THINK TANKS AND UKRAINIAN INSTITUTIONAL REFORMS

Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of this article is to analyze the particularities of activities of modern
“Think Tanks” in the USA as non-governmental scientific research and information analytics
organizations, which generate ideas and develop recommendations for national governmental
and international institutions providing constructive dialogue on the solution of social, economic
and political problems in the “state-business-society” link. They are creative research
groups engaged in in-depth investigation of public policy issues and thanks to which it became
possible to turn intellectual activity from an individual creative act into a collective effort to
create new meanings. In Ukraine, the concept of a “Think Tank” is relatively new for representatives
of the scientific community, who still create the majority of significant analytical and
forecasting, and political and theoretical concepts. The lack of a full-fledged network of civil society
institutions and a sufficient accessibility to media resources and sites for their promotion
with the aim of influencing economic decision-making and political processes is associated with
the lack of transparency in the activities of state establishment and the rejection of political
elites still professing the principle of statism (concentration of economic controls and planning
in the hands of a highly centralized government). Nowadays, the use of the symbiosis of the potential
of the scientific community and the developments of Think Tanks, as analytical centers,
is one of the critical conditions for institutional reforms in Ukraine, an effective domestic economic
and foreign political strategy for the country’s development. Unfortunately, the process
of realizing that the very modern Think Tanks are the means of social engineering in general and
in political counseling in particular, and of the provision of independent political and socioeconomic
expertise, is slow and contradictory.
Key words: Think Tank, Brains Trust, institution, institutional reform, social engineering