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I am the President of the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington D.C. We are a 'think-tank plus', with the 'plus' being the idea that the research we do should be actionable. We want to have evidence-based policy ideas.

The CGD is only two years old so we still have a short history, but one area in which we have been very active is in trying to making the aid process more effective - the process by which donors transfer resources to developing countries. Probably our best example of success in bridging research and policy is that one of our researchers wrote what has become the 'bible' on how the US Government should set up its new foreign aid programme, the Millennium Challenge Account. The 'bible' has been cited as such by some of the Congressmen and Senators on the hill and in the White House as guiding the initial design of the way that the United States will try to structure this programme. Obviously it is not guiding everything and indeed we have some questions on the proposed initial design, but we have been influential on the idea of competition, on having a foundation-like approach, an independent board including people from outside government and so on.

Why did this work? Sometimes it is partly accident and sometimes by design. We put in quite a lot of effort from the beginning with the hill (legislators in the US). As he was developing his work, the scholar Steve Radelet held at least three or four seminars. When we started the work, we were fortunate to have the Secretary to the Treasury, Paul O'Neill visiting the Center, which signalled to a very large group of policy-makers in the White House and Washington that we mattered and that we had influence; that we were prepared to be independent but also to work with the mainstream. I think it was important that we had several well-known people come to talk about the Millennium Challenge Account and their ideas on it, including George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs. It also mattered that our research scholar Steve Radelet had come from the US Treasury, so he knew many of the people involved, and that I had had a long experience working in the international institutions, so that people felt that we were a group who had a lot of experience in the policy world. We were not just researchers: we were doing research in a scholarly way but also had real-world policy experience.

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