Travelling from West to East: Think Tank Model Adaptation to Central and Eastern Europe

Think tanks are usually understood as institutions claiming autonomywhose main aim is to influence policy making based on the social analysis they produce.The most apparent blind spot in extant think tank research is its predominantfocus on the English-speaking world. We argue that by focusing on think tanks in non-Western contexts, we can better understand think tanks. When studying the diffusionof the organizational form of think tanks to new contexts, it is not enough to maintainthe “sender” perspective (the formulation of the institutional characteristics of thinktanks in the contexts in which they first emerged). We need to complement or evenmodify that perspective by also taking into account the “receiver” perspective. In otherwords, internationally circulated ideas and institutional patterns are always interpretedand translated in local “receiving” contexts, which coproduce, reformulate, and readjustthe blueprint. Our focus in this Section is therefore on the translation and localadaptation of the think tank institution in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, aregion that has undergone deep changes in a relatively short period.