SKAPE Seminar: Hartwig Pautz speaking on ideas and crisis – think tanks and austerity

Ideas matter, and so do the organisations which produce them. The think tank is one such organisation. Hartwig’s talk at SKAPE will start with the observation that the think tank continues to be a popular organisational format throughout the world. However, the diversification of the global think tank landscape makes definitions increasingly difficult while also adding to the complexity of understanding the relationships between experts – at think tanks or elsewhere – and policy makers. The Global Financial Crisis, with its start now just over ten years ago, and the Great Recession have demonstrated both the diversification of epistemic communities and the increasing complexity of relationships between those who ‘have’ the knowledge and those who ‘have’ the power. In fact, the crises have again demonstrated that the ‘two communities’ approach is problematic – something that will be discussed in the talk using existing research findings from a special issue in Policy & Society which Hartwig co-edited. The crises have also led to an entrenched austerity regime in the Eurozone and beyond and are therefore a good case for studying the role of expertise in policy-making and the relationships between knowledge and power. Related to this, Hartwig will also report from own current research on the question why, in the German context, alternatives to ‘ordo-liberalism’ are not surfacing more in current debates or are simply not able to compete with the ‘dangerous idea’ as Mark Blyth referred to neo-liberalism. For an explanation, the ability of think tank to create intricated, i.e. highly entangled, networks or webs in which ideas can emerge, travel, transform, amplify and ‘grow’ legitimacy and authority whilst people can shift identities and move between the fields at whose interstices, according to Tom Medvetz, think tanks sit should be considered.