health, gender,
energy and finance, among others) are usually aligned to the political
vision and preferences that experts and think tanks support—for exam-
ple those in line with free market, anti-state, libertarian ideologies versus
those more in line with equality, social and political rights, and justice.
Strategies to Shape Policy-Making

Although it is not easy to weigh the influence of think tanks in the adop-
tion of public policies—as acknowledged by several authors (Abelson
2000, 2004; Rich 2004; Stone and Denham 2004)—Mexican think
tanks combine several strategies, most notably the networks constructed
by the governing boards and experts of think tanks that we examined
in the previous section; lobbying and other forms of pressure and nego-
tiation with various agencies of the executive and legislative that have
become progressively more open and institutionalized; and an increas-
ing use of the media for several purposes, including creating a favour-
able view of certain reforms and weakening resistance, promoting checks
and balances, demanding accountability, evaluating and monitoring the
performance of public administration and officials. These strategies are
pursued especially by neoliberal think tanks and experts, although social
liberal think tanks have accumulated greater expertise in opening spaces
of action within the field of power.
The network that interlocks think tanks and experts with a more or
less academic or technocratic profile forms a field of power within which
these actors struggle to control the orientation of public policies and
practices. This field alone becomes a powerful mechanism of pressure
and negotiation, influencing key areas of the administration and public
opinion, since experts and leaders generating the connections are pre-
sent in multiple spaces inside and outside the network where relevant
decisions are made and dominant discourses constructed. Furthermore,
this network overlaps with corporate networks and fields of power—
national and international—as well as with global think tanks, such as
the Trilateral Commission, Think-20, NACC, the Ludwig Von Mises
Institute and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Prominent
members of the corporate network can be found among those who have
a greater presence in the Mexican think tank network—that is those who
hold two or more positions on boards of directors, or who have become
affiliated experts and academics. At least 16 out of the 200 big linkers
of the think tank network belong to the corporate network too, notably
Valentín Diez Morodo and Daniel Servitje Montull, holding four posi-
tions each in the think tank network, Alberto Bailleres with three and
Claudio González Laporte with two. All of them also hold a central posi-
tion in the corporate network.
44 A. Salas-Porras
Furthermore, the network woven by Mexican think tanks connects

with regional and global networks. Four linkers belong to the Trilateral
Commission [TC] one of the most important global think tanks that
brings together regional elites in North America, which has become
actively involved in shaping regional institutions—particularly those
stemming from NAFTA, among them María Amparo Casar and Carlos
Heredia, both experts affiliated with CIDE (see Chap. 4). Four are the
members of the Committee on Competitiveness of North America, an
organization gathering ten big businesses from each country member of
NAFTA. As seen before, COMEXI—the most central think tank in the
Mexican network (see Table 2.2)—is a member of Think 20, a global
policy-making organization, where countries belonging to G-20 regu-
larly meet to coordinate foreign policies, especially in the trade and finan-
cial spheres.
Lobbying is another mechanism whereby Mexican think tanks exert
pressure on the process of policy-making. Executive lobbying is carried
out today by former public officials who join or create consultancy firms
when they leave office. From these firms, which have become an attrac-
tive professional option, former officials maintain close connections with
the administration, profiting from the social and political capital accumu-
lated throughout their careers. Although it is not possible to give a clear
idea of the scope and dimension of this new political practice here (often
referred to in the US literature as the revolving door), a few cases can
illustrate this new form of lobbying the public administration. Among
the most conspicuous consultancy firms lobbying and participating
actively in public debates, three are influential: Soluciones Estratégicas,
Protego-Evercore and Grupo de Economistas Asociados (GEA-ISA).
Soluciones Estrátegicas was founded in 1994 by Jaime Zabludovsky,
who holds seven positions in the Mexican think tank network, effects
36 interlocks and presides over COMEXI, the think tank with the high-
est centrality eigenvector (see Table 2.2). Soluciones Estratégicas is a
consulting firm specializing in international trade, and Zabludovsky
was a public official occupying high positions in the public administra-
tion under Zedillo. He was Deputy Secretary for International Trade
Negotiations, designing Mexico’s trade-negotiation strategy and admin-
istering NAFTA as well as other FTAs.10
Grupo de Economistas Asociados (GEA-ISA) is a consulting firm pre-
sided over by Jesús Reyes Heroles, who has maintained close contacts
with many of the agencies in the administration where he held high
positions, particularly in  Pemex, Banobras and the Ministry of Energy.

At the beginning of 2012, Reyes Heroles formed a strategic partner-
ship with Morgan Stanley to invest in the Mexican and Latin American
energy sector and create a corporation leader in the region, clearly show-
ing the use of privileged information for personal benefit. Such prac-
tice, which was sanctioned until recently, has become more difficult to
prosecute because the legal boundaries have become very imprecise.
According to John Moon, a partner and managing director of Morgan
Stanley Private Equity, due to his positions as Secretary of Energy and
Director of Pemex, Reyes Heroles ‘has an unmatched network of rela-
tionships across the energy industry … which will be invaluable in gener-
ating attractive new investment opportunities for Morgan Stanley Private
Equity’.11
In turn, Protego-Evercore, founded in 1996 by Pedro Aspe soon
after he left his post as Secretary of Finance, offers financial engineering
services to several state agencies to obtain funding in the international
markets. The funding he negotiates for municipal and state entities is
oriented to infrastructure projects, assistance in issuing and managing
public debt and development of financial institutions—again, closely
resembling the functions he performed as Secretary of Finance.
Although lobbying the legislature—another strategy to influence the
definition of public policies—was not formerly common in Mexico, it
has now become a political practice that is formally organized, institu-
tionalized and even regulated (Alba Vega 2006; Salas Porras 2009). This
practice is frequently carried out by think tanks—particularly independ-
ent think tanks and those affiliated with consulting firms, academic insti-
tutions and business associations.12 Out of the 56 think tanks on our
database, at least 42 undertake legislative lobbying, either directly or
indirectly. All of those affiliated with business associations (in particular,
Coparmex, Concamin, CCE and CEESP) do so with the help of spe-
cial departments and teams dedicated to putting pressure on legisla-
tors. In addition, out of the 20 independent think tanks, at least eight
lobby the legislature, notably IMCO and INSYDE—the former even
belongs to the Competitiveness Committee of both chambers, besides
a systematic dialogue and periodical meetings with Congressmen; the
latter also cooperates with both chambers on security issues. At least
eight out of the 11 academic think tanks have been found lobbying the
legislature, Colmex and CIDE being clear examples of this practice in
action. Colmex participates in several legislative committees and CIDE
46 A. Salas-Porras
has agreed on several contracts and the organization of events with leg-
islators. Parliamentary hearings have become an increasingly common
practice, providing experts and think tanks with the opportunity to push
legislation in a given direction, as in the case of the anti-corruption legis-
lation mentioned before, as well as in the reforms to the laws and by-laws
in the telecommunication and energy sectors.
The previous strategies to influence policy-making compounds the
effect when they overlap with the use of media. An active presence in
TV and radio broadcasting, newspaper columns and magazine edito-
rials has become crucial for propagandizing ideas, influencing public
opinion and building consensus around the reforms and public policies
promoted. According to Kuntz (2012, quoted in Stone 2015, p. 5), it
is a widespread strategy among think tanks ‘to influence public opinion
first, then governments will follow’, particularly in the case of independ-
ent think tanks interested in socializing the results of their research, their
proposals and their political philosophy. Out of the 56 think tanks in our
database, at least 46 participate regularly in news media programmes and
discussions, and 13 of the 20 independent think tanks—notably IMCO,
CIDAC, COMEXI and ETHOS—do so. ETHOS has organized numer-
ous activities to disseminate its ‘model of responsible government’ in
Mexico and Latin America in the media.13 IMCO is probably the inde-
pendent think tank that has the most intense presence in the media,
including news programmes on radio and TV, several newspapers and
magazines, such as El Economista, Este País and El Financiero, and TV
news programmes on Foro TV, MVS Radio and many others. In all these
spaces, IMCO presents research results on competitiveness, transparency,
corruption and other issues.
CIDAC has also considerably expanded its participation in the printed
and digital media, offering regular institutional briefings to newspapers
and interviews on TV news programmes. This think tank is presided
over by Luis Rubio, who regularly writes columns in national (Reforma)
and US newspapers (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The
Los Angeles Times), where he writes on problems of justice, competi-
tion, individual rights and liberties. He is also a member of the Trilateral
Commission, which links him to American and international elites.
In short, although it is very difficult to demonstrate the impact of all
these think tanks in the process of policy-making and in the transforma-
tion of the Mexican political economy, all the strategies and activities
analyzed converge around how they try to redefine the limits between
state, market and society. Some of them argue in favour of a much

smaller state, making great efforts to retreat its presence permanently
from multiple areas of the economy and society. Other think tanks put
more pressure on issues regarding transparency, and the accountability
and efficiency of public officials. A third group focuses on human and
social rights. A few think tanks work simultaneously in all of these direc-
tions (e.g. CIDE and CEEY), but if this is the case, different teams and
individual experts are involved. However, their purpose is not only to
influence state agencies and officials but also to naturalize the core prin-
ciples embedded in the liberal policies they pursue and quite frequently
to legitimize strategies and policies that have been decided beforehand.
Concluding Remarks
The transformations that have occurred in the landscape of Mexican
think tanks have led to the constitution of a field of power overlapping
and mediating with other fields (parliamentary, corporate, media and
information and knowledge, among others), but amplifying enormously
the voice of a small group of experts and brokers who have doubtlessly
become part of the ruling elite. This group plays a key role in constitut-
ing, disseminating and naturalizing a neoliberal-technocratic discourse.
Its members procure enormous financial, social and intellectual resources
to organize multiple forums and events, whereby they promote, defend
and legitimize the market-centred policies advanced over the last three
decades (privatization, deregulation and the retreat of the state from the
economy). In the process, they more or less deliberately reinterpret his-
torical experiences and refashion national identities.
At the same time, several think tanks within the network and field
of power build up an increasingly coherent social liberal discourse that
challenges some of the main tenets of the neoliberal project. They put
forward policy proposals to tackle the problems stemming from the neo-
liberal policies pursued, particularly the problems of corruption, insecu-
rity, concentration of economic, social and cultural resources, and social
and human rights. All these groups struggle for the control of the cul-
tural resources embedded in the network, in particular, the criteria by
which knowledge and ideas can be certified and validated.
The field of think tanks is becoming ever more powerful within the
national structure of power, due to three processes that feed back into
one another: an increasingly dense network woven by the organizations
48 A. Salas-Porras
involved in the field, including private actors; increased national and

international influence in the knowledge regime; and the production and
legitimation of policy knowledge and policy discourse. This is all con-
trolled by a smaller group of experts, political intermediaries and large
corporate leaders, who have become the key links connecting the most
influential elites in the region. In this way, a policy community has been
constituted that has increasingly become involved with the community of
regional and global policy wonks and hacks, following tropes, practices
and discourses that are very similar to those of their counterparts around
the globe.
Mexican think tanks are externally oriented research centres—that
is they produce reports, monitor processes and have an active presence
in the media, building networks of national, regional and global scope,
and organizing public discussions and congressional hearings. Their
aim is to convince public officials and the public opinion in general that
their policy proposals are grounded in sound and objective research.
Their sources of authority and legitimacy depend on the quality of
their research and the capacity to translate it into a more common lan-
guage that is easier for policy-makers, regulators and the public at large
to grasp, in this way connecting ‘academic research with the real world,
knowledge and power, science and politics’ (Stone 2015, p. 3). Mexican
think tanks are thus especially good at generating consensual power,
becoming ‘permanent persuaders’ while simultaneously trying to look
neutral.
Notes
1. Several authors acknowledge the confusion created when this concept is
translated. For example, Desmoulins (2009, p. 2) notes that in French
there is no equivalent to the term ‘think tank’, which has been translated
as ‘réservoir intellectuel’, ‘boîte à penser’ (Béland 2000, p. 253) or ‘insti-
tut de recherche’, ‘laboratoire d’idées’, ‘cercle de réflexion’ and ‘boîte à idées’
(Desmoulins 2009). In Spanish, it is common to use the English term
(Tello Beneitez 2013), but terms like ‘tanque de pensamiento’, ‘tanque
pensante’, ‘laboratorio de ideas’ and ‘centro de pensamiento’ are being used
more often.
2. Bourdieu (2005) defines the field of power as a network of relations
between organizations and agents competing to control resources in dif-
ferentiated spaces (economic, cultural, social and symbolic). The struc-
ture of each field—that is the predominating pattern of relations—guides
the strategies of the actors (agents and organizations) to maximize social

capital. Each field constitutes an arena of struggles through which the
power structures is constituted and reconstituted.
3. All think tanks affiliated with business associations (except COECE) were
founded before the 1980s.
4. Among others, the Instituto Mexicano del Café, Instituto Nacional
de Investigaciones Forestales, Comisión Nacional de Zonas Áridas,
Comisión Nacional de Fruticultura (all of which operated as decen-
tralized research centres) and the Centro de Investigación sobre el
Desarrollo Rural (depending on the Secretary of Planning and Budget,
SPP).
5. To construct the database, all the members of the boards were included,
as were all the academic researchers, members of councils of differ-
ent types (administrative or academic), advisers, committees and, in the
case of international think tanks such as the Konrad Adenauer and Ebert
Foundations, representatives of these organizations.
6. Prize recipients include Lech Wałęsa from Poland in 2009, Margaret
Thatcher from the United Kingdom in 2009, Lorenzo Servitje from
Mexico in 2010 and Álvaro Uribe from Colombia in 2011.
7. See http://ipea.institute/nosotros.html, accessed 24 January 2015.
8. See http://www.ceey.org.mx/site/ideario-ceey, accessed 25 January
2015.
9. Most researchers at CIEP come from Tecnológico de Monterrey, see
http://ciep.mx/nosotros, accessed 25 January 2015.
10. See http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Grupo_TMM,_S.A._(TMM)/
Jaime_Zabludovsky_Kuper, accessed 24 January 2015.
11. See http://www.morganstanley.com/about/press/print/dceea7cb-495a-
40ab-904d-5b672faef863.html, accessed 5 January 2015.
12. The distinction between policy advice and lobbying tends to be blurred,
making restrictions to the latter difficult to implement, as several authors
acknowledge (see Lipton et al. 2014; Medvetz 2014).
13. See http://www.ethos.org.mx/index_esp.html, accessed 24 January
2015.
Acknowledgements I greatly value Matilde Luna and José Luis Velazco’s

comments on the first version of this chapter. I am also very grateful to Alejandro
Ruiz for the technical support in carrying out the network analysis and to Martí
Medina for his valuable support in constructing the database.
50 A. Salas-Porras
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CHAPTER 3
The Australian Think Tank: A Key Site in a

Global Distribution of Power?
Georgina Murray
What is a think tank? Superficially, think tanks are not difficult to define. In
Australia, the typical think tank has members who write, run forums, hold
conferences, appear before parliamentary committees, evaluate, support or
critique government policy, give educational lectures and increasingly use
the media to express their opinions. Think tanks provide ‘expert’ invited
and uninvited commentary on policy and current events (Carlisle 2005),
and these organizations generally claim to be non-partisan and non-profit in
nature—although clearly most are neither (Cahill 2010; Dunlap and Jacques
2013; Smith and Marden 2008). Indeed, their uniting characteristic is their
desire to influence policy/and or politics, and their consequent need for
funds to do so. They are what Gramsci (1971, p. 334) calls ‘permanent per-
suaders’, that is, the frontline fighters in a war of insinuation, a battle to get
their ideas into the popular consciousness as the commonplace understand-
ings. In some countries (e.g. Canada and the United States), think tank par-
tisanship is discouraged by regulation tied to tax exemptions (Leeson et al.
2012), but this is not the case in Australia, where the dominant political out-
look is neoliberalism and many Australian think tanks openly acknowledge
G. Murray (*) 
Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_3
54 G. Murray
and promote this political perspective (Cahill 2013, pp. 71–80; Mendes
2003) because it returns to them long-term financial gain.
So the description of think tanks is not difficult: they are the perma-
nent persuaders emanating from a politically left–right continuum but
they are most numerous as representatives of the political right. Think
tanks have been researched extensively, both internationally (Cockett
1995; Denham and Garnett 1996; Harvey 2005; Klein 2007; Stone
1996) and nationally (Beder 2003, 2006a, b, p. 129; Ellam 2006;
Leeson et al. 2012; Smith and Marden 2008; t’Hart and Vromen 2008).
So the issue is not the description; rather, it is how to analyse the signifi-
cance of these think tanks. The first question is whether think tank ide-
ologies create the politics—that is, are think tanks creating the ideas that
make us think and act in the ‘commonsense’ ways of neoliberalism?
This common sense involves the acceptance of a ‘utopia of a pure
perfect market’ (Bourdieu 1998) that leads on to a new, harsher disci-
pline upon labour that works for management, shareholders and lenders.
Neoliberalism also aims to reduce the intervention of the state in welfare
and to extend the power of financial institutions, including central banks
and the pursuance of strategies (for example, free trade) that drain the
economies of non-core countries.
A second question relates to whether these well-funded Australian
neoliberal think tanks are clones (Beder 1999, p. 30;2001; Pusey
1991) of internationally messianic bodies such as the American Atlas
Foundation (Beder 2006b; Cockett 1995; George 1997; Klein 2007;
Mittasch2014)? Or is this clone idea just cloaked idealism in the
Hegelian philosophic sense, meaning that the neoliberal ideas from think
tanks create our material reality? Instead, do the material conditions, that
is, the blocks threatening capital expansion in a welfare state; corpora-
tions that have the funding and incentives to simultaneously spread their
legitimating ideology and demonize their opposition to make the ideas
of think tanks spread? Are think tanks just competing agents among a
plethora of other politicized institutions—politicians, media, corpora-
tions, lobby groups—which create ‘the contextual’ conditions that move
capitalism forward (Cahill 2013; Marsh 2007)?
In sum then the questions asked asked by this chapter are: Do think
tanks create the politics, or do the politics create the think tanks? What is
the significance of think tank funding in relation to think tank interests? And
what is the history of neoliberal ideas, and how did these old ideas replace
the Keynesianism that was their twentieth-century nemesis? This chapter
examines Australian think tanks to try to find an answer to these questions.
3 THE AUSTRALIAN THINK TANK: A KEY SITE … 55
Evaluating the Significance of Australian

Think Tanks
When looking for the significance of think tanks, one of the first things
to do is to sort think tanks into categories (CAPE 2015). The category
with which we are concerned is their political commitment (Cahill 2013,
pp. 71–80; Mendes 2003), as this is fundamental to what they are trying
to persuade others to believe in. From the think tank literature, the web-
sites and the blogs, it was possible to identify 42 think tanks described in
the literature, or self-described, in Australia in January 2015. These can
be divided into two main types:
• Advocacy-lobby. This is the front of most fundamentalist think tanks,

most visible to the public and the media. Experts are available to
produce quick and easy policy reports, analyses and media grabs.
Financial support typically comes from anonymous corporate spon-
sors, members, foundations and sometimes state funding (Ackland
2014). The staff of these think tanks often are, or have been, politi-
cal professionals—activists experienced in producing press releases
and policy statements from other people’s research. Their released
material will typically have a political angle, which is used to influ-
ence current debate, and can be categorized on a politically left–right
continuum, with the think tanks affiliated with and advocating for a
particular interest group (for example, the Liberal Party’s Menzies
Institute or the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) Evatt Foundation).
Typically, the source of the funding for such think tanks is corporate.
• University-based. Australian universities often have research think tanks
(for example, the Asia Education Foundation) attached to their cam-
puses. These university think tanks can be distinguished from other
think tanks because their policy analysis is more likely to be in the
form of long-term, peer-reviewed publications, distinguishing them
from the typically short-term advocacy lobbyist outputs, although
there is some overlap between the two groups. Sources of financial
support are competitive: monies can come from the university, from
the government (both state and federal), and from foundations and
corporations. The staff are likely to be qualified and published aca-
demics, but distinguishable from their university colleagues because
their work is rather more policy-driven, so they are less likely to want,
or be able to, write for leading academic journals (Carlisle 2005).
56 G. Murray
Fig. 3.1 Partisan or independent think tanks 2015
From these two divisions of think tank types—advocacy and university-

based—only one, advocacy, can usefully be categorized into left and right
political groups, as shown in Fig. 3.1.
This study shows that the Australian think tanks that support a neoliberal
perspective constitute 43% of the total number of think tanks. They share
what John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) calls an ideol-
ogy with a ‘moniker’ that is ‘free market or liberal or conservative or some
combination of the three’ (Roskam 2005). The left-leaning (that is not
neoliberal) groups are 34% of the total and the university-based independ-
ents are 23%, which makes the right-leaning think tanks the largest group
of Australian think tanks (Lyons and Passey 2006; Murray and Pacheco
2006; t’Hart and Vromen 2008)—but now only just. These think neo-
liberal tank figures in Australia in the 1990s were higher: 83 (Herd 1999)
and 90 (Marsh 1994, 2007), respectively. The latest figures are therefore
counter-intuitive—why are there not many more neoliberal think tanks, as
they have now been credited for successfully fighting and winning an ideo-
logical revolution that has ‘changed the political landscape to one in which
neoliberal ideas are the norm’ (George 1997, p. 3)? One suggestion is that
the neoliberal think tanks have concentrated and consolidated. The smaller
think tanks have disappeared (e.g. the Tasman Institute and the Bennelong
Institute), while the larger ones have become more powerful (e.g. the IPA,
the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Sydney Institute).
McGann’s (2012) data is on 6603 think tanks worldwide and it sup-
ports this theory of the concentration and centralisation of the larger
think tanks but the overall growth transnationally of think tanks world-
wide. His think tank figures cover from 1900–2010 and they show the
enormous growth of think tanks internationally, with
the emergence of regional economic alliances due to global interdepend-

ence [having] created a new network of regionally oriented policy institu-
tions. But these organizations tend to be the same ones that find it difficult
to compete with the highly specialized organizations that have a clear mar-
ket niche and constituency. (McGann 2012, p. 22)
How could they do this? Professor Sharon Beder (2006a) argues that
the right-wing think tanks have had the advantage of both larger num-
bers and a related larger pool of funding. But the number of think tanks
is easier to establish than the amount of their funding. A global group
called Transparify (2014) has estimated that by 2014 there were 6800
think tanks globally, and that in Australia the number was between 11
and 100.
Transparify (2014) was only able to document funding accountability
for three Australian think tanks: the Australian Institute of International
Affairs (giving it only a 2/5 transparency, with a rating of 5 being the
highest); the Centre for Independent Studies (0/5 transparency rating);
and the Lowy Institute (2/5 transparency rating). Do this small think
tank number and financial opaqueness mean that these think tanks are
hegemonic? (Gramsci 1971: 334)? No but Robert Neubauer (2011)
argues that neoliberal think tanks have advantageous access to corporate
money and corporate media support that gives them more power.
By hiding these funding sources, think tanks cloud their accountability,
but point critical researchers to the importance of funding and to other
sources for verification (Norington 2003). The conservative Hugh Morgan,
the CEO of Western Mining and later the chair of the Business Council
of Australia, is reported to have said to the reporter Paul Sheehan that he
thought funding think tanks was ‘the way to reshape the political agenda …
we have to change public opinion’ (quoted in Duncan 1985: 69).
Amounts of corporate funding for Australian think tanks have also
been noted by Norington (2003): $2 million given to the United States
Centre from Dow Chemicals; $10,000 to the Sydney Institute (TSI)
from Philip Morris and smaller sums from Shell, Boral, AMP, Australia
Post, Macquarie Bank and BT. A total of $229,105 was given to the
Menzies Centre from the federal government; approximately $15,000
58 G. Murray
each from Western Mining, BHP, Telstra, Dick Pratt and others to the
IPA; and a $34 million federal government endowment to the Grattan
Institute. Corporate backers for the CIS include BHP Billiton, Western
Mining, Neville Kennard, Robert Champion de Crespigny and ICI
(Norington 2003). This greater corporate funding gives neoliberal think
tanks a lead not only in their ability to pay in-house ‘experts’—that is,
trained journalists, academics and conservative activists—but also to train
their own ‘experts’, who then go into advocacy organizations, govern-
ment offices and media outlets (Gutstain 2009).
Where Do the Ideas of Australian Neoliberal

Think Tanks Originate?
The old ideas of the Keynesian compromise, that is, that welfare state
interventions are there to prevent poverty and ensure lifelong human
dignity, state ownership of key resources, free education, affordable
housing and progressive taxation were modified forms of John Maynard
Keynes’ prescriptions to create demand and economic stability (Hall
1989a, b). Neoliberalism replaced these ideas in Australia from the late
1970s. But why? Beder explains:
The neoliberal collective voice is that of the bourgeoisie, that is the owners
and the controllers of capital: first as a small dissident classical economic
liberal cry but becoming hegemonic (as in dominant bourgeois state rule
(Gramsci 1978)) by the 20th century replacing the ‘moral truth’ that was
the previous domain of the churches. (Beder 2006b, p. 35)
Ideas found in right-wing think tanks come from two main sources:
classical economics and neoliberalism. I deal with these sequentially but
briefly by not including the offshoots of the theories (for example, public
choice theory).
The Classical Economists

The classical liberal economists Adam Smith (1723–1790), David
Ricardo David Hume (1711–1776) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
all accepted the idea that free markets, left to their own devices, would
regulate themselves in ways best suited the interests of society. The
most relevant to the current neoliberal theory are the liberal economists
Dudley North, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. These men saw capital as
a system that freed individuals from the yoke of feudalism, aristocrats and
kings. Classical liberal economics arose as an antithesis of the bourgeoi-
sie, in a dialectical sense, to mercantilism, which had been the dominant
theory and strategy of accumulation of the British aristocracy (Rubin
1929)  in the period just prior to, and through, the eighteenth century.
Free Trade and the Small State—Dudley North and Adam Smith

Anti-mercantilist writing began with Dudley North (1691) in his book
Discourses upon Trade (Rubin 1929) not, as commonly thought, with
Adam Smith. North argued that free trade and non-government inter-
vention were the prerequisites of good business, ‘since it is impossible to
force men to deal in any prescib’d manner’ (1929, p. 63). Neither North
nor Smith wanted free trade, but nor did they want a big state domi-
nated by kings and aristocrats. Smith details this in his five-part work An
Inquiry into the Nature of the Wealth of Nations (1776), where he did
make at least two original contributions to the theory of how the wealth
of nations was developed. The first was what became known as the the-
ory of absolute advantage—meaning the ability to produce a product or
service more cheaply than it is produced elsewhere by using fewer labour
hours, specialist skills or more advanced tools. This theory developed
from his second major contribution to the literature, his theory of the
division of labour. In other words, it is most efficient to assign specific,
partial tasks, and thus enable the completion of one task, giving rise to
assembly line production, a method of speeding production and enhanc-
ing profit that is still a standard method of capitalist production. Rather
than each individual producer producing an entire product or service,
workers specialize in doing one part of the operation. Later Marxists saw
this system as the basis of wage slavery.
Neoliberal Nemesis: Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes

In relation to ideas as the background structure enabling capitalist pro-
duction, Karl Marx (1818–1883) said that
the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its rul-
ing intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production
60 G. Murray
at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental pro-
duction, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack
the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx 2004, p. 64)
Less fundamentally antagonistic to neoliberalism was the much later critic,

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Keynes was a liberal social democrat
who argued that orthodox liberal economics exacerbated crisis, making
it unstable and counter-productive to the long-term interests of capital-
ism. He challenged neoliberalism’s basic assumptions that capital forma-
tion governs the rate of savings (for example, in the work of  von Hayek
1933). Instead, he suggested that investment or capital formation gov-
erns income accumulation. The full utilization of the capital goods indus-
try and full employment stimulate the output of consumer goods. Keynes
(1967) argued that the greater the propensity of society to consume, the
greater will be the stimulation to increased primary investment. In Keynes’
view, the obvious policy prescription to counter crisis was to pump-prime
demand, particularly in the down-phase of the recession. This means that
state intervention is necessary to  apply fiscal and monetary manipulation
of the market and that this should be in the form of maintaining, spending
and achieving full employment—the opposite of the neoliberal prescription.
Neoliberalism and the New Right

These Keynesian and Marxist ideas were abhorrent to economic liber-
als—particularly Friedrich von Hayek (1944), who argued that they
were incompatible with individual freedom and therefore easily lumped
together with all other forms of state-centric authoritarianism, including
Nazism, Fascism and Communism.
Von Hayek began his anti-Keynesian activism in 1938, when he ran a
conference to try to reverse what he saw as a trend towards socialist, col-
lectivist and totalitarian ideas (Cockett 1995, pp. 9–12). This first gath-
ering included Milton Friedman and Austrian School theorists Ludwig
Von Mises, Lord Antony Fisher and Karl Popper. In 1947, after the
Second World War, the second conference was held at Mont Pèlerin in
Switzerland. This became a biannual meeting of what was subsequently
called the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS). According to Cockett (1995:
pp. 100–121), this organization became the ideological heart of neo-
liberalism for many countries, including Australia. The chicken farmer
millionaire Lord Antony Fisher went on to build the Atlas Foundation,
a key think tank used to globally disseminate neoliberal views (Kelly

2014). John Blundell, the chairperson of the Institute of Economic
Affairs (IEA), explained it in this way:
Starting in the mid-70s, the IEA model began to be copied around the
world, and Antony found himself in great demand as a consultant to such
fledgling groups. By the late ’70s his mailbag was so large that he incor-
porated the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to be a focal point for
intellectual entrepreneurs wishing to establish independent public policy
institutes. Today it lists some 50+ institutes in some 30+ countries that it
has helped to establish, develop and mature. (Blundell 1990)
In answer to our original question, ‘How come the public have come
to accept economic liberal ideas as common sense?’, this has occurred at
least partly because of extremely effective, well-funded and opportunistic
think tank operatives like Tony Fisher, who have systematically marketed
their ideas over a 50-year period. But Australian business was waiting for
the ‘expert’ neoliberal framework as articulated by a top business inter-
viewee in a study on Australian corporate power (Respondent 57, quoted
in Murray 2007, p. 155). He shared that
the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Public
Affairs (IPA), the HR Nicholls Society and the Mont Pèlerin Society …
have all made important contributions to providing an intellectual frame-
work and support basis for community attitudes to start to change. Once
those changes were there then the Business Council of Australia (BCA)
and the Chambers of Commerce all changed their positions as well.
Australian Think Tanks

According to Beder (1999), Australian think tanks are ‘generally par-
tisan, politically or ideologically motivated’, and they practise the art
of ‘directed conclusions’, tailoring their studies to suit their clients’ or
donors’ demands. She goes on to suggest that ‘in recent times a number
of think tanks have become more openly ideological. These conservative
think tanks aim to influence government and set the agenda in a variety of
policy arenas’ (1999, p. 30). For the think tanks to be effective, they must
insinuate themselves into the networks of people who are influential in par-
ticular policy areas. They do this by organising conferences, seminars and
62 G. Murray
workshops, and by producing books, briefing papers, journals and media

releases. They liaise with bureaucrats, consultants, interest groups and lob-
byists. They seek to provide advice directly to the government officials in
policy networks and to government agencies and committees. (1999, p. 30)
Australian think tanks have been around since the Australian Institute of
International Affairs (AIIA) was established in 1924. The next to appear
was the IPA, which was established in 1942 by the Victorian Chamber
of Manufacturers to ‘combat socialism’ and was used extensively by the
United Australia Party (UAP) under Robert Menzies (Crisp 1970). The
IPA publishes the work of liberals such as von Hayek (whom the IPA
Centre brought to Australia in the 1970s), Friedman, Nick Greiner, a
former premier of New South Wales, Gary Sturgess, former director-
general of the NSW Cabinet Office under Greiner, and the media baron
Rupert Murdoch (see Beder 1999, p. 30). Its council has included
Rupert Murdoch as well as other conservative business leaders. Like
many of the US conservative think tanks, the IPA has good connec-
tions in the media via right-wing commentators with regular columns in
major newspapers. It also has good political connections. Staff members
include former senior public officials and former politicians. For exam-
ple, former Treasury secretary John Stone is a consultant to the IPA,
and Dame Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of the University of Sydney, has
headed one of the IPA’s units (Beder 1999, p. 30).
Table 3.1 presents examples of think tank groups, showing their politi-
cal focus, their budget sources and key staff members and offering com-
ments as to how they came about. An important lacuna here is some
missing information about the funding of think tanks. This is because,
according to John Roskam of the IPA and a former adviser to state and
federal Liberal Party ministers, the public cannot handle this information:
It’s not for us to reveal our supporters … Whether we like it or not, the
Australian democracy is not so sophisticated that companies can reveal they
support free market think tanks, because as soon as they do they will be
attacked. (Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
When asked whether this meant that the justification for secrecy was
on the grounds that the Australian electorate was immature, Roskam
replied, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ (Roskam 2005, p. 6).
Table 3.1 Examples of central Australian think tanks
Name Political focus Budget and funding sources Key staff and members Comments
Policy HR Nicholls Right—“To promote Unknown Board—Adam Bisits (President); Founded in 1986 with
advocate Society discussion about the Kyle Kutasi (Vice President); 40 interested members.
Think Link: http:// operation of industrial Michael Moore (Secretary); Founding members
tanks www. relations in Australia Tim Andrews; Des Moore; Alan Chair John Stone and
hrnicholls. including the system Anderson; Hon. Peter Reith; Ken Peter Costello, Barry Purvis,
com.au of determining wages Philips, etc. and Raymond Evans.
and other conditions Its members include industrial Raymond Evans (personal
of employment.” lawyers, politicians, employers, farm-
assistant to WMC’s CEO
ers, business people, and academics
Hugh Morgan) a member of
(Beder 2006a: 133) the Mont Pelerin Society and
1990s BCA president
Institute of Right—in 1942 aimed 2012: $2.5 million—a big J. Roskam (CEO). 31 staff including Founded in 1942; Organized
Public Affairs to “combat socialism” source is the tobacco indus- J. Bolt (son of Andrew Bolt). Has by the Victorian Chamber
(IPA) and “oppose the Labor try (Beder 2006a: 135). Also 500 members. Board includes John of Manufacturers; set up in
Link: www.ipa. Party.” IPA is the from private sources plus a Roskam; M. Hickinbotham; Rod other states after 1943.
org.au main source of fund- $50,000 grant from Howard Kemp; G. Hone; J. Barlow; Michael Publications in 12,000
ing for the UAP (the government (2004); Donors: Kroger; H. Clough; Rod Menzies; schools, 475 companies, and
late Robert Menzies’ WMC, Philip Morris, BHP W. Morgan; T. Duncan’ M. Folie; for 2000 individuals
party). Advocates free Billiton and Visyboard B. Hetherington; A. Pigeon; M. Based in Melbourne.
market economics, anti- O’Shannasy
big government, and
anti-Kyoto Protocol
(continued)
3 THE AUSTRALIAN THINK TANK: A KEY SITE …
63
Table 3.1 (Continued)
Centre for Right—Public policy Struggled then big injec- G. Lindsay (CEO) former presi- Founded in 1976; Sydney
Independent and free enterprise tion of funds from mining dent of Mt Pelerin. Twelve staff; based
Studies (CIS) companies. 2005 revenue: 1800 members. Board members Supports a philosophy of
64 G. Murray
Link www.cis. $2 million. Other donors include Peter Yates; Steven Wilson; Adam Smith, Friedman,
org.au include McDonald’s Christopher White; Gary Weiss; etc. Lindsay has overseen
Australia, Philip Morris, Alison Watkins; S. Kala; D. Robb; the development of the
the late Dame Elisabeth G. Ricketts; J. Philips; N. Moore; CIS into Australia’s largest
Murdoch, Fairfax. Website R. Mead; Robert McLean; Jenny independent think tank cov-
invites contributions by: Lindsay; J. Green; R. Grant; P. ering the three major policy
donating; becoming a mem- Farrell; R. Eddington; P. Dodd; areas—economic, social, and
ber of the CIS; including the M. Chaney; M. Rennie (DC); C. international
CIS in your will Roberts (DC), and M. Darling “Experts”– four in-house
adjunct fellows and 15
research scholars
Sydney Right—a breakaway $Privately funded Gerard Henderson (formerly Founded in 1989 by Gerard
Institute group from the IPA. Some funders have included director IPA and chief of staff Henderson —the Sydney
“Boasts of links with Shell; Boral; AMP; Australia to PM John Howard) and Anne branch of the IPA
similar institutes Post; Macquarie Bank; BT Henderson. Two staff. Board:
around the world & Philip Morris, Coca-Cola Meredith Helicar (Chair); R.
including American Amatil, FAI Fergusson (Deputy Chair);
Enterprise Institute[], P. Murnane; N. Johnson; Professor
the Manhattan Institute P. Drysdale; P. Charlton; J. Yat Sen
(NY), The European Li; C. Livingston; J. Gersh; L. Ralph
Policy Forum and Dr J. Munroe
(London) etc.” (Beder
2006b: 135–136)
(continued)
Table 3.1 (Continued)
The Australia Left—Public Policy Unknown Membership, ACTU; NSW Founded in 1994. Located in
Institute Think Tank. Focuses Environmental Protection Agency, Canberra
on issues such as the BP, AGL; Greenpeace, Australian
role of the market; Conservation Foundation, The
climate change; media Kantors
regulation; health;
consumer affairs; and
trade
The McKell Left—The McKell Funded by members’ dona- John Watkins (Chair); Sam Founded in 2012. Located in
Institute Institute named after tions. Receives no money Crosby (CEO); Directors: Jennifer New South Wales
William McKell, the from government or political McAllister; Mark Lennon; Peter
27th Labor Premier parties Bently; Verity Firth; Michael
of NSW & Governor- Easson; Sarah Kaine; Bruce Hawker;
General of Australia. Tara Moriarty; Tim Ayres; Ric
McKell conducts an Sissons; Scott McDine; and George
annual survey, The State Newhouse (Managing Director)
of NSW, which charts
the views of residents
on social and economic
issues
Sources da Silva (1996); Nira (1996); Beder (2006a&b); Norington (2003)

MCGANN, J. 2012. 2012 Global go to think tanks Report and Policy advice. Philedelphia, USA.: University of Pennsylvania
SECOMBE, M. 2014. Abbott’s faceless men of the IPA. The Saturday Paper, May 31
3 THE AUSTRALIAN THINK TANK: A KEY SITE …
65
66 G. Murray
With the exception of The Australia Institute and the McKell

Institute, these think tanks share an economic liberal philosophy, but to
different degrees and with different levels of enthusiasm.
Australian Think Tank Ideology

Australian think tanks have not been associated enough in the public
mind with the rise and sustenance of neoliberalism. Even though they
commonly articulate support for neoliberal issues—for example, IPA
CEO John Roskam’s ‘marshalling the troops’ comment on the labour
victory over a one-term Coalition government in 2012–2015:
After the Queensland election Tony Abbott said ‘the lessons are not to
give up on reform, but to make sure that everything you propose is fully
explained and well-justified’. He’s right. (Roskam 2015)
This is because their style is veiled.

