"I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day", was how Abraham Lincoln once reflected on his first term as the sixteenth President of the United States. A hundred and fifty years later, policy-makers and decision-makers do not have the luxury of looking at things one day at a time. No matter how intuitive and prophesying the inputs, any policy is flawed and misleading without research. In Pakistans case, the critical linkage between policy-making and research has largely been absent. The country hasn yet woken up to Loet Leydesdorffs riple-helix model of knowledge-based innovation, which describes dynamic interconnections between the university, industry and government. That the Pakistani universities produced over 5,000 research papers in peer-reviewed international journals in 2010, may come as a surprise to many. But the kicker is that so little of this work is noticed or found useful by the countrys policy-making elite. Over fifty departments of economics in Pakistani universities become just a statistic when their output is not found on, lets say, the finance ministers table. Dr. Vaqar Ahmed - who heads the Economic Growth Unit at SDPI, an Islamabad-based think-tank -suggests that the buck stops with the academics, as business community is smart and the government will always be lax. "True academics have to be searched hard for in Pakistan. They are found doing good work, but that gets unnoticed because they are not proactive in reaching out to the government & industry." Can this situation be turned around? Apparently, that is what the Planning Commissions Deputy Chairman Dr. Nadeem-ul Haque is setting out for. He is steering a research initiative, "Competitive Grants Programme", to support the "Framework for Economic Growth" proposed by the Commission last year. The Commission has joined hands with the International Food Policy Research Institute for this programme. The CGP, which is guided by a scholarly advisory committee chaired by Dr. Nadeem, has invited research proposals in all four areas of the FEG: improved governance, vibrant markets, energetic youth and communities, and creative and connected cities. The proposals must identify key policy decisions that can support the FEG, assess impacts of those decisions, and evaluate constraints to reforms process. The faculty members and staff at Pakistani universities and research institutes, along with foreign academia interested in Pakistans economy can participate in the Programme. In addition, Pakistani graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. and thesis-based Masters programmes are also eligible to apply. The grants would be upto $20,000 for upto one year of research, and upto $50,000 for upto two years of research. "Through this initiative, our aim is to make the academia think about policy issues because it is their responsibility, too, to come up with research solutions. We want to attract and engage the thinking minds among them in competition amongst themselves", Dr. Nadeem told BR Research. The proposals have to be submitted by March 31, 2012, which will then be evaluated by the review panel on multiple criteria. Finding novel policy prescriptions from the academic community begs an improvement in research capacity, too. Towards that end, SDPI is running an interesting project that will train and empower the Pakistani universities economics departments to formulate growth strategies for their local area economies. "Each universitys economics department will be facilitated by the chamber of commerce and other business associations in that area, along with the civil society. These strategies will then be recommended to the provincial governments", said Dr. Vaqar, who is spearheading this initiative. It would be interesting to see how these two initiatives fare. Among other things, it is perhaps time for the informed and knowledgeable academics to converge and form a constituency of their own. Only then can they get the government to listen to their recommendations.
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