decision making

lead to wrong decisions in the absence of high-quality expertise in analysing the facts and assessing the implications. Expertise is the product of institutional training, on-job experience, opportunities for interactions with other experts and first-hand knowledge of the past difficulties in implementation.

The quality of in-house expertise has definitely improved in recent years, but more spectacular has been the growth of a reservoir of non-State expertise which governmental policy-makers can tap with benefit.

The growth of the non-State expertise has been facilitated by the rapid increase in the number of NGOs and think tanks helped by private funding and the trend towards their trans-national networking. Non-State experts enjoy certain advantages over their governmental counterparts such as the following:

* They can be more objective in their assessments since they do not have to be politically correct and acceptable. Their assessments are not unduly influenced by purely nationalistic considerations. They are prepared to view a problem in a much broader perspective.

* Their trans-national interactions with one another are generally free of the inhibitions and mental blocks which characterise the interactions of State experts with one another. This enables them to pick the brains of their trans-national counterparts much more easily than State experts can do.

The readiness of the State policy-makers to make use of the expertise of non-State actors has contributed to many innovations in policy-making. One could cite the recent correctives to the US policy of over-focussing on China to the benign neglect of India as the outcome of the growing influence of non-State actors on foreign policy-making in the US.

Non-State experts were closely involved in the confabulations which preceded the recent visit of the US President, Mr.Bill Clinton, to South Asia and one could attribute his decision to visit Pakistan despite Indian objections and his blunt messages to Pakistan in his pronouncements at New Delhi and Islamabad to the advice received from non-State experts such as the Independent Task Force of the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Apart from academics, experts of think tanks and activists of NGOs, other non-State actors playing an increasingly active role in foreign policy making are businessmen, whose influence on the evolution of US policy towards China has been considerable, and special interests and human rights groups, which have had great impact on US policy-making towards Myanmar and the Taliban-controlled Government of Afghanistan.

While non-State experts are increasingly being consulted by State policy-formulators in India, their role in policy-making is still limited since governmental experts view their analysis and approach as highly esoteric and cut off from reality.

There is an urgent need for an examination of the positive and negative aspects of our policy and decision-making process in respect of foreign policy in the light of the experience of other countries in order to improve the quality of the decision-making.


B.RAMAN (30-4-00)

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail:corde@vsnl.com)