David Harvey (2010, p. 10) explains that neoliberalism is
a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of
rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the
virtues of privatization, the free market and free trade, it legitimized draco-
nian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power.
Beder (1999, p. 30) suggests that successful think tank marketing of the
economic liberal ideology in Australia has ‘enabled the conservative, cor-
porate agenda of deregulation, privatisation and an unconstrained market
to be dressed up as …virtue’. The head of the CIS, Greg Lindsay, credits
his centre’s considerable economic liberal victories to its
advocacy of welfare change [which the] centre has been pushing its ideas
in the area since 1987, examining how single mothers – once their children
get older – can move from welfare into the workforce. It has also looked
at how people with disabilities can be encouraged into some form of paid
work. (quoted in Nahan 1996, p. 3)
The IPA and the HR Nicholls society were behind the push of the
Howard government in 1996–2007 for the radical deregulation of the
labour market in what became the controversial Work Choices legislation
(Hannan and Carney 2005). According to CEO Ray Evans:
The HR Nicholls Society believes that in a modern society there is no

intrinsic imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees
and the regulation of workplace relations should be minimal. (HR Nicholls
Society 2004)
Interestingly—and notable for marking the delineation of the limits of

the neoliberal think tanks—this idea of deregulation of the workplace
that was so central to the neoliberal agenda was pivotal in ultimately
bringing down the Howard government (Peetz 2015).
Techniques
Evan Thornley (cited in Hannan and Carney 2005), an internet entre-
preneur who has returned to Australia from the United States, suggests
that the IPA and CIS have lifted their language and thinking—indeed,
‘completely imported’ them—from American think tanks. The key US
think tanks function as
Ad and PR agencies who are in the business of word branding. They make
a pitch on behalf of the brand, and they do it relentlessly so that eventu-
ally the word or the term they are pitching assumes a new meaning and is
accepted. (Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
According to an anonymous Age reporter, the ultimate goal of think

tanks is ‘to push an idea, or repudiation of someone else’s idea, so hard
and for so long that it enters general public debate: down-shifting politi-
cal correctness, the out-of-touch elites, welfare to work, school vouch-
ers’ these are all apparently a product of this push:
When the idea that has become a term becomes a word that enters the
general vocabulary – used by talkback radio callers, taxi drivers and poli-
ticians – the think tank has done a little bit more to advance its agenda.
(noted in Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
Think tanks have also cleverly saturated the media—although, ironically,

in Australia they are the harshest critics of the national broadcaster (the
ABC), on which they enjoy frequent exposure. (Rich 2002)
How do think tanks go about their business of influence? According to

Michael Porter (2006) of the Tasman Institute, they do not work alone
68 G. Murray
at their job of influencing the public. To be effective, well-funded think

tank organisations their personnel must  network with people who influ-
ence policy making. So how effective is this? Two officers of the New
South Wales Labor Council summed up the influence of think tanks
when they wrote that ‘the HR Nicholls Society is winning the intellec-
tual and political debate’ (HR Nicholls Society 2004).
Noted as Australia’s most influential think tank, the CIS and its CEO
Greg Lindsay defined their role in influencing policy-making processes in
the following way:
to influence the general ideas environment … but as I went on I real-

ized that there was more to achieving change than dreaming up what a
Liberal Party future might be. For instance … if you felt that shopping
hours should be deregulated, it was not just a matter of putting it on to
paper and feeling confident that your brilliant statement would win the
day. (Lindsay 1996)
The CIS had to actively lobby and network with others to bring about
change. Networking links and contributors on the CIS website include well
known neoliberals and conservatives such as F.A. Hayek, Lord Acton, Nick
Greiner, Wolfgang Kasper, P.P. McGuinness, Rupert Murdoch, former
Abbott Coalition government-appointed Human Rights Commissioner
and now federal Member of Parliament Tim Wilson and many others
(Lindsay 2015). Illustrative is a meeting between CEO Lindsay and Lord
Anthony Fisher, where ‘the ex chicken farmer’ Fisher who was then head
of the British Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is reported to have dis-
cussed a plan to open a replica of the IEA in Australia with Lindsay; appar-
ently Fisher ‘wished me luck’ (Lindsay 1996). Lindsay went to his first
Mont Pèlerin meeting in Hong Kong in 1978 where  he was introduced to
Milton Friedman and the public choice advocate James Buchanan.
On the event of the IPA’s birthday, former prime minister Tony
Abbott acknowledged that he had received ‘a great deal of advice’ on the
policy front from the institute. The relationship between Abbott and IPA
CEO John Roskam has been described as a ‘bromance’. Then Abbott
went further, saying he promised the institute he would act on its advice:
‘I want to assure you,’ he said, ‘that the Coalition will indeed repeal the
carbon tax, abolish the department of climate change, abolish the Clean
Energy Fund. We will repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination
Act, at least in its current form. We will abolish new health and
environmental bureaucracies. We will deliver $1 billion in red-tape savings

every year. We will develop northern Australia. We will repeal the mining
tax. We will create a one-stop shop for environmental approvals. We will
privatise Medibank Private. We will trim the public service and we will
stop throwing good money after bad on the NBN’. (Abbott, quoted in
Secombe 2014)
Mike Secombe (2014) suggested that, unlike the other popular pledges
made to voters, these promises would be ‘over-delivered’. Secombe iden-
tifies the key characteristic of the IPA as ‘the way it does propaganda’. In
the IPA Annual Report in 2013,
it clocked up 878 mentions in print and online. Its staff had 164 articles
published in national media. They managed 540 radio appearances and
mentions, and 210 appearances and mentions on TV.
In 2010–2011, there were 39 appearances by IPA staff on one ABC TV

program, The Drum—which matched the combined total of all other
think tanks from any persuasion (Secombe 2014).
The Sydney Institute claims to be only a ‘facilitator of debate’
(Hannan and Carney 2005). CEO Gerard Henderson was chief of staff
to former prime minister John Howard from 1984 to 1986. Henderson
wrote a history of the Liberals and he exercises his influence through his
weekly columns in the Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian,
appearances on ABC TV’s Insiders and a weekly spot on ABC Radio
National’s breakfast program. The Sydney Institute papers are published
as The Sydney Papers. The institute also publishes The Sydney Institute
Quarterly, which includes a media watch section (Hannan and Carney
2005, p. 6).
Funding
Twenty-three years ago, Ian Marsh (1994) estimated that Australian
think tanks had a collective budget of $130 million; they employed 1600
people, published 900 reports and discussion papers, and held almost
600 conferences and symposia each year. The think tanks have been
very cagey in updating these figures or giving credence to anyone else’s
update. Peter Botsman, from the left-leaning Evatt Foundation, claims
that:
70 G. Murray
The Centre for Independent Studies is the best in the country by far when it
comes to resources, capacity and the ability to get the cabinet and the shadow
cabinet into the same room. (quoted in Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
On the left, the leading think tank is The Australia Institute:
but to compare that with the Centre for Independent Studies is like say-
ing there is a casino with all the international high rollers over there and
there is a game of tiddlywinks being played over here … The problem for
all think tanks on the left is that the finances are always very precarious.
Clive Hamilton has done a lot with very limited resources. But on the left
or the centre-left when you’re strapped for cash … if you make one wrong
decision you lose your money, whereas the Centre for Independent Studies
and the Sydney Institute can make five or six mistakes a year and it doesn’t
matter. (Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
Finding out what think tank funding might be in Australia is no easier

than it is globally (McGann 2014). However, it has been noted that the
two top neoliberal think tanks that have ‘in particular carried the neo-
liberal torch – the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of
Public Affairs’ (Kelly 2014)—are also the best funded, although IPA
CEO John Roskam has suggested that the IPA’s unduly negative stance
on the culture wars has proved so unpopular among the sponsors that
the IPA now has only one-third of what it previously had from spon-
sorship (Secombe 2014). However, the IPA has had continued support
from mining interests, including Gina Rinehart (Hamilton 2012) and
some past donors, including the tobacco industry, the late Dick Pratt’s
Visyboard, Telstra, Western Mining and BHP.
Having government links is a privilege enjoyed by think tanks closely
associated with political parties, as they receive public disbursements—
for example, the Green Institute (Australian Greens) gets $55,000; The
Page Research Centre (National Party) receives $10,953; the Menzies
Research Centre (Liberal Party) benefits to the tune of $213,728; and
the Chifley Research Centre (ALP) receives $213,728 (Miragliotta
2011).
Greg Lindsay from the CIS (and ex-president of the Mount Pelerin
Society 2006–2008) (Kelly 2014) raised $2 million from private donors
in 2005, but told the media that his centre’s funding was ‘a matter
between the individuals or the organizations that give to us, and us,
and it’s a private thing’ (Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6). He is also on
record as saying that he got his big financial break from Hugh Morgan,
the CEO of Western Mining: ‘Morgan had a financial “whip around”
amongst mates for seed money for the CIS. He raised $200,000 that was
to be spent by the CIS over five years’ (da Silva 1996).
The bulk of CIS (and other think tank) funding would seem to come
from wealthy individuals and corporations. Financial supporters of CIS
projects have included the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, J.O. Fairfax
and McDonald’s Australia, while BHP, Shell, ICI and Western Mining
are some of the companies that provided funds when the centre started
in 1976. The CIS’s current subscriber base includes 70 companies and
1200 individuals (Hannan and Carney 2005, p. 6)
University Links
As universities increasingly become dependent on external (to govern-
ment) funding, their susceptibility to neoliberal thinking and to their
need to create income streams using think tanks have grown exponen-
tially. In our sample, 39% of the think tanks were ‘neutral’ university
ones (see Fig. 3.1). These university think tanks are playing increas-
ingly key roles in policy debates. For example, the Centre for Policy
Studies (CPS), run by Professor Peter Dixon (formerly employed by
the International Monetary Fund (IMF)), has been influencing state
policy since 1975. Another notably influential university think tank is
Flinders University’s National Institute of Labour Studies (NILS), which
in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided academic legitimacy to the
Business Council of Australia’s industrial relations reform agenda. Since
the departure of Dick Blandy, Judith Sloan and Mark Wooden, NILS has
returned to its original role of being a ‘labour’ research institute without
ideological alignment (Peetz 2015).
Business Lobby Groups

Business lobby groups are distinct from think tanks, but they are
included here because they have a symbiotic relationship with the
state. They both act to apply pressure on the state as to the rightness
of their corporate (or neoliberal think tanks’ sponsors) interests, and
they are strategic parts of the infrastructure making up the neoliberal
environment. Lobby groups have CEOs and presidents whose job it is
to produce attractive literature that convinces those to whom they are
72 G. Murray
advocating change and also unites their members with an understand-

ing of their core interests. Like think tanks, these lobby groups have an
ideological position that varies with regard to its political strength. One
of the most important of these lobbies and a consistent supporter of neo-
liberal policy Australia is the Business Council of Australia (BCA).
The Business Council of Australia

The functions of this top lobby groups are multifarious, but an often
theoretically overlooked one is cementing power for the ruling class.
The neoliberal think tanks initiate the ideas, then the BCA acts on them.
According to Poulantzas 1969, p. 244):
The characterization of the existing system as capitalist in no way depends

on the motivations of the conduct of the managers … one need not refer
to the motivations of their conduct but only to their place in production.
This superordinate place in production then ensues their position of ide-

ological domination.
The BCA’s membership consists of the CEOs from the top 125
Australian companies with Origin’s CEO Grant King as president
(August 2016). There is an executive board of nine and a secretariat of
six. In 1997, the BCA had a reported budget of $4.9 million and its
members’ companies covered the working lives of more than 1.1 million
people (BCA 2006).
The key BCA motive to make more profit from labour has not
changed since the BCA’s launch by Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1983.
According to ex-president Hugh Morgan (2003):
My view is that the BCA play[s] a vital role in key debates … about labour
market reform … success will ensure that the needs of the continued pur-
suit of labour market reforms, of which much progress has been made
[and which must] remain on our agenda.
The Australian State

The ties between the federal and state governments, think tanks and top
lobby groups are close. This can be illustrated by the behaviour of the Abbott
Coalition government in 2014, particularly its insistence on pushing through
an extremely unpopular neoliberal budget. Dominic Kelly (2014) explains:
The free-market, anti-welfare ideas informing this budget have been

increasing in popularity in conservative circles since the 1940s. They have
been propagated by an international network of think-tanks, forming what
has been termed a ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (Mirowski and Plehwe
2009). One of these think tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, pro-
vided the platform for Hockey’s speech.
When the CIS head Greg Lindsay was asked about being a ‘firm favour-
ite’ of prime minister John Howard, he replied, ‘If we are a firm favorite,
that’s nice.’ The IPA is said to regularly act as a policy arbiter for the
federal government: John Roskam, its then head, said part of the IPA’s
role was to ‘push the boundaries of debate so political parties can move
in that direction. By not moving as far, politicians are seen as pragmatic
and considered’ (Hannan and Carney 2005). Retiring Federal govern-
ment treasurer John Dawkins (1983–1996) described this close relation-
ship between think tank, lobby group and government as follows:
Such was the intimacy of the relationship that it has been useful on occa-
sions to have the BCA appear to be a critic of the government’s perfor-
mance. It suited the government to have the endorsement of the BCA
when it needed it, but to be able to create some distance on other occa-
sions. While it was useful to have the BCA as part of the cheer squad, it
was useful for other reasons for the BCA to not be identified as author of
the policies, and sometimes to appear as a critic of the government’s per-
formance. (Williams and Ellis 1994)
This ties in with Gramsci’s (1978) and Block’s (1987) ideas that the rul-
ing classes do not rule directly through coercion. Whatever the politi-
cal persuasion of governing politicians, the ruling class manages to see
that its interests continue to be viewed as the interests of all. Members
of the ruling class know that members of the state—both politicians and
bureaucrats—sufficiently identify with capitalist class interests because
they share these interests (Block 1987). Gramsci broke society into two
spheres: ‘political society’ (that is, those who can and do rule through
force) and ‘civil society’ (that is, those who must rule through consent).
Civil society is operational in the public sphere, where NGOs, trade
unions and political parties try to renegotiate the power of the bourgeois
state in the sphere where the dominant ideas and beliefs are shaped. This
is where think tanks are located, and they are able to exercise ‘hegem-
ony’ in the reproduction and insinuation of their ideas throughout the
74 G. Murray
cultural life propagated by the media, schools, universities and religious

institutions, where they are able to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy
for their regimes (Heywood 1994, pp. 100–101).
Conclusions and Discussion
In answer to the key question ‘How did Keynesianism give way to the
neoliberalism?’ An answer is that, with the post 1970s changing eco-
nomic conditions (the move to stagflation, oil embargoes etc) in
Australia, neoliberal think tanks were able to capitalise on these changing
insecure conditions to enlarge their numbers and grab the popular dis-
course to fund, fight and win the war of ideas (Beder 1999, pp. 30–32).
Think tanks and lobby groups have pushed neoliberalism because these
ideas benefit ruling-class interests, and in turn ruling-class interests keep
them funded—it is cyclical (Block 1987; Cahill 2004). As Strinati (1995,
p. 165) argues:
Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively

the ruling class, maintain their dominance by securing the ‘spontaneous
consent’ of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the
negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus, which
incorporates both dominant and dominated groups.
Intellectuals in neoliberal think tanks are structurally important because

they are not only thinkers but also organizers, and they organize through
their words and actions the people on the periphery of their interest groups,
such as bureaucrats, politicians and corporate lobby groups—that is, people
involved in the productive process and beyond. Neoliberal think tanks and
their neoliberal practices, aims and objectives need to be seen in the context
of the contested control of the Australian workplace (Donaldson 2008),
but also more globally within a transnational class perspective (Robinson
2014). The study of the role and impact of global think tanks like the Atlas
Foundation in this context would be useful. That the Australian neoliberal
thought collective (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) operates within this wider
global context is troubling, although hardly surprising.
What can be done? The public—including academics—need to take
back the control of critical thinking everywhere, but particularly in the
universities. This means university needs to be publically funded not
relaint on corporate handouts. Currently state institutions are being
strangled for funds and are hence liable to be used for corporate ideo-
logical interests. We might also fight for think tank funding to be made
transparent, as t’Hart and Vromen (2008, p. 145) argue. Think tanks of
all persuasions could be made to declare, through a mandatory declara-
tion system, their interests and funding sources (Rich 2002; t’Hart and
Vromen 2008, p. 145).
The second question asked in this chapter was, ‘Do think tanks cre-
ate the politics or do the politics create the think tanks?’ The evidence
supports Cahill (2013), who suggests that neoliberal think tanks are not
stand-alone bodies responsible for the neoliberal revolution we experi-
ence daily. Rather, think tanks are just one social organization among a
number of institutions—the media, the state, the education system—that
have the means to organize and influence thought, both locally and glob-
ally. This is not to suggest that think tanks are always successful when
their ideology does not line up with the experiences of the public (as in
Work Choices in 2005), but they may only consider this a temporary set-
back when they have longer-term economic and social interests in play.
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CHAPTER 4
Power Without Representation: The

Coherence and Closeness of the Trilateral
Commission
Matilde Luna and José Luis Velasco
The Trilateral Commission (TC) is a think tank that aims to function as a

transnational governance network. Such networks usually claim to repre-
sent at least an important part of global public opinion, and on that basis
seek to influence decision-making on key global issues. Yet, in contrast
to what happens in formally representative organizations, this claim is
not backed by widely recognized institutions or endowed with the neces-
sary power and legitimacy. Therefore, transnational governance networks
have to substantiate their claim to representation through their own
actions.
We argue that to make this claim credible, these networks have to
constitute themselves and act in accordance with two opposing princi-
ples: coherence and openness. One of their main challenges is to balance
these principles; how they face this challenge is critical for both their
legitimacy and efficacy.
M. Luna (*) · J.L. Velasco 

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_4
82 M. Luna and J.L. Velasco
The case of TC both illustrates this challenge and shows how diffi-
cult it is to face it. On analyzing its membership for the triennium 2012–
2015 and the agendas of its annual meetings from 2005 to 2015, we
observe that the TC is a coherent but closed network, and also very
powerful but scarcely representative. This means that although it is capa-
ble of expressing the views and interests of powerful elites, it fails to
articulate the diversity of the global public opinion that is relevant to its
mission.
We begin by briefly characterizing the TC and mentioning the chal-
lenges that—like most other transnational governance networks—it faces
as it attempts to represent a sector of global public opinion. In “The
Logic of Representation”, we analyze its integration and composition,
especially its Executive Committee. This analysis shows that the TC’s
membership is excessively coherent but insufficiently open: Many indi-
viduals and organizations that should actively be represented in the TC,
given the declared aims and ideological inclinations of the Commission,
are in fact excluded from it.
In “Efficacy: The Annual Meetings”, we argue that by structuring its
membership and representation in this way, the TC restricts its own effi-
cacy. So our main conclusion is that the excessively coherent representa-
tion that exists within the TC is accompanied by a form of deliberation
that is immoderately restricted and exclusive. The result is that, seen as a
global governance network, the TC is very powerful but scarcely repre-
sentative. The TC’s capacity to make itself heard in the highest circles of
power is remarkable, but its capacity to articulate global public opinion is
much less effective.
Self-defined as a ‘non-governmental, policy-oriented discussion
group’ (TC 2016), the TC functions as a transnational governance net-
work. It is a highly informal group; the actions, aims, and structure of
which are largely self-generated, rather than imposed and guaranteed by
formal political institutions. In view of these characteristics, we approach
it as a complex associative system (CAS). This approach focuses on the
logics that underlie the functioning of these systems and the principles
that regulate and orient their political design (Luna and Velasco 2010,
2017). We assume that CASs, as will be briefly discussed in the next sec-
tion, have emergent properties that distinguish them from other associa-
tive experiences. Therefore, these systems should be studied not simply
4 POWER WITHOUT REPRESENTATION … 83
as mixtures of other organizational forms but as entities in their own

right, with their own distinctive properties and characteristics. Two of
these characteristics are the ability to cross territorial, institutional, and
identity borders, and the preference for collective decision-making mech-
anisms.
Another characteristic of CASs—the one that guides the present
analysis—is that, even though they are outside formal political institu-
tions, they may acquire authority. Following Weber’s classical definition
of authority as a combination of power and legitimacy (1978, pp. 212–
214), we ask how global governance networks like the TC acquire their
authority and how and when they exercise it. Roughly stated, our main
claim is that a governance network like the TC, however powerful it may
be, cannot acquire authority unless it is willing and able to represent,
with enough amplitude and diversity, the part of global public opinion
that is concerned with the issues that it purports to shape.
In this chapter, we examine the membership and agenda of this organ-
ization to see whether they are congruent with its main declared aim—
to promote ‘study and dialogue about the pressing problems facing our
planet’—and with one of the main organizational principles that it pro-
fesses to follow—‘diversity is vital to a well-rounded consideration’ of
global issues (TC 2016).
The Trilateral Commission as a Complex Associative

System
Created in 1973, the TC seeks ‘to bring together experienced leaders
within the private sector to discuss issues of global concern’ (TC 2016).
Its main founder was David Rockefeller, a prominent US businessman
and also at that time chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), the leading foreign policy think tank in that country. It was origi-
nally formed by private citizens of Japan, Europe, and North America
(the USA and Canada) ‘to foster closer cooperation among these core
industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities
in the wider international system’. The assumption was that, because of
their ‘great weight in the world economy and their massive relation with
one another’, these countries ‘bear a special responsibility for developing
effective cooperation, both in their own interests and in those of the rest
of the world’.
Since its inception, the TC has professed its commitment to pluralism

and diversity:
For the kind of broad-based discussion the Commission’s founders hoped

to encourage, they believed it was important to draw leading citizens from
many sectors of society and with a variety of political views …. Members
are distinguished leaders in business, banking and finance, media, aca-
demia, non-profit causes, labor unions, and other non-governmental
organizations. They include women, minorities, and members of many dif-
ferent political parties. (TC 2016)
The TC uses several means to disseminate the information and ideas it

generates. One is the issuing of documents, like the task force reports
written by experts from the three regions or the reports on plenary and
regional meetings. Moreover, the TC seems especially interested in cul-
tivating its relations with the media: Several prominent journalists are its
members, and many others are invited as speakers or guests to both ple-
nary and regional meetings. The TC also seems to expect much from
a simple, but highly effective means: direct, interpersonal communi-
cation. Thus, it declares that the purpose of its meetings is ‘to enable
members to take back to their home countries a greater understanding
of problems affecting all of us in this global age’ (TC 2016). Clearly, this
communication by word of mouth heavily depends on the prestige and
reliability of the speakers.
A chairman (sic) and deputy chairmen lead each of the TC’s regional
groups—Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific; together, these indi-
viduals constitute the collective leadership of the Commission.
Many analysts (e.g., Tucker 2008) have classified the TC as one of the
world’s most influential and powerful global organizations. Originally
financed by the Ford Foundation, it has subsequently diversified its fun-
draising activities. The result is that, at least within the USA, ‘an increas-
ing portion of the needed financial support has come from a wide range
of corporations’, foundations, and individuals (TC 2016).
To analyze this organization, we conceptualize it as a Complex
Associative System [CAS]. In previous work, we have argued that these
systems have four distinctive properties. First, they are autonomous—
that is, they are able to generate their own rules and not be subordinated
to other institutions or organizations. Second, their members are also
autonomous, which means that each of them participates in the system
voluntarily and may leave it at any time. Third, members are interde-
pendent, since the resources that each of them controls are necessary
for the success of the system. Finally, CASs are dynamic with a member-
ship that expands or contracts in the course of the interaction, with aims
and goals that are defined and redefined as the system progresses, and
with a dispersed structure of authority. Because of these properties, these
systems involve a series of tensions between strong, opposing trends; of
these tensions, the most important is that between autonomy and inter-
dependence (Luna and Velasco 2010, 2017).
CASs may act at different levels, from the local to the transnational.
The TC is located at the latter extreme. During its more than 40 years
of existence, it has consolidated itself as a global governance network.
Networks of this kind bring together a great variety of public and private
actors interested in transnational public issues. Usually, some participants
in these networks are representatives or agents of local or national gov-
ernments, national and transnational business firms, and local and inter-
national nongovernmental organizations; however, others are prestigious
or influential personalities acting in their own right. As governance
organisms, these networks serve to ‘make demands, frame goals, issue
directives, pursue policies, and generate compliance’ (Rosenau 2004,
p. 31).
Networks of this kind may be composed of smaller, regional units.
That is precisely the case for the TC, which is made up of three regional
groups. Of course, an entire global governance network—or one of its
smaller units—may perform certain strictly national functions. Such is
the case with the TC’s North American Group (NAG), which as well as
having played a central role in the region’s economic integration (Salas-
Porras 2012; Luna and Velasco 2013) has also functioned as a channel
for recruiting members of the US political elites.1
Like other CASs, the TC is autonomous, even though it remains con-
nected in several ways to the organism that promoted its creation, the
CFR. Similarly, although each participant has their own power base, they
are not hierarchically connected among themselves: All are autonomous
and free to leave at any time. But each of them brings their own portion
of power, resources, and influence. Finally, as the TC’s history shows, its
membership has constantly evolved, with the inclusion of ‘representa-
tives’ from new member countries; its agenda has changed in reaction
to the changes in the global sphere. In other words, like other CASs, the
TC is autonomous and dynamic, with members who are both autono-

mous and interdependent.
The main mechanism that the TC uses to achieve its mission is per-
suasion. Of course, many of its members have access—directly or indi-
rectly—to traditional power tools, notably military force and wealth. But
as an organization, the TC does not have such resources. This is why, it
has to resort to what Joseph Nye (a prestigious scholar who chairs the
NAG) has called ‘soft power’. In his view, soft power does not consist of
getting others to do your will, but rather ‘getting the others to get the
outcomes that you want’ (Nye 2004, p. 5). Therefore, this power works
not through force and money but through persuasion.
This preference for persuasion is a characteristic of many other global
governance networks. Rather than seeking authority (which, in Max
Weber’s (1978) classical definition, is the combination of power and
legitimacy), they seek influence. To attain it, they need to be more legiti-
mate than powerful—or, more specifically, they must be legitimate in
order to be powerful. This search for influence may follow very different
paths. To demonstrate this diversity, we briefly discuss two extreme cases.
On the one hand are those networks whose members have no access to
the commanding positions of powerful public and private organizations.
Therefore, to achieve the necessary influence, they must mobilize public
opinion. Power is their aim, and public opinion their means.
At the other extreme are those networks whose members are pow-
erful and would be able to make, by themselves, many of the decisions
in which the network is interested, without having to persuade public
opinion. These networks could, in other words, behave like a secretive
sector or like a discrete interest group, coordinating the decisions of
the powerful firms and government organisms in which their members
occupy commanding positions. Backed by these organizations, those
decisions may easily translate into strong international policies—perhaps
even supported by some of the planet’s strongest states. A network that
acts in this way may further the interests of those states. By doing this,
though, it will not be able to mobilize global public opinion and thereby
help those states ‘fulfil their shared leadership responsibilities in the wider
international system’, which is the self-proclaimed mission of the TC
(TC 2016). To fulfill a mission like this, the network must use the com-
manding positions controlled by its members not to impose a decision
but to promote an opinion. In other words, in cases like this, established
power positions are the means and public opinion the end.
In any of these extremes (and, by implication, also in the intermedi-

ate cases), in order to achieve the desired legitimacy, these networks have
to be representative. Their proposals to solve transnational problems
and promote the global public good would lack the necessary legitimacy
if the networks did not represent at least an important segment of the
global society. But in contrast to conventional political institutions, the
representativeness of which is formally guaranteed in constitutions and
laws, these networks have to earn their right to speak and act in the name
of global public opinion.
In practice, this right is not easy to obtain. Every attempt in this sense
would give rise to a basic dilemma. On the one hand, ideally these net-
works should be inclusive; they should represent a constituency that is
as wide as possible. In this way, it would be easier for them to guarantee
the legitimacy of their opinions and proposals. But even if this ideal were
fully attainable, it would be undesirable: The network would lose in pre-
cision what it would win in amplitude. Therefore, the ideal of inclusive-
ness should be limited by that of coherence. Coherence, in this context,
means that the network must convene only those individuals and organi-
zations that share a coherent worldview—which are part of an identifi-
able and definite current of opinion.
Yet, this creates a new dilemma. The search for coherence may eas-
ily result in the creation of a sect, formed by an excessively closed group
of people, tightly connected among themselves but with few linkages to
other people and organizations. If this happens, the information that cir-
culates within the network would often be redundant. Therefore, both
the legitimacy of the network and its capacity for innovation would be
very limited. To avoid this risk, the network needs to have many mem-
bers able to act as ‘translators’ or ‘bridges’—actors who, while sharing
a distinctive worldview, nonetheless have frequent contact with people
who do not share that view.
Hence, to be truly representative and efficacious, the global govern-
ance network must have a membership that is, at the same time, coher-
ent and open. For our present purposes, it is useful to emphasize that
coherence has two interrelated dimensions: One refers to the homogene-
ity of members (their personal and professional profiles and the organiza-
tions they are affiliated with); the other concerns the degree to which the
composition of the network enables it to achieve its stated purposes—in
other words, the extent to which the structure of representation is con-
gruent with the network’s explicit principles.
To analyze the TC’s openness and closeness, one must bear in mind
that a central component of its ideology is the notion of interdepend-
ence, which is seen both as a reality and as an ideal. Thus, the organiza-
tion itself claims that, ‘The most pervasive characteristic of the current
[international] situation is the steady expansion and tightening of the
web or interdependence’. At the same time, it holds that, ‘The requi-
site [international] cooperation for both the short and large term must
be based on the shared conviction that it maximizes overall gain and
increases the welfare of all those involved’ (Cooper et al. 1977, p. 287).
Closer to the US Democrats than to the Republicans, and highly
critical of the conservative ‘state-centered’ view, the TC has promoted
regional integration and globalization from a ‘multicentric world’ stand-
point. It has been a key promoter of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and the so-called NAFTA-Plus (the Security and
Prosperity Partnership, launched in Texas in 2005). It has also strongly
supported the development of the European Union (EU). More
recently, it has promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agree-
ment among 12 Pacific countries, signed in February 2016. Regional
agreements have been seen through the lens of international liberal-
ism and complex interdependence, concepts developed by international
relations scholars who are also distinguished members of the TC, such
as Joseph Nye. According to these views, cooperation and persua-
sion—rather than force, threats, and bargains—are the privileged means
through which state and other actors should pursue their goals in the
international arena.
The TC has a lasting commitment to a limited liberal democracy.2
Its famous report on the ‘crisis of democracy’ insisted that the main
risk facing this democratic regime was intrinsic: ‘the operations of the
democratic process do indeed appear to have generated a breakdown
of traditional means of social control, a de-legitimation of political and
other forms of authority, and an overload of demands on government,
exceeding its capacity to respond’ (Crozier et al. 1975, p. 8). Therefore,
democracy has to be saved from itself by preventing the excessive exten-
sion of democratic practices.
The TC has been strongly criticized from both the left and the right.
From the right, it has been accused of conspiring to take over the US
government and wanting to establish a world government.3 Authors
from the left have depicted it as an ‘opaque’ organization, an upper
room or ‘cenacle of the international political and economic elite …
seeking at the same time to protect the interest of multinationals and

to “enlighten”, through its analysis, the decisions of political leaders’
(Boiral 2003). Similarly, in his seminal analysis based on a ‘historical
materialist theory of international relations’, Gill (1991, p. 155) argues
that the TC ‘is almost entirely representative of the elite of society’. He
adds that its membership is monopolized by the ‘international establish-
ment’, consisting of ‘the intersecting domestic establishments of a range
of capitalist countries’ (1991, p. 155). Decades later, this author claimed
that the TC ‘continues to reflect a very powerful set of overlapping net-
works of influence … framing the strategic responses that are deemed
to be politically permissible or possible’. Despite their ‘many disagree-
ments and differences of view’, these members share ‘a broad consensus
in favor of policies that broadly speaking seek to sustain the “centrist”
projects of a neoliberal world order’ (Gill 2011, p. 85).
Given this ideological orientation, one should expect the ‘private
citizens’ invited to TC membership to share what Burris (2008) calls a
‘moderately conservative’ profile: leaders of transnational business firms,
devoted partisans of trade liberalization and free international invest-
ment; ‘globalist’ intellectuals committed to both economic integration
and to the defense of the international political system headed by the
USA; and ‘internationalist’ political leaders, closer to the US Democratic
Party than to the Republicans (and their equivalents in other countries).
In consequence, one should not expect this coherent membership to
include many leaders of domestically oriented, protectionist firms, ‘isola-
tionist’ intellectuals, hard-core conservatives, critics of globalization from
both the right and the left, critics of the transnational hegemony of the
USA, union leaders, and many other critics of the job displacements pro-
voked by economic globalization. However, according to the principle
of openness, one should expect this membership to include a significant
number of people able to engage their critics in a strong but civilized
public debate.
The Logic of Representation

Who is represented in the TC? What is the logic of this representation?
To answer these questions, we focus on the membership of its Executive
Committee. Integrated by the three regional Executive Committees and
their respective leaders, this committee meets once a year to define the
themes that will be analyzed by its different working groups, to review
the activities of the commission and to define the main lines of action for
its regional chairmen and deputy chairmen. These meetings also make
decisions on the recruitment of new members. This committee is impor-
tant in itself, since it constitutes the formal leadership of the TC. But it
is also important as an indicator: Its composition obviously reflects the
criteria that guide the selection of members and the composition of the
organization as a whole.
The criteria used to select new members are far from clear. In fact,
only three of them are publicly known: the maximum number of indi-
viduals per country, the rule that active government officials cannot be
members of the group, and the provision that ‘membership is by invi-
tation of the national and regional Executive Committees’. Apart from
these general rules, the US group has a rotation system, stipulating that
between five and ten of its members should be relieved every year. No
similar system is defined for other national or regional groups. Each
group decides how to choose its members and how to raise and spend its
funds.
Therefore, the logic of representation implicit in the TC has to be
inferred from the characteristics of its membership. To do this, we use
the affiliation information reported by the TC itself (which includes both
current and past affiliations). These affiliations can be classified into four
main sectors: business; politics (government and legislature)4; think tanks
and universities; and the media. Yet, the boundaries between these sec-
tors are rather fuzzy: Many of the people coming from the think tank
and university sector also participate in the business and political sec-
tors. Moreover, many consulting firms—providing financial, legal, and
lobbying services—which we classify as part of the business sector, often
perform functions similar to those that one usually associates with think
tanks and universities.
The TC as a whole has around 400 members: a maximum of 175
from Europe, a maximum of 120 from North America, and over 100
from the Asia-Pacific region. Regional membership is, in turn, divided
into national quotas. According to the original plan, each region was to
have an equal number of members, but this plan was modified as new
countries were included into the groups in order to broaden the scope
of the organization. Thus, for example, the original Japanese Group
became the Asia-Pacific Group, which since 2009 includes people from
China and India; the NAG includes Mexican members since 2000; the
European Group has grown as the EU has expanded.
At first sight, representation within the European Commission (EC)

seems equilibrated: Each of the three regions contributes one chair
and two deputy chairs for the nine-member board that presides over it.
However, as we shall see, this equilibrium breaks down when we move
down from the top leadership of the committee to its entire member-
ship, and from regions to countries.
The Executive Committee

The TC’s Executive Committee is composed of 65 members5: 17 from
the NAG, 33 from the European Group, and 15 from the Asia-Pacific
Group. Even though the European Group has almost twice as many
members as the NAG, the USA clearly predominates within the commit-
tee, with 13 positions, distantly followed by Japan (5) and France (4).
The structure of power within each of these three groups also pre-
sents different degrees of centralization. The NAG is highly centered on
the USA, which holds 76% of the group’s positions within the EC. In
contrast, the European Group is quite decentralized, with France, Italy,
Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom together holding
just 45% of the positions allocated to this group within the Executive
Committee. The Asian Group occupies an intermediate position: two
countries—Japan and Korea—together hold a little more than 50% of
Executive Committee positions.
Together, the 65 members of the Executive Committee report 181
affiliations. It should be noticed that all these affiliations correspond to
top positions within the respective institutions and organizations; there-
fore, these members are all part of the elite of their respective regions. As
Table 4.1 shows, those 181 affiliations are heavily concentrated in three
sectors: government and politics; business; and think tanks and universi-
ties.6 Much lower is the representation of the media and international
organizations. But these organizations are all of the greatest impor-
tance in the international field, such as the United Nations (J. Kubis,
U. Plassnik, and P. Sutherland), the Group of Thirty (J.C. Trichet,
chairman), and GATT/WTO (Sutherland, former general director).
Also noticeable is that these organizations are represented only in the
European Group. In North America, the political and think tank sectors
predominate, while in Europe, the business and political sectors prevail.
In the Asia-Pacific Group, think tanks are much better represented.
Table 4.1 The TC’s executive committee: Members’ affiliations by region and

sector
Sector North American European Group Asia-Pacific Total

Group Group
Government 16 (36%) 40 (37%) 6 (21%) 62 (34%)

and politics
Business 9 (21%) 41 (38%) 5 (18%) 55 (30%)
Think tanks and 16 (36%) 19 (17%) 16 (57%) 51 (29%)
universities
Media 3 (7%) 03 (3%) 1 (4%) 7 (4%)
International 6 (5%) 6 (3%)
organizations
Total 44 (100%) 109 (100%) 28 (100%) 181 (100%)
Many members of the EC are simultaneously affiliated with two

or more sectors. Thus, 82% of the North American members of the
Executive Committee, 55% of those from Europe, and 40% of those
from the Asia Pacific report leadership positions in more than one sector.
This suggests both that there is a significant level of elite circulation and
that many of these people function in practice as intermediaries, facili-
tating communication between different social spheres. This circulation
seems to be more common in two circuits: between business and politics,
and between think tanks and the public sector.
Generally speaking, if we observe the positions held by members of
the Executive Committee in government or the kind of business firms to
which they are affiliated, we realize that the area of finance clearly pre-
dominates. This is especially so in the European Group, which registers a
high number of finance companies as well as many former chairmen and
presidents of central banks (including the European Central Bank) and
high-level executives of national finance ministries.
In what follows, we present the most outstanding characteristics of
the main sectors of think tank activity, taking regional differences into
account.
Think Tanks and Universities

A total of 16 members of the NAG participating in the Executive
Committee are affiliated with think tanks or universities. Among these
organizations, the leader is Harvard University, with four positions in

the EC (D. Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership; K.E.
House from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; J.S.
Nye, former dean of the School of Government; and M.L. O’Sullivan).
Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government is important not
only because of the number of affiliations but also because one of its for-
mer directors, Joseph S. Nye, occupies the highest position in the NAG
and is the leading author of the TC’s foreign policy doctrine.
After Harvard, the most important think tanks are the Peterson
Institute for International Economics (A.S. Posen, president, and C.F.
Bergsten, emeritus director) and Syracuse University (C. Bertini, from
Maxwell School of Citizen and Public Affairs and linked to The Chicago
Council on Global Affairs, and J.B. Steinberg, also from Maxwell
School). Some of these members not only have served in top govern-
ment offices in economic policy areas, such as the treasury, but also in
defense, national intelligence, and security, as is the case of Nye and
Steinberg. These areas of influence distinguish the NAG from the Asia-
Pacific and the European Groups, mostly centered on economic, politi-
cal, and cultural matters.
Within the European Group, the most important think tank is the
Bruegel Institute, with two positions. This institute plays a role compa-
rable to that played by Harvard’s JFK School within the NAG: Its chair-
man, Jean-Claude Trichet, a Frenchman who among other important
positions has been president of the European Central Bank and Alternate
Governor of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank, holds the highest position in the European Group. This institute, a
European think tank based in Brussels that specializes in economics, was
created in 2004 and has played an active role in European policy debates.
Its governance and funding model is based on membership from mem-
ber states of the EU, international corporations, and other institutions.
It was cofounded by Jean Pisani-Ferry and Nicolas Véron, who is also a
senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. Mario Monti, European honorary
chairman in the TC, was its first chairman.
Of the other think tanks or universities also represented in the
European Group’s quota within the EC, several operate at the European
level and have promoted regional integration, not only in economic but
also in political and cultural matters. Such are the cases of G. Bethoin,
honorary chairman of the European Movement (1948) and the Jean
Monnet Association (1987). The former, integrated by 34 associations,
has promoted the creation of think tanks and has lobbied for the political
and cultural integration of Europe according to the principles of peace,
democracy, liberty, solidarity, political pluralism, and respect for human
rights. The Jean Monnet Association, for its part, has worked for the
construction of Europe. Other members are presidents of several uni-
versities and research centers, such as J. Braga de Macedo, director of
the Center for Globalization and Governance in Lisbon and chairman of
the Forum Portugal Global; M. Monti, president of Bocconi University,
Milan; Carlo Secchi, former rector of the same university; and Peter
Sutherland, chairman of the London School of Economics.
Finally, 16 members of the Asia-Pacific Group participating in the
EC are affiliated with think tanks or universities. Unlike those repre-
sented through the European Group, most of these think tanks oper-
ate at a national rather than regional level. Most of them deal with
economic issues but—as said before—also with political matters. The
Asia-Pacific Group includes three important Japanese think tanks: the
Institute for International Monetary Affairs (Toyoo Gyohten, presi-
dent); the Canon Institute for Global Studies (Akinari Horii, member
of the board of directors), which deals with research and policy pro-
posals on economic, political, security, and social issues; and the Japan
Center for International Exchange (Akio Okawara, president), ori-
ented to strengthening Japan’s role in international networks of policy
dialog and cooperation. Among other think tanks from Singapore, the
Philippines, and Australia, the group’s Executive Committee quota also
includes Hang Sung-Joo, chairman of the International Policy Studies
Institute of Korea, Seoul, and emeritus professor at Korea University;
Jusuf Wanandi, cofounder and vice-chairman of the Centre for Strategic
and International Studies, Jakarta; Chen Naiqing, vice president of the
Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs; and Tarun Das, funder
trustee of Ananta Aspen Centre, which focuses on leadership develop-
ment and open dialog on India’s development and national security.
Business
Each of the three regional subgroups within the Executive Committee
includes at least one leader of business associations. Such is the case of
the Asia-Pacific chairman, Yasuchika Hasegawa, former chairman of
the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (1946), which includes
around 1400 top executives of some 950 corporations; this organization
conducts in-depth studies and research, and provides solutions to

improve the Japanese economy. A similar case is John Manley, president
and CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, representing
150 leading Canadian corporations. Vladimir Dlouhy from the Czech
Republic and Michael Fuchs from Germany, both of whom are European
deputy chairmen of the TC, also belong to this category. Dlouhy is presi-
dent of the Czech Chamber of Commerce, whereas Fuchs has been vice
president of the Federation of European Wholesale and International
Trade Associations, among other German business organizations; he is
also a member of the German Bundestag.
All three subgroups include chairpersons and CEOs of some transna-
tional or multinational large corporations that operate in different eco-
nomic areas. Yet, the great majority of registered firms represented on
the Executive Committee provide consultant, financial, and legal services
on global trade and investments and lobbying.
In the NAG, in fact, the dominance of these types of firms is almost
absolute. Some of the most important members are as follows: Carla
Hills, from Hills & Company International Consultants, Washington
(established by Carla Hills, former US trade representative and a leading
figure in negotiating NAFTA); Paul Volcker, from Wolfensohn and Co.
(established by James D. Wolfensohn, graduated from Harvard School
of Business, member of the CFR, former president of the World Bank
Group (1995–2005) and former chairman of the Board of Governors of
the US Federal Reserve System; Kenneth Duberstein, who was chief of
staff to President Ronald Reagan and established the Duberstein Group,
a lobbying company that promotes the interests of selected corporations
and associations, and is also a member of the CFR; Karen Elliot House,
from the Belfer Center and former vice president of Dow Jones and
Company (which publishes financial information); and John Manley, for-
mer counsel of McCarthy Tétrault LLP (a law firm) and former deputy
prime minister and minister of finance in Canada.
Business firms from the European Group represented in the TC’s
Executive Committee operate predominantly in the financial services sec-
tor. Many are national banks or important international firms. Among
these, one should mention the Rothschild Group, one of the world’s
largest independent financial advisory groups and the only one with
three positions on the Executive Committee (Alfonso Cortina from
Spain, vice-chairman of Rothschild Europe; Nigel Higgins from the
United Kingdom, CEO of the Rothschild Group, London; and Panagis
Vourloumis from Greece, senior adviser for this group). Also impor-
tant is the Goldman Sachs Group, a leading global investment banking,
securities, and investing firm, with two positions (Peter Sutherland from
Ireland, former chairperson of Goldman Sachs International, as well as
chairperson of the London School of Economics, honorary European
chairperson of the TC and former general director of the WTO, among
other positions; and Vladimir Dlouhy from the Czech Republic, interna-
tional advisor of Goldman Sachs, as well as president of the Chamber of
Commerce, former minister of economy, and former minister for indus-
try and trade).
Finally, in the Asia-Pacific Group, we find the following firms: the
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (Toyoo Gyohten), Mitsubishi Corporation
(Minoru Makihara), and Takeda Pharmaceutical (Yasuchika Hasegawa,
Asia-Pacific chairperson), all of them from Japan; and Poongsan Corp,
which fabricates nonferrous materials and products for the military
industry (Ryu Jin Roy), from Korea.
Government and Politics
Within the political sector, most affiliations correspond with the execu-
tive branch. The North American and the Asia-Pacific Groups only
report one affiliation each to the legislative branch (J. Harman and J.R.
Hewson). But Europe registers 12 out of 40 affiliations with this sector,
including the European Parliament. The main affiliations of the NAG
are with defense, intelligence, treasury, international trade, and foreign
affairs.7
Within the European Group, the inclusion of several former presi-
dents and prime ministers (E. Aho from Finland; M. Isarescou from
Romania, also governor of its National Bank; and G. Vassiliou from
Cyprus, who was also head of the negotiating team for the accession
of this country to the EU) is remarkable. Members who have had high
positions in national governments are concentrated in economic areas
(treasury and finance, industry, and foreign affairs), and there are several
former governors and presidents of central banks as well as ambassadors,
most of them appointed to the USA. Former members of European
institutions, such as the EC and European Parliament, and former
presidents of the Central Bank of Europe and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development have been also incorporated into the
TC’s Executive Committee.
Within the Asia-Pacific Group, six affiliations relate to the political

sector: three of them correspond to the Korean Han Sung-Joo, former
minister of foreign affairs and former ambassador to the USA (and cur-
rently chairperson of the International Policy Studies Institute of Korea),
and Hong Seok-Hyun, also former ambassador to the USA (and chair-
person of Joong Ang Media Network, the largest media group in Korea);
a fourth corresponds to Roberto de Ocampo, former secretary of finance
in Philippines (and current chairperson of the Center for Public Finance
and Regional Economic Cooperation); and the last two are related to the
former governor of the Bank of Thailand (Tarisa Watanagase) and the
Australian former leader of the federal opposition (John Hewson, also
chairperson of the Asset Owners Disclosure project, aimed to protect
members’ retirement savings). Interestingly, none of these positions are
linked to Japanese politics.
Media
Within the media sector, as well as some analysts and correspondents, the
following groups are mentioned: CNN and the Wall Street Journal from
the USA; Joong Ang Media Network, the largest media group in Korea;
Politiken from Copenhagen; EPH from Zagreb, and three firms special-
izing in communication from Serbia (East West Bridge, GCA Global
Communication Associates, and Kovacic and Spaic).
Coherence and Openness
From these observations about the composition of the Executive
Committee, we can infer that the TC is a highly coherent organization in
two basic senses: its highly elitist nature and its ideological preference for
international markets and financial capital. Since members are recruited
by invitation only, it is foreseeable that the TC would show strong ide-
ological homogeneity in favor of globalism, free markets, procedural
democracy, and international multilateralism under US hegemony. Its
relative political autonomy reinforces the permanence of the TC, ensur-
ing its continuous influence beyond the periodic turnover in government
leadership.
With regard to its openness, one outstanding fact is the exclusion of
labor leaders. Also marginalized or simply excluded are the interests of
business firms oriented toward domestic markets; similar comments
can be made about the areas of government dealing with social policy
and about civil society organizations. In terms of gender, its member-
ship is also strongly biased: Only 29% of those on the North American
Committee are women, but that proportion looks very high compared
with the Asia-Pacific Committee (13%) and the European Committee
(only 3%). Furthermore, no woman has been chair or deputy chair of the
TC.
The TC’s manifest preference for members who circulate among the
business, political, and think tank sectors further accentuates its endog-
amous nature. Moreover, it blurs the relation between some economic
interests, more general political interests, and expert knowledge, under-
mining the necessary autonomy of participants. As noted previously,
members function as brokers and translators across different spheres, and
do so quite efficaciously; however, this communication only occurs at the
top of each sector and is restricted to the same sorts of firms and institu-
tions.
In sum, the TC falls far short of the ideal defined at the beginning: Its
membership is certainly coherent, but it is also very endogamous—that
is, relations are tied to one specific social level.
Efficacy: The Annual Meetings

According to the traditional definition, an actor is more efficacious when
it obtains more, and better, results. But for CASs, and therefore for
global governance networks, we need a more specific definition. To be
efficacious, these systems must not only have practical results that benefit
themselves and their members. They must also preserve and multiply the
conditions that enable their members to continue searching for collec-
tive solutions to shared problems, without forsaking their diversity and
autonomy. In other words, they must preserve and increase their own
organizational capital: their interpersonal trust; their capacity to create a
common language, understandable by all members; and their capacity to
negotiate and deliberate. Finally, to be efficacious, a network like the TC
must make a significant contribution to global associative capital. It must
inspire other global social actors to associate themselves in order to pro-
mote their worldview in the transnational public sphere; promote venues
where these visions are presented and confronted in an open and reason-
able discussion; and finally, teach the transnational public how to con-
stitute itself through association. In other words, the efficacy of global
governance networks, like that of all CASs, must at once be practical,

organizational, and associative.
As previously pointed out, according to its own description, the TC
aims to promote discussion, study, and dialog. Therefore, to analyze its
efficacy, we should concentrate on the main deliberative activity that it
promotes: its annual meetings. The TC would be more efficacious, the
more its meetings generate better proposals, facilitate reasonable debate
among its members, and become a forum for the discussion of social
problems of global interest.
Two indicators are crucial in this context: the thematic diversity of
these annual meetings and the political diversity of its participants. To be
efficacious—in the practical, organizational, and associative senses—these
meetings should convoke a substantial number of external participants,
ensuring that all the more important views about the topics analyzed,
even those that are at odds with the ones held by members of the TC,
have a reasonable opportunity to be presented in the discussions. The
only views that could legitimately be excluded are those that are openly
intolerant, held by actors who refuse to participate in a reasonable debate
about the topics of interest. Similarly, the agenda of the meetings should
be ample, without going beyond the broad field in which the TC is
interested. This means that the most important global problems—those
that affect the governance and stability of the transnational system—
should be discussed freely in these meetings.
In sum, if for representation the ideal was a combination of internal
coherence and openness to the context, for efficacy the ideal is the widest
possible thematic amplitude and maximum political plurality. This com-
bination of amplitude and plurality would enable the TC to formulate
better proposals, increase its own organizational capital, and significantly
contribute to the development of the global public sphere.
For practical reasons, we will analyze the annual meetings held from
2005 to 2015. These 11 meetings had a total of 104 panels or sessions.
Table 4.2 shows the countries or regions to which these panels or ses-
sions referred.
As is to be expected from a global entity such as the TC, the largest
number of panels or sessions (40%) referred not to specific countries or
regions but to truly global issues, such as energy security, climate change,
and the world economy. Beyond this, one can notice a clear domination
of the USA (14%) and the region with which this country was particu-
larly concerned during the period: what the Second Bush Administration
Table 4.2 Countries
Country/region Number of panels/ Percentage
and regions analyzed in
sessions
the TC annual meetings
Global 42 40.4
USA 15 14.4
Greater Middle East 10 9.6
Europe 9 8.7
East Asia 6 5.8
Japan 5 4.8
China 4 3.8
Asia 3 2.9
Russia 3 2.9
Belgium 1 1.0
China and India 1 1.0
Hong Kong 1 1.0
Iran 1 1.0
Korea 1 1.0
Trilateral 1 1.0
Germany 1 1.0
Total 104 100
used to call the Greater Middle East—comprising the most important

countries of the so-called Muslim world (10%). These data also show
an interesting, and somewhat unexpected, contrast between Asia and
Europe: Only 10% of the panels or sessions were dedicated to Europe,
compared with 22% dedicated to Asia. Even more revealing is the total
absence of two regions: Africa and Latin America.
An analogous conclusion can be drawn from the distribution of ses-
sions or panels according to their subject matter. Again, as is desirable
for an organization of this kind, the most frequent theme, with 30% of
panels or sessions, was geopolitics: the conflicts and situations that affect
global or regional power balances—for example, the global impact of the
rise of China and India, or the implications of conflicts in the Middle
East. Also as foreseeable, especially in a period characterized by global
financial crises, the economy was the second most frequent theme (26%);
the attention to this theme is also congruent with the TC’s interest in
economic liberalization and the global economy. Equally noticeable
is the large numbers of sessions or panels devoted to domestic politics,
especially that of the USA (15%). But perhaps even more prominent
are the obvious absences: themes that are crucial for the world—such as
migration, agriculture, human rights, and poverty—but that nonetheless
were not considered worth a single panel or session in these meetings.

