Development policy and development research

How helpful is academia for politics?
A round-table discussion

D+C: This discussion should proceed from two suppositions. One is that development politicians are not sufficiently interested in academic advice. The other is that academia does not offer enough research findings that are useful for politicians.

Hofmann: There is no doubt that politics needs advice. All German government ministries have Academic Advisory Boards. Many expert reports are written both for the government and the Parliamentary area. So both sides know that they need each other. The question is whether what academia offers is helpful for political practice. In the developmental sector we are to a great degree integrated in international processes, so we have certain timeframes in which we need advice. That means just-in-time delivery, so that it can flow immediately into the working processes. The academic world must understand that.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly in the USA, there is a great deal of personnel exchange. Academics work in the Administration, then in business and then at a research institute. Thus they acquire extensive knowledge of the various spheres, and empathy for what is required in each place. We do not have that. I believe it would be important that we also should open the doors wider in the political arena. That would enhance the capability of German academia to offer what was more relevant to the practice, and at the right time.


Three pillars, no bridge

D+C: The German management consultant Roland Berger said recently that German society was 'pillared'. Business, academia and politics stood next to each other like three pillars, but there was no connection between them. Why is that different from America? Has it something to do with the fact that we have a tenured bureaucracy which no outsiders can penetrate?

Hofmann: It is also possible in the German system for a minister or a state secretary to make personnel choices but the civil service guidelines do indeed apply. From that point of view, 'pillaring' is certainly an accurate image. One should more often lay a few planks between the pillars to facilitate movement from one to another.

Ihne: I believe this 'pillaring' theory is very accurate. The reasons for it are very simple. There are various clienteles and various objectives. In German academia over the course of centuries, a marked self-referential system, an own world, has emerged in which one interchanges, in which one can make a lifetime career without ever having contact with the outside world: the ivory tower. Whoever works here must embody the profile of the German university – they must work analytically, and thus are hindered in finding an answer to questions posed by politics. For the main questions of the political world that are not answered by academia are not analytical, but synthetic, which seek the big picture. They must be answered in interdisciplinary terms, but there is no real tradition for that at German universities. Instead, one usually lands up in the multi-disciplinary sector – meaning the various approaches of the individual disciplines between two book covers. A completely new type of academia would have to be established, a synthetic one in contrast to the analytical, one to provide a cross-section academic world.

D+C: But some German professors pursue this cross-section academia, such as Franz Nuscheler, in Duisburg. Where lies the opposition to it? Is it an institutional opposition?

Messner: There is institutional opposition, which has something to do with the different career paths. Leading figures in the Anglo-Saxon area, like Joseph Stiglitz, who made an academic career, then played an important role in the Clinton Administration, and then in an international organisation, and finally returned to university, would find it endlessly difficult here. The 'pillaring' in Germany that has emerged over many centuries results in us taking a biased view of each other. The academics believe that they portray the world correctly, and the politicians suspect that the academics have no idea of the realities of the world.

But there is still another problem. Hans Singer, one of the great, old development thinkers, pointed out recently that development research has always assumed that you must only present a clever analysis of a problem and then a corresponding proposal for a policy-oriented solution, and the problem would be solved more or less. Research has dealt intensively with policy, but not enough with politics and polity, that is, with the question: how do you actually feed the findings and proposals for solutions into the political process and institutions? However, this dimension is often ignored in development research.

A third point is the phenomenon of acceleration and fashions in the political sector. As a politician, Michael Hofmann is dealing with that – and so are we as application oriented academics: A new subject every day. But academia depends on a medium-term preoccupation with its subject to be able to produce reliable expertise. That is why there is this divergence between what the political world asks for and what academia can deliver.


Who sets the agenda?

Ihne: We should not, however, insist too much on academia's own pace. If we are unable when required to establish academic task forces that can react to demands from the political arena, then we might as well also immediately cut the links between the two sectors. Behind that is the fundamental question of who actually sets the agenda on development issues. The academics mostly believe they do, but I believe they are wrong. The agenda-setter is reality, and its powers to shape things are generated first and foremost in the political sphere. Academia must be in a position to work agenda-oriented.

D+C: Mr Hofmann, you have said that sometimes you must be able to ask for a just-in-time advisory service. Does that mean then that you have a commission you would like to place and can find no-one to fulfil it?

Hofmann: We have to note that much in the German academic scene is terribly thinned out. Certainly, we could find the respective expertise that we need on the international academic market. But in politics the feedback of one's own society’s thinking is also important. So it is of little help to know that there are brilliant American academics who have worked on the subject in question if they arrive at a solution to a problem which cannot be adapted to German circumstances. Therefore I shall mention another actor that we have not yet talked about: the media. To a great extent, politicians react to what is covered by the media. That means journalists provide an important service when they 'screen' the academic scene, and then explain, in a language that politicians can understand, which interests are possibly linked with which findings – as Jürgen Habermas teaches us. This is an important hinge function.
Now to the point of agenda-setting: In politics we are, indeed, often dealing with policy decisions in which politics calls for help from academia – think, for instance, of the present debate on the German social security system. In such cases, every political persuasion has its academics who can underpin its arguments in academic terms. One should visualise it as a court case. Paul Feyerabend, the great philosopher of science, used this metaphor: the public prosecutor and the defence lawyer must present their arguments in such a way that the laypersons making up the jury can understand them. Correspondingly, the academics play the role of the advocates of both sides in the political process, and the politicians, in the role of the jury, must then take their decision.

