It's not that surprising that Singapore isn't a think tank hub. Although government support, especially in terms of funding, is very generous wrt ISEAS and RSIS-IDSS, think tank hubs also tend to be university hubs and that, in turn, is largely a factor of the size of the possible student population which in turn tends to correspond with the size of the population of the city in question. Likewise, the most influential institutions also tend to reside in the cities of great powers. Not surprising that Beijing or Tokyo will rank highly in terms of Asian think tanks. As such, our institutions haven't done badly at all.

A look at Foreign Policy magazine's taxonomy does raise some questions though. Our think tanks are not really 'policy makers' - RAHS excepted, I can't think of a single policy where local think tanks had a decisive influence.They are not particularly 'partisan' in the sense of pushing for party-political ideology, mostly because there isn't much political competition. Calling all of them 'phantoms' is IMHO unfair; RSIS does a lot of useful Track II work, what comes out of ARI and ISEAS is scholarly, critical and even enjoyable to read, LKYSPP... er... no comment. 'Scholars' - I think the think tanks themselves are pushing in this direction but we're not quite there yet, a lot due to the reasons mentioned above. 'Activists' - are you kidding?

Regarding that fifth category of the 'Scholar' type think tank, Alan Chong and Tan See Seng's piece, 'Teaching international relations in Singapore: 1956-2008: from supporting development to global city aspirations?' in the most recent issue of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (Vol.9 No.1) hits the nail on its head when they identify how the tensions between

the dialectics of whether the future lies in open-ended knowledge inquiry or hewing to some version of state-associated pragmatism remains unresolved.

The spiral paradox here is open-ended knowledge inquiry is the dominant ethos of the think tank community on a global scale; kind of like how being able to do good basic science is often regarded as the bedrock of doing good applied science, the ability to generate knowledge for knowledge's sake is a pragmatic necessity for the ability to generate good, actionable policy-relevant knowledge. But as long as we continue to harp on the second to the neglect of the first, I'm afraid we'll continue to chase our own tails in the one area of possible improvement where we possibly have some room for manoeuvre.