This means that, if we wanted to classify the TC according to the themes
that it discusses in its main meetings, we would be inclined to say that it
is an organization that specializes in geopolitics, the economy, and secu-
rity, rather than being generally interested in the problems of the wider
international system.
In summary, as far as this issue can be judged by the themes of its
annual meetings, deliberation within the TC ignored various themes of
obvious importance for the stability and governance of the world, and
instead concentrated disproportionally on geopolitics, the economy, and
security. Therefore, the first indicator—thematic amplitude—shows a
rather poor result: In the TC, the political interest and ideological orien-
tation of members seems to prevail over the desire to provide a forum to
discuss the ‘urgent problems of the planet’.
With regard to the second indicator—political plurality—the relevant
question to ask is just how ample and well balanced was the composition
of participants in the annual meetings: To what extent did the meetings
convene all the relevant actors and opinion currents? A useful indicator
of this is the nationality of participants. One of the most remarkable facts
is the absolute predominance of the USA, which accounts for 85 (30%)
of the 284 speakers who participated in these meetings. Interestingly,
the second place was occupied by Japan—one of the TC’s founding
countries. In total, the EU accounted for 71 speakers (25%). But per-
haps more telling are the absences: With the exception of Egypt (two
speakers), Africa was unrepresented in these discussions—as was Latin
America, with the exception of Mexico (six speakers).
A second aspect is the participation of external speakers in the meet-
ings, something significant if one considers that the TC portrays itself
as a forum for the discussion of global problems. The most visible sign
of this is that people external to the TC delivered exactly half of all the
talks. This means that, at least at first glance, the TC’s annual meetings
indeed seem to have been an open forum for the discussion of global
problems.
But how plural was the composition of these external participants? An
important indicator in this regard is their affiliation (as reported by the
TC itself). Since some speakers report more than one affiliation, the total
number of affiliations is 168. Of these, by far the largest number (83, or
49%) are political affiliations: government officials, legislators, or political
party leaders. The meaning of this figure is easy to grasp: As mentioned,
the only category of people explicitly excluded from membership into

the TC is active members of national governments. It therefore seems
that this exclusion is compensated for by the invitation to participate in
the annual meetings. After the politicians, the most frequent external
invitees were, as was to be expected, people from academia and business.
In contrast, the very low participation of the media (5.4%) and especially
NGOs (0.6%) is quite surprising, given that these are important actors in
the global sphere. Even more prominent and significant is the exclusion
of people from social movements and human rights organizations.
But even these data may give a misleading impression about the TC’s
openness. It is true that half of all the talks (142) of the annual meetings
were delivered by external speakers. In reality, though, the number of
external speakers was notably lower: 119. This is because 17 invitees gave
more than one talk during the period. In total, these frequent invitees
gave 38 talks—that is, more than one-quarter of all the talks given by
non-TC speakers.
In summary, the agenda of the TC’s annual meetings excluded several
relevant themes and actors. This means that the TC did not achieve the
thematic amplitude and political plurality that its self-assigned mission
would require. The meetings certainly helped the TC’s members and
close allies to discuss themes that were particularly important to them—
many of which are also of obvious importance for the world. In contrast,
these meetings left little room for other themes and actors that are also
crucial for transnational governance.
By focusing exclusively on the themes in which it is directly interested
and by tightly controlling the list of invitees to its discussions, the TC
apparently privileged its internal coherence and its organizational effi-
cacy. However, these limitations reduced not only its associative efficacy
(its capacity to enrich transnational associative life) but also its practi-
cal efficacy (its capacity to produce benefits for itself and its members).
Obviously, neither the intellectual capacity nor the social and political
influence of the people who participated in its meetings can be denied.
But if these meetings had also included other themes, participants, and
viewpoints, the members of the TC would have been able to refine their
ideas, strengthen their arguments, draw better conclusions, and formu-
late sounder proposals.
Ultimately, this also affected the TC’s organizational efficacy. If the
meetings had had wider thematic openness and greater political diversity,
the TC would have had a unique opportunity to transform itself into a
more efficacious, stronger, and more flexible organization, one less cen-
tered on itself and therefore more able to present and publicly defend its
own ideas.
Conclusion
Since it aspires to be a ‘soft power’ global network discussing the world’s
pressing problems, a CAS like the TC should be able to represent a wide
segment of global public opinion. To achieve this representativeness, it
should have a membership that is simultaneously coherent and open. But
our analysis of its composition showed that, although membership is very
coherent (excluding, as expected, representatives of economic protec-
tionism, hard-core conservatism, and other adverse opinion currents), it
is also excessively endogamous, representing only a closed circle of very
exclusive business, political, and think tank sectors.
This means that what the TC’s membership truly represents is a
global elite centered on the USA, the interests of financial transnational
corporations, and a liberal view committed to trade liberalization—or,
expressed in Gill’s historical materialist terms, the TC’s membership
‘reflects the twin processes, transnationalization of economy and state,
since many members are associated with transnational fractions of capital
and corresponding elements of the state’ (Gill 1991, p. 155).
In Ronald S. Burt’s (2005) terms, the TC shows high ‘closure’
and little ‘brokerage’. According to Burt, with a balance like this, the
information circulating within the network tends to be redundant, and
therefore, the network tends to be reluctant to undertake experimenta-
tion and innovation. Our analysis of the annual meetings confirmed this
expectation. We found that the agenda of these meetings did indeed
tend to be monotonous, with little capacity to discuss ideas different
from those held by members of the TC. The meetings tended to be self-
oriented, serving to maintain internal consent by ensuring that all the
members shared the same views, that they acquired prestige within the
network and so forth. This has grave effects for the associative efficacy
of the network, but it also affects its practical and organizational efficacy.
Thanks to its high level of closure, the TC preserves itself as a pow-
erful network. But this power depends more on the affiliations of its
members—based on the fact that all of them occupy leading positions
in their respective organizations. In contrast, the TC’s capacity to legiti-
mate this power among the broader public is quite limited. To enlarge its
legitimacy, the TC would have to open itself up to the public—which, by

the way, would enhance its capacity to formulate and diffuse ideas about
how to solve the problems of the world.
Ultimately, it seems ironic that an organization with such powerful
members is so closed to its context and so reluctant to enter into a lively
debate with other members of the world’s public opinion-makers. But
perhaps the greatest irony is that an organization apparently so commit-
ted to ‘soft power’, which is founded on opinion, is so dependent on
hard and traditional power—on the institutional, economic, and govern-
mental power of its members and invitees.
Notes
1. Six of the latest eight presidents of the World Bank have been ‘trilateral-
ists’. Several US presidents and vice presidents have been members of its
North American Group (e.g., Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). Since the
Carter Administration, more than half of all the US secretaries of state and
three-quarters of all defense secretaries have also been members of the TC.
This trend continued in the Obama administration, with 11 TC members
being appointed to key high-level positions within the first 10 days of this
administration (Wood 2009).
2. ‘Liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ are used here in the conventional European sense,
denoting a preference for individual rights, limited government, and ‘free’
markets—in contrast to current US usage, where they normally denote a
commitment to social rights and progressive causes.
3. One of its most consistent right-wing critics has been the John Birch
Society (e.g., see Barry 2009).
4. In the case of government, the affiliations refer to positions held in the
past; as previously noted, current government officials cannot be members
of the TC.
5. According to the ‘Introduction to the Trilateral’, the Executive
Committee has 48 members; however, the list of members of this commit-
tee has a total of 65 names.
6. We have grouped together think tanks and universities, even though they
have different functional purposes and structures, because both of them
use knowledge—particularly research, analysis, and generation of informa-
tion—as their main resource and, in the present case, the frontiers between
them tend to become fuzzy.
7. As we have noticed in our analysis of the NAG, members of the US
Republican and Democratic Parties are equally represented (Luna and
Velasco 2013).
Acknowledgements We appreciate Karin Fischer’s comments to the initial draft

of this chapter.
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trilateral-commission-endgame. Accessed 21 Jan 2016.
CHAPTER 5
The Bilderberg Conferences: A

Transnational Informal Governance
Network
Aleksander Miłosz Zieliński
This chapter deals with a think tank that is considered by many to be one
of the most powerful in the world today, the Bilderberg Conferences.
I argue that the main achievement of its members is to have created a
transnational network of influential people in positions of power. ‘Power’
and ‘influence’—or ‘hard’ and ‘soft power’ to use Nye’s (2004) terms—
are difficult to define unambiguously. Manuel Castells (2011), a lead-
ing theoretician of the network society, defines power as ‘the relational
capacity to impose an actor’s will over another actor’s will on the basis of
the structural capacity of domination embedded in the institutions of soci-
ety’ (2011, p. 775, my emphasis). He considers power relationships as
the foundation of society and contends that in a network society, ‘social
power is primarily exercised by and through networks’ (2011, p. 774).
The exercise of power (or control) over others relies on constituting and
programming networks, as well as connecting and ensuring the coop-
eration of different networks by sharing common goals and combining
resources.
A.M. Zieliński (*) 
University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_5
108 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
Social power ‘operates primarily by the construction of meaning in

the human mind through processes of communication’ (Castells 2011,
p. 785); therefore, global multimedia corporate networks ‘are the fun-
damental networks of power making in society’ (2011, p. 785), with
social power allowing them to set agendas as well as take managerial
and editorial decisions. However, these corporations are not auton-
omous actors, as they are dependent on the global financial mar-
ket (which is a network itself, beyond the control of specific actors).
Therefore, ‘the global financial market exercises network power over
the global economy’ (2011, p. 784). This nexus of global financial and
communication networks is closely linked to political power relation-
ships, which ‘provide the access to and management of institutions of
governance’ (2011, p. 783) and centre around the state, which is ‘the
default network for the proper functioning of all other power networks’
(2011, p. 786).
This chapter argues that the Bilderberg Conferences are a network
hub for CEOs of some of the largest TNCs, as well as leading politicians,
academics and representatives of the media, for informal discussions on
geopolitically important topics related to NATO and the world economy.
To use Castells’ terminology, programmers and switchers from the global
financial markets connect with programmers and switchers from the net-
work of political power as well as programmers and switchers from the
global media network (including intellectuals), with the aim of bringing
together different networks under a common goal for programming the
networks with ideas, visions and so on.
Since 1954, 64 Bilderberg Conferences have been held in 18 countries.
According to the official website,1 the Bilderberg meetings are ‘a forum
for informal discussions about megatrends and major issues facing the
world’, with the aim of fostering ‘dialogue between Europe and North
America’. Considering the high level of participants, it is surprising that
until a few years ago there was little scholarly interest in these conferences
(with some notable exceptions—see Thompson 1980; van der Pijl 2012).
This changed only with the advent of the Internet as a counter-hegem-
onic public space. Due to the secretive character of the meetings (the con-
ferences observe the Chatham House rules, which prevent participants
from disclosing information on the content of the discussions), the dis-
course about the Bilderberg Conferences has for a long time been inter-
nally closed and subsequently  dominated by conspiracy theorists (e.g.
Estulin 2009).
5 THE BILDERBERG CONFERENCES: A TRANSNATIONAL … 109
Proper scholarly referenced academic publications have only appeared

recently (Aldrich 1997; Aubourg 2003; Richardson 2011; Wendt 2015;
Wiford 2003). Most focus on the foundation (1952–1954) and the early
years of the Bilderberg Conferences. The most thorough analysis of the
contents of their  discussions remains unpublished (Geven 2014; Gijswijt
2007). Serious research is hindered by the fact that the official archive has
a 50-year block on access to its documents. However, the evolving public
space emerging from the Internet has provided important new informa-
tion: in 2014, a leaked collection of documents regarding the Bilderberg
network was uploaded to the file depository platform scribd.com,2
including the complete annual conference reports from the years 1954–
1995 (with the exception of the years from 1956 and 1994) collected
from various libraries and archives. Before this leak, the official position
of the organisers of these conferences was that no written documents
existed. However, it turns out that after every conference a detailed
report, including the official list of participants as well as a summary of
the papers that had been presented  and the subsequent discussions, was
prepared and distributed to former and prospective participants.
My work here is based on these conference reports, and my objec-
tive is to provide an overview of the participants in these conferences.
After a look at the structure of these conferences and a short historical
background, I provide an overview of the countries from which the more
than 2500 participants have been invited before taking a closer look at
the people at  the centre of the network. After a more detailed look at
the participants in recent years, I then show some important connections
between the Bilderberg Conferences and international organizations
before turning my attention to the most important think tanks that have
traditionally been connected with the Bilderberg meetings.
The Structure of the Bilderberg Conferences

While the Bilderberg meetings cannot be defined as a formal organization
because the large majority of participants are invited only once, there is a
smaller group called the Steering Committee, to which the term ‘mem-
bership’ can be applied. Currently, the Steering Committee consists of 27
members from 18 countries (plus the chairman, who traditionally comes
from an aristocratic family and since 2012, this has been Henri de Castries,
CEO of French insurance company AXA). Currently, all countries (except
Turkey) that participate regularly in the conferences have one member in
110 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
the Steering Committee, while a few have more than one: Germany, Great
Britain, Italy and France have two; and the United States has eight. The
task of the Steering Committee is to set the agenda for the next confer-
ence, to decide who to invite (including the number of guests from each
country) and to choose who will present papers. Since the beginning the
aim of the Bilderberg organisers has been to invite influential people and
to persuade them to their position in subtle ways (Retinger 1956).
The Bilderberg meetings fit into this book’s wide conception of a
think tank for the following reasons: the participants come from busi-
ness, politics, media and academia, and discuss important current geo-
political and economic issues; and the line drawn between their policy
planning and strategic discussions is often blurred. However, the fact
that the chairmen of basically all major Atlantic think tanks partici-
pate regularly in the conferences merits its investigation from the point
of view of supranational policy-planning. Based on the topics dis-
cussed during these conferences, it seems appropriate to call the con-
ferences a ‘strategy forum’3 of the transnational elite that has formed
a Transnational Informal Governance Network (TIGN) (see also
Christiansen and Neuhold 2012).4
Historical Background
The Bilderberg Conferences were founded in the context of the Cold
War. During World War II, the Allied Forces partnered with Stalin’s
Soviet Union to defeat Germany, Italy and Japan. The death of
Roosevelt and his replacement by Truman as president of the United
States marked the beginning of the end of the close relationship between
Washington and Moscow. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
cemented the division of Europe into two spheres of influence, includ-
ing a divided Germany. In April 1949, representatives from 12 countries
signed the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing the first supranational mili-
tary force, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This asym-
metry in power between the United States and the other member
countries implied its leading role in the Alliance. After the outbreak of
the Korean War, US leaders decided that they would continue to aid
Western Europe only if Germany was allowed to arm itself and join
NATO (Trachtenberg and Gehrz 2003), which led to increased tensions
between the United States and its allies in Western Europe, especially
France.
The founding myth of the Bilderberg Conferences takes this

European anti-Americanism as its starting point and focuses on how,
in 1952, Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard, supported by Paul van
Zeeland and other influential European politicians, began preparations
to organise an informal conference that would bring together influen-
tial Americans and Europeans and help them iron out their differences.
However, this myth omits other Trans-Atlantic forums for growing coop-
eration between Europe and North America, like the European League for
Economic Cooperation and the Action Committee for the United States
of Europe, which have existed at least since 1947 (Aldrich 1997; Zieliński
2016). The Bilderberg meetings, therefore, need to be analysed in the larger
context of the building of a cold war  anti-communist Atlantic community
after World War II (Aubourg et al. 2008; Catlin 1959), of which European
and North American integration was considered a necessary component.
In 1952, when the preparations for the first Bilderberg Conference
began, Greece and Turkey joined NATO, ensuring that this part of South
Eastern Europe stayed in the Western sphere of influence. This explains
their ongoing presence at the Bilderberg Conferences since 1954.
Also in 1952, Lord Ismay, a British general, became the first Secretary
General of NATO. He participated in the third Bilderberg Conference
in Germany in 1955, thus establishing an ongoing tradition of participa-
tion: all the Secretaries General of NATO have participated in at least one
Bilderberg Conference, some of them in each conference during their
term in office. The participants in the first Bilderberg Conferences came
from ten NATO member countries as well as Germany, Sweden and
Switzerland. One of the most controversial topics at the first Bilderberg
Conferences in 1954 and 1955 was the question of German integration
into NATO. Advocates of a stronger inclusion of Germany into Western
political and security structures held sway, and in 1955 Germany joined
NATO (Gijswijt 2007, p. 81) which was just  before the third Bilderberg
Conference took place for the first time in Germany.
The Bilderberg Network, 1954–2015

Between 1954 and 2015, a total of 2,578 people were invited to 63
Bilderberg Conferences. The country with the highest number of par-
ticipants was the United States, which reflects its dominant role in
world politics, and in NATO after World War II. A strong presence of
British, Canadian and Dutch elite members underlines the trans-Atlantic
112 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
character of the network. Most of the participants came from NATO

member countries. A noteworthy exception here is Switzerland, which
although not a member of NATO, has traditionally had strong ties to
transnational finance capital.
Inner Circle
Despite the high fluctuation of participants—roughly two-thirds partici-
pated only in one conference—at the heart of the network is a group
of individuals, some of them from very wealthy dynasties, others rep-
resenting large financial institutions, who have participated in virtu-
ally every conference for approximately 10 years, sometimes longer.
According to Ian Richardson (2011, p. 182), ‘longevity of member-
ship … is clearly associated with perceived influence within the elite net-
work’. This warrants a closer look at some characteristics of this ‘inner
circle’ (Useem 1984) of the Bilderberg network. We identified 53 per-
sons who have participated in at least 16 conferences between 1954 and
2015—that is, more than 25% of all conferences—and assigned them to
a sector: Finance, Business, Politics, Royalty, Academia, Media, Think
Tank, Diplomat or Lawyer; the category ‘Other’ consists of individuals
who could not meaningfully be assigned to any sector. Whenever pos-
sible the participants were assigned based on the information provided
on the official list of participants. For example, Nicolas Baverez is listed
as ‘Nicolas Baverez, FRA, Partner Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP’
and was therefore assigned to the ‘Law’ and not the ‘Academia’ sector.
However, sometimes the description in the official list of participants
can be misleading. For example, in 2012 Jon Huntsman Jr was invited
to the conference in Chantilly, VA, as ‘Chairman, Huntsman Cancer
Foundation’ although cancer or related medical problems were not on
the agenda. However, Huntsman was also the US ambassador to China
between 2009 and 2011 and became chairman of the Atlantic Council
think tank in early 2014—both positions are more likely reasons for his
invitation, especially considering that in that same year some important
Chinese elite members were invited as well. Some participants had to be
assigned to more than one category because their primary occupation
had changed over the years.
Table 5.1 presents an overview of the sectors to which these peo-
ple belong, while Table 5.2 shows their country of origin. It is striking
that exactly half of them represent financial (30%) or industrial (20%)
Table 5.1 Participants
Sector Number of partici-
in the inner circle by
pants
sector
Finance 17
Business 10
Politics 7
Politics/academia 2
Politics/media 1
Media 5
Think tanks 4
Royalty 3
Diplomats 2
Academia 1
Law 1
Table 5.2 Participants
Country Number of partici-
in the inner circle by
pants
country
USA 14.5
Netherlands 7
Great Britain 5
Italy 3
Spain 3
Canada 2.5
Belgium 2
Austria 2
Sweden 2
Turkey 2
Germany 2
France 1
Finland 1
Norway 1
Switzerland 1
Denmark 1
Greece 1
Portugal 1
Ireland 1
corporations. This is a very strong indicator that the organisers of these

conferences—we will call them ‘hosts’, as opposed to the less frequent
participants, who are ‘guests’—represent the interests of large financial
institutions and multinational corporations. More surprising is the strong
114 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
presence of members of European nobility and royalty. Most prominent

are the Dutch and Spanish royal dynasties, a sign of their economic influ-
ence in the contemporary world (the Dutch royal family, for example,
owns a large share of Royal Dutch Shell). The presence of presidents of
think tanks points to the relevance of these meetings for their work. As
for the presence of mass media, Richardson interprets this as evidence
of the growing interdependence between transnational policy makers
and media elites up to the point where the ‘editorial participants are no
longer, in any meaningful sense, distinguishable from the policy network
itself’ (Richardson 2011, p. 171). This is consistent with Castells’ (2011)
approach to network power.
At the core of the network, we can identify members of prominent
aristocratic and high-finance dynasties: the Dutch Royal family, the
Agnellis from Italy, the Wallenbergs from Sweden, the Rockefellers
from the United States. Between 1965 (that is, the creation of the euro
bond market) and the end of the 1990s (that is, SG Warburg’s merger
with UBS), the Warburg banking empire was represented prominently
by Sir Eric Roll (chairman SG Warburg) and Anthony Griffin (chair-
man Triarch Corporation).5 Vernon Jordan Jr, who in recent years has
been accompanied by the new CEO, Kenneth Jacobs, has represented
the Lazard bank for a long time. Edmond de Rothschild himself repre-
sented the Rothschild dynasty until the mid-1970s. In the last 10 years,
the main representatives of this dynasty (on the official list of par-
ticipants) were Franco Bernabe, Vice Chairman of Rothschild Europe
since 2005, and Marcus Agius, husband of Katherine de Rothschild
and former chairman of Barclay’s (2007–2012). Since the early 1980s,
Goldman Sachs has been very active in the Bilderberg network: Several
former Commissioners of the European Union, who have been regular
participants in the Bilderberg Conferences, have at some point worked
for Goldman Sachs International, the most prominent examples being
Romano Prodi, Mario Monti and Peter Sutherland (see following).
The Revolving Door

These people are at the same time examples of a phenomenon known as
the ‘revolving door’, switching between positions in government and the
economy: Peter Sutherland, for example, was a member of the Delors
Commission in the European Community between 1985 and 1989. In
1989, he attended his first Bilderberg Conference and became chairman
of Allied Irish Banks, one of the largest banks in Ireland. Subsequently,

he became director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
between 1993 and 1995, an organization traditionally close to the
Bilderberg network (Gijswijt 2007; Richardson 2011). Subsequently, he
was chairman of Goldman Sachs International for 20 years, a member of
the Steering Committee of Bilderberg, chairman of the European Group
of the Trilateral Commission (2001–2010) as well as vice-chairman of
the European Roundtable of Industrialists. Since January 2006, he has
been UN Special Representative for International Migration.
Of course, this phenomenon is well known at the national level. In
his official history of the Rothschild dynasty, Niall Ferguson (2000,
p. 491ff) describes the ‘proliferation of contacts between N M Rothschild
[chair Sir Evelyn Rothschild] and the political world’ since the mid-
1970s. Influential individuals with ties to the Rothschild dynasty, like
Joseph Retinger and Paul-Henri Spaak, were influential in the Bilderberg
Conferences even before Edmond de Rothschild joined the Steering
Committee in the mid-1960s. Their continued presence at these confer-
ences seems to contradict the myth of their declining role in global finan-
cial markets (and international politics). A striking recent example is the
architect of Britain’s New Labour, Peter Mandelson, who participated in
all conferences between 2008 and 2014 (except for election year, 2010).
Mandelson is a friend of Jacob Rothschild, whose daughter Hannah pro-
duced a documentary movie about his 2010 election campaign titled The
Real PM? Whenever Mandelson attended the conference, he met key
Tory politician and another friend of the Rothschilds, George Osborne,
Shadow Chancellor 2005–2010 and Chancellor 2010–2016. The frequent
meetings among the Rothschilds, Mandelson and Osborne have been the
subject of media investigations in recent years and most recent French
President Emmanuel Macron’s previous work at Rothschild is noted.
This overview shows the dominance of business and financial interests
in the Bilderberg network. One possible function of these meetings thus
appears to be to invite young politicians and journalists and to integrate them
into the Atlantic community—or, as Martin Taylor from Barclay’s put it, ‘We
want to control the politicians who come’ (Richardson 2011, p. 166).
Gender and Race
The Bilderberg Conferences have been characterised as an old boys
club. A look at the participation of women in these conferences
116 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
confirms this. In 1972, for the first time in its history, the Steering
Committee invited six women to a Bilderberg Conference. One of
them was Princess, then Queen, later Princess again Beatrix of the
Netherlands. She became ‘host’ of the conferences, having partici-
pated in all conferences between 1986 and 2015.6 In the meantime,
the number of female participants has grown steadily, from two to three
per conference in the 1970s, seven to eight in the 1990s, to almost 15
per conference in the last 10 years, reaching an all-time high in 2015
with 25 female participants—that is, 20% of all participants. This devel-
opment parallels norms elsewhere with women graduating to more
senior positions in politics and the economy. In general, the Steering
Committee is very much aware of current macroeconomic trends, and
the invited business representatives continuously represent the most
profitable sectors of the economy at any given time.
From the 176 female participants, only four can be considered to
belong to the inner circle, two of them due to their status as members of
important royal families (Princess/Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and
Queen Sophia of Spain), while the other two chair important American
think tanks: Marie-Josée Drouin-Kravis (and wife of Kravis-Kohlberg)
from the Hudson Institute and Jessica Matthews from the Carnegie
Endowment.
If the Bilderberg Conferences are an old boys club, can the same
be true of race—are they also a white boys club? Our analysis shows
that nothing similar to the inclusion of women can be observed con-
cerning non-white participants. While from time to time single non-
white people have been invited to the conferences (e.g. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice in 2008), there is only one non-white person
who belongs to the inner circle, having participated in 34 conferences
between 1969 and 2013, namely Vernon Jordan Jr from Lazard Frères.
A former activist for racial emancipation, he became very influential in
the Democratic Party from the 1980s and was responsible for inviting
Bill Clinton to the Bilderberg Conference in 1991. The same is true for
Asian participants—except for Nobuo Tanaka, who participated in 2009
when he was director of the International Energy Agency (IEA). No
Japanese has ever been invited to a Bilderberg Conference.
When the conferences started in the 1950s, all participants were white
Christian males. Soon the first Jewish participants appeared; now they
account for around 10% of all participants. Non-white participants are
still a big exception.
Table 5.3 All participants 2003–2015 by sector
Sector No. participants % of all participants % of inner

circle
Politics 227.5 29.2 12.5

Business 147.5 19.0 19.0
Finance 138 17.6 35.0
Academia 87.5 11.1 4.0
Media 68.5 8.8 10.0
Think tanks 39 5.0 7.0
Diplomats 13.5 1.7 1.5
Consulting 12 1.6 0.0
Law 10.5 1.3 4.0
Military 7.5 0.9 0.0
Secret service 5.5 0.6 0.0
Royalty 5 0.6 4.0
Politician/finance/academia 1 0.1 1.5
Politician/business/diplomat 1 0.1 1.5
Other 9 1.2 0.0
The Bilderberg Network 2003–2015

In the next step, we take a closer look at all participants of the Bilderberg
Conferences in the years 2003–2015. Table 5.3 shows the share of each
sector in the total population as well as its share in the inner circle.
The invited politicians include nine incumbent prime ministers and 10
former prime ministers; several other heads of state; more than 40 min-
isters who were in office at the time of the conference; and at least 20
former ministers; as well as 12 members of the European Commission.
Companies in the Inner Circle

A total of 29 participants have attended at least 10 conferences and
another 43 participants have attended between six and nine conferences
in the years 2003 and 2015. All of them come from 16 countries—
mostly from the United States, plus two representatives of supranational
institutions: European Commissioner Neelie Kroes from the Netherlands
and Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank,
2003–2011. The numbers of participants per country in the inner circle
118 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
Table 5.4 Participants in the inner circle 2003–2015 by country
Country Participants in inner % of inner circle % of participants from

circle this country
USA 20 28.0 12.0

UK 9 12.5 19.0
Canada 5 7.0 12.0
Italy 5 7.0 23.0
Germany 4 5.5 10.0
Spain 4 5.5 19.0
France 3 4.0 5.0
Austria 2 3.0 9.5
Netherlands 2 3.0 5.0
International organiza- 2 3.0 5.0
tions
Sweden 2 3.0 8.0
Ireland 2 3.0 22.0
Turkey 2 3.0 4.0
Belgium 2 3.0 16.0
Switzerland 2 3.0 8.0
Denmark 2 3.0 8.0
Portugal 1 1.5 4.0
Finland 1 1.5 4.0
Greece 1 1.5 6.0
Norway 1 1.5 4.0
correspond more or less with the total number of participants in the

Bilderberg meetings (Table 5.4).
Again, the financial and industrial sector are over-represented
compared with the number of total participants in the Bilderberg
Conferences in the years 2003–2015: Participants from the world of
finance represent 35% of the inner circle, while CEOs from multi-
national companies account for another 20–25% of the inner circle.
The following companies belong to the inner circle of the current
Bilderberg network: the World Bank, European Central Bank (2x,
EU), Österreichische Kontrollbank (Austria), Investor AB, Enskilda
(Sweden), Rothschild Europe (EU), Goldman Sachs International
(USA), Société Générale (France), Lazard (2x, France/USA),
Barclay’s (2x, Great Britain), Deutsche Bank (Germany), TD Bank
(2x, Canada), Allied Irish Banks (Ireland), Santander (Spain),
JP Morgan Chase (USA) and HSBC (Great Britain). Some of these
banks are the largest in the world, while Lazard and Rothschild are
the only banks that specialise in sovereign debt consulting for gov-
ernments.
This means the CEOs of some major international banks that are
competitors in the financial markets meet regularly with each other,
while CEOs of other major international banks are rarely, if ever, invited
to the Bilderberg Conferences. The Royal Bank of Canada, Citigroup,
the Bank of America and BNP Paribas (since its merger in 2000)—to
cite some prominent examples—are hardly ever invited to the Bilderberg
Conferences. This could mean that the transnational power elite is not
monolithic but rather made up of different fractions (within fractions
of transnational finance capital) who compete with each other as well as
with fractions of national capitalism.
Which corporations are at the centre of the inner circle of the cur-
rent Bilderberg network? The presence of Internet and telecommunica-
tion giants Google, Microsoft and Nokia indicates that the Bilderberg
group—which was sometimes accused of living in the past—has arrived
in the twenty-first century. Other important sectors are energy, led
by Royal Dutch Shell and featuring ENI from Italy and DONG from
Denmark, and aluminium, with leading manufacturers Norsk Hydro and
Alcoa. Another transnational corporation is Airbus, Europe’s leading
firm in the defence industry. Also featured are generalists like Siemens
and Koc Holding. Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is on board, as is
Fiat Chrysler. From the food and beverage industry, the only company in
the inner circle is Coca-Cola. In general, most of the companies whose
CEOs participate in the Bilderberg Conferences are market leaders in
their segment, sometimes globally.
Bilderberg Meetings and International Organisations

The following international organisations have particularly close ties to
the Bilderberg network: NATO, GATT/WTO, World Bank, European
Union and the Trilateral Commission.
All the secretaries general of NATO since the early 1960s have partici-
pated in at least one Bilderberg Conference. Some have even participated
in every conference during their term in office, as in the case of Joseph
Luns, who participated annually from 1964, when he was the Dutch
foreign minister. His successor, the British Lord Peter Carrington, later
became chairman of the Bilderberg Conferences from 1990 until 1998.
In recent years, all secretaries general of NATO have participated in at
120 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
least one conference before assuming this position and at least one while
in office.
A similar connection can be observed with the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a multilateral agreement regulating inter-
national trade that was in effect between 1948 and 1995 before being
replaced by the WTO. Most directors-general of this organization par-
ticipated in several Bilderberg Conferences while in office. Both Peter
Sutherland and Renato Ruggiero attended several conferences before
and during their term. Trade liberalisation has been an important item
on the Bilderberg agenda since its inception in the 1950s.
Another international organisation with a close connection to the
Bilderberg Conferences is the World Bank. The ties were not very tight
until the 1980s but beginning with James Wolfensohn in 1995 and
lasting till 2012, the presidents of the World Bank (Wolfensohn, Paul
Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick) participated in almost every Bilderberg
Conference. In recent years, instead of the president of the World
Bank, the secretary general of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
Christine Lagarde, has been a frequent guest.
Another supranational financial institution with very close ties to
the Bilderberg network is the European Central Bank. All three of its
presidents have previously been regular participants in the Bilderberg
Conferences: Wim Duisenberg, Jean-Claude Trichet and the current
president, Mario Draghi.
The last chairman of the Federal Reserve—the American equivalent of
the European Central Bank—to participate frequently in the Bilderberg
Conferences was Paul Volcker, in office between 1979 and 1987. He
was invited to four conferences during his term in office and remained
involved in the discussions over the following decades. His successors,
Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, participated only once each. In gen-
eral, it is difficult if not impossible to say whether changes such as these
reflect changes in the function of these conferences in the geopolitical
arena, or whether they can be attributed at least partly to a rising public
interest in the Bilderberg Conferences since the late 1990s (Wendt 2015,
p. 58ff) and the fact that some people in important official positions pre-
fer not to participate or at least not be listed on the official list. Another
explanation could be that in the meantime other forums exist, where
more specialised discussions can take place, like the Group of Thirty for
central bankers or the Eurogroup for finance ministers of the Eurozone.
Not only the European Central Bank but also the European
Commission—the executive body of the European Union—has close
links to the Bilderberg network, which can partly be attributed to the
influence of the organisers of these conferences on the European integra-
tion process in the 1950s (Gijswijt 2007, p. 300). Since 1998, at least
one member of the European Commission (sometimes up to four) has
been invited to the Bilderberg Conference every year.
Since its foundation following the Bilderberg Conference in 1973,
the European Group of the Trilateral Commission has had six chairmen,
all of whom have participated in Bilderberg Conferences, while four of
them (Kohnstamm, Monti, Sutherland and Trichet) are part of the inner
circle. The American group has had five chairmen so far—all of them
have attended Bilderberg Conferences.
The members of the Trilateral Commission are also regular attendees
at the Bilderberg Conferences. Over the last 10 years, between 30% and
40% of members of the European Group have participated in at least one
conference. For the North American group, the figure is slightly lower
(around 30%). This is not surprising, considering that prominent mem-
bers of the Bilderberg network were instrumental in the creation of the
Trilateral Commission after 1973 (Knudsen 2016). We can thus assume
that there is a strong overlapping of worldviews and aims between these
organizations.
The Bilderberg Network and Prominent Think Tanks

In this section, we examine the connections between the Bilderberg
network and various high-profile think tanks. These links are relevant
because from the outset it was the aim of the organisers of these confer-
ences to delegate tasks to other organisations. Since a suitable one did
not always exist, sometimes such an organisation had to be founded, as
in the case of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1958.
The Global Go to Think Tank Index Report (McGann 2016) is the
most comprehensive annual scholarly publication on think tanks. In its
ranking of US Think Tanks for 2015, the following institutions appear
on the top ranks: Brooking Institution, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies
and the Council on Foreign Relations. All four top American Think
Tanks have close links to the Bilderberg Conference.
122 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is, without doubt, the

think tank that is most closely linked to the Bilderberg network: Shoup
(2015) identifies 52 key people (that is, regular participants and/or
members of the Steering Committee) from the American delegations
to the Bilderberg Conferences—no less than 48 of them were mem-
bers of the CFR. Currently, six out of eight American members of the
Steering Committee are members of the CFR and its current (since
June 2007) co-chairperson, Robert Rubin has been invited to every
conference since 2010. After working at Goldman Sachs and serving
in the Clinton Administration, Rubin became a member of Harvard
Corporation (2002–2014), the governing body of Harvard University,
which is one of the academic institutions with the closest links to the
Bilderberg Conferences: six Harvard professors have been invited in
the last 13 years. Together with two other important persons from this
institution, they represent almost 10% of all academic participants in this
period.
From the beginning, the CFR has been closely linked to the inter-
ests of large banks and corporations. During World War II, it had a big
influence on American foreign policy and later succeeded in filling key
positions in the American government with its members (Shoup 2015).
Their systematic strategic discussions with like-minded members of the
European elite at the Bilderberg Conferences have certainly contributed
to the cohesion of the trans-Atlantic capitalist class and to the ongoing
dominance of multinational corporations from the EU and the United
States (Carroll 2010).
Another think tank with a long-standing presence at the annual
Bilderberg meetings is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Its president between 1950 and 1970, Joseph E. Johnson, was Honorary
General Secretary for the United States during almost 20 years and
attended all conferences between 1957 and 1980. More recently, Jessica
Mathews (Carnegie president between 1997 and 2015) has been a regu-
lar participant and has only missed four conferences during her time in
office.
A similar picture emerges regarding the Brookings Institution: Bruce
MacLaury, its president between 1977 and 1995, was a regular attendee
in his first years as president. In recent years, several senior fellows of this
think tank have participated in the Bilderberg meetings, demonstrating
the ongoing relevance of this institution for the Bilderberg network.
More surprising, considering the neoliberal ideology (Andersson and

Calvano 2015) of the Bilderberg network, is the presence in the inner
circle of Marie-Josée Drouin-Kravis, who has only missed one confer-
ence in the last 27 years and is a member of the Steering Committee. For
many years, she has been a senior fellow and vice-chair of the board of
trustees of Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. She is also mem-
ber of the CFR and of the Trilateral Commission. Richard Perle from
the American Enterprise Institute is another prominent (neo)conserva-
tive American thinker who belonged to the inner core of the Bilderberg
network until 2015. In general, though, the US government is better
represented at the Bilderberg Conferences when a Democrat is president.
A similar pattern of connections can be seen between the Bilderberg
network and the top non-US think tanks. In the above-mentioned
report, the top four think tanks are: Chatham House/RIIA (UK),
Bruegel (Belgium), the French Institute of International Relations
(France) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (UK).
Considering the close ties between the Bilderberg meetings and the
Council on Foreign Relations, it is a bit surprising that similar connec-
tions do not exist in the case of the Chatham House which is considered
its sister organisation. Still, leading Chatham House members occasion-
ally participated in the conferences.
The other three think tanks are closely linked to the Bilderberg net-
work. The French Institute of International Relations was founded in
1979 by regular Bilderberg attendee Thierry de Montbrial, who has
been its president ever since. Between 1974 and 2013, he participated in
almost all conferences. The International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS) was founded by Dennis Healey, Michael Howard and Alastair
Buchan in 1958 with financial support from the Ford Foundation
secured through Shepard Stone at the Bilderberg Conference in Fiuggi
in 1957 (Gijswijt 2007, p. 189). Buchan would serve as the first direc-
tor of the IISS, and in this role participated in several Bilderberg meet-
ings in the 1960s. Healey has been a regular attendee of the Bilderberg
Conferences since their inception, having participated in almost all meet-
ings between 1954 and 1967 as well as several more in the 1970s and
1980s. Between 1959 and 1987, he almost continuously held important
positions in the British government and shadow government and is one
of the few participants in the Bilderberg network to openly admit that he
considers these meetings a prototype of world government (Richardson
2011, p. 73ff). Buchan’s successor, Louis-François Duchêne, was
124 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
director between 1969 and 1974 and attended all conferences between
1969 and 1971. After Duchêne, Christoph Bertram became director of
IISS in 1974 and started attending the Bilderberg Conferences in 1978.
He was a regular guest until the end of the 1990s and can be consid-
ered part of the inner circle. The previously mentioned former president
of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Joseph Johnson,
was also vice-president of IISS between 1965 and 1981, and attended all
Bilderberg Conferences in this time period. Of the European think tanks,
this is definitely the one with the closest links to the Bilderberg network.
The director of Bruegel, Jean Pisani-Ferry, was invited in 2009. Jean-
Claude Trichet was the chairperson of this think tank between 2012
and 2015, after his tenure as president of the European Central Bank
(2003–2011). He was a regular Bilderberg participant, especially during
his term in office.
Agenda and Consensus
After this in-depth look at the participants at the core of the Bilderberg
network, we need to examine the agenda of the meetings. One of the
first topics for discussion in the Bilderberg Conferences was how to abol-
ish trade barriers in Western Europe. Once this task was accomplished,
the promotion of free trade in the world became an important matter
on the agenda. In 1955 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, ‘Marjolin argued
that the ultimate goal of liberalization should remain a global, multilat-
eral system of free trade and payments’ (Gijswijt 2007, p. 116) and in
1964 in Williamsburg, ‘The general conclusion … was straightforward–
the West should do all it could to lessen barriers to international trade
in the Kennedy Round in GATT. The European Economic Community,
in particular, had an obligation to avoid becoming a protectionist block’
(Gijwsijt 2007, p. 286). Later, when the GATT negotiations were
blocked, the Bilderberg network was considering sending another nego-
tiator who would put more pressure on the developing countries.
Another important issue is the centralisation of monetary policy
through the creation of monetary unions, like the European Union.
At the 1960 conference in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, shortly after the
implementation of the Rome Treaties, key protagonists like Marjolin or
Spaak predicted that sooner or later a political union would be inevitable
(Gijswijt 2007, p. 238). Banking dynasties at the centre of the Bilderberg
network accelerated the process of European integration by means of
financial innovation: the Warburgs in the 1960s, through the creation of

the Eurobond and Eurodollar markets in London (Ferguson 2010, pp.
201–233); and the Rothschilds in the 1970s, through the invention of
the Eurco/ECU (Ferguson 2000, p. 486; Wilson 2006, p. 76).
The debt crisis has been another recurring topic of discussions at
Bilderberg Conferences. In the 1980s Alfred Herrhausen, then chair-
person of Deutsche Bank, started advocating the necessity for debt relief
to the poorest countries. This position met with strong opposition from
other leading members of the network. Shortly afterwards, Herrhausen
was assassinated and the option of debt relief disappeared from the dis-
cussions. The continuing presence of leading employees of Lazard and
Rothschild (and of Warburg employees in the 1960s until 1990s) is a
sign of the ongoing importance of sovereign debt issues at the confer-
ences.
Finally, the question of the identity of the Western community and
its shared values has been another recurring topic on the agenda. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago, the Bilderberg network
agreed that NATO would continue to exist and that neither Russia nor
China belonged to the West. The negligible role played in the network
by elite members of countries from Eastern Europe can be interpreted
as a sign that these countries are perceived as not belonging to the same
community either.
In contrast, the rights of workers were a non-issue. When confronted
with an American trade unionist demanding guarantees of workplace
security after the next round of trade liberalisation, they redirected him
to the ILO, arguing that they did not feel responsible for the conse-
quences of trade liberalisation for the American working class.
For a group of powerful and influential people who claim that no
decisions are taken and that the goal is not to reach consensus, a sur-
prising number of sentences in the summaries of the discussions read
‘there was a consensus that …’ or ‘there was no agreement about …’
Furthermore, as Richardson (2011, p. 110) points out, often the task
is not to generate consensus but rather to reinforce an already existing
consensus.
126 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
Discussion
It is necessary to put some of the results from this analysis into a broader
context. Despite the growing economic significance of other regions of
the world, especially Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the
so-called BRICS countries—virtually nobody from these countries ever
gets invited to the Bilderberg Conferences. Why? First, it is important
to keep in mind that the Bilderberg Conferences are defacto an informal
forum of NATO (Gijwsijt 2007, p. 298). A quote from the introduction
to the conference report from 1985 illustrates this: ‘Lord Roll observed
that this year’s conference was taking place just a few days after the for-
tieth anniversary of VE day. Out of that event had grown the NATO
Alliance, and Bilderberg, while not formally a part of the Alliance, had
been born alongside it’ (Bilderberg Conference Report 1985, p. 11).
Since NATO is first and foremost a military alliance, it makes sense to
look at the relationship between NATO countries and China not only
from the perspective of current economic growth, but also from the per-
spective of military strength. According to a discussion paper from the
Bilderberg Conference in 1999, China was still considered a regional
power and not expected to rise to a global power at any time soon.
Nor is China independent from the transnational capital in the eco-
nomic field. In his analysis of ownership of large Chinese financial insti-
tutions, Harris (2012) demonstrates that although the Chinese state
always owns at least 51% of all large corporate  financial institutions
belonging to the Bilderberg network, like Blackrock, Goldman Sachs,
HSBC, JPMorgan or Barclay’s, own substantial shares of these corpo-
rations. Additionally, Kentor argues that based on his analysis of TNC
networks, it seems that ‘Chinese TNC networks have little impact in the
global economy’ (Kentor 2005, p. 282). Still, it is noteworthy that, con-
trary to the 1970s when it was not an option for the European aristo-
crats to invite the Japanese, since 2004 a few Chinese have been invited.
What does this imply for the role of the Bilderberg meetings in con-
temporary geopolitics? On the one hand, it is likely that the importance
of these meetings for world politics today is not the same as it was in
the 1950s, when most major Western countries sent high-level repre-
sentatives, or in the 1970s, when through the Rockefeller–Kissinger–
Brzezinski axis they were very close to the US power centre. A look
at the official lists of participants confirms this: the number of heads
of states and important ministers has diminished slightly over recent
decades. Nevertheless, a decline in influence is not the same thing as