D+C: That is an interesting thought, but it presupposes that there are academics who appear in this court case. You have yourself just raised the objection that the German academic scene has been greatly thinned-out. Indeed, there are hardly any more chairs of development economics, and regional studies are suffering from the thinning-out as well. Therefore development policy cannot simply call up the expertise available. Must not then politics acknowledge the task of purposefully promoting that part of academia which you need for your decisions and give it research assignments? Such as the two NGOs that commissioned the Wuppertal Institute to develop the study 'Sustainable Germany'?

Luhmann: We began this discussion with a dual assumption, and I do indeed believe that we are dealing with a common shortcoming of academia and politics. Each depends on the other, but they behave like a couple living in a bad relationship. That is a systemic problem, and it does not exist in the development policy sector only but also in the general relationship between political consultation and academia. My own thinking has led me to giving up the holistic academic concept. There are good reasons for classic academia to be as it is. Besides that, there must be something else for special requirements, namely consultation – but that should be understood as part of academia, as consultation science. And only for this part of academia do we need a different behaviour. For that, and only for that, different incentives must be put in place. Thus we are not talking about individual failures, but about dysfunctional behaviour due to systemic constraints.

Hofmann: I accept that academia must organise itself according to self-referential aspects, but I do believe that at the same time that academia creates products which can then be brought into the consultation sector. Those who do so are possibly not the same persons. One type is the academic who outlines a theory and believes that humankind develops according to this path. The second is the practitioner, who is convinced that he should concentrate on what can be made operational. And third, there is the type that stands between them who would like to have a hand in influencing politics, as a political journalist - or in another variation today as an activist in a non-governmental organisation. The new intermediary role, which many NGOs play for the media, and indirectly for politics, is very important, and at the same time it makes clear that academia – as in the metaphor of the courtroom –is part of a partisan confrontation.

Luhmann: At this point, Mr Hofmann, we have clear differences. You say academia acquires the findings, which must then be transported into society. My perception is that the conception of advisory products is something different from the mere transport of finished findings. This is so as early as the conceptual level. Both sectors do actually work with different conceptual approaches. The paleoclimatologist, for instance, has a different concept of greenhouse gases than the climate scientist who does the preliminary work for environmental policy. And I think that academia should not rest on an intermediary between itself and politics, but that the screening of– supposedly – different views and their processing for the public should be a task for academia itself so that politics can simply pick up on the result.


Development research thinned-out

Messner: I would like to come back again to the quantitative problem that Mr Hofmann has touched upon. In the sector of development research, foreign policy research, security policy research, we have two or three hundred people in Germany who work on these fields academically and in professional terms, of which perhaps one hundred work politically-oriented. In Britain, there are about two to three thousand in these fields. These figures make clear the bottleneck in Germany. For training, this means that in contrast to comparable countries we do not have enough qualified young people whom we can send to international organisations, or who can properly advise you, Mr Hofmann, or who subsequently can perform outstandingly in our academic institutes.

A second question arises from that: Does politics decide that knowledge is a strategic resource, which should be used accordingly. In the Anglo-Saxon area, politics does that. British foreign and development policy makes it a priority area, takes part in international agenda-setting, and knows that you need massive academic expertise if you want to be in a position to influence World Bank and IMF reforms, debates in the climate process, and so on. Whoever has such soft-power capacity can effectively influence the actions of many others as well as the direction of future policy. If you decide to take this course you must create the appropriate reception structures in the ministries so that you can use the application-oriented academic expertise in a purposeful way.

Hofmann: Well, it is not that we did not have something like that in Germany. In the 1960s we made the strategic decision to found the German Development Institute. There were already a number of advisory institutes in the economics research sector. So it is quite clear that politics needs advice. However, the difference to the Anglo-Saxon area becomes clear if you directly compare an American institute, say the Brookings Institution, with an institute in Germany. At Brookings, there are people who know the world in several sectors and therefore know what is really relevant for political processes. And they provide their expertise in good time. When a big international organisation appoints a new leading figure, such as at the World Bank or IMF, Brookings is prepared for it and can present an agenda for the new man. We are not yet in a position to do that in Germany.

That there are institutes such as Brookings in the USA but not in Germany also has to do with the fact that, in the US, there is a great social and business engagement in financing research institutions. Not all of them are financed public funds, but there are large contributions by private sector foundations.

