Despite growing research on policy advice, little is known about how and why the nature of policy advice varies. We hypothesize that examining policy capacity and control within the policy advisory system (PAS) is useful in this regard. We examine how government capacity, think tank capacity, and think tank autonomy influence the content of policy advice in India. We code policy advice based on content analysis of 60 knowledge products from think tanks in India and estimate policy capacity of government departments and think tanks based on their respective staff strengths and budgets. We find that the nature of policy advice, specifically whether it is long-term or short-term, varies based on think tank capacity as well as government capacity; high capacity think tanks tend to provide more long-term advice to high capacity governments. As the PAS within developing countries have less capacity to generate strategic policy advice, variations can be expected in the kinds of policy advice supplied by the PAS in developing countries vis-à-vis OECD countries. Thus, the PAS literature can be extended to developing countries by studying the dynamics between the content of advice, capacity, and control.

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It is a shared understanding among policy scholars and practitioners that governments with high levels of policy capacity are better able to design and implement public policies for driving economic growth and social development. Despite the centrality of policy capacity, a common definition and measurement of policy capacity remain elusive. There exists a long list of concepts that seek to encapsulate the ability of the governance system to deliver desired policy outcomes–such as state capacity, administrative capacity, governance capacity, bureaucratic capacity–that stimulates greater academic enthusiasm but more often contributes to intellectual divergence on the subject. This paper performed a conceptual analysis of policy capacity through a bibliometric analysis and qualitative framework synthesis of relevant literature various fields like political science, public administration and policy studies. It identified a pattern of fragmentation in the overall approach in defining and operationalizing capacity, which underlies the divergence in the conceptual and operational understanding of policy capacity. A synthetic framework is offered with the intention of putting together this disparate research into a process-oriented dynamic of the development of policy capacity.@en