becoming meaningless: Royal Dutch Shell (oil), Siemens (engineering)
and Deutsche Bank (banking) belong to the largest companies in their
sector worldwide. And in the meantime, other informal meeting points
of the transnational elite have been established, like the World Economic
Forum (established in 1971), the Trilateral Commission (established in
1975) and the Munich Security Conference (established in 1963).
Furthermore, until 1990 there was virtually no media coverage of
these conferences. However, this has changed since then, especially
since 2005 (Wendt 2015, p. 58ff) as  now the interested public is more
aware of the existence of these conferences, which is why more people
in important positions prefer not to participate—or at least ask to have
their names removed from the list of participants. At the same time, the
organisers are developing new ways of maintaining contact with for-
mer participants in positions of power, like 2005 participant and later
French foreign minister (2007–2009) Bernard Kouchner, whose wife
Christine Ockrent participated in the conferences in 2007 and 2008, or
Anne Applebaum, the wife of former Polish foreign minister Radosłlaw
Sikorski, who participated in 2015 and 2016.
Two further examples illustrate the ongoing relevance of the
Bilderberg Conferences for international politics. In 2015, the confer-
ence was held in Austria in early June. The secretary general of NATO,
Jens Stoltenberg, and the German minister for defence, Ursula von der
Leyden, attended. 2 weeks later, they announced that NATO needed
more funds and that the German government would override their
previous decision not to increase the defence budget. One of the top
defence contractors in the European Union is the transnational corpo-
ration Airbus. Its CEO, Thomas Enders, belongs to the inner circle of
the Bilderberg Conference and has participated in every conference since
2009. It does not seem far-fetched to assume that the discussions at the
Bilderberg Conference in Austria influenced von der Leyden’s decision.
In the same week, first-time participant and former French prime minis-
ter Alain Juppé announced that he would run for president of France at
the next election.
How should the results of our study be interpreted from the point
of view of elite sociology? For Marxists, global policy groups such as
the Bilderberg Conferences ‘act as vehicles of international elite inte-
gration, linking capitalists to a political-cultural community where class
extremes are mediated’ (Carroll 2010, p. 39), at the same time ‘defining
128 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
and promoting lines of policy that ensure the stability and reproduction
of a system shaped by capitalist social relations’ (Peschek 1987, p. 216).
Obviously, the Bilderberg Conferences fulfil this role by linking large
financial institutions with incumbent and possible future ministers, presi-
dents and other politicians. Organic intellectuals (represented by major
think tanks and other influential academics) provide the brainpower for
policies that help to stabilise and expand global capitalism (Robinson
2004).
From the functionalist (or pluralist) perspective, however, the same
phenomenon is perceived as much less problematic (Dahl 1961; Mitrany
1966). The emergence of supranational institutions is a quasi-natural
development stage on the way to a free market global economy. Informal
discussions based on Chatham House rules are considered a vital ingredi-
ent of the democratic process in order to allow frank discussions between
the decision makers. As long as the democratic system allows for other
interest groups to organise themselves and to articulate their interests,
there is nothing problematic with these off-the-record meetings between
the 0.1% and influential politicians and intellectuals. Furthermore, the
possibility of a unity of interests of the business community is questioned
on the premise that the corporations compete against each other in the
economic system.
As a result of the inability of both these approaches to explain the
actual policy-making process adequately, a third approach in elite sociol-
ogy emerged in the 1950s and 1960s: power structure research as devel-
oped by C. Wright Mills (1956) and slightly amended by G. William
Domhoff (1990, 2014). It studies decision-making processes in demo-
cratic capitalism based on detailed empirical research. Assuming that
societal power is rooted in both classes and hierarchical organisations,
it uses overlapping memberships in these organisations as a way to map
the underlying power structure, and takes disproportionate wealth and
income, as well as over-representation in decision-making groups, as key
indicators of power. The results point to the existence of an upper class
rooted in corporate ownership, which exercises power through a lead-
ership group that consists of actively involved corporate owners and
their high-level employees in corporations as well as in foundations,
think-tanks and policy-planning organisations that they fund and direct.
Domhoff’s (1975) analysis of the function of clubs like the Bohemian
Club for social cohesion among members of the upper class (and in the
end for the policy-making process) remains valid for this study of trans-
national elite gatherings like the Bilderberg Conferences.
While on the national level controversies surrounding these
approaches and the empirical findings that would validate them remain
to this day, the transnationalisation of our society generates new research
questions: Does a transnational power elite exist or is it emerging? How
homogeneous is it? What is the relationship between transnational and
national elites?
Conclusion
Ground-breaking studies on the transnational business community and
transnational capitalist class have been published over the last 15 years
(Carroll 2010; Carroll and Fennema 2002; Kentor and Jang 2004). Our
in-depth analysis of the participants of the Bilderberg Conferences pro-
vides further answers. Indeed, a trans-Atlantic elite (van der Pijl 2012)
emerged after World War II. With some qualifications, we can speak
of a fraction of the transnational capitalist class. However, it is limited
geographically: the centre of this world-system consists only of member
countries of NATO. The rest of the world is perceived as either periph-
ery (Eastern Europe, Middle East, etc.) or rivals (Russia, China). Some
national networks seem to be closer to each other than other networks,
a situation that might have its historical roots in the conflict between
Protestants and Catholics (or liberals and conservatives): when the
Bilderberg Conferences were founded in the 1950s, Retinger was very
conscious about not inviting members of the Spanish elite associated
with the Habsburgs. An overview of the most important corporations
and politicians at the centre of the Bilderberg network prima facie con-
firms a certain liberal-Zionist dominance.
Recent historical research (Großmann 2014) has revealed that more
or less at the same time as the liberal fraction of transnational capital
began meeting at the annual Bilderberg Conferences, the conservative
fraction started meeting in other elite circles, like the Vaduz Institute or
Le Cercle. Le Cercle, an even more secretive transnational informal gov-
ernance network, brings together conservative politicians, businessmen
and members of the intelligence community. In the early years, it was
dominated by the Vatican; however, especially since the 1980s, British
and American conservatives have held most key positions. Between 1996
and 2008, its chairman was Norman Lamont, who held various posts in
130 A.M. ZIELIŃSKI
the British government between 1983 and 1993. Before joining parlia-
ment, he worked for N.M. Rothschild and Sons, and became director of
Rothschild Asset Management.
Research into transnational informal governance networks, like
Bilderberg or Le Cercle or MPS, can provide us with important data
on the individuals and organisations involved which then needs to be
put into its socio-historical context. Once sufficient data is available, a
Bourdieausian, field-theoretical approach should help to identify the
structure of the transnational power elite.
Notes
1. See https://www.bilderbergmeetings.org.
2. See http://scribd.com/bilderbergboys.
3. Other such forums include the Aspen Strategy Forum, the Munich
Strategy Forum and the Ambrosetti Forum.
4. The dominance of finance and business warrants—with some qualifica-
tions—the term ‘transnational capitalist class’ (see Carroll 2010; Robinson
2004; Sklair 2001).
5. According to Ron Chernow (1993, p. 636), Siegmund Warburg had hired
Griffin as a diplomat, which provides some explanation for his constant
presence at the meetings.
6. According to Gijswijt (2007, p. 270), who cites van der Beugel, Princess
Beatrix was indeed the first woman to participate in a Bilderberg
Conference; however, already in 1963 in Cannes (she ‘was usually reticent
during the plenary Bilderberg sessions, but all the more active outside the
official debates’).
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CHAPTER 6
The Rise and Decline of the Business

Roundtable?
Bruce Cronin
As the organized voice of the largest corporations in the world’s larg-

est economy, the US Business Roundtable has gained notoriety not
only for its potential power but also its effectiveness, spurring imita-
tors from Canada to Australia and New Zealand. Since its formation
in the early 1970s, the Roundtable has won remarkable legislative vic-
tories and built popular support for the notion that what is good for
business is good for America. Yet, at the same time, it has also been
adept at compromise and retreat, which has led some to suggest its
time has passed. With echoes of the passing of the Roman Empire,
John Judis (2000) and more recently Mark Mizruchi (2013) have sug-
gested that the very success of the Roundtable in winning early victo-
ries over labor rights and the reach government regulation removed
its raison d’être, winning the battle but losing the war of reshaping the
US polity.
While arguably representing the narrow interests of a particular group
of firms, the Business Roundtable meets the criteria for “think tanks”
presented by Georgina Murray in Chap. 3: “permanent persuaders”
providing allegedly non-partisan expert opinion on policy matters in an
B. Cronin (*) 
University of Greenwich Business School, London, UK

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_6
134 B. Cronin
attempt to influence these. While it directly represents the interests of

large industrial companies as members, since these firms comprise a cen-
tral part of economic activity, the Roundtable’s positions potentially have
a very wide impact on society. Certainly, it has aimed at, and succeeded
in, reframing the political agenda on major economic issues.
Burris (1992) categorizes the Roundtable as a “moderate-conserv-
ative” lobbying group distinct from the “ultra-conservative” National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and Chamber of Commerce lob-
bying groups and from “moderate-conservative” research groups such
as the Committee for Economic Development (CED). Where research
groups tend to develop and apply ideological positions to policy matters,
the Roundtable has been quite pragmatic from the start, pursuing the
interests of business in general and big business where there is a con-
flict, but avoiding narrow self-interests of particular members. It is dis-
tinguished from other interest groups in framing this pragmatism within
popular tropes and mobilizing grassroots support.
This direct, pragmatic yet long-running engagement by the CEOs of
the largest US industrial companies in policy matters meets Gramsci’s
definition of “organic intellectuals,” engaging not only economically but
also in the social and political arenas:
The capitalist entrepreneur … already characterised by a certain direc-

tive and technical (i.e. intellectual capacity) … must be an organiser of
masses of men … an organizer of the ‘confidence’ of investors … If not
all entrepreneurs, at least an élite among them must have the capacity to
be an organiser of society in general, including all its complex organism of
services, right up to the state organism, because of the need to create the
conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class … (Gramsci
1971, pp. 5–6)
In this chapter, I review the rise of the Business Roundtable, examine

the organizational methods underpinning its success and consider
whether it is now in a state of decline. I predominantly employ an his-
torical method, drawing on a variety of accounts of the major policy bat-
tlegrounds over the last 50 years in some detail. I supplement this with
a social network analysis of the changing position of the Roundtable in
the network of Congressional lobbying, utilizing a little-used dataset (see
Lee and Cronin 2016 on the value of combining such methods in het-
erodox research).
6 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE BUSINESS ROUNDTABLE? 135
Origins
As meticulously detailed by Linder (2000), the immediate origins of
the Business Roundtable lie in the corporate mobilisation from the late
1960s against the perceived power of unions in general and construction
unions in particular. But as Domhoff (1983) points out, the organiza-
tions that coalesced at this time had deep roots in the Business Council,
the center of business policy networks since 1933. He quotes DuPont
chair Irving Shapiro: “The Roundtable was created to have an advocacy
organization. It wasn’t created by the Business Council, but by the same
people” (1983, p. 135).
Union power in the construction sector was particularly problematic
for industrial firms in the 1960s. While many large US manufacturers
had responded to rising labor costs by relocating production offshore
in the 1960s and 1970s, construction unions were largely impervious
to this, as their production was inherently localized. Rising construc-
tion costs from labor shortages arising from the Vietnam draft directly
impacted on large US industrial firms when constructing new plant
(Linder 2000).
Amidst a variety of industry responses to the escalation in construc-
tion costs, a key figure was US Steel Corporation CEO Roger Blough;
in a bid to weaken union power, he halted construction work on his
plants in June 1967 to deny alternative employment to workers strik-
ing against local contractors. US Steel was joined by large local employ-
ers Westinghouse and Jones and Laughlin. Chamber president and
construction firm owner Winston Blount subsequently called for more
widespread united employer action against construction unions (Linder
2000).
In May 1969, a Construction Users Anti-Inflation Round Table
(CUAIR) was established to build solidarity among large industrial
firms in setting common terms when agreeing on construction con-
tracts and to find methods to reduce the power of construction to press
wage increases. A distinct feature of the group, which would also come
to characterize the Business Roundtable, was that it solely comprised
CEOs or chairs of major industrial companies. Roger Blough agreed to
chair CUAIR on the condition that member CEOs agreed to person-
ally participate in the policy committee (Linder 2000). Founding par-
ticipants comprised CEOs or chairs from GE, Standard Oil of New
Jersey, Union Carbide, Kennecott Copper, GM, and AT&T. Other early
136 B. Cronin
participants included Alcoa, Shell, Bechtel, Ebsasco, Procter & Gamble,

Dow Chemical, B.F. Goodrich, International Paper, Consumers Power,
the Aluminum Company of America, American Electric Power, General
Dynamics, Humble Oil, Owens-Corning, Texaco, and DuPont.
By 1972, Blough had turned to broader concerns, working with
Alcoa CEO John Harper to bring together a number of groupings of
senior executives agitated by prevailing labor conditions, largely to
rationalize existing overlapping membership. CUAIR became the
Construction Committee and a “Labor Law Study Group” became
the Labor Law Committee of the new Business Roundtable—for
Responsible Labor–Management Relations in October 1972, each with
a full-time executive director. The “March Group” an informal network
of CEOs who had for a long time met at the New York members’ Links
Club merged in early 1973 (Linder 2000; Waterhouse 2014).
Modus Operandi
A key organizing principle of the Business Roundtable is the direct
engagement of the CEOs of the largest US industrial corporations in its
daily activity. Blough’s experience in the sluggish politics of business rep-
resentative organizations and his direct involvement in US Steel’s conflict
with construction unions proved the need to unite these key decision
makers in what many business figures interpreted as an existentially defin-
ing period. In turn, the mobilization of CEOs generates direct access to
very senior levels of government; the Roundtable’s first lobbying activity
on its formation was a meeting of half of its executive with the White
House budget director, the Federal Reserve chair, and the chair of the
Council of Economic Advisors (Waterhouse 2014).
A second characteristic of the Roundtable is its industrial composi-
tion. Members are overwhelmingly vertically integrated industrial firms
operating in stable regulated markets with few competitors. While the
particular industries represented shifted with changes in economic struc-
ture, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and IT in place of engineering, until the
late 1990s it remained apart from the finance sector—banks, insurance
firms—and from investment capitalists throughout, who were cast as a
destabilizing influence on business (Waterhouse 2014).
Third, the Roundtable eschews partisan politics in preference for
a long-term effort to build support across Congress and does not
fund PACs or individual candidates, although individual corporates
Fig. 6.1 Business Roundtable—registered annual expenditure on lobbying,

1998–2015
do: John Harper (Alcoa) and Irving Shapiro (DuPont) were promi-
nent Democrats; Blough and John Young (Hewlett Packard) were
Republicans (Waterhouse 2014). Instead, the Roundtable organizes
around a set of task forces focused on legislative areas deemed to be
restricting business; in addition to the labor law and construction com-
mittees, there were initially task forces on consumerism, taxes, environ-
ment, and trade; these expanded to other topics as the need arose. Each
task force was chaired by a CEO with administrative support from the
CEO’s firm; the Roundtable itself had few administrative staff (nine in
1974; 11 in 2004), although the expenditure on hired attorneys and
lobbyists remained substantial. This was funded by membership fees of
$2‚500 to $35,000 per annum, a total of $1.9 million in 1974, with 161
members paying $10,000 to $35,000‚ and a total of $3 million by 2004
(Slavin 1975; Domhoff 2006). Recent spending on lobbying is reported
in Fig. 6.1.
Fourth, the Roundtable effectively combines national coalitions of
business organizations with grassroots mobilizations of their members,
138 B. Cronin
allies and employees at local levels. The Roundtable Construction

Committee initially continued CUAIC efforts to mobilize local
“user groups” in solidarity against local construction unions and in
Congressional lobbying. This was extended to employees and household
consumers in a mobilization of major employer organizations against the
1977 Labor Law Reform Bill, which saw an unprecedentedly wide coa-
lition and the first business use of grassroots lobbying. Thereafter, the
focus of popular mobilization was to support specific legislative efforts
(Waterhouse 2014).
The Roundtable’s focus, then, is more tactical than the propagation
of abstract principles characteristic of research-oriented think tanks. An
early foray into this area, an expensive public relations campaign in the
Readers Digest to improve public perceptions of business, was quickly
dropped when no measurable impact on public opinion was detected
(Waterhouse 2014). The Roundtable maintains a pragmatic legislative
focus, drawing on the well-honed tactical skills of business competition,
deployed and developed skills in exploiting the political divisions of the
day and framing their goals within universal popular concerns ahead of
narrow business interests.
Effectiveness
To assess the effectiveness of the Roundtable’s lobbying activity, a set of
major issue areas in which the Roundtable has engaged are considered.
These cover labor, inflation, consumer protection, regulation, taxation,
trade, and healthcare.
Labor
By Linder’s (2000) account, the Roundtable’s precursor, CUAIR, had
sought to create a “united front” among employers to expand the supply
of skilled labor, avoid overtime, stop local building during local strikes,
and support local collective bargaining. The organization gained regular
access to senior members of the administration but was not effective in
impacting government intervention in collective bargaining. The CUAIR
funded research on nonunion contracting, and provided and funded
legal representation for small contractors in labor disputes, rolling back
union picketing rights; it also formed dozens of construction local user
groups to build employer solidarity.
A key target for employers became union hiring halls. Contractors

depended on hiring halls in order to maintain a steady supply of special-
ist combinations of labor. These were readily unionized, providing an
organizational focal point with highly skilled and unionized crafts at their
core. Attempts to limit union power here typically faltered against indi-
vidual contractors’ needs for labor and the alternative costs of the com-
plex personnel administration in house. In January 1971, Blough called
for a “hard crackdown on construction unions,” and advocated the
use of nonunion contractors; a nonunion hiring hall was established in
Houston later in the year.
The position of unionized contractors declined through the 1970s,
with their share of domestic contracts falling from 69 to 41% from 1965
to 1975, with nonunionized contractors gaining market geographic share.
The nonunionized Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) doubled its
membership to 10,000 from 1972 to 1976, accounting for 32% of non-
residential construction by 1971, and gaining large-scale industrial projects
from Roundtable firms. In 1970, DuPont—which had previously used
unionized contractors—awarded three contracts to nonunionized construc-
tion firms, in pursuit of lower construction costs. By 1974, half of DuPont’s
construction was undertaken by nonunionized firms. In 1973, Shell Oil
awarded a $12 million contract for a natural gas plant to a nonunionized
Houston firm, the first nonunion contract in highly unionized Michigan.
At the same time, an uneven supply of skilled workers in complex
projects at critical locations and times sustained unionized contrac-
tors. Attempts to regularize the supply of skilled labor saw the Nixon
Administration, with support from unionized contractors, introduce
training programs and tripartite bargaining in the construction indus-
try to limit local wildcat strikes. The Business Roundtable, now on the
scene, called for legislation to give national unions control over their
local branches, but saw the main mechanism being increased employer
bargaining power through strengthened local contractors’ associations.
In April 1975, the Ford administration attempted to legislate for
larger area bargaining, accompanied by a concession to allow second-
ary picketing of nonunion subcontractors. The Roundtable immedi-
ately resolved to oppose this, noting the major cost reductions coming
from the growing nonunion sector. It reiterated its preference for local
employer solidarity over larger area bargaining that would strengthen
national unions and spill over into other industries. Employers mobi-
lized against the extension of picketing via a National Right to Work
140 B. Cronin
Committee campaign, vigorously supported by Ronald Reagan, who

was contesting Ford for the Republican presidential candidacy, leading
Ford to veto the Bill after Congress passed it. When the Bill was rein-
troduced to Congress by the Carter Administration in 1977, it was deci-
sively defeated, amidst vigorous opposition from the Roundtable and a
wide coalition of business organizations. By 1984, the Roundtable could
report an overall decrease in construction wages by 45 cents per hour. In
summary, Linder (2000, p. 414) argues that
the Roundtable was unable to secure enactment of its national legislative

agenda, but it did thwart the AFL-CIO’s congressional initiatives. Its most
important accomplishment, undermining unions’ quasi-monopoly of the
large-scale industrial construction so vital to Roundtable members’ accu-
mulation strategies, was a self-help measure undertaken largely without
state assistance.
Inflation
By Waterhouse’s (2014) account, in a position of relative weakness in the
early 1970s, generated by labor shortages and spiraling prices driven by
the Vietnam War, business had pragmatically called for government con-
trols on wages and had supported Nixon’s New Economic Policy from
August 1971 to 1973, introducing wage and price stabilization. The
program was supported by 70% of the public polled, and was publicly
welcomed by, among others, the chairs of GM, Chrysler, Metropolitan
Life Assurance, Republic Steel, and Pan American Airlines. While con-
tested among their membership and qualified as “a necessary evil”‚ the
NAM and Chamber also supported the program. But as controls could
only effectively be short-lived, employers were concerned to strengthen
their bargaining position once controls were lifted. Accordingly, the
Chamber mounted a public relations campaign associating labor power
and government spending as underpinning causes of price inflation.
By contrast, the Roundtable agitated from the start against further
government controls on business. The CUAIC’s first act following its
October 1971 formation was a meeting with senior government officials,
where they made a vigorous call for the immediate cessation of the con-
trols. In Congressional hearings on the possible extension of controls in
1974, the Roundtable and individual members argued that controls were
associated with economic decline as they restricted investment.
The linkage among government spending, union power and infla-

tion, worsened by government, was deployed tactically in a major mobi-
lization against proposed extended picketing rights in the 1977 Labour
Law Reform Bill discussed above. The Roundtable, NAM, and Chamber
sought common cause among big and small employers and consumers,
who it was alleged would suffer from enhanced union power. Similarly,
the three lobbied successfully against the 1978 Equal Opportunity and
Full Employment Bill, on the grounds that full employment at prevailing
union rates would fuel inflation.
The Roundtable and NAM initially tolerated Carter’s 1978 voluntary
wage and price restraint as the price of reduced government spending.
But as the Administration applied more complex wage and price guide-
lines in the face of the 1979 oil price shock, the Roundtable, NAM,
and National Association of Retailers turned against wage and price
guidelines in favor of the “hard policy choices” being prompted by the
accession of Paul Volcker as chairperson to the Federal Reserve and his
aggressive 1979–1982 monetary restrictions and the accompanying
recession.
Consumer Protection
With rising affluence through the 1960s, greater exposure of product
failures and sympathetic Democrat administrations, public support grew
for consumer rights beyond caveat emptor, crystallized on 1969 calls for
a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA). Business organizations mobilized
against the perceived state encroachment on their decision-making, with
the Roundtable establishing a Consumer Issues Working Group (CWIG)
in 1973. Acknowledging widespread popular support for consumer
rights legislation, the CWIG did not oppose this directly but rather
sought to rally the minority opposition in Congress to delay and amend
to limit the effectiveness of proposals. A grassroots strategy was deployed
to lobby the minority Congress members, asking small business members
of the NAM to write to Congress as independent voices.
Alongside the Congressional initiative, the Roundtable led efforts to
try to shape public opinion on the issue, commissioning a public opinion
poll that counterpoised the creation of a new, overarching and expensive
federal agency against improving the effectiveness of effective agencies.
With 75% of respondents supporting the loaded answer, the poll result
was promoted widely and effectively against the CPA proposal, while
142 B. Cronin
reinforcing the general business position against state encroachment and

exploiting public distrust of state bureaucracy and paternalization. When
the Bill passed Congress in 1975, Ford, under pressure from business-
aligned Reagan for the Republican nomination, succumbed to the busi-
ness lobby to veto it. On resubmission under Carter in 1978, sustained
business public relations campaigning against big government dissuaded
congressional support (Waterhouse 2014).
Regulation
By the late 1970s, the Roundtable had succeeded in weakening union
and consumer protection rights, defeating price controls and commit-
ting successive administrations to reducing government spending. It
had done this with considerable tactical nous in building wide coalitions
exploiting the political divisions of the day in Congress, but framing each
targeted issue as part of a burden on business efficiency that was eco-
nomically detrimental to the public as consumers. On this basis, they
turned their attention toward a more comprehensive reduction in gov-
ernment regulation of business.
A precursor to the push for regulatory reform was the industrial
deregulation of the Carter administration. Regulation of airlines, truck-
ing, and telecommunications had been established in the Progressive
and New Deal eras to protect firms from excessive competition (Coase
1959; Kolko 1963). But by the 1970s a sufficiently complex set of
imperfections, market and price restrictions, capacity and expansion
limitations had developed that the incumbent firms welcomed change,
although they were highly divided in their response to specific propos-
als. Consequently, the national business organizations, including the
Roundtable, which typically represented both winners and losers from
specific deregulation proposals, had discussed the need for regulatory
reform for many years without consensus and thus were not highly moti-
vated to mobilize to resist change (Derthick and Quirk 1985).
While quiet on deregulation, the Roundtable was a vocal opponent
of any new regulation without strong cause. As part of his anti-inflation
policy, Ford accepted the view that government regulation often gener-
ated hidden costs and mandated a cost–benefit analysis for all new gov-
ernment regulations. The Roundtable quickly established a regulation
taskforce under Irving Shapiro (DuPont) to collect a mass of examples
of “harmful or unnecessary” regulations from members and estimates of
their cost. It then used these examples to lobby for legislation for com-
prehensive regulatory reform (Waterhouse 2014).
However, Waterhouse (2014) argues that the Roundtable made two
tactical mistakes in promoting the legislation. First, it pressed for a clause
removing the presumption that a proposed regulation was valid unless
it could be proved otherwise. Second, it opposed a proposal requiring
regulatory agencies to provide small firms with regulatory exemptions
and flexibility in application. These proposals weakened unity within the
coalition of large and small businesses and strengthened the resolve of
their opponents, leading Carter to drop comprehensive reform in favor
of a small business-focused Regulatory Flexibility Act, without mandated
cost–benefit analysis.
Reagan’s 1981 election provided a fillip to the pursuit of regulatory
reform, with a new executive order requiring cost–benefit analysis of
existing regulations where compliance costs exceeded $100 million and
the creation of a Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief. The task
force asked the Roundtable to identify the ten regulations that could be
changed to greatest benefit and then opened itself up to take complaints
of regulatory burden from businesses. Efforts to resubmit comprehen-
sive regulatory reform through the Democratic-controlled House were
unsuccessful, but presidential regulatory review under Reagan saw regu-
latory capacity diminished by the widespread appointment of advocates
to head regulatory agencies (Waterhouse 2014).
Fiscal Policy
By Waterhouse’s (2014) account, the government deficit was seen by the
Roundtable not only as a driver of inflation (deficit spending detached
from productivity growth) but also as crowding out funds for business
investment. Because the government was borrowing to finance the defi-
cit, firms had to pay higher rates to borrow capital for investment. Thus
the government deficit undermined the ability of firms to invest to mod-
ernize plant, increase productivity, and develop their competitiveness
against growing foreign exports. Further, as Roundtable taxation task
force chair and GE CEO Reginald Jones argued in 1975, not only did
government fiscal policy make it expensive to raise capital externally; tax
policies made it difficult to fund investment from retained earnings.
The Roundtable pursued an acceleration of the depreciation rate
allowed as a tax deduction. Since 1934, firms had been allowed to
144 B. Cronin
deduct the cost of wear and tear on plant and equipment from the
amount on which they were liable to pay tax. Governments had period-
ically shortened or increased the period of wear and tear deemed nec-
essary before replacement in order to encourage or discourage capital
investment. The Roundtable argued that the economic difficulties of the
1970s demanded increased capital investment, and advocated a reduc-
tion in the capital replacement period (depreciation rate). The proposal
was supported by a lobbying mobilization by the Roundtable, NAM,
Chamber, and a range of trade associations, reframing the desire for
tax relief as a contribution to national competitiveness and economic
growth.
But while reduced capital depreciation periods were valuable to the
large capital-intensive industrial firms at the heart of the Roundtable,
smaller firms with lower capital expenditure were more interested in
lower interest rates and reductions in the gross rate of corporation tax.
Tax reduction campaigns had spread since the success of a 1978 referen-
dum on the issue in California. This “supply side” movement advocated
a general reduction in taxation, and business taxation, in particular, to
provide more incentives for entrepreneurial activity and competition as a
driver of productivity.
Reagan’s election embraced the latter generalized tax cut policy,
which he incorporated alongside $140 billion in government spending
cuts in the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Bill. This, together with reduc-
tions in regulation and stable monetary policy, were sufficient to bring a
broad sway of business leaders, including the Roundtable, to support the
new policy regime. When reduced depreciation rates were included, the
Roundtable assembled the usual coalition and grassroots mobilization to
support the Bill, overwhelming the Democrat-controlled house.
But the Act did not survive the severe recession faced by the
Reagan Administration, providing little scope for the proposed spend-
ing cuts yet with the tax cuts opening up the deficit and increasing
pressure on interest rates. In a bid to reduce the deficit and increase
the availability of capital for investment, in mid-1982 the Roundtable
called for a closing of the deficit by a reversal of the tax cuts, albeit
retaining the lower headline marginal rates. But this broke the coali-
tion with the Chamber and other trade associations of smaller firms
who valued the tax cuts much more and divided the Roundtable itself,
with less capital-intensive firms less committed to the deficit reduction
goal (Ehrbar 1982). Taxes were subsequently substantially increased
by the Administration in the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, but this

was mainly through reductions in corporate allowances, including a
third of the depreciation allowance (Martin 1991; Waterhouse 2014).
In 1983, amidst recession and a renewed rising government defi-
cit, the Roundtable established a budget task force chaired by Cigna
Insurance CEO Robert Kilpatrick, who launched a campaign to restrain
government spending. In 1985, the Roundtable organized a nationwide
letter-writing campaign among its employees, mobilizing a million peo-
ple around a call to “Halt the Deficit,” involving cuts to defence and
social security. But unusually out-of-sync with public sentiment and the
fine lines of political division, and with the Roundtable and among other
business associations themselves divided on the issue, the campaign failed
to win over the House Democrats. Instead, with Democrat support,
the Administration reduced the corporate tax rate from 46 to 34% but
removed $100 billion in annual tax exemptions.
Only Bush’s 1990 deal with the Democrats to combine spending cuts
with increases in marginal tax rates made inroads into the budget defi-
cit, a deal advocated by the Roundtable and NAM with wide support
from major CEOs over Chamber and NFIB opposition (Mizruchi 2013;
Waterhouse 2014). Having lost tax cuts under George Bush Snr and
maintained by the Clinton administration, the Republicans were insist-
ent on reversing these under George W. Bush, who would not enter-
tain cuts to business taxation until personal tax cuts were enacted. The
Roundtable and NAM agreed to this and were subsequently rewarded
with cuts to capital gains and dividends and accelerated depreciation
allowances (Mizruchi 2013), with their priorities for economic growth
tied to the 2002–2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations.
Trade
The Roundtable had opposed NAM and Chamber proposals in the early
1980s for an industrial revitalization program as overly statist and mis-
representing the state of US competitiveness. Instead, via its trade task
force under Lee Morgan (Caterpillar), the Roundtable advocated free-
trade agreements to allow US firms to compete on a larger interna-
tional scale. The Roundtable joined with the Round Table of European
Industrialists in 1987 to advocate a WTO in place of the GATT, and
with the Canadian Business Council on National Issues for a US–Canada
free trade agreement. Roundtable member Edson Spencer (Honeywell)
146 B. Cronin
argued that an expansion of international trade and investment would

stimulate US industry. Prominent Roundtable firms led the US–NAFTA
coalition, undertaking state-level public relations campaigns and eventu-
ally winning the Clinton Democrats to the policy, albeit with qualified
side agreements on labor and environmental standards.
In accounts of the Roundtable’s legislative program, little atten-
tion has been given to the organization’s efforts to secure liberalization
of international trade and investment, perhaps taking this for granted
and seeing little conflict at stake. But as Milner (1988) emphasizes, the
shift toward free trade was initially bitterly opposed by less competitive
industrial sectors. For the most competitive industrial sectors, which the
Roundtable tended to represent, liberalization of international trade and
investment was a major prize.
Healthcare Reform
By Judis’s (1995) account, in the face of rapidly rising health insurance
costs, the Business Roundtable advocated systematic reform against
Reagan proposals to deregulate healthcare. The Roundtable, via Xerox
and the big steel firms, engaged with the 1986 National Leadership
Commission on Health, which recommended universal reform. In 1991,
this group of big employers proposed that businesses that did not pay
insurance be taxed to cover the uninsured, thus reducing the overall cost,
a proposal endorsed by the Chamber in 1993.
When the Clinton Administration moved to enact this proposal, the
Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers, and Chamber ini-
tially supported it. But a coalition of small business organizations, health
insurers, drug companies, and conservative media mobilized to turn
public opinion and the peak organizations against any mandatory health
insurance. This would allow small businesses to continue to avoid con-
tributions to insurance premiums or taxes, and prevent the capping or
regulation of premiums paid to insurance firms or prices paid for drugs
or healthcare.
Noting that public support for the detail of the healthcare reform
rested on trusting the president, conservative media, centered on The
American Spectator, mounted an unrelenting campaign to undermine the
credibility of Clinton’s past personal and business dealings. In 6 months,
public support for the plan fell from 59 to 46%. Amidst this grow-
ing public uncertainty, the Chamber came under pressure from large
members that did not provide insurance, including Pepsico, General

Mills, and Woolworths. Meanwhile, the National American Wholesale
Grocers’ Association resigned from the coalition and many small mem-
bers defected to the National Federation of Independent Businesses
(NFIB) that was campaigning against reform. Within the Business
Roundtable, opposition was mobilized within its Health, Welfare and
Retirement Task Force, chaired by the CEO of Prudential Insurance, and
including 18 firms that were either in health or that did not insure their
workers. This group eventually convinced the Roundtable to oppose the
plan, and the NAM and the Chamber then followed.
Through the George W. Bush Administration, the Roundtable con-
tinued to press for reduced health insurance costs, the major cost item
for large employers. Immediately after Obama’s election in 2008, the
Roundtable, the NFIB, America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP), and
the American Association of Retired Persons advocated universal insur-
ance to spread the costs of healthcare. The Roundtable eventually sup-
ported Obama’s capping of the costs of treatment, despite reservations
that they would have to fund the shortfall for their employees. The
AHIP, Chamber, and NFIB opposed yet were defeated (Mizruchi 2013).
Judis (1995, p. 13) sees healthcare reform as an example of “American
business [lacking] the kind of farseeing leaders who have the intelligence,
objectivity, and authority to unite it around its long-term interests.” But
it can also be interpreted as tactical maneuvering to reconcile a range of
diverse business interests, and a pragmatic response to the outcome.
Evaluation
The case studies suggest that the Roundtable’s modus operandi repeat-
edly secured legislative success. In each case, a specialized task force was
established to develop detailed proposals attuned to the political land-
scape of the day. This then brokered coalitions with a wide range of other
business organizations, with differing interests and policy objectives, to
unite on the specific proposal. Congress and the Administration were
lobbied systematically from a wide range of organizations, reinforced by
grassroots mobilization of individual members and their employees to
build up a groundswell of public opinion in support of the proposal. In
these mobilizations, the proposals were carefully framed within a popular
trope, such as opposition to rising prices, taxation, or big government.
148 B. Cronin
Table 6.1 Outcomes of Roundtable policy advocacy
Policy area Outcome
Labor rights Stalled, reframed; won extra-legislatively

Inflation Reframed, won
Consumer protection Reframed, stalled
Regulation Reframed, stalled
Fiscal policy Reframed, initially won, lost, sidelined
Intl. trade and investment Reframed, won
Health care reform Stalled, compromised
Table 6.1 summarizes the outcomes of the cases discussed. The his-

torical evidence suggests that in all but two of the policy areas, the
Roundtable achieved its goals of preventing further encroachments
of state regulation and reframing the policy debate. In the case of fis-
cal policy, it initially won tax and deficit reductions, but later saw these
reversed. In the case of healthcare reform, it stalled the changes it
opposed and eventually found a compromise. But the great gains in roll-
ing back labor rights and inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, and inter-
national trade and investment in the 1980s and 1990s, undoubtedly
outweighed the qualified outcomes elsewhere, for these were viewed as
existential issues for business.
Decline?
The early rapid gains of the Roundtable against organized labor in the
1970s are often counterpoised against the more mixed results of the
1980s, and the complex and at times paralyzed policy environment that
has followed. If the Roundtable’s early success is attributable to its com-
position as the powerful commanding heights of the economy, why has
this power not created continued and unchecked dominance of the pol-
icy agenda since?
Two arguments are commonly advanced to explain this paradox:
fragmentation and it being the victim of its own success. The fragmen-
tation thesis is that structural changes in the economy associated with
globalization and technical change have undermined the industries in
which the Roundtable has been rooted, and thus its economic power and
political influence; it has struggled to respond to the changing environ-
ment. The victims of success thesis is that the sophisticated tactics and
overwhelming resources invested in lobbying that enabled the early

policy gains have overwhelmed the political system, paralyzing effective
decision making and consensus formation, leading to outcomes against
the interests of the dominant participants.
These arguments will be evaluated in their own terms and in the light
of the case studies presented, then considered in the light of an empirical
analysis of the Roundtable’s position in the structure of lobbying activity
over time.
The Fragmentation Thesis

Waterhouse (2014) points to a generational shift in the Roundtable in
the early 1980s as foundational “charismatic” leaders retiring and a weak-
ening of the industrial sector in the structure of the US economy and
thus a decline in its influence. Mizruchi (2013) argues that this reflected
increased expectations of shareholder value maximization among Fortune
500 firms, the average CEO tenure of which fell from 9.7 years in 1982 to
6.8 years 2002. The weakening social cohesion among the economic elite
from increased turnover was reinforced by a decline in director interlock-
ing among firms, as board membership diversified with internationalization
and director workload increased with new obligations under the Sarbanes
Oxley Act. Average interlocks among SP1500 firms, where a director of
one firm simultaneously serves as a director of another firm, fell from 7.14
to 4.98 in the period from 2000 to 2010 (Chu and Davis 2011).
In terms of structural change, a new business lobby, the American
Business Conference, was established in 1981 to represent the rapidly
growing risk-oriented mid-sized finance and high-tech service sectors,
gaining the ear of the Reagan administration and winning reductions in
capital gains taxes and weakening of financial regulation. The “big three”
(the NAM, Chamber, and Roundtable) had, with the addition of the
ABC and the NFIB, become the “big five” (Waterhouse 2014). Jeffrey
Bimbaum (1997) compared the Roundtable to “a vacuum-tube opera-
tion struggling to survive in a digital age,” with its members “too busy
restructuring, reengineering, merging or acquiring to dabble in public
policy” (cited in Linder 2000, p. 210).
But while these structural changes are said to have undermined the
position of the Roundtable as a cohesive central coordinating force, the
organization readily accommodated the structural changes to the econ-
omy, recruiting the CEOs of the major firms in the new industries. In
150 B. Cronin
1988, the Roundtable leadership was drawn from firms from these indus-
tries—Pfizer, Aetna, American Express, and IBM—while major firms
in rising industries such as IT (Microsoft, Yahoo) and retail (Walmart,
Target) continued to join the Roundtable (Waterhouse 2014). While
director interlocks may be an important force for corporate cohesion, the
evidence is mixed and there may be other mechanisms (Mizruchi 1996).
Victim of Success Thesis

Judis (2000) argues that the success of the business offensive against
state regulation has been its undoing, as the excessive short-term self-
interest has stymied the political and institutional balance of interests
necessary for the pursuit of a common good that provides long-term
benefits for business. He argues that underpinning the great periods of
US economic and social progress—the Progressive Era, the New Deal
and the 1960s—were political-institutional combinations of strong pub-
lic-spirited contest among political parties, an independent public service
responsive to the balance among contesting interest groups and non-par-
tisan moderate-policy elite organizations with a vision of the common
good. But by the 1990s, political contest had become extremely partisan
and deadlocked, the public service was politicized, business investments
in lobbyists outweighed the capacity of countervailing interests, and
there was no willingness in elite circles to attempt to forge a non-partisan
vision in the face of partisan hostility.
Mizruchi (2013) draws on this view, arguing that the victories of the
conservative business elite consolidated by Reagan in the early 1980s
removed the principal constraints on business—labor and government
regulation—but in so doing removed the drivers of business unity.
Banks, which through a central role in the interlocking director network
through the post-war era, had turned their attention to financial ser-
vices and investment, and no longer mediated sectional conflicts within
the corporate elite. Mizruchi offers two cases to support his view that
class-wide elite cohesion has been broken, one concerning fiscal policy
and the other healthcare. In the case of fiscal policy, he argues that the
1986 tax defeat led the Roundtable to retreat and then abandon efforts
to resist Republican tax cuts thereafter. With this abdication, no moder-
ate public service oriented policy elite organization remained to provide
elite cohesion, as the National Civic Federation and the CED had in the
past. Likewise, with healthcare, self-interested divisions within business
delayed and threatened to destroy a healthcare reform package that

would have reduced the costs of all participants, including business.
Judis’s (2000) analysis of despair for a lost liberal democratic equilib-
rium amounts to a moral exhortation, a call for a courageous educated
elite to put aside short-term self-interest in favor of the long-term com-
mon good and to redesign institutions to better resist partisan capture.
Yet, the rise and decline of the great epochs of US progress can as read-
ily, and more convincingly, be interpreted within a Gramscian frame-
work. From this perspective, the Roundtable is engaged in an ongoing
war of position, building coalitions, and advancing and retreating tacti-
cally as necessary to maintain its hegemony.
The case studies illustrate the Roundtable acting constantly as a
hegemon with mixed tactical success. It was very successful in the 1970s,
faced challenges in the 1980s‚ but was still very successful in arguably the
most important arena—international trade and investment. Mizruchi’s
(2013) tax case needs to be interpreted in the larger context of expand-
ing international trade and investment. The tax deductions defeat of
1996 was followed by tactical success in reducing the deficit via marginal
tax rises and spending cuts under George Bush Snr and Bill Clinton. The
acceptance of a deficit and support for tax reductions with George W.
Bush was not an abdication of principle but an act of pragmatic, tactical
advance. Likewise in healthcare, the Roundtable attempted to find legis-
lative outcomes that would meet the needs of most of the varying busi-
ness interests, and ultimately succeeded with its support for Obamacare;
this is characteristic of a hegemon, accommodating varying interests, not
an expression of narrow self-interest.
Hegemonic Position
The activity of the Roundtable as a hegemon, building tactical coalitions
framed in terms of broad popular interest, is likely to see it centrally con-
nected to other organizations in the policy environment. Building on
the historical evidence discussed above, this section provides a systematic
analysis of this proposition, employing a social network analysis of US
lobbying activity.
Network analysis has previously identified the central position of the
Roundtable among business organizations. In an informal analysis of the
executive committees of ten business-planning groups, Burch (1983)
found the Business Council to be the most central of these organizations,
152 B. Cronin
alongside the Roundtable, CED, Council of Foreign Relations and the

Trilateral Commission. Burris (1992), in a more systematic and formal
network analysis, found that the Roundtable, the Business Council,
the Conference Board, and the Council of Foreign Relations were the
most central organizations. More recently, Strangfeld (2006) found that
Roundtable member firms became more central in the interlocking direc-
tor network among energy firms in the 1970s and 1980s.
The analysis in this chapter makes use of quarterly returns made by
registered lobbyists in accordance with the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure
Act (Office of the Clerk of the US House of Representatives 2016).
Where traditional social network analyses of director interlocks simply
infer corporate cohesion (Cronin 2011), this approach offers direct evi-
dence of the joint representational activity of business organizations. The
data for this analysis comprise the quarterly returns of all registered lob-
byists, detailing their representations to government entities during the
period, for 68 quarters from the start of electronic archiving in 1999 and
the end of 2015—two million observations.
The data from each quarterly register were modeled as an advocacy
network, comprising directional ties from registered lobbyists to gov-
ernment entities; multiple representations of a lobbyist to the same gov-
ernment entity during the quarter were modeled as multiple ties. An
example of an advocacy network from the third quarter in 1999, is pre-
sented in Fig. 6.2. The network was visualized using a spring-embedded
algorithm with default settings from a Gower scaling in Netdraw 2.154
(Borgatti 2002). The circles are registered lobbyists, with node size
reflecting the number of representations registered in the quarter (their
outdegree). The squares are the government entities being lobbied, their
size reflecting the number of representations made to them during the
quarter (their indegree). The arrows from one node to another indicate
representations from lobbyist to government entity registered during the
quarter. Nodes located toward the center of the visualization are more
central to the lobbying activity.
Lobbying activity in this example is centered on the Senate and House
of Representatives from a large mass of lobbyists. On the right is an array
of the major economic departments: Treasury, Transport, Environmental
Protection, and Defense. Between these two poles of government lies a
set of highly active lobbyists. These include peak trade associations, such
as the Chamber and NAM; specialist lobbying firms; large individual cor-
porations, such as IBM and GE; and the Roundtable.
Fig. 6.2 Advocacy network Q3, 1999
The social network analytics underpinning this visualization provide

some precision in the identification of influential positions in the net-
work, beyond a simple count of the number of representations (indegree
or outdegree centrality). For example, a node’s degree centrality can be
weighted by the degree of the nodes to which it is connected, to high-
light nodes that are connected to more highly connected nodes (a met-
ric known as eigenvector centrality). Closeness centrality highlights those
nodes that have the shortest paths to all other nodes in the network.
Betweenness centrality highlights nodes that are commonly on the short-
est paths to each pair of nodes in the network, a measure of brokerage
(see Cronin 2016; Borgatti et al. 2013 for accessible elaborations).
To evaluate the position of the Roundtable in the network of organi-
zations in the policy environment, these common measures of network
centrality were calculated for each registered lobbyist in each quarter.
But these measures only make sense when nodes of the same type are
considered. Two different types of organizations are evident in a com-
bined network in Fig. 6.2: lobbyists and government entities—that is, a
two-mode network. The act of lobbying is of a different quality to the
act of being lobbied, and while the data document common behavior
154 B. Cronin
among lobbyists, there is only partial information on the behavior of

those being lobbied—particularly their own interactions. So, in order
to carry out the centrality analysis, the network of lobbying activity
alone needs to be extracted. The one-mode network of lobbyists can be
extracted from the two-mode data by projecting a relationship between
two lobbyists where they lobby the same government entity. So, where
the Roundtable and the Business Council lobby the Senate in the same
quarter, a tie between the Roundtable and Business Council is projected.
The subsequent centrality analysis then effectively models the relative
competitiveness of each lobbyist in the lobbying activity.
The longitudinal dataset allows the measurement of the evolution
of the competitiveness of lobbyists over time. To consider the position
of the Roundtable within the policy environment during this period,
the various dimensions of centrality were compared with the mean cen-
trality of all lobbyists over time. A linear regression with an interactive
variable was then undertaken to determine whether the trend in the
Roundtable’s position diverged from the mean trend during the period.
significance of the coefficient β2.