Ihne: All summed up, the basic question remains: how can the valuable expertise which academia makes available be transferred to politics in such a way that it has an effect? How do I get what we are researching into, say, the political strategy of the Federal Government? We are looking there for a missing link. The Centre for Development Research was, indeed, founded with exactly this task, at the interface between theory and practice, and after eight years of building-up work I have to note that academia in the classic German university meaning cannot achieve that without reforms of its sense of reality. We can establish something like consultation science, as Hans-Jochen Luhmann has called it. However, that presupposes that we are in a position to actually take up the subjects of each current agenda. And for that we need people who have a theory-practice approach, who are at home in both worlds. The usual academics have their last external contact with reality when they take their Abitur. They then disappear into the university and advise reality from there. They know neither political nor economic conditions from practical experience. That must change. This new type of academic must be trained at the interface between theory and practice.

Luhmann: The cause of this undesirable trend lies in the wrong standard evaluation criteria, which result in dysfunction in the consultation sciences. Academics are evaluated by academics, both in appointments to positions and in the assessment of research institutes, and it is by means of this process that resources are distributed. At the same time, however, much greater account is taken of the self-referential criteria of pure academia than of outwardly directed, consultation-oriented criteria. Thus, resources are steered in the wrong direction. Actually, the academic sector has quite considerable financial resources. I’ll give you an example to explain the cost structure of consultation-oriented research: When the Wuppertal Institute drew up the 'Sustainable Germany' study mentioned just now, the 'commissioning' NGOs, BUND and Misereor, made about DM 100,000 available, but by the time the study was completed in writing we had spent DM 600,000. But then came the real task, presenting the study to the public, and when afterwards we 'counted the cash', everything had cost the Wuppertal Institute, not counting the NGOs' contribution, DM 2 million. Well, the Wuppertal Institute is politically-oriented; other institutes could work similarly if they were guided on this path by a change of the evaluation criteria.


Research should volunteer more opinions

Messner: The GDI aims to influence and help mould thinking on development and the practice of international cooperation. The issue of agenda-setting is particularly important for this purpose. We have three levels at which academia must perform and sometimes we are simply not brave and consistent enough. The first point is: we must not become more willing to express opinions. Academia, at any rate as we are discussing here, is part of the political process, and we must have confidence in ourselves to take a stand based on sound analysis in the case of current debates and controversies. When future development policy is being discussed in Monterrey, when it is at stake how development and foreign policy should be considered as one entity, an institute must be more willing to express opinions on such central issues.

Then there is a long-term perspective, future topics, which – based on our analyses – we think should really be on the agenda in five years' time. Hans-Jochen Luhmann has cited 'Sustainable Germany' as an example. Such subjects perhaps do not yet interest politics at all today, they may even get on politics' nerves if we place them on the agenda now, but that is also our job. We need certain autonomy to pursue agenda-setting in this sense and define future issues, which is why the independence of advisory research is of fundamental importance.

In parenthesis: in the development sector, we have a special relationship between politics and academia – we don't want to hurt each other. That is quite different in finance and economic policy, where the economic research institutes' appraisals are often very harsh, but despite that cooperation takes place. The development policy sector is a small community, which always feels it must defend itself against the rest of the world; a mutual ability to criticise is not so well established among us. I believe we must work on being able to express and tolerate more constructive criticism.

Finally, at the third level we are dealing with models and concepts that must be reengineered into political instruments. We often lack incentive structures there. I will give an example. The Institute for Development Studies (Brighton, UK) examined together with the Duisburg Institute für Development and Peace what links there were in various regions between strengthening competitiveness and environmental policy instruments. We gained very interesting new knowledge, but no-one now asks us to translate this in terms of politically relevant expertise. This kind of knowledge does not meet the usual criteria of scholarly standards, but is highly relevant for politics. An institute such as the GDI could take this second step now because it works in an application-oriented way. That is the special significance of such institutes.

Hofmann: You call for courage to express opinions. However, if we take a look around us, the economics advisory landscape has to be an off-putting example for development policy. True, it is not afraid to express opinions, but to a great degree it is politically irrelevant. In some of these institutes the people must despair that nothing of their proposals is implemented. Why is that so? One of the reasons is that it is not enough to be right; others have to acknowledge it. You should always think about with which partner an idea can be implemented, how the thinking in certain actors' worlds is structured, in order to estimate what has prospects of being made operational. However, many academics cannot do that. That is why I believe that, in the developmental sector. We must train people who are capable of feeling equally at home in different worlds.

Ultimately, political processes cannot be influenced solely by good studies, but by direct participation, such as in negotiations. During their course, moments arise that are suited to coming up with good proposals for solutions. You must then have something ready, you can't say we shall carry out a study; you must be able to say after one or two telephone calls that here is a possible solution – the only thing is that academic thinkers rarely lend themselves to that.

D+C: But if in general you do not finance a broad research landscape, you do not find the resource person at that moment.


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