Rashad Cassim
Transcript of video interview
I am from Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1993, I set up a research
unit that was aimed at helping the post-apartheid government in
trade and industrial policy. The institute had a good link because
it had been initiated by bureaucrats within the new government and
these were people who had an academic background and could appreciate
research when they went into government. The new government discovered
that there had been no tradition within the old government of harnessing
research from the community to influence policy. The main aim of
this unit was to do just that. The governance structure of the institute
was such that you had the major policy-makers with an academic and
research interest influencing the agenda. As a research manager
I did not often have the luxury of determining the research agenda.
There was some of that, but essentially the government set the parameters
of what we should research. Beyond that, we had a fair amount of
freedom in deciding how to do the research and what methodologies
to use and so on. In a sense it worked very well because the governance
structure meant that policy-makers had a serious stake in the Unit
and they relied very heavily on it for what were often burning policy
issues. They were often good people with a genuine interest in research
and with influential positions in government. The transitional nature
of the country threw out many challenges for which a great amount
of research was needed.
What was particularly interesting about the way that the Unit was
set up was the extent to which it bought into the government's policy
package. It was not the aim of the research to question in a fundamental
way the government's policies of market liberalisation and so on,
although what we did begin to question were a whole lot of policy
issues at the margins.
There are a few ways in which I think government took up the research.
One important way was in terms of exposure to different alternatives.
For example, if the government chose to liberalise the economy,
we would bring in various analysts to look at the pros and cons
moving either faster or slower than the government was moving. Exposure
to different options was quite critical in helping the government
to think through some of the issues. Another important aspect was
that although we were driven by the demand side, I think that what
the government ultimately used was research which we had proactively
begun to work on. For example, when we started in 1993, the government
was pretty much obsessed with free trade agreements and we said
that they needed to think about the service economy. They were not
terribly interested at the time, but five years later they used
the services work we had produced in a far more serious way than
the trade policy research which they themselves had commissioned.
So one of the biggest lessons to come out was that the proactive
work, which at the time the government had not been keen on, came
to have more of an impact on their thinking than the whole demand-driven
research.
I think that the major impact that we had on government was to
get government to think critically about the implications of what
they are doing. For example, what is seen as one of the success
stories in South Africa is a success story of industrial policy
in supporting the motor industry. In its media, the government played
up how successful it was at promoting a good programme around the
motor industry. We then came out with research which showed that
although there had been some progress around the motor industry,
that essentially came at a real cost to the economy. Suddenly the
terms of the debate changed. Even journalists in the newspaper began
putting inverted commas around 'the success' of the motor industry.
This stretched the government to consider that their conclusions
needed to be moderated, or at least that there were other alternative
ways of looking at the success of a policy.
If I had to draw three lessons from our experience, I think firstly
that we underestimated the time that one has to put into the packaging
of research. For example, one of the reasons we found for a low
uptake of research was that most of the researchers - even those
who were consultants rather than academics - often struggled to
package things in a way that governments could absorb. The packaging
of the research is important even if your policy-makers are sophisticated.
We employed a few people to do this, but we undoubtedly needed to
do more on this.
Having said that, there is still always a need to build the absorbtive
capacity of governments. It is important to hold short, quick workshops
to expose governments to the methodology that underscores your impact
analysis of trade policy and so on - even if that means going to
government offices rather than holding a larger conference.
The third issue which affected our success was our close links
with government, but that was also our failure in some respects.
It works very well when you have a highly accountable government
with open-minded policy-makers, but the moment that those people
change and are succeeded by new people, you become more vulnerable,
particularly when research challenges some of the more fundamental
assumptions. So it is important to keep close contact with government
but ensure that your integrity is maintained by having some independence.
Having some independence does not necessarily mean that you have
less influence. You can have more influence from a distance sometimes.
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