In the regression Eq. (6.1), divergence is given by the magnitude and
Y = α1 + β1 X + α2 D + β2 XD + µ (6.1)
where
Y is the centrality metric
X is the quarter
D is a dummy representing the two groups (Roundtable or not)
Metrics were calculated with the igraph package in R. Degree and

betweenness centrality were normalized by adjusting for the total nodes
in each network. Eigenvector and closeness centrality were normalized
on a 0–1 scale. Betweenness was estimated betweenness with a cut-off
of six steps. There were 126 observations and two degrees of freedom in
each regression.
As shown in Table 6.2, all regression models fitted and accounted
for much of the variation in the data. Roundtable centrality significantly
diverged from the mean trend in the case of eigenvector centrality and
converged toward the mean from a below-mean position in the case of
betweenness centrality. There was no significant divergence from the
mean trend for outdegree centrality or closeness centrality, while the
intermediating role of the Roundtable in terms of all actors increased.
Table 6.2 Business
Centrality metric Adj R2 Divergence (β2)
Roundtable relative
centrality, 1999–2015 Outdegree 0.1231** 0.0002652
Eigenvector 0.3766*** 0.0008937**
Closeness 0.3971*** −0.0000521
Betweenness 0.4237*** −73.06875**
***p < 0.000; **p < 0.001
This demonstrates that while the Roundtable did not increase the num-
ber of representations to government more than the mean during the
period (outdegree), it was increasingly making representations in a man-
ner similar to the most connected lobbyists (eigenvector centrality)—that
is, it was becoming more central among the most central lobbyists and
becoming more of an intermediary (betweenness centrality).
Conclusion
This review of the major business policy battlegrounds of the last 50
years indicates that reports of the decline of the Roundtable are greatly
exaggerated. The organization remains a powerful think tank with
an effective modus operandi. The lean central organization and direct
engagement of the CEOs of the major US industrial corporations in its
policy and implementation see its strategy and tactics being honed by
those at the forefront of capitalist competition and cooperation. These
CEOs are highly focused on making a difference—identifying scope for
value adding and pursuing it vigorously. The heightened strategic and
tactical sense translates readily into the policy arena, eschewing partisan
ideology for pragmatic, tactically astute, legislative lobbying, with clear
ability to build coalitions and to frame the specific goals within broad,
popular themes in the polity.
While critics may yearn for a policy environment that is more accom-
modating of the broad range of social actors, such as labor and govern-
ment, this does not mean the US polity is lacking hegemonic players. The
Roundtable has proved itself to be a hegemon in the Gramscian sense,
achieving specific goals by building effective coalitions. For a hegemon,
tactical gains and losses occur within a longer-term war of position.
The persistence of the Roundtable and its effective modus operandi
indicates that the forces of elite cohesion are wider than those formed
by the interlocking personnel between organizations. It has been able to
156 B. Cronin
accommodate new powerful organizational entities that have emerged

with changes to the structure of the economy and continues to become
increasingly central to the US policy advocacy network.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Bill Carroll and David Peetz for their

detailed and constructive comments on this paper, to David Dekker for the
lobbying competitiveness metaphor, and to Larry Su for suggesting the
divergence test employed.
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CHAPTER 7
Neoliberal Think Tank Networks in Latin

America and Europe: Strategic Replication
and Cross-National Organizing
Karin Fischer and Dieter Plehwe
The discussion of international think tanks has focused on two major

themes: the contribution of global think tanks towards public policy and
governance matters (McGann and Sabatini 2010; Stone 2013) on the
one hand; and think tanks’ role in and relevance for ideological orien-
tation in transnational civil society and class formation processes on the
other (Carroll and Carson 2006; Keck and Sikkink 1998). The two per-
spectives are not mutually exclusive. For example, in the case of climate
change, decision makers have to cope with organized efforts to under-
mine evidence-based climate policy. This involves dealing with ways
that advance climate change (policy) scepticism if not outright denial
(Oreskes and Conway 2010) that are driven by ideological concerns. In
the case of social welfare, ‘knowledge shaping efforts’ (Bonds 2011) of
think tanks have served to turn the traditional notion of welfare against
K. Fischer (*) 
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
D. Plehwe 
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_7
160 K. Fischer and D. Plehwe
deprivation into a neoliberal discourse on welfare as cause of dependency

(Medvetz 2012).
Think tank networks are part of preference, civil society and class-for-
mation processes, and an increasingly important element of transnational
‘multi-stakeholder’ policy making (Gleckman 2016). Partisan net-
works need to be observed in relational terms, according to movement
and counter-movement dimensions. Neoliberal think tanks were stra-
tegic trailblazers for the ascent of neoliberalism. Free market advocacy
networks started to expand at a time when neoliberal socialization was
gaining momentum. Nowadays, they complement conventional politi-
cal institutions—for example, international organizations, diplomacy and
commissions. On the national and transnational levels, they attempt to
influence public policy.
This chapter aims to fill a further research deficit in think tank
research. While scholars have written about the coordinated efforts
of left-wing networks (Carroll 2007) and of neoliberal forces (Cockett
1994; Walpen 2004) around the globe, we do not know much about the
world regional activities of think tank networks in general and of con-
tinental neoliberal networks in particular. Literature on regional think
tank networks are still scarce (see Álvarez-Rivadulla et al. 2010; Mato
2007 on Latin America; Dakowska 2009; Gagatek and van Hecke 2011
on Europe). In order to move a further step forward, we provide new
empirical evidence on the capacities and knowledge efforts of neoliberal
networks in both Latin America and Europe.
Latin-American networks have been organized in more formal ways
since the 1980s, followed by European networks about a decade later.
In the meantime, we can distinguish five interrelated Latin-American
neoliberal networks (Fischer and Plehwe 2013) and two interrelated
European networks (Plehwe and Schlögl 2014). In each world region,
they comprise more than 100 organizations.
Building on our own previous research based on the development of
extensive databases on think tank networks in Europe and Latin America
in particular,1 we apply a think tank network approach (Plehwe 2015,
pp. 359–361) to compare and contrast European and Latino neoliberal
networks for the first time. We track and trace the historical evolution of
think tanks and think tank networks in each region, and present impor-
tant structural data on the regional networks. We show the work per-
formed in and by the regional networks and examine how closely they
7 NEOLIBERAL THINK TANK NETWORKS IN LATIN AMERICA … 161
are integrated in terms of staff or board interlocks. We classify the think

tanks and investigate the question of how the common worldview and
different contextual parameters play out in the forging of transnational
regional think tank networks.
We expect differences—for example, we generally expect stronger
think tanks in Europe than in Latin America—but also mimetic patterns
and behaviour due to shared worldviews and the strategic replication of
strategies, partly due to the role played by neoliberal elite coordination
within both networks by members of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS),
which was founded by Friedrich August von Hayek and others in 1947
(Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Walpen 2004).
The chapter is organized as follows. We introduce and examine the
Latin-American networks, then follow with the European networks. The
chapter then compares and contrasts important dimensions of the two
regions and their networks. Our conclusion highlights important find-
ings and points towards future research needed to deepen our under-
standing of both strategic replication and the emerging class of dominant
think tank professionals.
Neoliberal Think Tank Networks in Latin America:

Against State-Led Development and the Pink Tide
The history of neoliberal think tanks in Latin America can be traced back
to the 1950s. They resulted from alliances between businessmen and
policy entrepreneurs that aimed at building an intellectual infrastructure
independent from state agencies, ruling professionals and public univer-
sities. Their political goal was to combat the dominant post-war devel-
opment paradigms of import substitution industrialization and social
reform led by an interventionist developmental state. Argentina was an
early hotspot in this respect. One of the first think tanks was the Centro
de Estudios Sobre la Libertad (CDESL) founded in the 1950s. In the
1960s, the Instituto de la Economía Social de Mercado (IESM) and
the Fundación de Investigaciones Económicas Latinoamericanas (FIEL)
were born (Ramírez 2007; cf. Walpen 2004 for additional cases). Some
of them started as business organizations that later were transformed into
think tanks.
A distinctive feature of the think tank landscape in Latin America has
been the founding of private universities by think tank entrepreneurs.
Neoliberal intellectuals considered higher education to be a particu-

larly important area for promoting political change. Flagships are
Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala, founded by MPS mem-
ber Manuel Ayau in 1971, and the Graduate School of Economics and
Business Administration (ESEADE) in Buenos Aires, founded by MPS
member Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr in 1978. In Chile, the Fundación
Adolfo Ibáñez, presided over by MPS member Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda, set
up a business school in the 1950s that was transformed into the Adolfo
Ibáñez University in the 1980s. The universities became important sites
for transnational networking and the collaboration of neoliberal academ-
ics.
Given the polarized political situation, the pioneer think tanks fre-
quently went beyond intellectual activities. They also engaged in direct
action, such as infiltration of trade unions, blacklisting of trade union
members or even the support for counter-revolutionary militias. Other
activities were more similar to today’s think tank activities—that is, pub-
lications, radio propaganda and dissemination, public campaigns, student
and business education and leadership training. Support in the form of
conference sponsorship, scholarships and visits from renowned liberal
scholars came from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and
its founding president Leonard Read, the Latin American Information
Committee, Heritage, the Aspen Institute for Humane Studies (all from
the United States), and the German Naumann Foundation for Liberty
(Bailey 1965; Fischer 2016). Apart from foreign foundations (local and
transnational), the private sector was and still is the main source of fund-
ing.
A second wave of neoliberal think tank founding started in the 1980s.
While the first phase (from the 1950s to the 1970s) was characterized
by personal contacts and informal networking, the subsequent expansion
was furthered through the institutional support of the Atlas Economic
Research Foundation and other networking agencies. The Atlas umbrella
think tank was established in 1981 by the founding father of the British
Institute of Economic Affairs and MPS member Antony Fisher to pro-
vide seed money for neoliberal think tanks around the globe (Cockett
1994).
The 1980s and 1990s saw the spread of structural adjustment poli-
cies and neoliberal restructuring in Latin America, which reduced the
size and the role of the state. This coincided with the decentralization
of government functions. In this context, the think tanks and networks
of organized neoliberalism became important political actors (Braun

et al. 2010, p. 93). While independent university research centres and
NGOs suffered from the crisis, well-staffed think tanks actively created
contact points with the government departments that were now open
to them. In Argentina, for example, Menem implemented in the 1990s
what FIEL and other think tanks had developed in the 1970s and 1980s
(Ramírez 2000).
In our sample, we can differentiate between think tanks that dissemi-
nate ‘pure doctrine’ and those that are closer to politics. Most think
tanks in the first group are disciples of the Austrian School of Economics.
Key figures like Hayek and Mises are extraordinarily popular in Latin
America. Think tanks like the Instituto Ludwig van Mises (Brazil),
Fundación Bases, Fundación Atlas 1853 and Fundación Libertad
(Argentina), Instituto Democracia y Mercado (Chile), Instituto Mises
Colombia and the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala City
promote their books in Spanish and prepare ideas that are easy to digest
bits. The large number of ‘Austrian School’ aficionados may be due to
the immigration of right-wing intellectuals from European countries dur-
ing and after World War II. Pragmatic neoliberal think tanks attempt to
influence public policy making. They have fewer purists on staff and fre-
quently engage in concrete political and economic reform-issues related
to the Washington Consensus.2
When we look at regional think tank networks in Latin America,
what can we say upfront about the capacities of the different set-ups?
Atlas is the biggest think tank network on a global level, and the sec-
ond largest on the Latin American continent. The Atlas global direc-
tory of think tanks currently comprises 457 institutions in more than 90
countries worldwide (including 76 think tanks in Latin American and
the Caribbean).3 The Virginia-based foundation became a central node
in the transmission of funds, personnel and other resources in the trans-
national flow of neoliberal ideas and policies. It supports its members
through joint events, travel grants, awards and fellowships. Moreover,
Atlas enhanced the professional character of think tank activities and per-
sonnel by developing start-up training and an MBA course for think tank
executives.
Atlas, the largest network in the region, overlaps with the Hispanic
American Center for Economic Research (HACER). It was established
in 1996 and is headquartered in Washington, DC. HACER focuses on
Hispanic Americans in North and South America. A total of 91 think
tanks belong to this network, 73 of them in Latin America, six in Spain

and 12 in the United States.4 HACER adopts an explicitly regional per-
spective and tackles common problems faced in different Latin American
countries. HACER’s Latin American news section provides country
reports and public policy papers, distributed in English and Spanish.
An extensive online library offers neoliberal classics and contemporary
literature from key neoliberal intellectuals in Spanish. HACER’s board
of trustees is headed by Atlas president and MPS member Alejandro
Chafuen.
Another transcontinental network, the Fundación Internacional para
la Libertad (FIL, or International Foundation for Liberty), emerged on
the initiative of the Spanish right. FIL was founded in 2003 in Madrid
on the initiative of the Fundación Iberoamérica Europa, a think tank
linked to former Spanish Prime Minister José Aznar. FIL is now head-
quartered in Rosario, Argentina. The Peruvian-Spanish writer and public
intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa leads the organization. On FIL’s execu-
tive board we find other prominent Latin American MPS members like
Gerardo Bongiovanni, president of Argentina`s Fundación Libertad and
member of several think tank boards, long-standing executive director of
Chile’s Libertad y Desarrollo Cristián Larroulet and Alejandro Chafuen.
The academic board assembles neoliberal economists from three conti-
nents.5 Currently the FIL network comprises 26 Latin American think
tanks (out of 37); the United States and Spain are represented by five
and four think tanks, respectively, and support comes also from the
Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
Network number four is the Red Liberal de América Latina (RELIAL,
or Liberal Network for Latin America) linked to the Liberal International
(LI). RELIAL was founded in 2004 with the help of the Friedrich
Naumann Foundation and has an office in Mexico City. In terms of
party memberships and electoral success, the LI is rather weak in Latin
America. This makes it even more important to nurture free market
orthodoxy through think tanks: out of the 38 Latin American members,
only six are party organizations.6 The network has links to think tanks in
the United States and United Kingdom, Canada, Spain and Germany.
Leading neoliberal intellectuals such as Gerardo Bongiovanni, Carlos
Sabino and Mario Vargas Llosa staff the RELIAL boards.7
RELIAL has its ‘counterpart’ in Latinoamérica Libre, our
smaller think tank network number five of the Unión de Partidos
Latinoamericanos (UPLA). The regional spinoff of the International
Democrat Union was founded in 1992. Both are headquartered in

Santiago de Chile. UPLA gathers reactionary right-wing parties that
are linked to former dictatorships, traditional conservative parties, and
new parties and movements from the (neoliberal) right. Party mem-
bers include the far-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA)
from El Salvador, Chile’s Renovación Nacional and Unión Demócrata
Independiente, and recent formations like Mauricio Macri’s Propuesta
Republicana (PRO) from Argentina and the Movimiento Demócrata
Social from Bolivia. In total, 12 Latin American think tanks are part
of the think tank network; it receives international support from the
German Hanns Seidel Foundation and Atlas.8
There is a considerable overlap between RELIAL and Latinoamérica
Libre, which indicates the proximity of reactionary, conservative and
neoliberal ideas. Political parties behind the two networks articulate dif-
ferent views and programs and display different profiles in their national
contexts, however, the related think tanks interact and support each
other. The think tank model enables cooperation and the forging of
discourse coalitions across party lines (Hajer 1993). At the same time,
political dimensions of division and competition continue to play a role
within think tank networks. Think tanks in Latin America often back the
policy position of certain powerful individuals. Think tank profession-
als coordinate election campaigns and/or formulate the economic pro-
gram for the candidate. In these cases, think tanks sideline or substitute
a—non-existing or weak—party organisation. Examples of this include
Manuel Ayau in Guatemala and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (Vommaro
et al. 2016). It is a common feature that the front men pack their gov-
ernments with think tank personnel when they achieve power. Another
example of this is Chile under Sebastián Piñera or the Berger adminis-
tration in Guatemala, which appointed think tankers from Libertad y
Desarrollo and the Center of National Economic Studies (CIEN) respec-
tively to ministers (Fischer 2012, 2016).
All five think tank networks in Latin America strongly overlap.
Figure 7.1 displays the five networks. We represent only those think
tanks that belong to at least two of the five networks; this reduces the
number from 114 to 57 organizations. This allows us to focus on the
organizational integration of the Latin American think tank networks.
In terms of numbers, Argentina stands out, with 25 individual organi-
zations, followed by Peru (16) and Chile (12), while large countries like
Brazil (nine) and Venezuela (two) surprise nowadays with a rather poorly
Fig. 7.1 Think tank networks in Latin America. Source http://thinktank-

networkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.php?title=Category:Think_Tank_
Network; we are grateful to Moritz Neujeffski who has supplied the network
graphs
developed—albeit very active—think tank infrastructure, as measured

against the size and the political environment of the respective countries.
In Chile, neoliberals expanded their think tank base immediately after
the transition in order to maintain its influence under democratic con-
ditions. Peru has seen the spread of specialized neoliberal organizations
since the 1990s. These were spurred by the beneficial environment cre-
ated by the Fujimori administration.
Network overlap perhaps helps to explain common norms and shared
perspectives among the five networks. Unifying principles include limited
government, individual freedom, free enterprise and the rule of law; their
common bogeyman is state-led development. Lately, the ‘pink tide’—
that is, left and centre-left governments that came to power in several
Latin American countries around the turn of the millennium—has been
branded as populist and irresponsible.
Individual think tanks perform quite different tasks. Activities are var-
ied, ranging from academic research to policy advice and op-ed writing.
Some of the think tanks have a specific target audience—for example,
youth or students. Altogether, they form a neoliberal think tank universe
that is characterized by quite common forms of division of labour among
these groups. What Bailey stated in 1965 is still accurate: ‘Whereas one
society will be activists, engaging in civic action, pressure tactics and/or
direct action against the enemies, another group will be concerned with
propaganda and education’ (1965, p. 201).
A head-count of individuals who are engaged in the neoliberal think
tank universe in Latin America is a total of 811 individuals (research last
updated in July 2016). Think tank staff and board members are often
affiliated with more than one think tank (on average, every individual has
about four positions—see Fig. 7.2). In sum, they make up for 3384 posi-
tions in Latin American think tanks.
Board members are members of advisory boards or supervisory
boards. They form the biggest part of the affiliates. They also hold most
interlock positions. In absolute numbers, HACER, which is also the
biggest network in terms of organizations, has the most affiliates. FIL
is likewise more ‘staff intensive’ than RELIAL, although it is composed
of fewer think tanks. Atlas is very well equipped with think tank profes-
sionals in leadership positions—maybe as a result of its training programs
(Table 7.1).
When we look at transnational think tank networkers—that is, indi-
viduals who hold at least two think tank positions in different countries
on the continent, we discover a high number of members of the Mont
Pèlerin Society: 51% of these transnational linkers take part in the circle
(see Fig. 7.2). Mont Pèlerin members clearly outnumber others when it
comes to occupying positions in three or more think tanks. We, there-
fore, consider them a key element of transnational neoliberal knowledge
Fig. 7.2 Think tank networks in Latin America: interlocks (two or more

positions). Source http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.
php?title=Category:Think_Tank_Network, MPS members: light grey; size of cir-
cle grows with number of think tank positions
power elites in C. Wright Mills’ (1956) sense of occupying organiza-

tional leadership positions. While classical power elites in large state and
private sector organizations control much larger organizations and more
staff, knowledge power elites secure critical positions that shape people’s
beliefs and the ways people think about issues. Knowledge elites control
knowledge transfer and diffusion. They organize repetition and replica-
tion activities relevant to exert knowledge power.
Table 7.1 Latin American networks: number of think tank personnel by cat-

egory (staff, board, leadership)
Think tank Founded No. of No. of No. of No. of No. Total

network in think tanks think staff board of
(Latin tanks members members CEOs
America (total)
and the
Caribbean)
Atlas 1981 76 457 124 455 283 862

FIL 2003 26 37 105 364 143 612
HACER 1996 73 91 224 695 270 1189
Latinoamérica 1992 12 14 58 82 69 209
Libre
RELIAL 2004 23 31 91 289 132 512
Total 602 1885 897 3384
positions
811 indi-
viduals
Source http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.php?title=Category:Think_Tank_
Network
Emphasizing differences between think tanks along the lines explained

before (pure doctrine versus applied research) can easily lead to underes-
timate the extent to which diverse organizations are linked by common
board and/or staff positions. Of the total 103 think tanks, 46 are inter-
related due to interlocking leadership positions (about 45%). Given the
strong links between think tanks across networks, the additional links
between think tanks due to joint leadership positions and the extraordi-
nary presence of a neoliberal intellectual elite in interlock positions, the
networks provide an ideal base for discourse coalitions across a range of
issue areas.
Neoliberal Networks in Europe: Limiting the Welfare

State and Opposing Political Integration
Neoliberal think tank activities in Europe date back to the Cold War era.
Contrary to many think tank stereotypes, private ‘civil society’-based
think tanks were common in many countries across continental Europe
after World War II. They were founded around the same time and even
before, thus, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was established
in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. In Germany, for example, the

Arbeitsgemeinschaft für eine Soziale Marktwirtschaft (ASM, or Action
Group for the Realization of the Social Market Economy) was founded
to support Ludwig Erhard’s original plans for a neoliberal social mar-
ket economy against Social Democracy and the Christian Catholic wing
of his own party. Ordoliberal scholars like Ludwig Röpke and Walter
Rüstow were active as writers and speakers for this organization, which
targeted academic elites as the key audience. Funded by big German
corporations, an additional campaign organization called ‘Die Waage’
(the scales) was speaking to the general public audience in support of
Erhard’s ideas, using movie theatres and a range of marketing techniques
(Schindelbeck and Illgen 1999).
In France, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, early think tanks were
founded during or immediately after World War II by major business
associations. The French Association de la Libre Entreprise, the Danish
Erhvervenes Oplysningsråd (EO), and Norway’s and Sweden’s Libertas
organized meetings across borders (Denord 2009; Olsen 2014). Their
transition from business associations to neoliberal think tanks was in fact
quite fluid.
In the heroic narrative of the history of neoliberalism, information on
these early activities is repressed in favour of the allegedly unique his-
tory of the Institute of Economic Affairs as the first think tank (Cockett
1994). The literature does not deny the very strong neoliberal and pri-
vate sector partisanship of the IEA. But the tale of neoliberal civil soci-
ety think tanks that operate separately from the private sector prevails,
partly due to the lack of attention to the continuities of the relation-
ship between the corporate sector and think tanks. The early neolib-
eral think tanks at any rate opposed the Keynesian planning and welfare
state perspectives. At the same time, leading industrial circles in Europe
embraced collective bargaining and social partnership with trade unions,
partly to stave off state intervention in industrial and labour relations in
Switzerland and Germany, for example (Steiner 2009). Early neoliberal
think tanks in Europe were founded to complement the more traditional
business association activities and to strengthen the intellectual resolve in
support of market-oriented post-war reconstruction.
For about three decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, neoliberal
think tank activities in Europe remained rather marginal in the wider
public. Only a few think tanks gained respectable positions in domes-
tic knowledge hierarchies—for example, the Walter Eucken Institute in
Freiburg, Germany (founded in 1954). During the 1970s, neoliberal cir-

cles around the Mont Pèlerin Society became somewhat more active in
Europe. Three new organizations were launched in France, one in the
United Kingdom and one (Timbro) in Sweden (Walpen 2004, 402).
It was only in the 1980s that the number of new neoliberal think tanks
increased. From the 1980s onwards, these organizations were stead-
ily and heavily involved in the ensuing battles over the future direction
of European capitalism. Stiftung Marktwirtschaft (Foundation Market
Economy) was found in Germany in 1982, for example, to reinforce
the forces of  the centre-right parties in favour of privatization, deregu-
lation and liberalization. Several new British think tanks complemented
the IEA and the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) (founded in 1978), and
exerted greater influence on the political mainstream beyond the previ-
ous goal of programmatic redirection of the Tories. Neoliberal intellectu-
als were deeply involved in the European 1992 project, contributing to
the problem definition (‘Eurosclerosis’, a term coined by MPS member
Herbert Giersch from the Kieler Weltwirtschaftsinstitut), and to deregu-
late agenda setting (Paqué 2013).
The move to complete the European common market by 1992 can
easily be considered one of the largest cross-border liberalization pro-
jects in world history. On this, there was no opposition from the Tory
right wing, and there was also no need for an army of Euro-sceptic pol-
icy think tanks from the neoliberal right. Neoliberal think tanks in sup-
port of the internal market were defending the project against criticism
from trade unions and left-wing parties. But, in spite of some conces-
sions to trade unions, like the increase of structural funds and the prom-
ise of a European employment policy, European integration moved in
a right leaning neoliberal direction (Gamble and Payne 1996). Even in
the course of Europe’s turn to the right, neoliberal think tank activities
remained concentrated in a few European countries, notably Germany,
France, the United Kingdom and Sweden.
The situation changed dramatically in the late 1980s with the immi-
nent collapse of the Soviet Union. Following the Bruges speech of
Margaret Thatcher, who adamantly rejected visions of a political
European Union (EU) advanced by Jaques Delors, the Bruges group of
Euro-sceptic British MPs and MEPs were formed. Over the course of a
few years, the unique liberalization climate of the 1980s had changed.
Together with Delors at the helm of the European Commission (EC),
French leaders struggled to tie Germany to the integration project by
way of proposing the common currency, and by advocating an Economic

and Monetary Union, which eventually became the reality signed at
Maastricht on 7 February 1992. The signals were all set for the track
to political union. The 1990 publication of a Manifeste pour l’Europe
des Européens of the ‘Groupes de Bruges’ was critical to setting an anti-
Delors und anti-Maastricht agenda (Brack 2012). Subsequently, we can
observe the formation of sprawling neoliberal networks across Europe as
a major conservative-neoliberal opposition against deeper integration.
But as the weight of Brussels increased, majority of the decision-mak-
ing within the European Council expanded to a broad spectrum of pol-
icy areas, coupled with co-decision-making procedures in the European
Parliament. The EU developed into a supranational arena of lobbying,
negotiation and legislation. Neoliberals in opposition to deeper political
integration were propelled to the European floor. In 1992, the European
Constitutional Group was formed to develop a neoliberal blueprint for
a European Constitution instead. It consisted of ten members, seven of
whom were members of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Plehwe and Walpen
2006).
The first permanent neoliberal think tank dedicated to Europe was
formed in Brussels in 1993. The Centre for a New Europe (CNE) was
strategically positioned to play a part in the growing neoliberal opposi-
tion to the EU. The CNE team combined neoliberal talent from across
Europe and the United States in staff and board positions. CNE was
backed up by, and took part in, Atlas Economic Research Foundation
network activities and was a member of the International Policy Network
(IPN), which was set up in the early 2000s to advance climate change
(policy) scepticism.9
CNE subsequently became a central pillar of the pan-European
Stockholm Network (SN), which was the first European think tank
network, setting an example for similar networks founded by Social
Democratic, left, Green and conservative circles. SN is a working group
of more than 120 market-oriented think tanks from across Europe. Most
of the present members of the network were founded between 1995
and 2005: it was originally created in 1997 by Helen Disney, a journal-
ist, and by Rick Nye, the founder of polling company Populus.10 Key
tasks of the network are the organization of thematic conferences, semi-
nars and meetings to arrange for meeting space with European officials,
and with private sector and civil society actors. The SN also produces
op-ed messages, and channels research and intelligence within its ranks.
Since 2000, the network has been run from the newly created think tank
Civitas in the United Kingdom.
While it is not clear whether and how the collaboration of think tanks
in this network is relevant to day-to-day policy making in Europe, the
network clearly serves as transnational channels in Europe’s fragmented
public sphere. Important arguments are featured and/or attacked if
a counter-narrative is needed. Johan Norberg wrote his monograph
In Defense of Global Capitalism in 2001 when Attac, an organization
of the anti-globalization movement, became a major force in several
European countries and the movement for a financial transaction tax
gained momentum. European Resource Bank meetings have been organ-
ized on an annual basis since 2004. Copying the Heritage Foundation in
the United States, resource banks are network-type activities that bring
together think tank entrepreneurs and donors, policy experts, corporate
leaders and activists of the right-wing/neoliberal movement. Neoliberal
think tanks in Europe, Asia, Latin America and even Africa have repli-
cated the format, and they conduct smaller versions of these network-
ing events to advise new members and serve as contact point to donors
(corporations or ideologically related associations like the European
Taxpayers Association).
While larger countries like the United Kingdom and Germany fea-
ture the highest number of neoliberal think tanks within the SN, Central
European countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland lead
the list of neoliberal think tanks per capita. Only Belgium features an
even larger number of neoliberal think tanks due to the headquarters of
the EU institutions. Since 2010, the SN umbrella organization has not
published new documents on its website. This coincides with the depar-
ture of Helen Disney from the organization. The SN has been main-
tained as a virtual network only (Internet and Facebook presence), but
many think tanks of the network maintain close links and have launched
joint initiatives like the ‘Nanny State Index’ or the ‘Authoritarian
Populism Index’, managed in cooperation between several think tanks by
the European Policy Information Center.11
The quieting of the SN may be due to the founding of the sec-
ond neoliberal network in Europe. In 2010, the Alliance of European
Conservatives and Reformists founded the New Direction Foundation.
Europe’s integration process and a wave of crises (no vote, impeach-
ment of the commission, etc.) had triggered the funding of European
political party foundations, which were supposed to assist the fledgling
Fig. 7.3 SN and NDF networks, interlocks. Source http://thinktanknetworkre-

search.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.php?title=Category:Think_Tank_Network
European political parties in medium- and long-term planning. Modelled

after the German and Austrian political party foundations, each major
faction in the EP was granted the right to form a foundation (Gagatek
and van Hecke 2011). When the British Tories, together with the Polish
Law and Justice Party and Czech ODS, left the conservative European
Party and formed a new party and EP faction in 2009 (Brack 2012), the
opportunity was there to set up a new foundation. The NDF was estab-
lished the following year. It operates on a small budget. Like all the other
European political party foundations, the way to compensate for limited
resources in Brussels is to setup a network of like-minded organizations
across Europe—a think tank network.
A total of 18 organizations formed the network until the EP elec-
tions of 2015. Nine organizations alone are located in various Eastern
European countries. The strongest contingent is in Austria. Many NDF
members are also members of the SN, as Fig. 7.3 shows.
The NDF basically added a network of neoliberal think tanks that is
closer in nature to political parties. European neoliberals used to work
at a distance from traditional liberal and conservative parties, which have
their own European political party foundations (Gagatek and van Hecke
Table 7.2 Stockholm network and New Direction Foundation (NDF): number

of think tank personnel per category (staff, board, leadership)
Think tank Founded in No. of No. of staff No. of No. of Total

network think tanks members board CEOs
(Europe) members
Stockholm 1997 120 644 1180 534 2358

network
NDF 2010 25 216 208 94 518
Total 860 1388 628 2876 posi-
tions 2497
individuals
Source http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.php?title=Category:Think_Tank_
Network
2011); however, the NDF and SN networks overlap with the traditional
conservative spectrum, the more radical new right-wing Euro-sceptic
movement. If we focus on specific European policies like austerity, we
can observe a strong overlap of positions across the neoliberal and con-
servative universe. While there is limited overlap in terms of party foun-
dation networks, the European Ideas Network (EIN) of the conservative
MEP shows many ties to the SN and the NDF.12
If we look at some structural data regarding the two European net-
works, we can see that about 2,500 individuals are involved in these cir-
cles. There are notable differences between the SN and the NDF (see
Table 7.2).
Board membership outnumbers the staff in the case of the SN,
whereas a greater number of individuals appear to be employees in the
case of NDF members. Since think tanks matter both with regard to elite
coordination and the active policy influence (media, politics, etc.), the
relative numbers of staff and board membership may indicate different
priorities. The numbers also indicate considerable overlap in terms of the
individuals who are active in each network. Figure 7.4 displays the inter-
locking positions within the SN and NDF networks.
A total of 69 of 138 think tanks are tied by interlock positions (50%).
Mont Pèlerin Society members are very prominent among the interlocks
in general (one third in the SN and 60% in the NDF), and among the
individuals who tie more than three think tanks together in particular.
Fig. 7.4 Think tank networks in Europe: Interlocks (two or more posi-

tions). Source http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.
php?title=Category:Think_Tank_Network, MPS members: light grey; size of cir-
cle grows with number of think tank positions
The SN and NDF networks feature a high degree of integration due to

joint board and staff membership.
Comparing the output of SN members on economic policy issues
after the European financial crisis on the one hand, and on climate
change policy on the other, interesting observations can be made with
regard to the variety of perspectives featured in the European network.
In the economic policy field, a cluster of think tanks can be identified
that takes a pragmatic policy line, addressing and acknowledging the

need for reforms following the financial crisis. Another group of think
tanks took a hard Austrian Economics line, rejecting calls for re-regu-
lation of the financial sector and blaming the public sector unilaterally
for the crisis. In terms of discourse, we thus find a similar division of
labour (or complementarity) between radical defenses of principled free-
market economics on the one hand, and neoliberal-minded reform poli-
tics on the other hand. In the climate change policy field, climate change
denial think tanks exist alongside a group of moderate think tanks, which
mostly argue in favour of economic policy instruments in the battle
against climate change (Plehwe 2010).
The NDF network is also far from homogeneous. A powerful neo-
liberal public policy research institute like the Lithuanian Free Market
Institute coexists with the small Institute for Free Enterprise, which
mainly features neoliberal commentary and co-organizes annual climate
change sceptic conferences together with its partners. In Brussels, the
NDF features initiatives that involve militants from the domestic scene—
for example, in the battle against debt mutualization during the Euro cri-
sis. The NDF publishes pamphlets that demand cutting the EU budget
by half, and reducing the funding of the European Parliament in particu-
lar. But the NDF also features the work in support of free-trade agree-
ments with the United States and other countries. Contrary to the SN,
the NDF has a stronger programmatic angle that can be summarized as
a partial disintegration agenda for Europe, but designed to preserve the
economic core of European integration (Plehwe and Schlögl 2014).
Comparing Neoliberal Think Tank Networks in Latin

America and Europe
Based on our data, we can now point to commonalities and differences.
The founding of individual neoliberal think tanks dates back further than
it is generally assumed. Just as organizational efforts of neoliberal intel-
lectuals can be traced back to the immediate post-war years (Mirowski
and Plehwe 2009), the first neoliberal think tanks were established from
the early 1950s in both regions. During the early period of the Cold
War, neoliberal think tank efforts were arguably more closely tied to
organized business interests. Funding by corporations is common across
time, but the link to business associations seems to have been closer in
the early history of think tanks compared with the later.
Contrary to ‘pensée unique’ assumptions about neoliberalism, think
tanks are characterized by considerable plurality in terms of their theo-
retical orientation (Virginia School/public choice, Austrian Economics,
Chicago School/monetarism, etc.), core activities and key audiences.
In each region, we find complementary activities across a wide range of
research, publishing, campaigning and advisory functions. They perform
different tasks aiming at the preference formation of key actors, and at
influencing the public debate and policy making at large. We thus find
a common pattern of shared norms and principled beliefs on the one
hand, and complementary profiles in terms of activities and functions.
Both networks feature strong degrees of integration on the organiza-
tional level and shared leadership positions of individual think tank activ-
ists at the level of interlocks. In both cases, we also see a combination of
general civil society network members and think tanks that are closer to
political parties. In Latin America, we find overlap of competing mod-
erate, new right/neoliberal and far right parties through links between
think tanks. In Europe, we find overlap between the traditional conserva-
tive centre and the new neoliberal-conservative right wing, but not so
far as the far right. Think tank networks encompass only different parts
of the centre–right wing spectrum. They can support common positions
and storylines, irrespective of party political affiliations.
The main discourses and battlefields do not differ in their general
approach. In both Europe and Latin America, neoliberal forces focus on
austerity and welfare state or developmental state retrenchment, respec-
tively. In both cases, we observe an emphasis on market-oriented deregu-
lation and re-regulation, fiscal constraint and sound money policy, and
on macro-economic rules in favour of the competitiveness of private
enterprise.
Since the political environments are different, concrete subject matter
and timing differs. In Latin America, early individual think tanks played a
decisive role in preparing the ground and neoliberal principles (especially
among key constituencies like entrepreneurs). The golden age, how-
ever, started in the 1980s. It was then that network formation started
and fostered the rollout and consolidation of neoliberal policies—that is,
the second-generation reforms of the Washington Consensus. State and
public sector reform and the ‘right’ anti-poverty policy (against universal
social policies, and pro targeting) were the main issues of the 1980s and
1990s, and neoliberal think tanks got directly involved in policy design,
implementation and evaluation. After the millennium, they continued
with this agenda, but at centre stage was the formation of a strong oppo-
sition against the ‘pink tide’ governments.
In Europe, the think tank networks’ issues revolve around discussions
such as European integration. Neoliberal think tank activism increased
strongly in the face of deeper integration, reaching areas like environ-
mental and social policy making over the course of the 1990s. Due to
the strong role of the state in public health, neoliberal think tank net-
works also feature numerous activities in favour of privatization of health
services and the liberalization of advertising and marketing of pharma-
ceuticals. Adversaries are progressive NGOs, notably in the environ-
mental policy field. Only lately, with the founding of the NDF, have
neoliberal think tanks stepped more directly into the realm of party poli-
tics.
In both regions, think tank network formation was driven by the
transnational or supranational agenda. In the case of Europe, threatening
perspectives of political union spurred transnational neoliberal networks
into action. In the case of Latin America, it was the neoliberal shift in
the wake of the international debt crisis of the 1980s, which hit heav-
ily in most of the countries of Central and South America. The answer
from Washington (and in some cases new elites in Latin America) was
structural adjustment following the Washington Consensus. Neoliberal
think tanks constituted a large orchestra with many instruments needed
to stage-manage the comprehensive shift from state-led to market-led
development, and to fend off the opposition.
In both Latin America and Europe, the share of think tank intellectu-
als who hold positions in more than one think tank that also belongs to
the Mont Pèlerin Society is very high: it is up to two third of the total
interlock positions. Think tank linkers can be considered a particularly
important part of the population of think tank intellectuals consisting of
staff and board members. In contrast to classical power elites composed
of military, political and economic leaders (Mills 1956), the neoliberal
knowledge power elite is transnational, both in composition and in ori-
entation. Apart from and beyond the innovative capacity of neoliberal
conceptual knowledge production in general, we consider the strong
position of Mont Pèlerin members as an important factor to explain
transnational circulation and diffusion of neoliberal ideas, and the devel-
opment and replication of strategies and institutions.
Quite similar to protest diffusion and ‘idea travelling’ in counter-

hegemonic social movements that lead to joint actions and mobilization
(Keck and Sikkink 1998) is the neoliberal think tank world that has also
developed common events and campaigns. Typical are joint efforts like
global freedom rankings. The resource bank model and the organization
of an annual Liberty Forum have been replicated in both regions.
Due to the different political conjuncture a clear difference emerges.
Neoliberal think tank networks in Europe fought an uphill battle in
terms of some of their goals during the 1990s. In Latin America, the
1990s offered an open space for neoliberal networks. In both regions,
neoliberal think tank networks were solid and strongly entrenched by
the end of the 1990s, and these must now be considered a reliable infra-
structure for cross-border civil society and class-formation processes.
Another interesting difference between Latin American and European
think tank landscapes can be observed with regard to their world–
regional connectivity in terms of financial ties. Although each of the
continental networks has its local financial resources, they are organiza-
tionally and financially tied to powerful institutions from abroad. While
Europe features organizations that rely on American money, Latin
American think tanks are heavily funded by sources from the United
States, Spain and Germany in particular. While in Spain the Foundation
for Social Studies and Analysis (FAES) is a bastion of support, the
German party foundations serve as an important hub for external fund-
ing and cooperation (not only of the neoliberal right wing, of course).
It is probably fair to say that external funding (and resulting dependen-
cies) plays a greater role in the case of Latin America than in Europe,
although Eastern European think tanks are likewise more dependent on
foreign (Western European, American, Brussels) money than Western
European think tanks. Funding details on the other hand are hard to
establish, since both Latin American and European think tanks are not
subject to transparency requirements comparable to US standards.
While this certainly helps to undermine think tank legitimacy, there have
not been strong efforts in either region to increase responsibility in an
increasingly shady sphere of civil society formation and lobby effort.
Research Desiderata for the Future Study

of Neoliberal Civil Society Formation
Our analysis and comparison of neoliberal think tank networks in Latin

American and Europe clearly demonstrates an important transformation
of the general globalization process: since the 1980s in Latin America
and since the 1990s in Europe, cross-national think tank networks
have emerged in response to common challenges and opportunities:
Washington Consensus politics in America and economic and political
union in Europe. We can observe parallel supranational logics of influ-
ence and comparable logics of membership and constituency in the two
regional partisan networks. Mostly situated in the space between private
business and academia, neoliberal intellectuals direct a sizeable chunk of
machinery of think tank organizations both within and across countries.
The networks under investigation display considerable success
in terms of strategic replication of think tank capacities and strate-
gies aligned by common worldviews. Transnational partisan networks
require local capacities because of the segmented and fragmented char-
acter of the public. While Latin America is more integrated in terms of
language, Europe has a higher degree of public policy integration. Yet,
in both regions, para-political actors and discourses need to insert and
assert themselves in national and otherwise fragmented media and pub-
lic spheres. The neoliberal networks are remarkable accomplishments to
bridge and combine efforts across such diversity, and can be considered
a huge competitive advantage particularly because of the double bonds
through both organizations and intellectuals.
They provide for a para-political space that allows for an integration
of discourse across the divide of political parties from the center to the
far right, and across fragmented public spheres. Continental think tank
networks are integrated by umbrella organizations and transnational neo-
liberal power elites, which are likely to account for effective transnational
knowledge circuits, transfer and translation, as well as social technologies
of relevance making. The study of the regional networks is particularly
useful to scholars who aim to better understand the position of neo-
liberal forces in contemporary political battles and (ideological) class
struggles. They help to explain both the flexibility and persistence of
neoliberal forces in Latin America and Europe.
The present study is just a first step to close the gap of civil soci-
ety formation in world regions in conjunction with processes of
transnational ordering, and several research questions remain open for

future investigations. We see research desiderata with regard to both
theoretical and empirical questions. In empirical terms, it is necessary to
achieve more knowledge about concrete practices and interventions of
think tanks. Currently, we can only assume the relevance of these net-
works for transfer and diffusion processes, which leaves room for both
quantitative and qualitative follow-up research. Qualitative in-depth
studies should aim at discovering how think tanks mobilize ideas, what
strategies they pursue and the effects that they cause. Quantitative stud-
ies could try to establish the extent to which we can observe the output
of think tanks as input in media and policy papers across countries.
While such research issues focus on organizations, we consider it
essential to integrate the individuals. In theoretical terms, we regard this
as a necessary and important contribution to studying transnational class
formation. From the investigation of interlocks, we know that mem-
bers of the Mont Pèlerin Society form a core of the organized neolib-
eral knowledge elite—at least in Europe and in Latin America. It will be
interesting to learn whether the pattern holds in other-world regions. It
would furthermore be interesting to know much more about the many
other think tank professionals. Apart from the transnational elites, a
major future research task is to look more closely inside what amounts to
an emerging class of think tank professionals and trace their professional
and political (collective) biographies. It will be highly interesting to learn
more about the specific qualifications and experiences of think tank pro-
fessionals, and about the emerging national and transnational labour
markets constituted by think tanks, NGOs and related organizations.
Notes
1. Available online at http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/
index.php?title=Main_Page, accessed 20 September 2016.
2. First-generation reforms focused on macro-economic stabilization, pri-
vatization and spending cuts. Second-generation reforms encompassed
reforms of civil service and public services and the regulatory state (Naím
1994).
3. See Global Directory and Partners in Latin America and the Caribbean
at https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory, accessed 20
September 2016.
4. See the list of allied think tanks at http://www.hacer.org/chico-1,

accessed 1 July 2016.
5. See http://www.fundacionfil.org/patronato.php and http://www.funda-
cionfil.org/academico.php, accessed 20 April 2016.
6. The composition of RELIAL had changed since our last data collection
in August 2015. One year later, the network was composed of 23 think
tanks and 12 political parties on the Latin American continent.
7. For a member list, see http://relial.org/index.php/miembros; the mem-
bers of the executive board can be found at http://relial.org/index.php/
relial/mesa-directiva, the honorary board at http://relial.org/index.
php/relial/junta-honorifica, accessed 20 April 2016.
8. See https://web.archive.org/web/20150810161512; http://www.lati-
noamericalibre.org accessed 29 April 2016.
9. See http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php, accessed 20 April 2016,
entries on CNE and the International Policy Network.
10. SN lists four founding organizations: Social Market Foundation
(UK), Timbro (Sweden), CNE (Brussels), and the French think tank
Paradigmes (founded in 1998). Another source adds the Edmund Burke
Foundation (Netherlands) and the Circulos de Empresarios (Spain): see
http://powerbase.info/index.php/Stockholm_Network, accessed 20
April 2016.
11. See http://nannystateindex.org, http://www.epicenternetwork.eu/
briefings/the-authoritarian-populism-index-main-findings, accessed 20
September 2016.
12. See http://thinktanknetworkresearch.net/wiki_ttni_en/index.
php?title=Category:Think_Tank_Network, entries NDF, SN and EIN,
accessed 20 April 2016.
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CHAPTER 8
Counter-hegemonic Projects and Cognitive

Praxis in Transnational Alternative Policy
Groups
William K. Carroll and Elaine Coburn
Knowledge production detached from experiences of domination and

challenges to that domination is likely to be less accurate, less compre-
hensive and less useful to subaltern groups than knowledge produced in
close-collaboration with movements and counter-publics. As the South
Africa-based Centre for Civil Society (CCS) observes:
The most rigorous knowledge production about oppressive systems is

generated when scholars understand first-hand, most often from activists,
the sources and processes of conflict. It is only when a system of power is
challenged by its critics—not just armchair academics—that we more fully
understand that system’s logic: how it reacts and represses, co-opts or even
concedes to opponents.
Yet knowledge generated by conventional think tanks is detached from

movements and counter-publics, and formed within the elite policy net-
works. As the introduction to this volume makes clear, the role that such
W.K. Carroll (*) · E. Coburn 

York University, Toronto, Canada

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_8
188 W.K. Carroll and E. Coburn
organizations play in public policy discussions typically reinforces exist-

ing power–knowledge relations within national and transnational politi-
cal theatres. Linked into the circuitry of policy networks, mainstream
media and corporate elites, ‘think tanks of the right have since the 1970s
become important sites of knowledge production and mobilization in
the construction of a neoliberal discursive field’ (Carroll 2013, p. 694).
Although they claim to enunciate a public interest, many are controlled
by private interests—the large corporations and private foundations that
fund them and the corporate directors who populate their governance
boards. Ensconced within the ‘relations of ruling’ (Smith 1999) govern-
ing the institutions of contemporary capitalist formations, they produce
useful knowledge to manage those institutions—knowledge that appears
to be a rational articulation of the public interest. For neoliberal think
tanks in particular, the ‘public interest’ is synonymous with the ‘free mar-
ket’, and public policy is seen as a set of mechanisms for protecting the
exercise of private property rights deemed integral to such ‘freedom’.
Non-profit initiatives may be supported, but only at the margins and
never imagined as generalizable across worldwide social relationships.
Mainstream think tanks function as highly professionalized elite net-
works of experts, policy ‘wonks’, political intermediaries and corporate
capitalists, concentrating knowledge and other resources, and on that
basis constructing and disseminating ideological discourses within rela-
tively exclusivist processes that shape public policy around entrenched
interests. They are sites where ‘expert’ knowledge is produced by cre-
dentialled professionals, a form of power/knowledge, to use Foucault’s
(1980) well-known expression. If wealthy individuals use their eco-
nomic capital to exercise influence, ‘experts’ rely on the cultural capital
of their educational credentials to legitimate their relative monopo-
lies over various spheres of public debates. Alternative knowledges—
whether based in radical social analysis or in subaltern experience—are
marginalized and discounted. In mainstream think tanks, the control
of capital combines with the power of the expert to skew and shrink
public debate.
Most sociological research on think tanks (including most contribu-
tions to this volume) attend to the policy networks that hegemonic think
tanks co-create along with other dominant interests, and the policy plan-
ning in which these groups participate. Yet, since the formation in 1974
of the Transnational Institute (TNI), and particularly since the 1990s,
8 COUNTER-HEGEMONIC PROJECTS AND COGNITIVE PRAXIS … 189
transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) have generated ideas—

both visionary and strategic—quite distinct from status quo perspectives.
TAPGs are, in part, responses from the left to such hegemonic pol-
icy-planning initiatives as the Trilateral Commission and the World
Economic Forum (Carroll and Carson 2003). In dialogue with transna-
tional publics and movements, TAPGs produce evidence-based knowl-
edge that critiques(many) hegemonic practices and perspectives and
promotes alternatives. They function as ‘think tanks of the left’. Unlike
social movement organizations, the knowledge of which is produced tac-
tically as they engage in the cut and thrust collective action (Swift 2014,
p. 136), TAPGs’ efforts—if inevitably and imperfectly realized—are
focused primarily and strategically on producing and mobilizing critical-
reflexive knowledge for social transformation—that is, cognitive praxis.
This chapter presents a comparative analysis of eight TAPGs, five from
the Global South and three from the Global North, along with a basic con-
ceptual framework for understanding them as sites of cognitive praxis. The
groups we examine here seek to (1) to create empirically grounded knowl-
edge that challenges hegemonic narratives; (2) advance alternative social/
ecological practices and policies; and (3) build capacity for social change
from below. In all these respects, they differ sharply from conventional think
tanks, even when they do not fully realize their counter hegemonic aims.
Our comparative case studies shed light on an emergent form of counter-
hegemony that complicates the transnational field of policy-planning by
introducing radical alternatives, in both theory and practice.
TAPGs are not without limits and contradictions. First, as Gramsci
(1999, pp. 52–53) reminds us, subaltern groups may ‘press claims’ of
a ‘limited and partial character’. They may eschew demands for an anti-
capitalist revolution, for instance, instead calling for significant transfor-
mations within a capitalist political economy in order to accommodate
basic human rights. To be considered an ‘alternative’ policy group for
the purposes of this chapter, they need only call for significant, not nec-
essarily revolutionary, social change. Second, TAPG actors are social-
ized into an unequal world. A TAPG may reproduce gender inequalities
within its everyday institutional relations, for instance, despite explicitly
challenging gendered relations of class power in its publications, because
these inequalities are institutionalized in apparently neutral procedures,
because stereotypical ways of thinking are commonsense and hence invis-
ible, and because they benefit male participants in the TAPG. Third, a
TAPG’s autonomy from the dominant actors that it seeks to oppose is

likely to be relative in a world of vastly unequal power and resources.
Roxana Ng’s (1996) study of a community-based organization for immi-
grant women in Canada, for instance, describes how, after accepting state
funding, her organization transformed. Once created as a space for sup-
porting migrant women workers in finding well-paid secure work, every-
day practices in the organization increasingly became preoccupied with
placing workers with employers seeking ‘low-skilled’ migrant labour.
Such placements were a condition of continued provincial funding, sug-
gestive of the ways in which the pragmatic need to ‘make do’ in a world
of unequal resources may result in the partial or full reintegration of
counter-hegemonic actors into projects and relations shaped by domi-
nant actors.
In sum, we are not arguing that TAPGs and their practitioners are
fully formed, autonomous, counter-hegemonic actors—that would be a
practical impossibility. We do argue, however, that the TAPGs analysed
here challenge many relationships of domination and inequality, both in
their everyday functioning and in the knowledge they produce. Below,
we present brief accounts of their functioning, which may underplay
some of their internal contradictions. We provide a deliberately strong
contrast with the more conventional think tanks discussed in the rest of
this book. In conclusion, however, we turn to some of the variations and
tensions among and within TAPGs, as well as their possibilities.
KPM Projects, Practices and Constituencies
Any group that places production and mobilization of alternative knowl-

edge among its top priorities does so with specific aims, constituencies
and publics, and means. In short, each TAPG has a distinctive project,
which ‘inheres in the artifact-mediated actions, norms, rules and symbols
flowing from the project’s self-concept and underlying the actions which
constitute the project’ (Blunden 2014, p. 9). The group’s strategies and
practices are shaped by that project, as its social vision and understand-
ings of justice and injustice.
Our analysis of KPM projects is based on in-depth, structured inter-
views, ranging from about 1 to 2 h, with multiple practitioners hold-
ing key roles in eight TAPGs (see Table 8.1). In addition, we contacted
on-site visits of the TAPGs, which was helpful in establishing how the
TAPGs functioned everyday, while offering some idea of the resources
Table 8.1 Projects and constituencies of eight TAPGs
Acronym/Home base/Year Name/Project Main constituency

est’d
1. ITeM/Social Watch Third World Institute/Social Activists in 80+ countries,

Montevideo Watch human rights advocates
1989 Through communication worldwide
and education activities,
ITeM promotes citizen
involvement in global deci-
sion-making; Social Watch
documents social inequi-
ties through a grassroots
network of “watchers,” and
advocates for social justice.
2. PRIA Participatory Research in Advocates of democratic
New Delhi Asia governance, grassroots
1982 An international centre for activists, CSOs and policy-
learning and promotion of makers in India, Asia and
participation and democratic globally
governance; key initiatives
focus on capacity building,
knowledge building, partici-
patory research, citizen-cen-
tric development.
3. IFG International Forum on Activists, students, and
San Francisco Globalization scholars in North America,
1994 A North–South research and worldwide
and educational institute of
leading activists, scholars
and researchers providing
analysis and critiques on the
cultural, social, political and
environmental impacts of
economic globalization.
4. CCS Centre for Civil Society Activists, scholars, students
Durban Through critical scholarship, in Durban, Southern Africa
2001 information dissemination and globally
and training, advances eco-
social justice by developing
knowledge, dialogue and
partnerships within civil
society aimed at capacity-
building.
(continued)
Table 8.1 (continued)
Acronym/Home base/Year Name/Project Main constituency

est’d
5. RosaLux Rosa Luxemburg The left in Germany,

Berlin Foundation Europe, and globally
1990 A political education
institution, affiliated with
the democratic socialist
Left Party. Acts as a think
tank for political alterna-
tives, organizes dialogues,
and supports progressive
movements through offices
worldwide.
6. TNI Transnational Institute Activists, policy experts,
Amsterdam An international network of scholars—North and South
1974 scholar-activists committed
to social change, combined
with a critical research insti-
tute that produces knowl-
edge for popular and official
audiences, on a wide range
of policy issues.
7. Focus Focus on the Global South Activists and scholars glob-
Bangkok Combines policy research, ally, with emphasis on Asian
1995 advocacy, activism, and issues
grass-roots capacity building
in order to generate critical
analysis and debates on poli-
cies related to corporate-led
globalization, neoliberalism,
militarization, and alterna-
tives such as de-globalization
and vivir bien.
8. DAWN Development Alternatives Women of the Global South
Global South with Women for a New Era and their allies
1984 A network of feminist schol-
ars, researchers, and activists
from the South working for
economic and gender justice
and sustainable and demo-
cratic development, through
research, analyses, advocacy
and activist training.
each has and the social character of the neighbourhoods in which each
is located. Each organization selected for the study satisfies three crite-
ria, which define the concept of TAPG as a distinct agency of knowledge
production and mobilization: (1) the group’s core function is production
and mobilization of knowledge; (2) a significant part of that cognitive
praxis takes up transnational issues and speaks to transnational counter
publics; and (3) the group engages a wide range of issues—that is, it is
not highly specialized.1
The thumbnail descriptions in Table 8.1 suggest considerable diver-
sity in the KPM projects and their constituencies. Particularly evident are
tracings of regionalism in the location of TAPGs, their constituencies and
the scope of projects. All groups’ core constituencies are regionally (and
sometimes nationally) delimited, even if some aspire to a ‘global’ pur-
view, as do TNI, IFG and RosaLux. That the latter are based in Europe
and North America suggests continuing traces, within the world system’s
North Atlantic heartland, of cosmopolitan universalism framing counter-
hegemony.2 On the other hand, some Southern-based TAPGs focus on
transnational issues and publics that are also regional. For instance, CCS
efforts centre on southern Africa; Focus and PRIA concentrate on South
and East Asia; DAWN takes the Global South as the relevant region for
its cognitive praxis.
A distinction organizing our presentation is between TAPGs that
understand global justice within a critical-liberal frame and TAPGs to the
left of liberalism, explicitly critiquing capitalism. The former emphasize
substantive human rights issues without articulating a critique of capital-
ist relations; the latter draw attention to the deeply structured injustices
of neoliberal, globalized capitalism. Our comparative case analysis begins
with the critical-liberal groups: Item/Social Watch and PRIA.
ITeM/Social Watch
At the Third World Institute (ITeM)/Social Watch (two organizations
that share the same secretariat space and coordinating personnel), the
social vision informing cognitive praxis includes four elements:
1. Eradicating poverty and its causes

2. Ending all forms of discrimination and racism
3. An equitable distribution of wealth, and
4. Realizing human rights, emphasizing ‘the right of all people not to

be poor’.3
This critical-liberal stance enables the group to speak mainstream lan-

guage while connecting deeply with worldwide grass-roots movements,
even if there may be tensions between the ‘universal’ language of human
rights and the vocabularies of local grievances. Likewise, ITeM/Social
Watch strives to maintain a dual, ‘inside/outside’ orientation, engaging
in United Nations (UN)-sponsored and related intergovernmental initia-
tive that addresses global governance issues and coordinating a vast net-
work of activists, the so-called Watchers who in their respective countries
(both North and South, numbering over 80) monitor compliance with
international covenants. ‘Watching’ is a key practice of cognitive praxis
within an extensive global network, whose centre is the Social Watch sec-
retariat in Montevideo. The strategy for change is one of documenting
and reporting on events, or failures to act—a kind of alternative jour-
nalism—thereby raising consciousness, and holding governments and
intergovernmental organizations to account to honour the commitments
they have made.4 Watching involves ‘a comprehensive strategy of advo-
cacy, awareness-building, monitoring, organizational development and
networking. Social Watch aims at strengthening the capacity of national
coalitions to effectively monitor and influence policies with an impact
over women, people living in poverty and other vulnerable groups.’5 The
Social Watch website is regularly updated, with news from Watchers in
various countries, flagging non-compliance as well as small victories. As
observed, the reframing of local grievances in terms that may be under-
stood easily internationally arguably reshapes local narratives to ‘fit’
dominant (human rights) vocabularies. Notably, each year, Watchers’
observations are condensed and compiled into an overall Social Watch
Report,6 widely distributed in IGO and NGO circles and returned back
to the various grass-roots communities of Watchers. This shares informa-
tion among communities and with institutions that might not otherwise
be aware of particular struggles, but may also reinforce existing hegem-
onic grammars of protest.
The report’s changing focus enables Social Watch to take up emer-
gent issues that connect with, yet go beyond, its core, rights-based cri-
tique of economic and gender inequity. Its 2012 report, for instance, was
subtitled ‘Sustainable Development: The Right to a Future’. The con-
tinuing dialogue between local Social Watch groups and the secretariat,
and among the groups themselves, mobilizes the local knowledge of

many activist communities in developing detailed assessments of state
compliance which (formally) agreed upon social objectives on develop-
ment, poverty and gender equity. The Social Watch website is an impor-
tant resource in these communicative processes. Besides the annual
reports and related resources, such as the annually updated Gender
Equity Index,7 the website provides news reports, often based on mate-
rial sent from local groups. Marcelo Jelen, a journalist who writes the
stories, explained that the aim is not conventionally journalistic, but to
give activists momentum by enabling them to ‘see themselves’ in the
webpage. For instance, one story recounted how a feminist group of
Watchers in Honduras launched a very tiny group of studies in a very
tiny village. It was not a very big story for the world, but it was for them,
and at a certain point it was also important for us because that is the way
things are done in the grass-roots movement.
Such stories make visible actors who are usually invisible or margin-
alized as minor players, emphasizing their agency (albeit in an unequal
world). Watchers’ democratic control over knowledge production is sup-
ported both by the dialogical process and by the organization’s demo-
cratic structure,8 while the reports are a key resource in struggles at the
national level. In this way, ITeM/Social Watch pursues an interstitial,
multi-level critical-liberal project, addressing intergovernmental organi-
zations, national states, transnational and national publics and the more
social-democratic currents within the global left.
Participatory Research in Asia

The critical-liberal roots of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) lie
in the 1970s movements for adult education, the pedagogy of the
oppressed (Freire 1970), and the development of participatory action
research. These innovations in cognitive praxis were foundational to
PRIA. From the start, PRIA has fostered dialogue among stakeholders,
seeking to co-create knowledge and build capacity for grass-roots self-
governance. Its vision is of a deep, inclusive and participatory democ-
racy, incorporating gender justice and balancing the social and the
economic, individual autonomy and collective solidarity. With the slogan
‘Knowledge is Power’ at the centre of its project (and inscribed in its
logo), PRIA emphasizes that for democracy to thrive, citizens need to
know and participate in knowledge creation and self-governance.
PRIA’s work focuses on four ‘thrust areas’: (1) Violence against

Women; (2) Urban Poverty and Governance; (3) Decentralized
Governance, Planning and Delivery of Basic Services; and (4) Changing
Roles, New Challenges and Capacities of Civil Society. These are all inte-
grate projects of action research and democratizing local governance in
India, training of practitioners in participatory research, planning, social
audit, activity mapping and other skill sets, and transnational action
learning and capacity building within the civil society. In short, PRIA
offers training that professionalizes activism. This may enable activists to
reach beyond highly local constituencies, but likewise re-centres activism
on specific kinds of activities.
Over three decades, PRIA has led the world in developing practices
that unify knowledge production with empowerment and social change,
although it has led ‘quietly’ without the kind of attention that an inno-
vative program funded by a major philanthropic donor might achieve.
In particular, PRIA has developed a rich repertoire of initiatives in par-
ticipatory development, education, community-based research, gen-
der empowerment and main streaming, organizational development,
self-governance, inclusion and strengthening civil society. Its programs
are now freely available to practitioners worldwide via the Practice in
Participation portal.9 Indeed, a strong focus on the Indian subcontinent
combines with initiatives in many sites throughout Asia, and its online
presence reaches a global constituency, both in Hindi and in English.
At the same time, PRIA offers pay-as-you go courses through the PRIA
Educational Trust, so not all programming is accessible to all, reflecting
the reality that even committed non-profits must find resources to fund
their activities.
As part of its project, PRIA seeks to systematize cognitive praxis by
inventing and refining methods of knowledge co-creation, opening up
processes of reflexive change—for example, gender auditing, partici-
patory planning, institutional analysis and citizen monitoring of state
practices (similar to ‘watching’, described above). PRIA thus advances
a social change strategy: mobilize at the grass-roots, using participatory
methods, but create intermediary, dialogical spaces that connect grass-
roots and civil society with institutional power, leading to program rede-
sign, new initiatives and increased state and private sector accountability.
In this sense, PRIA champions and convenes ongoing conversations to
empower communities and ensure state authorities and the private sec-
tors hear their voices. This means engaging with powerful actors at least
partly in a vocabulary and through practices that dominant actors can

understand. Arguably, this reflects a persistent tension between honour-
ing grass-roots voices and repertoires of action, and seeking to draw
attention to these voices and actions in a way that ‘makes sense’ and
appears serious and credible to hegemonic actors.
Like ITeM/Social Watch, PRIA represents the critical-liberal pole
in cognitive praxis. It is pragmatically committed towards realizing the
potential of liberal-democratic politics while implicitly pressing beyond,
since commitments to ‘deep democracy’ and meaningful participation
cannot be squared with capitalism and class society. PRIA instantiates
an immanent critique of liberalism—pushing liberal values beyond the
ways they actually function in legitimating the state and capitalist power.
There are good reasons for PRIA’s contradictory stance between the lib-
eral democratic politics and radical democracy. Perhaps the most salient
is contemporary India’s uneven and combined development. As Sumona
Dasgupta told us:
India lives in different centuries and everything that you say about India,
the opposite would also be true. So you have the twenty-first century in
India and the seventeenth century, probably on two sides of the same
street. And there is no dialogue at all. So that is where the bridge needs to
be built, because otherwise the potential for social violence is so great.
Contributing to this potential is the statist legacy, rooted in British colo-

nialism but further ossified in the second half of the twentieth century.
Despite the drama of periodic elections, India’s highly bureaucratic,
rather corrupt state apparatus has been unresponsive to popular pres-
sure from below. In India, liberalization has sometimes opened space
for ‘civil society’, so although PRIA recognizes problems in privati-
zation (decreasing scope for democratic accountability as services are
outsourced to corporates) and in concentrated corporate power, PRIA
considers that markets can be preferable to corrupt, unaccountable state
domination.
PRIA conceptualizes social problems as amenable to rational solutions
arrived via dialogue—convening the stakeholders and facilitating their
movement toward common ground. In Gramsci’s (1999, p. 52) terms,
this is arguably an attempt by a counter-hegemonic group to ‘influence
the programmes of these (dominant political) formations in order to
press claims of their own’. In addition, PRIA’s project centres the goal of
giving voice to the marginalized as an indispensable condition for deep,

participatory democracy, moving beyond appeals to powerful political
actors and towards more egalitarian, everyday agency.
International Forum on Globalization

Compared with PRIA, the International Forum on Globalization (IFG)
more directly contests globalizing neoliberal capitalism. The IFG first
convened as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
came into effect and as the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) begat the World Trade Organization
(WTO). The IFG describes itself as ‘a North–South research and edu-
cational institution composed of leading activists, economists, scholars,
and researchers providing analysis and critiques on the cultural, social,
political, and environmental impacts of economic globalization’.10 From
inception, it has been a think tank of international left luminaries (who
comprise its board of directors), with a twofold goal:
(1) Expose the multiple effects of economic globalization in order to

stimulate debate, and (2) Seek to reverse the globalization process by
encouraging ideas and activities which revitalize local economies and com-
munities, and ensure long-term ecological stability.11
IFG transformed from, arguably, a top-heavy group of high-profile

thinkers into a knowledge-producing organization with deeper roots in
primarily American activist communities. When we asked the IFG execu-
tive director Victor Menotti how the group produced alternative knowl-
edge, he gave this response:
I think the main strategy is listening about what the needs are of groups
on the ground, of frontline groups—victims of violence or whoever the
impacted communities are and listening to what they need and really try-
ing to gear what we know to support them. To strengthen them, to build
power with other constituencies to speak truth to power, to find platforms
to speak to power—to make informed appeals for change …
This is a good operational definition of what IFG founder Jerry Mander

(still active in the organization) calls ‘movement building for change’.
In this statement, there is some differentiation between ‘we’ and
‘they’—specifically between we ‘who know’ and ‘frontline groups’ who

need to be ‘supported’. This arguably suggests an asymmetrical rela-
tionship in which the IFG brings expertise to concerned actors, implic-
itly construed as less informed. Yet Menotti is at pains to stress that the
aim is not to act or speak for others, but to ‘strengthen them’, includ-
ing through coalition building, in order to enable dominated classes and
groups to speak truth to power.
The IFG pursues this project by:
• Creating large, high-profile teach-ins in major US cities on political

issues of great moment and salience (most famously, the IFG teach-
in immediately preceding the 1999 Battle in Seattle)
• Convening smaller, strategic seminars of movement leadership from
a wide spectrum to discuss and design political campaigns, and
• Policy work critical of neoliberal hegemony and proactive in the
articulation of alternatives.
A recent funding crisis deprived the IFG of substantial resources. This is

suggestive, too, of the financial precarity of many TAPGs. But the IFG
remains active on two programmatic fronts: the Asian-Pacific Program
(which discerns a ‘rising geopolitical battleground’ between the United
States and China for resources, markets and political control within the
world’s most populous region); and the Plutonomy Program (which
investigates ‘the rise and empowerment of global plutonomy and the
subjugation of democratic states’).12 These KPM interventions on geo-
political and class issues are particularly salient within the United States
and primarily address US publics; however, most IFG policy papers and
books in these and other fields are available globally in English, through
the IFG website. Through such campaigns, the IFG remains relevant
within concrete social struggles, contributing critical policy analyses for
a wide constituency centred in the United States, but spanning the globe
through its online publications and international board of directors.
The Centre for Civil Society

Of all TAPGs, the CCS is the most extensively and organically engaged
with local politics. The CCS devotes great energy to ongoing relation-
ships with local movements and struggles, providing intellectual leader-
ship in setting these struggles within a broader political-economic and
political-ecological context. Many books and other publications credited

to CCS principals and associates (including the biweekly column in the
Mercury, Durban’s main English-language paper) have a local thrust.
The CCS has at the same time built an impressive visible international
profile, particularly through the efforts of its ubiquitous director, Patrick
Bond.
The work of the CCS is done by three kinds of people: three research
staff, four administrative/communications staff (whose work extends
to community development and social media initiatives) and about six
Community Scholars. In addition, visitors from abroad, including many
academics, give public talks at CCS, which are posted immediately to the
website.
CCS’s initiatives build linkages between activism and analysis, in both
directions, as suggested by the layout of its offices. In addition to space
for academic and administrative staff, the centre’s multipurpose meet-
ing room, which holds 40–50 people and gets a lot of use, has along
its borders several computer work stations, which are offered to commu-
nity and visiting scholars, to facilitate political organizing and research.
The ‘Protest Observatory’ prominently featured on the CCS web-
site is another marker of intense activist engagement. Webmaster John
Devenish scouts the internet each day for stories to post. The informa-
tion-rich website contains many KPM resources for activists, including an
online library of radical literature with more than 3000 documents.
The close, dialogical relationship the CCS has with the Durban activ-
ist community enables the centre to learn from it and to provide intellec-
tual and other cultural resources to it. As Patrick Bond told us:
Here in Durban we probably are about the closest watchdogs of the left—
from the left—that you’d find in the city, and we will regularly put out
mega-critiques and micro-critiques. So we have got to jump scale, do eve-
rything—we do political economy and political ecology with some of the
best people in the world giving us assistance.
Such work involves the collaborative construction of venues, such as

Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT),
an initiative in socio-ecological justice in which the CCS plays a lead-
ing role. A 2012 policy paper that Bond coauthored with other EJOLT
researchers (Bond et al. 2012) is an example: it concluded that across
Africa, the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) subsidizes
dangerous for-profit activities such as coal-fired electrical generation and

deforestation, ‘making them yet more advantageous to multinational
corporations which are mostly based in Europe, the US or South Africa’
(Bond et al. 2012, p. 1).
CCS’s cognitive praxis includes local agit-prop (in various media) and
critical policy analysis, but extends to political community organizing and
intercultural dialogue through the CCS Community Scholars—activists
grounded in local, predominantly Black, communities, who receive a sti-
pend and their own space at the Centre to pursue initiatives in coop-
eration with other centre staff and visitors. Community Scholars provide
‘reality tours’ of Durban, a form of experiential political education for
visitors; they are active in political struggles around issues of migration
and xenophobia, access to water, toilets, electricity and so on. China
Ngubane, a political refugee from Zimbabwe and a Community Scholar,
who coordinates the program, has mastered a method of ‘protest map-
ping’ to understand the geography of protest in Umlazi, South Africa’s
second biggest township (after Soweto).13 These examples show how
the program sustains an organic link between the CCS, embedded in a
formerly Whites-only university campus of the University of KwaZulu-
Natal, and the majority communities of greater Durban.
The Community Scholars program is local in focus, but the CCS
also intervenes online, including its ‘debaters’ listserv, pulling together
a community of left intellectuals throughout southern Africa. When
possible, it organizes people’s conferences to coincide with major elite
summits held in Durban. Two early planning meetings in January 2013,
convened by the CCS and featuring local activists and allied groups, later
became the ‘BRICS from Below’ civil society summit—‘a call to re-build
BRICS, bottom–up’, in March 2013.14 Although these may appear to
be ‘reactive’, as the CCS challenges an agenda according to a calendar
decided by more powerful actors, in practice it convenes around the pri-
orities and needs emphasized by participating, typically subaltern, organi-
zations and groups.
CCS initiatives in cognitive praxis are informed by an epistemo-
logical commitment to view social conflict from the standpoint of the
oppressed, as illustrated by this chapter’s opening quote. Situated in
what one of its pamphlets describes as ‘the world’s most unequal and
protest-rich major country’, the CCS pursues a project attuned to the
need for knowledge grounded in ‘the sources and processes of con-
flict’, produced with and for those who challenge oppressive systems.
However, the CCS is not without contradictions. As observed earlier, the

CCS’s international visibility is concentrated in the person of Bond, who
is a white man originally from Northern Ireland. His family went to the
United States when he was quite young, and he went on to complete a
PhD with David Harvey at John Hopkins University in the 1990s. This
is suggestive of the ways in which even the most democratic, local organ-
izations depend upon concentrated expertise held by long-time activists,
which may reproduce hegemonic gendered and racialized relations of
power.
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

The brain trust of Germany’s democratic-socialist Left Party (Die Linke)
has a particularly clear vision of where its counter-hegemonic cogni-
tive praxis could lead. A formal organization with more than 100 staff,
the Rosa Luxemberg Foundation (RosaLux) is a research foundation
that undertakes and supports extensive political education projects in
Germany and internationally. Its funding from the German state, on the
basis of Die Linke’s share of the national vote (amounting to over $42
million euros in 2012) provides a material base that is a quantum-step
above those of all other TAPGs. While nationally centred, RosaLux’s
transnational presence is comparatively extensive, with 16 foreign offices
supporting activities in more than 25 countries. Within the founda-
tion’s division of labour, the Institute for Critical Social Analysis (IfG,
established in 2008) is most engaged in knowledge production, includ-
ing theoretical analysis and policy proposals, in dialogue with the left
intelligentsia and movement communities. The Academy of Political
Education and Centre for International Dialogue and Cooperation
engage extensively in knowledge mobilization, including funding allies’
cognitive praxis, often within partnerships.
RosaLux’s mission is to engage productively with a ‘mosaic left’—
diverse, pluralistic, transnational—to foster a transformative left. The
mosaic left is fragmented, yet its fragments add up to a picture—an alter-
native to neoliberal capitalism. RosaLux’s dialogical approach strives
‘to bring the different movements, the unions, the different parties
together to formulate their interests, their visions, and practices [so] that
they do not lose their specific identity’, but do converge into a coun-
ter-hegemonic bloc with transformative capacities. As Mario Candeias,
deputy director of the institute, explained, ‘We are all interested in
transformative things. We are all into these ideas of “you have to build
a mosaic”, not the Party, the Union, the whatever. And we’ve very clear
… that expanding “the public” is one of the very important things.’ The
point is not to replace the mosaic, but rather to assist in self-clarification
and development, helping revitalize the democratic public sphere.
As a multidivisional international organization, RosaLux’s practices
are especially diverse, tailored to the various publics and movements with
which it dialogues.15 However, as Rainer Rilling told us, the Foundation
has two tracks of cognitive praxis. Scientific work is carried out at the
Institute,16 which publishes analytical papers on strategy and policy for
the left intelligentsia within and outside Die Linke. It also organizes
conferences for broader publics followed up with synthesizing work.
The Academy17 offers general political education through participa-
tory courses and workshops for youth and adult learners on such top-
ics as economic literacy, gender inequalities, sustainable development
and political communication. It engages with movements directly and
through such media as its website, public events featuring music and dis-
cussion, and hard-copy pamphlets distributed at such events as Blockupy
Frankfurt. Project coordinator Lutz Brangsch explained that the acade-
my’s ‘Let’s Speak About Alternatives’ initiative mobilized the knowledge
of ‘people in very concrete alternative projects at the grass-roots level,
like city gardening or like organizing solidarity alternative production, or
bringing goods from the South to the North in a solidarity fair way and
so on’, to discuss which initiatives are effective, why people engage in
these projects, and how they can be generalized or scaled up. The result-
ing book, The ABC of Alternatives, was widely distributed as a popular
education tool.
The Centre for International Dialogue and Cooperation’s18 constitu-
ency is more popular than scientific, and is especially diverse, given its
presence in dozens of countries. Through its foreign offices, the cen-
tre supports left organizations and currents in Latin America, Africa,
Asia, Europe and North America. Support includes funding as well as
seminars and conferences organized with partners that include univer-
sities and civil society organizations, radio stations and magazines, and
in some cases left governments. Karin Gabbert, director of RosaLux’s
Latin American programs, described a RosaLux-supported study of
Indigenous justice whose results were worked into a course that the
government of Ecuador has now given all its judges. RosaLux’s work
in the South is done in partnership with movements and civil society
organizations, but shares critical knowledge between Global South and

North, in bi-directional processes of intercultural translation. In practice,
of course, such bi-directional processes may not be perfectly symmetri-
cal. ‘Cosmopolitan’ actors from the Global South with international lan-
guage skills and a recognizable international vocabulary of human rights,
for instance, may play more important roles than other Global South
actors in such exchanges. Nonetheless, RosaLux does create possibilities
for exchange in which Southern actors are not without agency.
In sum, RosaLux’s counter-hegemonic project engages with the
mosaic left to build a transformative left—a convergence of movements
against capitalism and for green socialism. It addresses injustices pertain-
ing to gender, sexuality, race and nation that intersect with problems of
capitalism, and mounts extensive programs of political education, critical
research and movement-building, the first two centred in Germany and
the third pursued both domestically and internationally.
The Transnational Institute

The TNI, initially the international branch of the Institute for Policy
Studies (based in Washington, DC), was created as ‘an international
network of scholar–activists committed to social change’.19 Its cogni-
tive praxis is multifaceted. TNI works with and for different constituen-
cies, and different sites of institutional power. It delivers macro analyses
and critiques of the global regime, focused around two large programs:
Drugs and Democracy (with regionally focused projects); and Economic
Justice (with projects on trade/investment, corporate power, agrarian
justice and public services/water justice—each providing a window on
the neoliberal global political economy and the search for alternatives).20
TNI brings a social vision of a sustainable, just and democratic world
to these projects. To these ends, it engages with activist communities
worldwide, dialoguing with movements and with progressive govern-
ments, recently in Latin America.
TNI’s knowledge-producing practices are diverse. Its basic strategies
range from insider efforts (Drugs and Democracy; working to influ-
ence the European Commission on trade and investment policy; advice
to progressive governments of the ‘pink tide’) to outsider initiatives
(the Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity). As
PietjeVervest summarized:
I think we have different audiences. I think our key audience is social

movements, but of course, policy makers and academe and media are also
audiences we would like to influence. That is more ‘influence’ and the
other is more ‘working with’. So we are producing knowledge on differ-
ent levels, suitable for the target groups for the audiences. What we do a
lot for social movements is developing primers—easy readable analyses of
land-grabbing, water-grabbing—EU role in land-grabbing worldwide …
For policy-makers, we choose policy briefings. And for the media, all kinds
of stuff—short reports, press releases.
In Drugs and Democracy, the basic research is done unconvention-

ally, compared with academic work on drug policy issues. TNI inter-
views farmers, small traders and others—vulnerable groups are typically
ignored by the mainstream. The grounded knowledge it produces is now
highly valued at the policy-making level in several contexts.
Similarly, though distinctly, in its Water Justice and Public Services
and Democracy projects, TNI mobilizes experiential knowledge as a
political resource for activists struggling to reclaim the commons after
privatization. Much of this cognitive praxis consists in finding and analys-
ing
working examples—[e.g.] of public-water utilities that are doing impres-

sive things. But learning from them as well—their mistakes, but part of
their experience is actually showing that an alternative is not just possible.
It already exists, and the question is how to share this knowledge.
TNI communications manager Nick Buxton continues:
Those kinds of sharing real experiences are really important, and one that
I try to push more because … we’ve got a convergence of systemic crises
and we are really wanting to say not just how bad the situation is—people
know it is bad – they want to know what we can do about it. So those
kinds of alternatives, those real life examples, ones that we can learn from
and improve upon, are really important.
TNI is a policy group that is particularly rich in capacity (as distinct

from balance-sheet assets) for transnational cognitive praxis across a
range of issues. It complements critical policy work, including original
research, with ongoing dialogues and facilitations associated with vari-
ous programs and projects, and provides cognitive resources to activist
organizations and campaigns via conferences, workshops, seminars and in

textual form. TNI’s capacity to act within transnational fields is enhanced
through its collaborative approach to cognitive praxis. Its list of collab-
orators indicates 82 partners, 14 of whom are part of extensive global
civil-society networks such as the Hemispheric Alliance, Our World is
Not for Sale, and the Seattle to Brussels Network.21 Although from a
localist–horizontalist perspective such networks may be viewed as repli-
cating cosmopolitan-elitist practices (for a critique along these lines, see
Dezalay 2004), we would argue that it is a significant rather than triv-
ial difference—that these actors self-consciously align with ‘alternative’
rather than ‘mainstream’ organizations and foundations. Not least, this
makes them responsible to counter-hegemonic actors, who are their col-
leagues, rather than to dominant actors, who move transnationally as
well but in different circles (for example, the Bilderberg group or the
World Economic Forum).
Focus on the Global South

Since its 1995 founding, the project of Focus on the Global South
(Focus) has been ‘to challenge neoliberalism, militarism and corporate-
driven globalisation while strengthening just and equitable alternatives’.
Focus works ‘in solidarity with the Global South’, in a range of knowl-
edge-producing practices that ‘bring together diverse actors’—from
government to social movements, from North and South—to share
and deepen analysis of emerging power patterns and new experiences of
social transformation as the basis for broad collective mobilization for
democratic change. Like other groups, Focus deploys a wide range of
approaches, including research and analysis, conferences and seminars,
‘education and study programs, network building, international solidar-
ity and fact-finding missions, direct action and parliamentary testimoni-
als, social forums, joint campaigns and media’.22
Although Focus produces alternative knowledge for a global pub-
lic, its work is centred in South and South-East Asia, where it has active
programs in Thailand, India and the Philippines, connecting with local
movements and national political processes. Twice a year, the 15 Focus
personnel convene for a staff meeting, to assess progress and discuss
broad strategy. Focus depends upon a relatively small, dedicated staff,
while seeking to create broad-based, participative change, a tension that
is arguably sharpened by the relatively limited financial resources Focus
has full-time salaries, but alleviated (as we observe below) through col-
laborations that enable broader grass-roots reach than its small staff
might suggest. Direction from this team of 15 informs the plan for
each national office, although regular cross-office contact is maintained
through email and conference calls.
Thematically, Focus divides its labour among three overlapping
areas: Trade and Investments (the original Focus concern); Climate/
Environmental Justice; and Land, Water and Forests (with an empha-
sis on Defending the Commons). Like other TAPGs, Focus is deeply
engaged in collaborative work, in some case with kindred groups. As
ShalmaliGuttal, who leads Focus’s Land, Water and Forests team, told
us:
With TNI for example, we have a very, very close relationship, because
they are our sibling organization in Europe and we are their sibling organi-
zation in Asia. So we are involved in a number of campaigns together. We
are involved in anti-land grabbing campaigns and retaining public water,
the Water Justice movement; the fight against TNCs on the issue of trade
and investment. So we are in a lot of coalitions with them and others … I
think for us that is the only way we can work. We have to work together,
and not carve up territory.
Focus’s work has featured in-depth, critical policy analysis, for which the
group is well known. But Focus staffs are activists, and there is a tight
interweaving of knowledge production and mobilization within move-
ment networks. As one staffer remarked:
The key thing is that we try to make links between national and local
movements with regional and international platforms. This is to inform
the national and local movements with new information analysis—global
debate has give them early warning of what would be the tendency com-
ing to the region, coming to the countries and so on—what would be the
impact and things like that. At the same time, we facilitate and animate
networks and movements at the national level—selectively, not every-
thing—and then feed the information upward. Like what is actually hap-
pening on the ground—what the implications of such policies are. And in
these processes, of course we engage in specific campaigns …
In this excerpt, we find a compelling description of cognitive praxis as

an ongoing venture in transformative politics, which is simultaneously a
process of alternative knowledge production and mobilization. Indeed,

Focus is a good example of KPM as praxis—developing alternatives
through activism. Focus self-consciously seeks to move both from the
local to the global, and from the global to the local, simultaneously
strengthening (and informing) local activism and ensuring that global
politics reflect the realities of what happens ‘on the ground’. In other
words, Focus takes seriously the need to be grounded in local politics,
but connected to and active in global politics.
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era

Like several other TAPGs, Development Alternatives with Women for a
New Era (DAWN), founded as a transnational network with a core of a
dozen or so Southern feminists, addresses its work both to movement
counter-publics and to institutionalized centres of power. DAWN has
four main research themes, which are explained at its resource-rich web-
site:
1. Political Economy of Globalization

2. Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
3. Political Restructuring and Social Transformation
4. Political Ecology and Sustainability.23
These focus DAWN’s core analyses and its global advocacy efforts.
Strategically, DAWN strives to ‘translate’ feminist political-economic and
political-ecological analysis into ‘advocacy demands’, and to help move-
ments use those demands to push governments for change, as Nicole
Bidegain told us. But it places equal or greater emphasis upon bottom–
up knowledge production. From the start, DAWN defined its core con-
stituency transnationally, as women of the Global South, yet has always
emphasized a holistic perspective challenging all forms of oppression.
Since its public launch at the 1985 World Conference on Women at
Nairobi, DAWN advocates within intergovernmental processes, includ-
ing Rio+20, but equally emphasizes ‘networking’ with movements and
‘training’ the next generation of Southern feminists. The goal is two-
fold: (1). to influence feminist movements by sharing structural and criti-
cal interlinkage analyses, (2). to ‘work with other friends from the left
or from the progressive social movements trying to bring the feminist
perspective there’ (DAWN’s Nicole Bidegain). As Bidegain continued,
training multiplies analysis and knowledge so that new feminists can

use it pragmatically, not only intellectually, to transform their realities.
A key accomplishment has been the creation of spaces within Gender,
Economic and Ecological Justice (GEEJ) and other DAWN training
institutes for intensive participatory education in interlinkage analysis, so
fostering transnational alumni networks.
As Gita Sen told us, from its first book forward (Sen and Grown
1987),24 DAWN’s cognitive praxis has integrated theory and practice
through extensive dialogue. ‘We don’t feel that we produce something,
and then say, oh, now let’s figure out what the activists think about it.
It’s theirs from the beginning.’ MarinaDurano, who has worked exten-
sively on all three fronts of advocacy, networking and training, shared her
account of how DAWN’s dialogical approach uses interlinkage to contest
neoliberal capitalism’s dominant narrative:
The North/South distinction is there always. It can create tensions among

civil society, but that’s the story. Then within the South, then you look at
the inequalities, exclusions, marginalizations. Some of them are identity-
based exclusions. Some of them are purely economic exclusions or mar-
ginalizations or poverty. The different dimensions of poverty have to be
brought forward, and of course gender-based discrimination is always
prominent in that story, because you have additional layers of sources of
exclusion or exploitation, depending on the relation you are trying to
explain. So those stories have to be brought out from within the content.
That is why seminars, workshops with allies are important—that is how
you draw out the stories. That is how you create the counter-story. We
have to be actually talking to each other; otherwise we won’t know our
stories. And then drawing from that, [we co-create] the main messages as
to the counterpoint to what is being sold as the truth.
Like ITeM/Social Watch, DAWN produces alternative knowledge

both for intergovernmental (mainly UN) agencies and with grass-roots
activists. At the same time, this is not without tensions, often rooted
in relations of inequality like the North/South divide. Hence there is
a specifically contrapuntal emphasis within DAWN’s work, as Durano
explains, emphasizing the stories of those whose voices are not typically
heard within the civil society. This effort to valorize and make visible
the experiences of those who are relatively dominated is not unique to
DAWN, but it is distinctive in its intense focus on women of the Global
South and holistic perspective, offering political-economic and political-

ecological critique.
Discussion: Variations, Tensions and Possibilities

In comparing across the eight groups we can distinguish three broad
categories based on the content and scope of their KPM projects: (1)
those sharing a critical-liberal perspective that promotes human rights,
grass-roots democracy and empowerment and seeks to re/trans/form
practices limiting these goods; (2) those positioned to the left of critical
liberalism, radically grounded in a political-economic critique of neolib-
eral capitalism, with a national-focus; and (3) those with radical projects
whose KPM practices are extensively transnational. TAPGs in the third
category come closest to serving as collective intellectuals of what Peter
Evans (2008, p. 272) terms ‘counter-hegemonic globalization’—that is,
‘a globally organized project of transformation aimed at replacing the
dominant (hegemonic) global regime with one that maximizes demo-
cratic political control and makes the equitable development of human
capabilities and environmental stewardship its priorities’.
Contributing to such a project raises formidable challenges, particu-
larly for groups operating extensively in transnational spaces. They must
establish the relevancies of their analyses and initiatives to local, on-the-
ground movement actors, through tangible, dialogical collaborations.
As Marx (1844) put it, ‘theory becomes a material force as soon as it
has gripped the masses’. Yet ideas that remain abstract and disembedded
amount to no more than what Gramsci called ‘castles in the air’ (quoted
in Germino 1990, p. 19). As TNI, RosaLux, DAWN and Focus pur-
sue transnational KPM projects, they develop a reflective awareness of
these challenges—which, however, does not necessarily make them eas-
ier to resolve. Moving from local experiences and knowledges to more
global, if not ‘universal’, grammars is complicated. Cultivating truly and
not only aspirationally dialogical, grass-roots relations in solidarity with
local subaltern groups is made difficult in the context of real inequali-
ties: between actors from the Global North and South; between women
and men; between more ‘cosmopolitan’ activists comfortable in English-
speaking settings around the world and more ‘local’ actors who may act
and speak in ways that are not widely understood precisely because they
are the ways of the marginalized. Sometimes, global analyses that artic-
ulate with transnational movement campaigns and publics and/or that
address states and intergovernmental organizations may become ‘cas-

tles in the air’, at least from the perspective of local actors. This is not
because TAPGs are inherently compromised, but because they must nav-
igate across inequalities in a way that hermetically sealed elite groups, like
the participants at the World Economic Forum, largely do not.
TAPGs’ resources vary, and this shapes their KPM projects. Most
TAPGs operate on ‘sweat equity’—with attendant risks of burnout, espe-
cially as demands for accounting ‘transparency’ create new administrative
burdens on under-staffed associations. But a few TAPGs have important
financial resources. In Germany’s political system, extensive funds have
made possible RosaLux’s ability to operate both nationally and trans-
nationally at an exceptional scale compared with other TAPGs (though
puny compared with, say, the World Economic Forum—one of global
capital’s collective intellectuals). However, DAWN, which operates on a
shoestring budget, reminds us that it is possible to pursue a radical KPM
project on a transnational basis, over decades, through light-footed prac-
tices and core protagonists’ thoughtful commitment.
Although many TAPGs use conventional methods of knowledge pro-
duction and mobilization, part of what makes them ‘alternative’ is their
dialogical, movement-centred approaches. Again, we are neither pre-
suming that dialogue is perfect, nor that all actors are always equally
respected within the exchanges. As noted at the outset, TAPG activists
are human beings socialized into a radically unequal world, and they may
reproduce some inequalities while challenging others. The ways in which
DAWN seeks to highlight feminist approaches when collaborating with
other counter-hegemonic organizations are indicative of the ongoing
work that dialogue requires if it is to be truly inclusive of relatively mar-
ginalized groups, including many women.
Nonetheless, if TAPGs reproduce social inequalities some of the time,
they are innovators in other ways that challenge ‘ordinary’ practices of
domination. Taken together, their eclectic toolkit includes grass-roots
monitoring of powerful actors (as in Social Watch’s practice of watch-
ing). It features practices that seek to democratize knowledge production
and link it directly to progressive social change—as in PRIA’s participa-
tory action research and the grass-roots research partnerships of RosaLux
and TNI, which value the experiential insights of such knowledgeable
practitioners as peasants and movement activists. It emphasizes prac-
tices that seek to build capacity for well-informed collective agency from
below, as in IFG’s teach-ins, CCS’s Community Scholars and DAWN’s
feminist training programs—all of which help to produce organic intel-

lectuals. Alternative KPM practices entail a double address to movement
counter-publics and subaltern communities, and to institutional cen-
tres of power (chiefly intergovernmental organizations and states). This
last raises specific challenges of cultivating credibility within the main-
stream public sphere while engaging with, learning from, informing and
even representing grass-roots constituencies on the margins. Critical-
liberal TAPGs resolve this by framing their projects within the hegem-
onic bounds of permissible discourse; other TAPGs engage selectively
and strategically with particular statist bodies and individuals embedded
therein.25 In stark contrast to mainstream think tanks, however, where
the accumulation of state-centred social and cultural capital is a badge
of honour, for TAPGs legitimacy stems primarily from their effectiveness
in democratizing knowledge through dialogical engagement with diverse
constituencies.
There are other overarching similarities across the groups. Most obvi-
ously, all of them engage in the basic activities of the alternative policy
group: to ‘expose, oppose, propose’ (Carroll 2016):
• They conduct critical analysis of dominant practices and institutions,

exposing problems of injustice, irrationality or ecological malady.
• They build alliances through dialogue with grass-roots movements
and subaltern groups, creating common ground and providing cog-
nitive resources that augment capacity for progressive collective
action that opposes domination.
• They develop proposals and strategies for alternative practices,
policies and ways of life, and mobilize these through a range of
media—for example, lectures and seminars, online content, videos,
publications and policy papers.
Beyond that, however, certain points of normative convergence can be

discerned, suggesting a ‘master frame’ (Snow and Benford 1992) that
bridges across single issues and informs the practice of TAPGs. Master
frames enable heterogeneous groups to be allied in common politi-
cal struggles; lending coherence to the movement politics of an histori-
cal conjuncture, or even an era (Tarrow 1992). For TAPGs, the frame
includes six key analytical and value elements:
1. The critique of hegemonic political-economic structure, typically

understood as a combination of neoliberal capitalism and (neo)
colonialism—of the class/state power and disparities it reinforces
and the problematic implications of endless, unregulated accumu-
lation by dispossession
2. The importance of social justice and ecological sustainability as
paramount values—a nascent social vision of global justice and sus-
tainable human development
3. The belief that such an alternative future can be achieved only
through grass-roots democratic movements
4. The ethical and strategic importance of North–South solidarity
5. The value of critical analysis that can inform effective and appropri-
ate strategies for creating change
6. The need to ground such analysis in practice, through an ongoing
dialogue with activist and subaltern communities.
These elements of a master-frame help specify the content of counter-

hegemonic knowledge as produced and mobilized by TAPGs.
Conclusions
TAPGs present an illuminating contrast to hegemonic think tanks.
Although both produce knowledge for politics and policies, TAPGs’
alternative goals—to expose, oppose and propose in the service of global
justice—require them to adopt startlingly different means, which stretch
and subvert the very notion of a policy-planning group. Here we have
presented an unavoidably selective analysis, relying in part on their own
reflexive accounts on their practices rather than an activist-ethnographic
investigation more attuned to the concrete interplay of relations of rul-
ing and relations of struggle (Kinsman 2006). We recognize that TAPGs
only partially realize their goals. Nonetheless, we maintain that TAPGs
matter, as they strive to create—and sometimes succeed in creating—new
sources of critical knowledge and mobilizing that knowledge within pro-
jects aimed at social justice, human thriving and ecological well-being.
TAPGs remind us that enlarging such spaces is a practical matter. It
means exposing, opposing and proposing, but always in close coopera-
tion with actual on-the-ground struggles towards a different and better
world.
Notes
1. See Carroll (2016) for further methodological details. Our analysis is
restricted to eight TAPGs where five or more in-depth interviews were
conducted with relatively limited participant observation—that is, the
groups’ own representations of their practices. A study of actual prac-
tice could reveal disjunctures between the TAPGs accounts and on-the-
ground practices.
2. Put critically, ‘cosmopolitan universalism’ may appear as a form of ideo-
logical neo-imperialism to some (e.g. Grosfuguel 2005). In this respect,
Northern-based TAPGs face the challenge of reconstructing knowledge
‘in ways that permit us to be non-Orientalist’ (Wallerstein 2006, p. 48),
without simply inverting the colonial epistemic hierarchy—valorizing
non-Western ways of knowing over post-Enlightenment thought. As
one of us has commented elsewhere, ‘Northern-based groups need to
avoid tendencies toward abstract universalism (as in most human rights
discourse), which in substance shores up Eurocentric hegemonies.
Conversely, Southern-based groups need to bring the energy of anti-
imperialist and Indigenous perspectives, often exemplary of “militant par-
ticularism”, into a global vision’ (Carroll 2014, p. 278).
3. See http://www.socialwatch.org/about, accessed 27 August 2013.
4. The group’s roots in alternative journalism run deep. Founder and execu-
tive director Roberto Bissio is a professional journalist whose work was
repressed in the 1970s by Uruguay’s dictatorship. ITeM’s initial project
was to publish the Third World Guide—long a basic source socioeco-
nomic conditions and human rights violations within each country of the
Global South.
5. Ibid.
6. See http://www.socialwatch.org/annualReport, accessed 27 August
2013.
7. See http://www.socialwatch.org/node/14365, accessed 27 August
2013.
8. Detailed at http://www.socialwatch.org/node/63, accessed 27 August
2013.
9. The portal is located at http://www.practiceinparticipation.org, accessed
19 August 2013.
10. See http://www.ifg.org/about.htm, accessed 27 August 2013.
11. See ‘History of the IFG’ at http://www.ifg.org/about/history.htm,
accessed 27 August 2013.
12. See http://www.ifg.org/programs.htm, accessed 27 August 2013.
13. CCS also provides training for Community Scholars and other activists in
videography. Some of these activist videos are available on the website at
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?3,76, accessed 27 August 2013.
14. Details are at http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/brics-from-below%20call%20
version%2017%20March.pdf, accessed 19 August 2013.
15. RosaLux engages only minimally with governments and IGOs, the major
exception occurring within Germany at the state and municipal levels
(such as Brandenburg) where Die Linke holds some state power. In those
cases, the foundation, through the institute especially, provides advice in
dialogue with the government.
16. See http://rosalux.de/english/foundation/research-projects.html, accessed
10 August 2013.
17. See http://www.rosalux.de/english/foundation/political-education.
html, accessed 10 August 2013.
18. See http://rosalux.de/english/worldwide.html, accessed 10 August 2013.
19. See http://www.tni.org/page/history, accessed 3 October 2011.
20. TNI’s Burma Project draws on other TNI projects (drugs, agrarian jus-
tice, investment/trade) in working with ethnic minority groups seeking
a voice in national policy making and engaging with international actors
operating in their territories.
21. See http://www.tni.org/partners, accessed 19 August 2013.
22. See http://focusweb.org/content/who-we-are, accessed 27 August 2013.
23. See http://www.dawnnet.org/index.php, accessed 9 August 2013.
24. Available at http://www.dawnnet.org/resources-books.php?page=2,
accessed 27 August 2013.
25. For a discussion of how TAPGs pursue ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ strategies
of engagement with dominant institutions, see Carroll (2015, pp. 714–
717).
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CHAPTER 9
From Research to Reality: Developing a

Radical Left Think Tank in New Zealand
as Counter-Hegemonic Praxis in a
Previously Empty Space
Sue Bradford
Despite the rapid rise in number of think tanks globally, particularly from
the early 1970s onwards, New Zealand was a comparative latecomer to
the think tank phenomenon. New Zealand’s first think tank of any sig-
nificance was the New Zealand Business Round Table (NZBRT), which
started life as a group of chief executive officers (CEOs) who adopted
the name ‘Roundtable’ around 1980, before setting up a permanent
office in 1986 (Kerr 1990). The NZBRT went on to wield influence at
the highest levels of government, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s
(Beder 2006; Harris and Twiname 1998; Jesson 1999; Murray 2006;
Roper 2005). A number of other think tanks developed following the
rise of the NZBRT, including the New Zealand Institute, the Ecologic
Foundation, the Institute of Policy Studies, the Centre for Strategic
Studies, the McGuiness Institute and the Maxim Institute.
S. Bradford (*) 
Economic and Social Research Aotearoa, Auckland, New Zealand

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_9
220 S. Bradford
Of these, the Maxim Institute, with its focus on family and social issues
from a conservative perspective, and the New Zealand Institute, which
arose out of the Labour Government-supported Knowledge Wave initia-
tive in the early 2000s, achieved substantial media and public prominence,
alongside the NZBRT. In 2012, the NZBRT and the New Zealand
Institute merged to become The New Zealand Initiative, described by the
National Business Review as ‘libertarian’ (Smellie 2012); its website says
‘we are certainly an Initiative that usually prefers Adam Smith’s invisible
hand to government’s visible fist’ (New Zealand Initiative 2016). From
an international perspective, the number of think tanks in New Zealand
has remained low. According to James McGann’s regularly updated index
(McGann 2016) there were 6,845 think tanks globally and just five of
those fitting the report’s criteria were located in New Zealand.
Since the 1930s, New Zealand’s unicameral system traditionally has
been dominated by two parties, National (conservative) and Labour
(social democratic left). In 1984, Labour came to power and unex-
pectedly set in motion a series of right-wing reforms that shifted New
Zealand to a very open, free-market economy. Hundreds of thousands
of jobs were lost, and rural and provincial communities suffered enor-
mously. ‘New Zealand suddenly became the test bed for a daring experi-
ment in free market economics’ (Gould 2008, p. 18). This was the
period during which the NZBRT rose to prominence. Its influence
continued after November 1990, when the National Party returned to
power, slashing welfare benefits and radically reshaping employment law
to the detriment of workers, the unemployed, beneficiaries and unions.
The hegemony of neoliberalism continued into the 2000s with a series of
Labour-led governments proceeding with an agenda still committed to
free trade and the primacy of the market, softened only by a more liberal
social character and muted attempts to restore more power to unions.
It was my own experience as someone highly engaged in political life
during these two decades that drove me to explore what was to become
my doctoral question. From around 1990 onwards, I had been part of
conversations, both as an activist and as an elected politician, about the
lack of a major left-wing think tank to counter those of the right. This
was only one aspect of the long-term weakness of the New Zealand
left, but for a number of us, it was clearly a critical gap in our ability to
develop effective counter-hegemonic voices and institutions.
I had spent a lifetime as a community-based activist, mainly in unem-
ployed workers’ and welfare claimants’ groups, and had just completed
9 FROM RESEARCH TO REALITY: DEVELOPING A RADICAL LEFT … 221
10 years in the New Zealand parliament as a Green Party MP. From the
vantage point of the legislature in the period 1999–2009, I had become
increasingly concerned about the loss of organizational capacity and a
decline in the culture of resistance among the radical activist left. I had
also seen how a lack of analysis, research and new policy ideas from any
left equivalent of the existing think tanks hindered the development of
thoughtful and inspiring new policy by parliamentary parties like Labour
and the Greens. At the same time, the ability of many progressive com-
munity-based organizations that previously had undertaken political
advocacy work was increasingly hampered by a mix of the impact of new
charities legislation and the chilling effect of controls wielded by gov-
ernment through its funding and contracting practices (Elliot and Haigh
2012; Grey and Sedgwick 2013; O’Brien et al. 2009).
While there had been a small amount of discussion about the low
level of think tank activity overall in New Zealand (Cheyne et al. 2005;
Crothers 2008; Langford and Brownsey 1991), there was virtually no
published comment—academic or otherwise—about the absence of
left think tanks, which was hardly surprising given that none existed.
However, a few voices were raised over this period, among them that
of economist Brian Easton, who constantly attempted to draw atten-
tion to ‘the poor public discourse that bedevils New Zealand’ (Easton
2003) and called for institutions with the intellectual substance sufficient
to enable the social democratic left to present a serious challenge to the
neoliberal capitalist hegemony that had dominated the country’s politi-
cal life since the 1980s (Easton 2012). Activist and academic Jane Kelsey
called for think tanks as part of ‘strategies for resistance’ when she pub-
lished her A Manual for Counter-Technopols. She advised:
Establish well-resourced critical think-tanks – neo-liberal and libertarian

think tanks have shown the importance of well-resourced and interna-
tionally connected institutes which can develop an integrated analysis and
foster climates favourable to change. Unco-ordinated research by isolated
critics can never compete. (Kelsey 1995)
In 2009, left academic Bryce Edwards gave a talk in which he noted

that ‘we still haven’t seen the creation of that left-wing think tank’, a
reference to the work of Bruce Jesson, an earlier public intellectual who
had spent a lifetime frustrated with the lack of thoughtful analysis and
debate among the New Zealand left (Edwards 2009). A little later,
222 S. Bradford
commentator Chris Trotter (2012) echoed Susan George’s (1997)

reflection on the irony involved in the right’s superior utilization of
notions of Gramscian cultural hegemony when he remarked:
It is one of the greatest ironies of recent political history that the Right
has learned the lessons of effective left-wing propaganda more thoroughly
than the left itself. Groups like the Business Roundtable and the Maxim
Institute have always understood the enormous power of ideas, and how
an argument well-researched, well-presented, and then powerfully and
consistently advocated, will almost always shift public opinion in the
desired direction.
The absence of any substantive think tank on the left of New Zealand
politics drove the five specific queries underpinning my research. (1)
Why had no major left think tank ever developed in New Zealand? (2)
Was there support from left academics and activists for such an entity
or entities? (3) If there was, what was the nature of any think tank they
would like to see established? (4) What did the state of the activist left in
New Zealand in the period 2010–2013 indicate about the possibility or
otherwise of establishing a left think tank in future? (5) With such an ini-
tiative in mind, what might be learned from some of the think tank-like
left organizations that had already existed in New Zealand, and from left-
wing think tanks overseas?
From the earliest stages of the project, it was clear that two key defini-
tions were critical: left and think tank. Neither was easy to construct. Any
attempt to define left carried with it the burden of hundreds of years of
historical, political and philosophical theorizing, advocacy, interpretation
and dissent. Ultimately, I settled on a definition aimed at covering the full
spectrum of ‘left’ from social democratic Labour and ‘neither left nor right’
Green through to the radicalism of socialist, communist and anarchist tra-
ditions, and taking into account New Zealand’s situation as a postcolonial
settler society while retaining an essential internationalist perspective:
Left: a commitment to working for a world based on values of fairness,

inclusion, participatory democracy, solidarity and equality, and to trans-
forming Aotearoa1 into a society grounded in economic, social, environ-
mental and Tiriti2 justice.
A fuller discussion of the thinking underpinning this definition is avail-

able in my thesis (Bradford 2014).
Attempting to define think tank presented another major conundrum.

Any assessment of the international literature reveals the difficulties of
finding agreement. Weaver (1989, p. 563) notes that there is ‘no clear
definition of what a think tank is’, while Stone (2004, p. 2) character-
izes it as a ‘slippery term’. In creating a definition, I was aware of the
extensive academic literature on think tanks, and of the huge variety in
their size, structure, operational activities, purpose and political orienta-
tion. For the purposes of the research I was about to undertake, I chose
to exclude from the definition think tanks that were fully government
funded or part of government itself; those that were based completely
inside an academic entity; those that were established by a church or
other faith-based entities; and those that were transnational. This was
because I sought a definition that described a think tank (or tanks) that
might realistically be created from an activist and academic community
base within New Zealand, while not precluding the possibility that any
new entity might have associations with academic, church, government
and transnational bodies as part of its operations.
Think tank: A community based not for profit organization which under-
takes detailed research and policy development in order to influence and
enhance public policy formation across a broad range of issues, through
publications, media work, lobbying, conferences, workshops and other
forms of advocacy and education.
This chapter is organized in six parts. In the first, I describe my research

framework and methods. The second identifies key findings around why
no left major left think tank has ever emerged in New Zealand, and
around whether the state of the left between 2010 and 2013 provided
fertile ground for the establishment of one or more think tanks, or not.
The third section goes on to explore participants’ ideas about what it
would take to create a new left think tank. In the fourth, I look at lessons
any New Zealand implementation project might learn from the experi-
ences of a selection of nascent think tank-like organizations within New
Zealand. I then tell the story of the gestation of a new left think tank
between mid-2014 and April 2016, and consider how praxis matched up
against some of the key research findings. Finally, I conclude with a few
reflections on the new project, its likelihood of survival and its place in
the wider context of building left counter-hegemony in New Zealand.
224 S. Bradford
Research Framework and Methods
The methodological framework used to guide the study was political

activist ethnography, an offshoot of institutional ethnography, which
feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (2005) had developed as a criti-
cal inquiry research strategy that aimed to ‘make visible and explicate
the socially coordinated character and organization of people’s lives’
(Bisaillon 2012). George Smith, an AIDS activist with a background
in the gay liberation movement, wrote what is widely considered to be
political activist ethnography’s seminal work in 1990, in which he took
Dorothy Smith’s methodology and developed it into a deliberate tool
of grassroots organizing ‘based on a sociology committed to describing
how society actually works’, rather than on sociological theory or politi-
cal ideology (Smith 1990, p. 647). The theory and practice of political
activist ethnography took another step forward with the publication of a
book inspired by a 2002 colloquium in Ontario (Frampton et al. 2006).
Key tenets included the importance of grounding research in the experi-
ences of activists and their organizations, rather than treating them sim-
ply as objects of analysis, and an overt commitment to taking action for
change from the point of view of those who are exploited and oppressed.
Political activist ethnography was adopted as the preferred methodol-
ogy for the project because (1) the questions that lay at its heart were
deeply grounded in the people and organizations that constituted the
research field, and in the dynamics and contradictions of our work; (2)
there is an assumption inherent in political activist ethnography that
knowledge gained from research is expected to inform the next phase of
work being undertaken by the relevant organizations; (3) it provided a
legitimate, if provocative, framework within which to reflexively pursue
my own role as a values-laden activist researcher; and (4) the toolbox
that attaches to ethnography itself provided some particularly relevant
and useful methods, including the concept of the ethnographic gaze—‘a
systematic way of seeing’ (Madden 2010, p. 100)—as a means of allow-
ing a degree of necessary separation of an insider researcher from the
researched.
In-depth individual semi-structured interviews with 51 left activists
and academics from around New Zealand formed the primary source
of data for the project. Factors for which I selected to ensure range
and diversity in the intended sample from a pool of over 200 possible
participants included age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, geographic loca-

tion, union, community and church involvement, place within the spec-
trum of left, proximity and distance from the researcher in respect of
personal relationships, and (for some) their role in one or more of the
small number of think tank-like organizations that already existed. The
second major data source for the project was a thesis journal that I main-
tained from June 2010 until July 2013, by which time it had reached
over 66,000 words. The journal served the dual purpose of maintain-
ing field notes and observations of my life in the left activist world—a
core component of standard ethnographic practice—as well as helping
to ensure that I engaged in iterative and increasingly reflexive practices
throughout the project. Interview transcripts and the journal were ini-
tially fully coded with the assistance of NVivo qualitative data analysis
software, but the complex nature of much of the data meant I also used
visual mapping techniques to create a series of diagrams to help deepen
and clarify the analysis.
A further research goal was to explore what might be discovered from
a brief examination of what I termed ‘nascent’ left think tanks, existing
and earlier forms of left think tank-like organizations in New Zealand.
From interviews, from documents publicly available and from my own
archives, I explored the experiences of seven such organizations: the
Alternative Welfare Working Group, a six-month-long project that car-
ried out a national public submission and report-back process as a
church and community response to the establishment of the National
Government’s Welfare Working Group in 2010 (O’Brien et al. 2010);
the Bruce Jesson Foundation, established to promote, in a limited way,
critical, informed debate and journalism from a left perspective (Bruce
Jesson Foundation 2016); the Campaign Against Foreign Control of
Aotearoa, producing research and publications covering all aspects of
foreign control of New Zealand since 1975 (Campaign Against Foreign
Control of Aotearoa 2016); the Child Poverty Action Group, set up in
1994 to work for ‘the right of every child to security, food, shelter, edu-
cation and healthcare’ (Child Poverty Action Group 2016); the Fabian
Society, running lectures and workshops since 2010, with a focus on
working to shift the Labour Party’s economic direction (Fabian Society
2016); the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre (1983–1999)
which, despite its origins as a simple activist and advocacy organization,
from 1987 onwards increasingly took on some of the characteristics of a
fully fledged think tank; and Kotare Trust: Research and Education for
226 S. Bradford
Social Change, the main work of which, since its foundation in 1999, has
been to deliver participatory adult education and conscientization work-
shops aimed at strengthening the capacity of community-based organiza-
tions, unions, networks and campaigns (Kotare Trust 2016).
Research Findings
Why Had No Major Left Think Tank Emerged in New Zealand?

When I first began raising the possibility of setting up a major left-wing
think tank in the early 1990s, the most frequent reaction from friends
and colleagues was that it was a good idea, but was unlikely to ever hap-
pen because people like us would never find the money to fund such
a project. Therefore I began this research curious to discover whether
this would still be the predominant approach. Financial constraints did
indeed remain high on the list. As one female academic from a radical
background put it ‘The very main purpose of left thinking is to put them
out of business. Why would they fund us if you want to put them out of
business?’ Overall responses confirmed my initial expectation that fund-
ing would be seen as an overwhelming barrier to the development of any
major left-wing think tank, either past or future. However, those I inter-
viewed were also very clear that factors such as external political circum-
stances, a culture of factionalism and mutual distrust on the left, a lack
of critical mass in a comparatively small country, a shortage of organiza-
tional expertise, and the debilitating impact of a long history of left anti-
intellectualism all contributed to an environment that was hostile to the
development of a substantive left think tank. The term think tank itself
was also a sticking point. As a male economist said:
The word think tank is a very problematic expression in New Zealand …

you have lobbyists who call themselves think tanks; they don’t do very
much thinking. So it’s not a phrase I use a lot.
Respondents were also disturbed by the term’s right-wing connotations.

A female activist and community-based researcher noted:
Well we were opposing those bastard business think tanks, the [NZ]BRT,
right back in 1990 or something, so we were aware of think tanks, but
we mainly saw them as the enemy … You sort of associate think tank and
horrible right-wing bastards in the same breath, so they do get a bit mixed
in that way.
Others were concerned by the warlike connotations of think tank, or by

an implication of aloof isolation and elitism. As one female Māori activist
said, ‘It kind of creates a picture of academics sitting around with a glass
of wine having a nice little chat.’
But this was not the end of the story. Despite the perceived barri-
ers and suspicion about the term think tank itself, participants were also
brimming with ideas about what they would like such an entity to look
like, and how its establishment might be achieved. As one young Māori
academic-activist put it, ‘I have not seen any thing that does work. What
we need is to really get creative and think of something absolutely brand
new.’
Was the State of the Activist Left in New Zealand During the Period
2010–2013 Likely to Provide Fertile Ground for the Establishment
of One or More Left Think Tanks?
My attempts to answer this question meant that the project became, in
part, an unusual opportunity for the left to take a partially collective look
at ourselves and the condition we were in at a particular point in his-
tory. As I began the interviews, what struck me initially was the sense
conveyed by so many participants that the left had lost—that we had, in
effect, been permanently defeated in the struggle against much stronger
economic and political forces upholding and pursuing the neoliberal cap-
italist agenda. Unions were seen as weak and unwilling to undertake the
analysis and work necessary to develop new and more effective forms of
organization; the community sector had by 2012 become almost com-
pletely colonized by the state and by private sector modes of operating.
The major parties of the parliamentary left, Labour and the Greens, were
perceived as edging ever further to the center and right of the political
spectrum. There was a widespread awareness of the long-term negative
impact of intra-left factionalism on the ability of the left to flourish as a
more effective counterforce to ruling agendas.
Accompanying this was a sense of diminished left confidence and
organizational fragility. Many participants also perceived a rise in mind-
less activism, actions undertaken without sufficient collective analysis
228 S. Bradford
and planning. As one ecosocialist feminist remarked, ‘Left wing political

organizations … barely have enough time and space to get their mem-
bers organized for on-the-ground political agitation, let alone matters of
grand theory and grand strategy.’ Whether referring specifically to the
Occupy experience in 2011 or to the work of unions and community-
based organizations more broadly, there was a frequent sense that groups
were not taking enough time for strategizing or for developing alterna-
tives and solutions; and that creating effective new forms of organization
relevant to the contemporary context was simply not happening in most
places. There were signs of hope, however, in the rise of new organiza-
tions, including a rising momentum among students post-Occupy, and
Occupy itself; the growth of anti-capitalist community-based organiza-
tion Auckland Action Against Poverty, which brought together political
action and education with individual advocacy assistance for unemployed
people and welfare claimants; and the appearance in 2011 of Mana, a
new parliamentary party bringing together some of the Māori and non-
Māori left in a form and strength not seen before. Accompanying these
developments were the emergence of new networks and collaborations,
and a widespread interest in debate and mutual learning between people
from different age groups and ideological backgrounds. While traditional
suspicions between academics and activists lingered, the desire for greater
connection and an awareness of missed possibilities were frequently
expressed from both perspectives.
As part of determining whether the left was in a fit state to support
the development of a major think tank, it was crucial to explore how
the left might develop counter-hegemonic power more effectually than
had been achieved so far. A senior male union leader summed up the
thoughts of many when he said the left needed ‘to put a knife through
that neoliberal framework, because it’s still so powerful’. In asking what
that knife might look like, four key components emerged. The first was
situated in the desire for a shared vision, and a shared way of achieving
that vision. As a mid-generation female academic and former activist said,
‘I’m still looking for that home, ideological home … and a really, really
beautiful utopia … I’m still looking for that too. I’ve never given up try-
ing.’ For many on the radical left, the yearning for an organization or
party that could provide an ideological base from which to organize and
act was one of the strongest motifs to appear.
The second component identified as critical to developing a more
effective left was the need to become braver and more aware that
courage and a determination to take on existing power structures are

essential attributes of successful and sustainable activist practice.
The third major element of left weakness—and potential—concerned
the role of theory. The lack of time put into theorization by the activ-
ist left and the need for more opportunities enabling this type of work
to flourish were noted by a number of participants, including a female
Māori community activist who summed up the feelings of many when
she said, ‘You just see how people grow from actually seeing the world
from a different paradigm … they start to be able to challenge those
things by having different worldviews.’
The fourth key point to emerge was that despite the hard work of the
groups termed ‘nascent left think tanks’ and other organizations and
individuals, what was needed urgently was simply the creation of oppor-
tunities for the left to become more thoughtful. A male welfare advocate
talked about the need to ‘overcome the imbalance of power by being
smarter … to find solutions creatively, in a smarter and more creative
way, up against a bigger, stronger, richer and more powerful opponent’.
All those I interviewed supported to various degrees, and with vary-
ing qualifications, the establishment of a left think tank. A number told
me that the moment was far riper for this development than it had been
at any point in the previous two decades. Everything I learned about the
state of the left at the time of this study convinced me that the ground
was fertile if the challenge was picked up and implemented in ways that
drew deeply and proficiently on our collective knowledge, experience
and resources.
Creating a Left-Wing Think Tank

Participants identified a number of factors which could help overcome
the historical barriers that had so clearly inhibited the development of
such a project in the past. Initial steps to creating a possible left think
tank were posited as, first, a simple decision by a competent group to
proceed, and second, making visible the possibility of such an organiza-
tion. Interviewees were very clear that the successful development would
depend on the willingness and ability of one or more individuals to make
the establishment of such a group their priority, and that unless that
vision was made visible, no progress could ever be made. Others stressed
how critical it was that those involved have credibility, with one male
230 S. Bradford
academic noting the importance of having ‘more academic and intellec-

tual firepower plus also … people who have real mana3 on the left’.
In spite of the overwhelming view that funding had been the major
obstacle to the development of a major left think tank in the past, many
of those interviewed were refreshingly optimistic and practical, with one
female academic saying, ‘If people do it, the money comes. It follows.
You don’t necessarily have to have it first.’ A young Māori woman activ-
ist told me, ‘Build up the credibility and then people will start to want to
be involved, people who have money who want to do something.’ Many
people had funding ideas they thought might work, as long as they were
associated with a ‘just get on with it’ approach combined with an aware-
ness of the need to effectively manage infrastructure costs while main-
taining the highest possible standards.
When it came to suggestions for what activities a major left think
tank might carry out, participants presented an enormous range of often
detailed suggestions. The role of research was seen as fundamental. As
one female academic said, ‘The big thing is the research base to enhance
… to have a say in the political environment on an equal footing with
everybody else.’ Many also stressed the importance of grounding any
think tank within activist communities, and as one male community-
based activist said, ‘research has to be defined by that activism, the gaps
the needs, what would be useful’.
The quality of research was also seen to be critical. Unless high stand-
ards were maintained, a left-wing think tank would become particularly and
justifiably vulnerable to media, academic and public disparagement. Many
different types of potential research output and activity were proposed,
including initiating and producing original research, bringing together and
disseminating research already being produced in the academy, ‘translating’
research into forms and language that ordinary people could understand,
and playing a wider role in skills training and support for university- and
community-based researchers. Alongside research sat clear enthusiasm for
any proposed think tank’s role in lobbying and advocacy, with a particular
focus on the importance of articulating and promoting solutions to existing
problems, beyond simply describing and analyzing them.
Many of those interviewed also spoke of the potential significance
of a think tank as a place where people from different parts of the left
could reflect and think together in ways that delved more deeply than
was often possible during busy academic and activist lives. Some empha-
sized the importance of mutual, ongoing critique and challenge as part
of nurturing the quality of left thinking, including within the develop-

ment of the organization itself.
Proposed activities included providing opportunities for deeper con-
versations that might nurture respectful internal left debate and dissent;
organizing public debates, seminars and conferences; the active encour-
agement of debate between the activist and the academic left; and the
use of online methods to provoke and encourage discussion. Many par-
ticipants also spoke of the importance of archiving, and of cultural and
creative work, as well as of creating a space where the views and stories of
those not ordinarily heard could be articulated and amplified in ways that
reached across society.
Multiple Possibilities
Support for the notion of some kind of major left think tank transcended
all differences between participants, including their positioning on the
left spectrum. One respondent raised the idea of a ‘pan-left’ think tank,
which did present an immediate appeal. However, my analysis of the data
and my own long experience of life on the left led me to conclude that
it would be foolish in the extreme to expect an initiative that tried to
include the entire left within its brief to have any chance of success. The
differences between the social democratic and radical left are too sig-
nificant, revealing themselves during the research process in participant
responses to questioning around the definition of ‘left’, the state of the
left, and the political agenda of any potential think tank. There was also a
substantive difference between much Green thinking, and that of others
on both the social democratic and radical left, in the ‘neither right nor
left’ tendency prominent in some Green Party and environmental activist
circles (Browning 2011; Tanczos 2011).
Given the very real issues of funding constraints, left organizational
fragility, a legacy of fragmentation, competing demands on key individu-
als in a small population and other barriers that would face any estab-
lishment project, I concluded that it would not be possible to overcome
these through a project with political fundamentals that were internally
confused and contradictory. Trying to blend the radical and social demo-
cratic left together, or force a conjuncture between those who contend
there is or should not be any such thing as ‘left’ or ‘right’ would simply
not work. There could be many possible permutations, but ultimately I
felt there could be a place for at least three major left think tanks: social
232 S. Bradford
democratic, green and left radical, plus other possibilities from the
worlds of the Māori and Pasifika left. To build a more effective coun-
terforce to the neoliberal capitalist agenda, we need a more thoughtful
left, and this applies to all parts of us, not just to some. However, my
own interest was in being part of the development of a radical left think
tank encompassing all who shared its common principles, grounded in
the world of left activism as well as that of the academy.
Learning from the Experience of Nascent Left Think

Tanks Within New Zealand
The examples of the Alternative Welfare Working Group, the Bruce
Jesson Foundation, the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa,
the Child Poverty Action Group, the Fabian Society, the Auckland
Unemployed Workers Rights Centre, Kotare Trust and two other groups
referenced by a number of participants (Action Research and Education
Network Aotearoa, and the Jobs Research Trust) illustrated both the sig-
nificance of their contributions to the development of a thoughtful and
more influential left and their importance as repositories of information
and experience relevant to any future think tank initiative(s). Comparing
movement-based knowledge production with regular activist campaign
work, Janet Conway (2006, pp. 131–132) said:
Knowledge production requires long-term investment of hopes and

resources, greater continuity in personnel, sustained attention to some par-
ticular issues and questions, and the time and space for the accumulation
of specialized knowledges and skills.
In their different ways, all these groups demonstrate that Conway’s

learning from her experience with the Metro Network for Social Justice
in 1990s Toronto is very similar to what can be identified from the local
examples in New Zealand between 1990 and 2013.
The most significant conclusion I took from the histories of the nas-
cent left think tanks was the importance of individual commitment in
the sustaining of any organization committed to left think tank or think
tank-like work. With the partial exception of the Alternative Welfare
Working Group, one thing all the groups had in common was the vital
role played by individual champions or leaders, and the equally signifi-
cant role of the group of dedicated individuals around them, sustained
over a protracted period. In all cases, the groups only achieved what they
did through the protracted foresight and commitment of a small num-
ber of people who were willing and able to move beyond the day-to-day
effort of activist and/or academic praxis. Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor
(2010, p. 2) say that:
Many scholarly, NGO and activist accounts pay inadequate attention to

the significance of low-key, long-haul political education, and community
organizing work, which goes on underneath the radar, as it were.
This went to the heart of the matter. It seemed clear that any project to
establish a major left-wing think tank would ignore this lesson at its peril.
The Gestation of a New Left Think Tank:

July 2014–April 2016
In February 2014, I completed my thesis, and two days later took on
a new job as a full-time lecturer at Unitec in Auckland. By mid-year,
I had formally graduated and my doctoral thesis, ‘A Major Left Wing
Think Tank in Aotearoa: An Impossible Dream or a Call to Action?’
went online. It attracted immediate interest, including an article in
Auckland’s daily newspaper (Collins 2014) and an invitation to speak
at a Fabian Society lecture about the project. An online socialist net-
work (Hobgoblin 2016) provided funding that enabled the organizing
of a number of public meetings outside Auckland in late 2014, where
I presented my research findings and sought feedback from attendees.
Support from interested people in other parts of the country allowed
this series of talks to continue into the new year. Meetings were held
in Auckland, Hamilton, Hawkes Bay, Palmerston North, Wanganui,
Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, and I presented in various aca-
demic settings as well. Enthusiasm for establishing a left-wing think tank
of one sort or another matched that which I had discovered among the
research participants whom I had interviewed several years earlier, as
noted in this comment from two early Dunedin supporters (Olsen and
Murray 2014).
As 2014 neared its end, I realized that there was no way I could con-
tinue to work as a full-time lecturer and pursue this project if it was to
234 S. Bradford
have any hope of coming to fruition. If I was going to adhere to one of

the key findings of my thesis—the need for the left to become braver—
I would have to follow my own advice, leave my job and throw myself
with as much time and energy as I could muster into the long, slow pro-
cess of setting up a left-wing think tank.
Public presentations and risk-taking on my part were all very well, but
the initiative also urgently needed a solid core of enthusiasts to drive the
project forward, along with at least minimal amounts of money and a
physical base. Without the involvement of a number of people, the initia-
tive would go nowhere, so one of the first tasks was to develop a small
team of volunteers committed to bringing the project to life in as collec-
tive and steady a way as possible. By early 2015, a core group had been
established, a bank account opened and enough donations received to
start paying me a part-time wage to coordinate the project. We began
sending out regular newsletters to complement the public meeting pro-
cess. Office space was provided by Auckland Action Against Poverty.
By mid-2015, our list of supporters had grown to over 300 people. We
called a first national workshop in August 2015 at Kotare Trust’s educa-
tional centre near Wellsford, to which we invited over 20 academics and
activists who had already shown a deep commitment to the project. It
was time to start making some key decisions.
First and foremost, what was our kaupapa to be? Kaupapa is a Māori
word conveying a sense of fundamental principles‚ of the beating heart of
how and why an organization exists. On the back of considerable collec-
tive work prior to the meeting, the participants hammered out the docu-
ment that would now underpin the work ahead:
Kaupapa
We are a national left think tank in Aotearoa whose work includes:
1. Developing an intellectual armory for the radical left, based on

high-quality research and the development of theory relevant to
the antagonisms and contradictions of our place and time.
2. Working to build a radical left hegemony in Aotearoa, based on a
kaupapa of social, economic and ecological justice, honoring tino
rangatiratanga and grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
3. Generating a body of knowledge which incorporates different tra-

ditions of thought and ecologies of knowledge, to nurture and fuel
activists and academics.
4. Seeding a culture of resistance, solidarity and hope, informed by
and translating the issues and hopes of exploited, oppressed and
marginalized people.
5. Combatting the political ideologies of capitalism.
6. Deepening strategic thinking with and for people working in dif-
ferent community organizations, unions, and sectors about how
we can move in practical ways beyond capitalism, starting now.
7. Establishing spaces where we can have respectful conversations,
debates and disagreements with each other from different parts of
the left, and from academic and activist bases.
8. Disseminating and popularizing alternatives to capitalism and col-
lective visions of a better future.
Second, what would we call ourselves? Naming a new organization is

traditionally a fraught exercise, and this was no exception. At meetings
up and down the country, attendees had put forward ideas, but none of
them felt right. We were aware that the wrong name at the start of a
project had the potential to doom the whole exercise. After protracted
debate, a decision was taken and Economic and Social Research Aotearoa
(ESRA) was born.
Third, we turned to decisions around structure, resolving to take
the legal steps necessary to form a charitable trust, providing the legal,
governance and financial framework we needed to proceed. Seven ini-
tial trustees with a mix of academic and activist pedigrees, and represent-
ing a good cross-generational and gender mix, were selected, with space
left for the appointment of up to four more trustees as the project pro-
gressed.
In early 2016, work started in earnest on ESRA’s first research struc-
tures and projects. Our goal was to publicly launch the new think tank
at a conference in Wellington on 2–3 September 2016. Before then, we
wanted some research streams underway; a research committee and a
number of mandated researchers in place; strategic priorities set; and a
credible website and social media presence up and running. At the time
of writing, this work was well underway, with research projects starting
up in areas including agriculture, the environment, employment, hous-
ing, welfare and questions of political organization. By this time, around
236 S. Bradford
450 people were part of the supporters’ network, and a series of inter-
linked working groups involving several dozen people met regularly to
ensure the coherent and steady development of ESRA as it progressed
toward its launch.
How Did Praxis Measure up Against the Research

Findings?
In April 2016, the gestating project was still months away from its first
public appearance as a newcomer in the world of think tanks and years
away from possible recognition as an entity with any track record of
achievement and influence. However, the growing numbers of those
actively involved in ESRA’s development, and their determination to cre-
ate ‘an intellectual armory for the radical left’ offered its progenitors hope
that what had been achieved so far would not be some quixotic flash in
the pan, but instead the first steps in the creation of an enduring organi-
zation. My doctoral research had provided some underpinnings for a way
forward, as well as offering some salutary warnings about the difficulties
that any project was likely to face, no matter how resolute its champions.
At the top of the list of potential problems remained the question of
financial security. Even after a year and a half of steady developmental work,
donations still funded only one part-time wage and minimum levels of pro-
vision for necessities such as design and website development, conference
and travel costs. A first paid research contract in the union sector was in
the offing, and it was likely that once ESRA became publicly visible and
research started to be produced and disseminated, the ability to raise funds
would be enhanced. However, it was unquestionable that the funding envi-
ronment for an openly left institution would always present difficulties. The
philanthropic environment in New Zealand is not favorable to such initia-
tives, and there were no likely major donor organizations or individuals in
the offing. The one thing of which the project was very sure was that it
would be vital to resist any temptation to sacrifice principle on the altar of
financial need. If it was to succeed, ESRA could not risk funder capture.
A second area where the fledgling organization continued to strug-
gle was in the tension between the prerequisites of academic quality and
the desire to be an organization firmly grounded in the activist left, serv-
ing the research and policy needs of union and community-based activ-
ists and their organizations. Suspicions around the term think tank noted
by a number of research participants and associated fears of academic
elitism played out in discussions about how to find processes that would
ensure research rigor, and a functional balance of power between aca-
demics and activists involved in the project. The commitment to qual-
ity research that was called for so strongly by those I interviewed was
enshrined in ESRA’s kaupapa. At the same time, the organization did
not wish to simply become a site for the publication of academic research
and a haven for left academics escaping the stringencies of the neoliberal
academy. Its goals were far wider than that. This meant that much of the
first few months of 2016 was taken up with an almost constant rework-
ing of internal processes to ensure that a fine balance between academic
stringency and activist purpose was embedded deeply within the think
tank’s structures. A key part of this was endeavoring to ensure a culture
of mutual respect between all involved in the project and a constant will-
ingness to challenge each other across old activist–academic divides.
A third major difficulty arose early on as a result of the second key
finding of my doctoral project: that the lack of a think tank was not the
only lacuna on the New Zealand left between 2010 and 2013. The sec-
ond and much more significant gap revealed through my research was
the absence of a mass-based political party that fully or adequately gave
expression to the aspirations of the radical left. Without an organization
willing and able to bring people together around a common program
and take action to challenge and move beyond neoliberal capitalism and
its structures, any counter-hegemonic project would fail. This conclu-
sion inescapably formed an integral part of the many presentations of my
research findings in academic, activist and public settings, and resulted in
frequent confusion between the two potential tasks: the establishment of
a radical left think tank and the formation of a radical left party. Those
involved in the ESRA project were always clear that the think tank could
not be a party and must retain its autonomy should any political organi-
zation evolve into reality. The functions and purpose of each were clearly
very different. However, in the left milieu in which ESRA was develop-
ing, there was a constant need over these early years to clarify and explain
the differences between—and the importance of—both projects. The
fomenting of discussion around the need for new radical left political
organization became in practice the first provocative and enduring col-
lective research activity of the yet-to-be-born ESRA.
On the other side of the equation, some of the difficulties predicted in
my research proved to be unfounded. First, the idea that New Zealand
may be too small a country to support the development of a left think
238 S. Bradford
tank proved quite fallacious. From the moment my thesis became pub-
lic, interest and support rolled in. One of the biggest problems faced
by the initiative in its early period was that too many people offered to
help rather than too few. Enthusiasm for active involvement came from
hundreds of university and community-based researchers and from a
wide range of activists, and was still growing fast at the time of writing.
As it turned out, the problem was not one of lack of critical mass, but
rather the lack of any group equipped to harness the latent enthusiasm
and energy felt by so many for such an endeavor. Alongside this, any
expectation that there would be a shortage of experience and knowledge
brought to any implementation project has been well and truly dashed
by the wide range of skilled people already deeply committed to ensuring
that the project will be brought to fruition.
A second possible barrier raised by a number of participants was that
traditional left factionalism had the potential to stymie implementation
right from the start. This has not proved to be the case at all. The deci-
sion to proceed with a think tank grounded in only one part of the left
rather than attempting some form of pan-left project has been part of
overcoming potential sectarian problems; another was the ability of the
originating group to collectively form a clear kaupapa at a comparatively
early stage of development. The initiative did not set out to colonize
existing left organizations, but rather to put a stake in the ground, which
invited those who did support the project to become a part of it with-
out any expectation of forcing some kind of false unity across ideological
and organizational divides. The role of a number of existing organiza-
tions in supporting the development of ESRA, such as Auckland Action
Against Poverty, Kotare Trust and the Hobgoblin network, also helped
to keep the new project embedded in the activist world while providing
a base from which it could develop strong relationships with supporters
within the academy without allowing the latter to exert more than their
fair share of influence over the organization’s future.
Concluding Reflections
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015, p. 165) talk about the need for
the left to support and develop its own intellectual organizations, includ-
ing think tanks, as ‘indispensable components of any political ecology’.
Those involved with bringing a new radical left think tank into exist-
ence in New Zealand are acutely aware of this imperative. ESRA talks
openly in its founding kaupapa document about working to build radi-

cal left counter-hegemony, of striving not only to combat the political
ideology of capitalism but also to deepen thinking about how the left
can move in practical ways beyond capitalism, in this place and in this
time. Developing ESRA is consciously a major counter-hegemonic pro-
ject, aimed at strengthening the New Zealand left at a moment in his-
tory when many individuals and organizations had been reduced to
fragmentation and despair. Running alongside this have been the seeds
of a much larger project to establish a new political organization capable
of filling another yawning vacancy, the need for a party capable of doing
the organizing work essential in any bid to challenge the strictures and
structures of neoliberal capitalism.
In looking to what the future may hold for the development of ESRA
and of left think tanks more generally in New Zealand, I offer a few
concluding reflections. First, while an early-stage initiative such as this
is likely to suffer any number of setbacks as it develops, I believe that
there are so many skilled, determined people involved that the project is
already at a stage where it will survive the loss of any one or any few of
us, including its progenitor. Issues around funding are likely to continue
for some time, but I also note the experience of left think tanks overseas,
including that of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives which sur-
vived a number of its earlier years with a paucity of funding before going
on to become a well-established and highly respected institution.
Second, ESRA will soon emerge from its gestational cocoon to start
seeking linkages with left think tanks in other parts of the world. New
Zealand’s geographical isolation has served to heighten our awareness
of the need for international information and skills sharing alongside
the development of strong relationships capable of advancing counter-
hegemonic theory and praxis on a scale well beyond the local. ESRA
will be particularly interested in developing work in the Pacific, where
there is a similar absence of major left think tank activity, but we will also
be keen to make contact with left thinks with whom we share common
cause anywhere in the world.
Third, my thesis concluded that there was room for more than one
left think tank in New Zealand. Several years ago I heard news of a think
tank initiative surfacing from among the Green left, but the latest word
is that the proposal has fallen quietly into oblivion. I believe all of us
involved in ESRA would welcome the emergence of major think tanks
grounded in other parts of the New Zealand left. However, unless such
240 S. Bradford
enterprises harness the mix of academic and activist determination, cour-

age and clarity unleashed by ESRA, success appears unlikely. It is not
access to large pots of money that will alone determine the sustainabil-
ity of left think tanks in New Zealand, although of course resources will
be necessary. More important will be the capacity for quiet, determined
long-haul organizing work by a diverse group of capable people working
for a clear common purpose that will be essential for the success of any
enduring counter-hegemonic endeavors.
Notes
1. Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand.
2. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between representatives of the
English Crown and many Māori chiefs, is a foundational constitutional
document. Tiriti is the Māori word for ‘Treaty’.
3. Mana—authority, power, status.
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CHAPTER 10
Why Establish Non-Representative

Organizations? Rethinking the Role, Form
and Target of Think Tanks
David Peetz
The book has focused on think tanks—non-representative organizations,

established by third parties, to generate information (often via research)
for the purpose of persuading others of a particular view of the world
or a particular policy approach—as a subset of what Antonio Gramsci
(1971) calls the ‘permanent persuaders’ that produce ideas and often
generate reports.
This chapter looks again at the meaning and role of think thanks,
in light of the information from earlier chapters of this book, and fur-
ther considers why interests establish non-representative organizations.
It looks at reasons—such as the need of various interests for ‘distanc-
ing’—to gain ‘third-party endorsements’ for their ideas, and the circum-
stances in which distancing is important. It also examines the target of
think tank ideas, the role of research and the relationship between think
tanks and notions of associational, ideological, structural and institu-
tional power. It does this by drawing upon the preceding chapters, but
it also makes use of other examples from the literature taken largely from
D. Peetz (*) 
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_10
246 D. Peetz
Australian industrial relations. The ecology of permanent persuaders in

Australian industrial relations illustrates how some organizations are in
synergy and some are in competition. All those we examine here seek to
influence policy in one way or another.
Location in an Organizational Ecology

We should first think about think tanks, and other bodies, as inhabiting
an organizational ecology (Berkhout and Lowery 2010). Each organi-
zation occupies a particular niche and performs a particular role within
capitalist society at any given point in time. As the environment changes,
some organizations or organizational forms become more prominent,
while some decline or may even disappear. In contemporary capitalism,
particularly in those societies with democratic bases, certain organiza-
tional forms are needed to legitimize state actions in support of capital.
In response, similar organizational forms may be used by those who chal-
lenge capital. Think tanks are one of those organizational forms—many
are from the right, but some from the left.
Think tanks can be placed within the broad group of ‘permanent
persuaders’ described by Gramsci (1971). These are organizations that
generate ideas or information for the purpose of persuading others of a
particular view of the world or a particular policy approach. A charac-
teristic of such organizations is the need to be perceived or portrayed
as ‘expert’, so permanent persuaders seek to provide expert opinion on
policy matters in an attempt to influence these others. A common, but
not universal, characteristic of permanent persuaders is that they produce
‘reports’: documents that purport to have investigated an issue, often
using quantitative methods, and that reach some conclusion with implicit
or explicit policy implications.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of permanent persuaders: rep-
resentative and non-representative persuaders. Representative persuad-
ers claim their expertise by acting on behalf of a particular group. Their
familiarity with that group gives them the ability to speak on behalf of
its constituency and to have ‘special knowledge’ of their situation. They
are financed principally through membership fees. Representative groups
include employer or business associations, professional associations and
trade unions. Amongst those, large employer or business associations are
the most well resourced and are thus most likely to have the capacity to
produce reports.
10 WHY ESTABLISH NON-REPRESENTATIVE ORGANIZATIONS … 247
By contrast, a non-representative group claims not to represent any

particular group, but rather to be non-partisan. Its expertise is portrayed
as deriving from the specialist training or background that its staff have
and their distance from vested interests. These non-representative groups
can in turn be divided into two categories. On the one hand, think tanks
are established by third parties to serve the purposes of permanent per-
suasion, and part or all of their financing comes from the interests that
establish them. Consultancies, on the other hand, are financed more or
less solely on a fee-for-service basis and serve the interests of whoever
commissions work from them. Various chapters in this volume, including
those by Alejandra Salas-Porras (Chap. 2), Georgina Murray (Chap. 3)
and Karin Fischer and Dieter Plehwe (Chap. 7), have demonstrated the
rise of both think tanks and Consultancies. They also showed the closely
intertwined networks that participants in various market liberal think
tanks have established with each other and with policy-makers. The dis-
tinction drawn above between think tanks and Consultancies is one of
degree. Many think tanks engage in consulting work, as a way of boost-
ing finances. Some consultancy firms issue uncommissioned reports to
build their profile in a speciality area (e.g. Hunt et al. 2015). Salas-Porras
(in Chap. 2) describes how, in Mexico, consultancy firms may, in effect,
morph into think tanks. Indeed, the boundaries are so blurred that her
chapter defines Consultancies as a subset of think tanks, whereas this
chapter follows Murray’s (Chap. 3) lead in defining them as distinct.
Regardless, both are forms of non-representative organizations that, as
we will see later, perform important distancing functions.
Although many of the organizations discussed in this book are non-
representative bodies—that is, they are think tanks—a major exception
is the US Business Roundtable, discussed by Bruce Cronin (Chap. 6).
We saw how the Business Roundtable used both the expertise it was
able to amass with its plentiful resources and its ability to represent the
top echelons of business, to influence decisions of government, both in
the executive and in the legislature. It could speak directly of the impact
decisions would have on its members and make implicit or explicit pre-
dictions or threats about how its very powerful members would behave
under various policy scenarios. Cronin’s chapter offers great insight into
the history and mechanics of overt business lobbying in the USA. In
Australia, the main report-producing representative organizations have
been: the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the Australian equivalent
of the Business Roundtable, directly representing the largest firms; the
248 D. Peetz
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), representing

employer groups across a range of industries; the Australian Industries
Group (AIG), representing employers in manufacturing and some other
industries; and, on the union side, the Australian Council of Trade
Unions (ACTU), the peak body of national unions. The BCA, in par-
ticular, published reports in the 1980s and early 1990s that established
an argument for a shift from centralized wage-fixing based on ‘awards’ of
tribunals to one based on enterprise-level negotiations (BCA 1989a, b).
While the ACTU itself, almost uniquely amongst Western Union move-
ments (and for its own reasons), also sought to shift wage-fixing to the
enterprise level, and was perhaps the key player (Katz 1993), the BCA
reports were crucial in reshaping the media and policy narrative towards
‘decentralization’ in industrial relations.
But not all lobbying needs be so overt, and in some respects, overt
behaviours can be counterproductive. If a government is seen to be car-
rying out the wishes of vested interests (those with a financial interest
in a particular outcome), it can undermine the legitimacy of the state.
A non-representative body might deliver the same message, but govern-
ment acting on the advice of a non-representative body cannot so easily
be portrayed as carrying out the wishes of vested interests.
So governments themselves might establish pseudo-independent or
quasi-independent advisory bodies. Sometimes this may be because they
genuinely seek longer-term thinking not so constrained by daily politics;
independence from bureaucrats and ministers might be advantageous for
that. Sometimes governments seek the benefits of distancing, which are
discussed below, but this holds risks. This is because organizations have
their own internal logic: On the one hand, a quasi-independent agency
cannot ignore the wishes of a current government; on the other hand, it
cannot afford to lose altogether the shield of third-party independence
on which it relies to survive future changes of government. So it cannot
be relied upon to always serve the interests of the government of the day.
In Australia, an example was the Productivity Commission (PC),
which had been established to provide advice on a wide range of pol-
icy issues. In 2013, it was asked to produce a major report on industrial
relations. While an avowedly market liberal institution, it had its own
internal logic that meant it was unable to serve the exact interests of the
government of the day on industrial relations, coming up with some pro-
posals that were politically too radical for the government while none-
theless endorsing aspects of the present system that the government had
criticized repeatedly (Peetz 2016). An economic body established more

explicitly as a result of industrial relations imperatives was the Economic
Planning Advisory Council (EPAC), promised in the 1983 prices and
incomes Accord between the then Labor Opposition and the ACTU and
developed before that as part of Labor’s economic strategy (Singleton
1985; Willis and Langmore 1983). Originally envisaged as providing a
longer-term, alternative view to the neoclassical orthodoxy of the main
economic department, the Treasury, and with an economic planning
focus, once Labor came to government the competition from other eco-
nomic agencies gave it little room to manoeuvre and it came to largely
mimic the orthodoxy of the time. Eventually, EPAC was dissolved when
the PC was established. The fate of EPAC showed the difficulties for
reformist governments in establishing alternative official think tanks that
go against prevailing economic orthodoxy. There was no nourishment
or room in the organizational ecology for an agency that might have
attempted to occupy the same niche as, but take power from, the existing
provider of economic advice. Alejandra Salas-Porras showed in Chap. 2
how, in Mexico, another approach has been to allow state research bod-
ies to wither away, to be supplanted by private think tanks.
Universities themselves may establish academic research centres,
sometimes referred to as ‘think tanks’, to build their profile and reputa-
tion in particular areas. Such centres often seek external finance through
research grants or, more lucratively, contract work (sometimes they are
required to become self-funding), and their orientations can be influ-
enced by such contracts. For example, several Australian universities
have established industrial relations research centres, but their political
alignment primarily reflected their personnel. For example, the National
Institute of Labour Studies was linked to the right, including by provid-
ing the academic rationale for the BCA’s report (BCA 1989a, b); how-
ever, with a change of personnel, this alignment was reversed.
More commonly, non-representative bodies (private think tanks) are
established by representative bodies, or even corporations, to advance
their interests but without direct attribution. Their funding comes
mainly from service contracts, membership fees or ‘donations’, some-
times kept secret where regulation permits.
Organizational ecologies can occupy different spaces, and so perma-
nent persuaders may operate at different levels. At local levels, however,
most are representative (such as local chambers of commerce) or even
university-based, as the economies of scale (discussed below) are not
250 D. Peetz
there to establish non-representative bodies. At national and transna-

tional levels, economies of scale become significant, and non-representa-
tive bodies become very important. It is at these levels, too, where policy
influences become critical.
Distancing and Scale
One reason for establishing a non-representative organization is to pool

resources, to facilitate the disseminating of ideas and the influencing of
policy-makers. Individual organizations often lack the level of resources
needed—in other words, they lack economies of scale. Yet that explana-
tion is not enough. After all, corporations (especially large ones) already
have significant resources and can undertake internal research and dis-
seminate information from that. And even if an individual corporation
cannot do this, the representative body to which it belongs will have the
resources to undertake and disseminate research. So economies of scale
do not, in themselves, explain think tanks—especially those on the right.
There is an additional benefit for corporations from establishing a think
tank: distancing.
The public, or even policy-makers, may be suspicious of corpo-
rate self-interest. Data on public opinion in Western countries suggest
that there is considerable scepticism about corporations, especially chief
executives (Essential research 2012; Harris Interactive 2009). As a con-
sequence, in democracies, policy-makers wish to avoid being seen to be
simply serving the wishes of capital.
Distancing enables lobbyists and policy-makers to claim that another
third party has endorsed the policy they wish to pursue. Governments
and lobby groups go to considerable lengths to obtain third-party
endorsements, as a means of securing legitimacy for their policies.
Marketers refer to the ‘astonishing power’ of third-party endorsements—
‘one of the most powerful forces in the universe for anyone marketing
a product’ (Walker and Burgin 2015). They offer ‘campaigns to obtain
third-party endorsement’ in order to ‘build trust through third-party
influencers’ (Ivy Worldwide 2016). Even allowing for the overblown
rhetoric, it is clear that third-party endorsements achieved through dis-
tancing are potentially crucial elements in gaining acceptance for a policy
that might otherwise meet resistance.
Distancing is important in controversial debates. For example, the
Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which steadfastly refuses to disclose
its funding sources (Hamilton 2012), has been prominent in its denial
about the adverse effects of tobacco smoking and climate change
(Farrelly 2016), and is part of ‘a patterned network of political and finan-
cial actors’ that promote polarization of attitudes on climate change,
with corporate funding ‘influenc[ing] the actual thematic content of
these polarization efforts’ (Farrell 2016).
Establishing think tanks is not the only means by which third-party
endorsements can be obtained, especially on ad hoc issues. Governments
may commission inquiries for major matters—hence the well-known
aphorism from the satirical series Yes Minister: ‘never set up an enquiry
unless you know in advance what its findings will be’ (Lynn and Jay
1989, p. 453). In some countries, a Royal Commission, headed by a
judge, will ‘attract public confidence as being impartial, non-political
and independent’ (Ransley 2015). Corporations or representative bodies
can commission a consultancy (governments can do this too, for lesser
matters). Perhaps most central to Australian industrial relations debates
was a consultant initially known as ‘Econtech’ (later part of KPMG, then
‘Independent Economics’) that provided modelling support for claims
of massive productivity gains from anti-union laws in the construction
industry. It soon emerged that this modelling was fatally flawed—based
in part on spreadsheet errors—but this did not prevent its being used
repeatedly in ‘update’ reports, and in rhetoric even a decade after the ini-
tial, debunked publication (Allan et al. 2010; Karp 2016).
For permanent persuasion, though, a think tank is necessary. And if a
proposal is particularly controversial, a think tank is more valuable than
a consultant because it is less easily dismissed as having given the find-
ing for which it was paid. Figure 10.1 illustrates how, if a policy idea has
potential value to a corporation, the more controversial the idea, the
more important is its distancing for the corporation. Relatively uncon-
troversial ideas can be incubated within the corporation’s research sec-
tion and disseminated by the corporation. Slightly more controversial
ideas may need to come from the relevant representative body. More
controversial ideas again may need the third-party endorsement of a con-
sultancy. The most controversial ideas—those requiring the most radical
changes to policy—should come from think tanks. Thus, some of what
might seem to be extremist proposals, for radical deregulation or restruc-
turing of markets or regulation, will come from think tanks if they are
to be given serious consideration. In Australia in 1985, for example, the
HR Nichols Society (discussed by Murray in Chap. 3) was established
252 D. Peetz
Fig. 10.1 Distancing and controversy
as a focal point for lawyers, business people and politicians seeking radi-
cal right-wing change to the industrial relations system (Coghill 1987).
As mentioned earlier, some of these may overlap (especially consultancies
and think tanks), so the boundaries between them may blur. On occa-
sions, different entities may cooperate to advance the most controversial
policy ideas, even if there are minor differences in details.
Most of the organizations that fit within the above are descriptions
from the ‘right’ of politics. But two chapters in this book focus on think
tanks from the ‘left’. In Chap. 8, Bill Carroll and Elaine Coburn focus
on transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) on several continents.
In Chap. 9, Sue Bradford focuses in more depth on the establishment of
one localized alternative policy groups (APG) based in Auckland, New
Zealand. APGs vary between being representative and non-represent-
ative bodies, but those studied in these two chapters are not typically
broadly membership-based like trade unions. For these groups, distanc-
ing is rarely important, but resource pooling is critical. So while corpo-
rate think tanks of the right and alternative policy groups of the left may
have similar objectives—to influence public policy—the reasons why they
are established may differ markedly: in the corporate sector, to achieve
distancing; and on the left, to enable pooling of resources and achieve
economies of scale.
Trade Unions, being the largest representative organizations of
the left, can sometimes benefit from distancing, so may help finance
the establishment of left-leaning think tanks. But these are far fewer in
number and scale than right-wing think tanks, as several chapters have
shown. In Australia, various non-representative bodies emerged from
the left and then declined, including the Evatt Foundation, financed by
unions. More recently, the Australia Institute, also financed partly by
unions, has issued reports on a range of issues challenging existing poli-
cies. Perhaps one factor in the small number of left-wing think tanks is
that distancing might not be quite as important for unions as corpora-
tions, since they purport to represent the interests of workers rather than
private capital. Much effort, however, goes into demonizing unions, and
they are not necessarily well regarded (Peetz 2002), so distancing is use-
ful for them as well. However, the primary reason for the smaller number
of left-wing think tanks is likely the relative paucity of resources available
to unions and other leftist bodies, compared to the resources available to
corporate interests.
Because distancing is usually important, think tanks (like employer
associationsand trade unions) develop their own internal logic.
Financially, they may be dependent on the bodies that created them,
and ideologically they may have a very strong affinity with their creators,
but it can never be assumed that they will always and unambiguously
do what their creators would have wanted. For one thing, their creators
may have differing interests anyway (firms in different industries, or of
vastly different sizes, may often have conflicting interests). A represent-
ative body cannot genuinely represent all the interests of all its mem-
bers unless it does very little. A non-representative body need not even
try to do so. Even without this conflict, each organization develops its
own raison d’être, ideology, internal politics and mode of operation. So
some representative and non-representative bodies can radically change
their positioning in a short period of time in a way that does not reflect
changes within their constituencies. Some key business associations in
the US oil industry appear to be more determined obstructors of climate
change action than some of their constituent firms—although whether
is due to their developing an independent logic or to oil firms using dis-
tancing to avoid the public relations damage from obstructionism is yet
to be determined (InfluenceMap 2015).
The emergence of an independent logic within think tanks is the
unavoidable adverse consequence of distancing. In Australia, the IPA,
always aligned with the Liberal (conservative) Party, shifted in the
1970s from a centre-right think tank to one advocating a hard-right
agenda on industrial relations and other issues (Seccombe 2016). The
254 D. Peetz
newly amalgamated but mainstream employer body, the ACCI, shifted

from being firmly ensconced within the norms of the industrial rela-
tions system (aimed at finding practical solutions to conflicting interests)
to becoming a vocal critic of it and advocate for radical (market liberal)
reform in the early 1990s. It did so before many of its members took the
same path, though it did follow the lead of the BCA (Plowman 2004).
Closed Think Tanks and Networks
Think tanks of the right take two principal forms. The majority are
what we call ‘open’ or ‘externally oriented’ think tanks. These under-
take their actions in the public gaze and produce reports that interpret
the world in a particular way and typically conclude with policy pre-
scriptions. A minority are ‘closed’ or ‘internally oriented’ think tanks.
Instead of attempting to persuade those outside the organization of a
particular worldview or policy, they aim to persuade participants. This
is normally done through closed meetings of one form or another. The
Bilderberg Conferences, discussed by Aleksander Miłosz Zieliński in
Chap. 5, provide one of the most important examples of such an institu-
tion. Participants vary from year to year, but a core group selects those
who attend, with a mind to incorporating them within the core group’s
worldview—and, perhaps, gaining some ideas from them. Likewise, the
Trilateral Commission, whose coherence and closeness is examined by
Matilde Luna and José Luis Velasco in Chap. 4, this is a largely internally
focused, closed think tank. That said, both open and closed think tanks
place great reliance on networks. Closed, inward-oriented think tanks
are, in effect, almost exclusively networks—perhaps best described, as
Zieliński does, as networks of governance. As can be seen in several other
chapters, open think tanks rely on effective networks for their funding,
and their meetings use networks, not just reports, to disseminate their
ideology.
So not all think tanks need produce research reports. While many do,
the important thing is to be able to influence policy-makers through the
promotion of ideas with the appearance of independence. For closed,
internally oriented think tanks, distancing is not as important, as the vis-
uals of a policy advocacy are only important where there is transparency.
The nature of closed think tanks, with their secrecy or at least confiden-
tiality, makes distancing an unimportant consideration. The credibility of
an expert report produced by an independent organization is replaced
by the psychological excitement of being part of the ‘in’ network that

knows and decides things.
While some think tanks of the left are open and externally oriented,
some of the TAPGs examined by Carroll and Coburn have a strong
internal focus. Networking is as important for them as it is for the closed
think tanks of the right, but the focus is less on annual meetings and
more on ‘education’, in much smaller forums, as a means of disseminat-
ing ideas. They lack the direct access to resources, media and policy-mak-
ers that think tanks of the right possess, and so rely heavily on networks,
local organizations, social media and internet technology to disseminate
ideas.
There may also be some internally oriented think thanks—a minor-
ity—that do not want to advance a specific policy agenda but instead aim
to be a forum for discussing such ideas. Some of the oldest think tanks,
such as Chatham House and the Australian Institute for International
Affairs, fall into this category. Indeed, it is probably these types of organ-
izations that first legitimized the term ‘think tank’—they genuinely were
a place for critical talking and ‘thinking’, a term that has since been
colonized by the majority seeking to advance an ideological or political
agenda.
The Targets of Think Tank Activity

The most influential think tanks today are ‘neoliberal’ think tanks that
reproduce a market liberal ideology of the right. However, it does not
follow that think tanks are aiming to promote a widespread neoliberal
ideology—that is, their aim is not to shape the ideological consciousness
of the masses, at least not directly. The ultimate target of think tanks is
policy-makers of the state. They seek to influence policy. Far more impor-
tant than the ideology of the public at large is the ideology of policy-
makers. Just as Carroll and Coburn’s TAPGs, and Bradford’s local
APGs, of the left aim to change policy, so do the think tanks of the right.
Certainly, if public opinion strongly favours market liberal views, this will
make it much easier for policy-makers to devise and implement market
liberal policies themselves—so framing the ‘public debate’ on an issue in
a particular way is quite important. But it is neither a necessary nor a suf-
ficient condition that the public should favour a particular policy view
in order for such a policy to be implemented by policy-makers. Instead,
policy-makers simply need to be assured that the recommended path is
256 D. Peetz
not too politically risky, or that the political costs can be managed and
are potentially outweighed by the political benefits. Distancing is part of
that assurance, reducing the political danger from being seen to be too
responsive to a vested interest.
Over the past three decades, neoliberal ideology has come to domi-
nate policy-makers’ thinking. In Australia, this was documented exten-
sively in Michael Pusey’s (2003) book, Economic Rationalism in
Australia (that being the common term then given to market liberal ide-
ology). Similar patterns exist elsewhere (Palley 2005).
Think tanks are not the only organization responsible for the market
liberal hegemony amongst public policy-makers. They may, however, be
more influential at the level of ideas than corporations, whose outputs focus
more often on specific policy initiatives. The economics profession itself
must take some—perhaps a majority of—responsibility for the dominance
of a particular ideology. Its role was a particular focus in the documentary
movie Inside Job and in Quiggin’s (2010) book Zombie Economics (see also
Palley (2005)). The mass media have played an important role in framing
debate, influencing public opinion and constraining options facing policy-
makers, but they lack the intellectual rigour necessary to create an ideologi-
cal hegemony amongst policy-makers. A full analysis would also incorporate
the role and internal politics of coordinating public sector organizations
themselves, but it is difficult to imagine that the hegemony could have been
this extensive without a facilitating role played by think tanks.
The focus on policy-makers, rather than the much more difficult pro-
ject of shaping mass consciousness, has presented inevitable contradic-
tions. Over the past three decades, public policy actions have diverged
substantially from the preferences of the majority of voters. Of course,
not all policies have been driven purely by market liberal ideology. Much
reflects the influence of money or political resources, which might be
consistent or at odds with the outcome liberal market ideology has pro-
duced (Murray and Frijters 2015). Regardless, many policies regularly
espoused and enacted by policy-makers, such as privatization, reducing
trade barriers, deregulation of a number of industries and cutting pub-
lic services, while consistent with market liberal philosophy, have been
implemented in the face of opposition from the voting public (Steel
2012). This increasing dissonance has spectacularly culminated in such
phenomena as Brexit and the rise and success of Donald Trump. While
these were not just a reaction to neoliberalism—other facets of globali-
zation, such as high immigration flows, were also important—the gap
between the preferences of policy-makers and the preferences of many

voters was stark (Long 2016; Williams 2016).
This is not to deny that some think tanks see for themselves a role
in shaping public opinion. The IPA, for example, puts extensive effort
into successfully using the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC),
the main public broadcaster in that country, as a platform to publicize its
ideas (Millar and Schneiders 2013) while being part of a widespread cri-
tique of publicly owned broadcasting. On climate change, as on tobacco
smoking, the main role of think tanks such as the IPA has not been so
much to create a public ideology supportive of smoking or a warming
climate as to spread doubt about the reality of science through misin-
formation (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Public doubt then makes pol-
icy-makers wary of concerted action. Think tanks cannot hope to mould
public opinion on their own, so such behaviour is a means to the end of
moulding policy.
As mentioned, distancing means that think tanks and other permanent
persuaders develop their own internal logic. So part of advancing a par-
ticular policy agenda may also require, or at least involve, influencing the
behaviour of supporters or, in the case of representative organizations,
some of their members. For a trade union, achieving concerted behav-
iour amongst members is a core element of the organization’s activity,
as unions’ strength lies in the collective behaviour of their members,
without which, in the face of the otherwise superior resources of capi-
tal, they are powerless. For employer organizations, collective behaviour
is less important because they have other sources of power, but they
may actively promote corporate action consistent with their ideological
agenda. In New Zealand, for example, employer bodies actively pro-
moted the use of individual contracts, often with templates, after indus-
trial relations legislative changes in 1991 (Peetz et al. 1993). Consultants
have been identified as a mechanism by which new managerialist ideolo-
gies are spread (Sturdy et al. 2015). Think tanks hold meetings, work-
shops and dinners to promulgate ideas to the converted and convertible.
Capital, like labour, is divided according to the different interests each
part of it has, and so neoliberal think tanks aim to secure a form of rul-
ing class solidarity through ideological coherence in a way that employer
organizations, representing those interests, may be unable to do.
So the mechanisms and directions of influence are complex and multi-
directional. As illustrated in Fig. 10.2, corporations both influence and
are influenced by permanent persuaders such as think tanks, each with
258 D. Peetz
Fig. 10.2 Directions of influence
their own logic, even though in the end it is policy-makers who are the
end-target of these efforts.
Conclusions
This concluding chapter has looked at the organizational ecology of
ideas in modern capitalism and focused in particular on the ‘why’ of
think tanks. In doing so, we have especially seen the importance of dis-
tancing and the role of economies of scale. For the right, distancing
gives corporate ideas a legitimacy they otherwise would not possess. It
provides a ‘third-party endorsement’ that is confected—from report-
age, invisibly confected. This helps make market liberal policies more
acceptable to policy-makers and has likely contributed to the domi-
nance of market liberal philosophy amongst policy-makers across devel-
oped countries. Distancing is not without its problems: think tanks,
along with representative organizations, tend to develop their own
internal logic, with which some corporations may be a little uncomfort-
able—at least at first although many find that the ‘guidance’ or repeti-
tion of ideas and influence from these bodies are ultimately difficult to
resist.
Think tanks are not alone in this organizational ecology of ideas.
Our interest in this book has been in the institutions that create ideas to
influence policy and action. These institutions include open and closed
think tanks (of both the left and right), as well as employer (business)
associations. Outside the scope of most of this book have been some
institutions that also create ideas to influence policy and action, includ-
ing trade and the state, because they have been extensively studied else-
where and the creation of ideas is only a small part of their repertory of
action. We have given some limited attention to consultants (who mostly
simply provide technical expertise acting on behalf of clients—though,
as we saw, they may also play a role in spreading ideas) and university
research centres (rarely established to achieve a political aim, and usu-
ally sitting somewhere in a range between academically independent and
consultants), while representative bodies of employers have had a single
chapter. These all form part of that organizational ecology, but as capital-
ism needed to confront the Keynesian challenge calling for a more equi-
table redistribution of resources and produce the market liberal response
in the 1970s, it was think tanks that occupied a key niche in that ecology,
playing a major role in securing policy-makers’ acceptance of market lib-
eral ideas.
Our permanent persuaders differ by categorization—for example,
are they representative or non-representative; are they of the left or the
right; are they internally or externally oriented; and at what spatial level
do they operate? Various chapters in this book have examined how they
are established and resourced, how they create ideas, what ideas they
create, why they do it—in whose interests they act, and if and why they
need to achieve ‘distancing’—what effects they have and what limitations
they face in a range of contexts, situations and countries.
Finally, we should add a few words on the links between these bod-
ies and power. Representative bodies seek to achieve and exercise asso-
ciational power on behalf of their constituents (Wright 2015). Political
‘permanent persuaders’, including think tanks and representative bodies,
seek to achieve and exercise ideological power on behalf of their funders.
Both forms of power can be used to create structural (economic) and
institutional power—for example, through the passage of laws, the crea-
tion or consolidation of markets, and so on. While the above refer to
forms of power, Lukes’ (2005) three faces of power refer to different
ways in which power is exercised. Think tanks, and some representative
bodies, might be thought of as attempting to exercise Lukes’ third face
of power—that is, attempting to change people’s preferences in a way
260 D. Peetz
that prevents them from even recognizing their own objective inter-
ests. If so, they are not very good at it. As mentioned above, voters
are not all that keen on liberal market policies; to use the parlance of
Washington, they have not ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’. It is probably better
to think of think tanks as part of the mechanism for exercising the sec-
ond face of power (Bachrach and Baratz 1970), by shaping the norms
or rules of the game in such a way that certain options are simply off the
agenda for decision-making. Think tanks have been part of (but are by
no means entirely responsible for) a programme that has removed from
the agenda for decision-making policies that are not considered con-
sistent with the market liberal framework. It is not so much that voters
think that public ownership, for example, is a bad idea; it is simply that
no policy-maker would contemplate a policy that involved greater public
ownership.
Think tanks are not going away. Those on the right will persist as
long as capital needs, and is willing, to put resources into bodies that
will reproduce ideas serving the interests of capital in ‘educating’ the
state about the benefits of certain policies. Counter-hegemonic think
tanks—or at least researchers and networks in TAPGs that mirror, in
reverse image, the think tanks of the right—will persist as long as some
bodies on the left are willing to put resources into bodies that will pro-
duce ideas that challenge the interests of capital. The former group will
always be better resourced than the latter, the pay will be higher there,
the models more sophisticated, the media more sympathetic and policy-
makers more attentive. Such is capitalism. How workers respond is less
easy to predict.
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Index
A B
Abbott, Tony, 66, 68 Beder, Sharon, 57
Academic think tanks, 29–31, 34, 36, Bilderberg, 15, 108, 115, 118
39, 42, 45 Business
Advocacy-lobby, 55 business associations, 29–31, 33, 35,
Agnellìs, 114 45, 49, 94, 246
Alternative policy groups, 19, 189, business elites, 150
212, 252 business Roundtable, United States,
Alternative policy ideas, 14, 26, 31, 133
252 business Roundtable, United States
Alternative policy practices, 212 – effectiveness, 138
Aotearoa, 18, 222, 225, 232–234, 240 business Roundtable, United States
Associational power, 259 – modus operandi, 136
Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Business Council of Australia, 57, 71,
40, 43, 61, 162, 172 72, 247
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, 16, 133–137,
Industry (ACCI), 248 139, 146, 147, 155, 222, 247
Australian Council of Trade Unions
(ACTU), 248
Australia Institute, 65, 66, 70, 253 C
Australian Institute of International Canada Without Poverty, 53
Affairs, 57, 62 Canadian Centre for Policy
Ayau, Manuel, 162, 165 Alternatives, 239
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 265

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7
266 Index
Capitalism Counter-hegemony, 189, 193

capitalists, 188, 189, 197
Centre for Independent Studies, 56,
57, 61, 64, 70 D
Centre for Policy Development Delors, Jaques, 171
(Australia), 223 Directions influence, 257, 258
Chafuen, Alejandro, 164 Distancing, 19, 245, 247, 248,
Chamber of Commerce, United 250–254, 256–259
States, 95 Dominant discourses, 28, 43
Chambers of commerce, 16, 61, 95, Dutch Royal family, 114
249. See also Business associations
Civil society, 9, 19, 40, 73, 98, 160,
169, 172, 180, 187, 191, 196, E
197, 199, 201, 203, 206, 209 Ecologies. See Organizational ecolo-
Class, 59, 127, 134, 160, 189, 197, gies
199, 213 Economic Planning Advisory Council
Classical economics, 58 (EPAC), 249
Climate, 65, 68, 207, 221, 251, 253, Economic and Social Research
257 Aotearoa, 18, 235
Closed think tanks, 254, 255, 258 Economies of scale, 249, 250, 252,
Closeness, 88, 153, 254 258
Cognitive praxis, 17, 189, 193–197, Elite(s), 7, 8, 13, 14, 18, 19, 25, 28,
201–207, 209 44, 46–48, 67, 82, 85, 88, 91,
Complex associative system, 82, 83 92, 179, 188
Consensus, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12–14, 19, 36, Employer associations. See Business
46, 74, 89, 125, 142, 149 associations
Constituency(cies), 17, 57, 87, 181, Erhard, Ludwig, 170
190, 191, 193, 196, 198, 199, Evatt Foundation, 55, 69, 253
212, 246 Expert(s)
Constructivism the Expert-Representativee/non-
Constructivist, 8 representative, 246
Consultancy/ies, 29, 31, 35, 38, 39,
41, 44, 247, 251, 252. See also
Consulting firms F
Consulting firms, 29–31, 33, 34, 36, Fabian Society, 2, 225, 232, 233
45, 90 Feminism, 192, 195, 208, 209, 211,
Cooperation, 14, 31, 35, 36, 83, 88, 212, 224
94, 108, 111, 155, 165, 173, Field of power, 12, 26–28, 40, 42, 43,
180, 201, 202, 213 47, 48
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Fragmentation Thesis, 148, 149
83, 85, 95, 121, 123 Free trade, 2, 15, 28, 42, 54, 59, 66,
Counter-hegemonic, 180, 213 124, 146, 220
Index 267
Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 2 Institute of Public Affairs, 56, 61, 63,

Fundación Internacional para la 70, 250
Libertad (FIL, or International Institutionalism
Foundation for Liberty), 164 institutionalist, 8
G K
Giersch, Herbert, 171 Keynesianism
Global Financialization, 100, 108, 115 Keynesian Compromise, 58
Globalization, 88, 89, 148, 181, 191, Knowledge
192, 198, 208, 210, 256 knowledge mobilization, 18, 27,
Global North, 2, 17, 26, 189, 210 188, 193, 208, 211
Global South, 2, 17, 189, 192, 193, knowledge production, 6, 9, 11, 12,
204, 206, 208, 209, 214 16, 18, 27, 35, 36, 187, 188,
Goldman Sachs, 96, 114, 115, 118, 193, 195, 196, 202, 207, 208,
122, 126 211, 232
Governance networks, 82 knowledge regime, 47
Gramsci, Antonio policy knowledge, 48
permanent persuaders, 246 Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2, 49
Green House Think Tan, 231
L
H Latin America, 3, 26, 46, 100, 101,
Hegemony 160–167, 173, 178–182, 203,
transnational hegemonic, 189 204
counter-hegemony, 193, 223, 239 Latinoamérica Libre, 164, 165
Hispanic American Center for Lazard, 118, 125
Economic Research, 163 Left think tank New Zealand, 18,
HR Nicholls Society, 61, 63, 66–68 219, 221–223, 225, 226, 232,
238–240
Legitimacy, 11, 15, 36, 42, 48, 74, 81,
I 83, 86, 87, 104, 248, 250, 258
Ideological power, 259 Lindsay, Greg, 66, 68, 70, 73
Independence Lobbying
independent think tanks, 9, 26, 27, congressional lobbying, United
29–32, 34–36, 41, 42, 45, 46, States, 134, 138
254
Industrial relations, 63, 246, 248, 249,
251–254, 257, 263 M
Industry associations. See Business Macri, Mauricio, 165
associations Marea rosa, 3
Institute for Policy Research, 2 Market liberal hegemony, 256
268 Index
Marxism Norberg, Johan, 173

Marxist, 7 North American Free Trade
Mass consciousness, 256 Agreement (NAFTA), 25, 33, 44,
Mass media, 114, 256 88, 95, 198
McGann, James, 7, 26, 28, 32, 33, North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
220 110
Media, 1, 5, 8–12, 14, 19, 25, 27–31, Nye, Joseph, 86, 88, 93
33–35, 41, 43, 46–48, 53–55, 67,
69, 70, 74, 75, 84, 90–92, 97,
102, 108, 175, 182, 203, 205, O
206, 230, 248, 255, 260 Obstructers, 253
Mizruchi, Mark, 133 Open think tanks, 254, 258
Mont Pelerin Society, 2, 17, 60, 61, Openness, 15, 81, 88, 89, 97, 99, 102
63, 167, 171, 172, 175, 179, 182 Ordoliberal, ordoliberalism, 170
Organizational ecologies, 249
N
National Association of Manufacturers, P
16 Permanent persuaders, 14, 18, 48, 53,
Neoclassical orthodoxy, 249 54, 133, 245, 246, 249, 257, 259
Neoliberalism, 74, 188, 192, 193, Policy-makers, 12, 19, 29, 191, 205,
198, 199, 202, 204, 206, 210, 247, 250, 254–260
213, 220, 256. See also Market Policy-making organizations. See
liberal hegemon Policy-makers
neoliberal, 42, 163, 170 Political activist ethnography, 224
Networks Political parties, 30, 35, 84, 101, 237
centrality, 153, 154 Political plurality, 99, 101, 102
centrality divergence, 154 Power
global governance networks, 194 associational power, 259
Red Liberal de América Latina, 164 faces of power, 259
social network analysis, 151 field of power, 10, 11, 20, 21, 27
Stockholm network, 172 institutional power, 259
Think tank network(s), 4, 13 relations of power, 13, 18, 26, 27
New Direction Foundation, 173, 175 structure of power, 13, 18, 27, 47,
New Economic Foundation, 140 91
New Zealand Business Round Table, Productivity Commission, 248
219
New Zealand Initiative, 220
Non-governmental organizations, 7, Q
84, 85 Quasi-independent advisory bodies,
Non-representative organizations, 248
245, 247 Quiggin, John, 256
Index 269
R Trade unions, 20, 73, 162, 170, 171,

Red Liberal de América Latina, 164 246, 252, 253, 259
Regionalism, 193 Transnational Alternative policy
Representative organizations, 81, 136, groups, 17, 189, 252
247, 252, 257, 258 Treasury, 93, 96, 152, 249
Representativeness, 87, 103 Trilateral
Research, 1, 5, 6, 14, 20, 28–30, 33, Annual meetings of the Trilateral,
48, 94, 95, 130, 178, 182, 206, 82, 98–101
221–224, 226, 230, 231, 236, Executive Committee of the
245, 249–251, 254, 259 Trilateral, 91
Retinger, Joseph, 110, 111, 115 Logic of representation in the
Right-wing politics, 3 Trilateral, 82, 89
Rockefeller, David, 83, 114, 126 Membership of the Trilateral, 103
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 192, Trilateral Commission, 13, 43, 44,
202 46, 81, 254
Roskam, John, 56, 62, 66, 68, 70, 73
Rothschilds, 95, 115, 125
Royal Commission, 251 U
Ruling class, 14, 59, 72–74, 257 Unions. See Trade unions
Ruling ideas, 59 University-based, 55, 56, 249
S V
Single Market, common market, 171 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 164
Social movements, 102, 189, 192, Victim of success thesis, 150
194, 195, 202–208 Von Hayek, Friedrich, 2, 17, 60
State agencies, 4, 7, 29–31, 33, 45, Von Mises, Ludwig, 40, 60
47, 161
Sydney Institute, 56, 57, 64, 69, 70
W
Wage-fixing, 248
T Wallenbergs, 114
Targets, 17, 19, 139, 167 Warburgs, 125
Thematic diversity, 99
Think tank funds/funding, 54, 70,
71, 74 Y
Third party endorsement, 245, 250, Yes, Minister, 251
251, 258

Think Tanks and Global Politics

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THINK TANKS

ISBN 978-1-137-57493-0 ISBN 978-1-137-56756-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939097

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © Georgina Murray

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Mexico City, Mexico Alejandra Salas-Porras

1 Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key Spaces in the

2 Think Tank Networks in Mexico: How They Shape

3 The Australian Think Tank: A Key Site in a Global

4 Power Without Representation: The Coherence and

5 The Bilderberg Conferences: A Transnational Informal

6 The Rise and Decline of the Business Roundtable? 133

7 Neoliberal Think Tank Networks in Latin America

8 Counter-hegemonic Projects and Cognitive Praxis in

9 From Research to Reality: Developing a Radical Left

10 Why Establish Non-Representative Organizations?

About the Editors

Alejandra Salas-Porras Professor at the National Autonomous

Sue Bradford is a community-based political activist and former Green

2010) and co-editor of Women, Labor Segmentation and Regulation:

ABC Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC)

CIEN Center of National Economic Studies

NDF New Direction Foundation

Fig. 2.1 Mexican think tank network in 2015 38

Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks 30

Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key Spaces

Alejandra Salas-Porras and Georgina Murray

Think tanks—broadly defined as organizations that specialize in research-

© The Author(s) 2017 1

and the Policy Planning Institute (founded in 1931 as the Political

sometimes the capitalist system as a whole, for its politico-economic ine-

delegitimize left-wing politics that have grown increasingly influential in

tank literature. We look analytically from a radical, socialist or Marxist

permeates broader and broader spheres of society, the narrative goes,

Specific ideas on public policies (education, health, energy and finance,

confrontational, partisan and competitive. The second type of regime

predominating in this space of intermediation, including recognition

From the previous discussion, an additional question arises regarding

Making Sense of Global Politics

characteristics of Mexican think tanks, who controls them, the networks

that think tanks have as the representatives of particular interests for

them look neutral, objective and independent, distanced from particu-

6. Following Bourdieu (2005), he defines the field of power as a network of

Think Tank Networks in Mexico: How

© The Author(s) 2017 25

Adapting the Concept of Think Tanks

are structured—which in turn shapes the knowledge regime, made up of

dense network, and as the production and legitimation of policy knowl-

Structure of the Chapter and Methodology

Second, a database was constructed that included all the directors

Types of Mexican Think Tanks

Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks

Affiliation Total % Presence in Lobbying Created

converge in certain practices. Thus consulting firms, independent think

• There has been a proliferation of independent think tanks and con-

• The profile of independent and academic think tanks and experts

Out of 17 independent think tanks with information available, at least

as security (INSYDE), human rights (CASEDE), rural development

• FUNDAR—whose agenda focuses on policies affecting equal-

of their research. Moreover, sponsors evaluating and qualifying

Some think tanks working strictly under contract (mostly consult-

reduced their research activities considerably, particularly the Instituto

Fig. 2.1 Mexican think tank network in 2015 38

Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks 30

Think Tanks and Global Politics: Key Spaces

tank literature. We look analytically from a radical, socialist or Marxist

Making Sense of Global Politics

that think tanks have as the representatives of particular interests for

6. Following Bourdieu (2005), he defines the field of power as a network of

Think Tank Networks in Mexico: How

Adapting the Concept of Think Tanks

Structure of the Chapter and Methodology

Types of Mexican Think Tanks

Table 2.1 Mexican think tanks

Table 2.2 The most central Mexican think tanks, 2014

Strategies to Shape Policy-Making

positions, particularly in  Pemex, Banobras and the Ministry of Energy.

The Australian Think Tank: A Key Site in a

Evaluating the Significance of Australian

Fig. 3.1 Partisan or independent think tanks 2015

Where Do the Ideas of Australian Neoliberal

Free Trade and the Small State—Dudley North and Adam Smith

Neoliberal Nemesis: Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes

Neoliberalism and the New Right

The HR Nicholls Society believes that in a modern society there is no

The Business Council of Australia

M. Luna (*) · J.L. Velasco 