Despite my skepticism about “top 10” lists, I waded through the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn’s Think Tanks and Civil Society Program‘s annual rankings of the world’s top think tanks. Mainly because it says something about the political economy and ideology of knowledge.

The “Global Go To Think Tank Rankings” was publicly released in late January. The authors of the report go on about how the rankings “… are based on a 2010 worldwide survey of 1,500 scholars, journalists, policymakers and peers from approximately 120 countries.  The panel nominated and ranked nearly 7,000 think tanks from every region of the world.” Basically those ranked judged themselves.

No surprises that the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C. finished top.  Second and third are the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also both based in the U.S.   Chatham House (aka The Royal Institute of International Affairs) and Amnesty International, both based in London, are 4th and 5th in the world.

You can see where this is going.

The results are then broken down for the top non-U.S. think tanks and the top U.S. institutions. So Chatham House and Amnesty International, Transparency International (in Germany), the International Institute for Strategic Studies (also in Britain) and the Stockholm Peace Research Institute in Sweden, are the top “non U.S.” think tanks.

On the “US-only list,” the top 3 institutions from the earlier mentioned “global top 5” list are joined by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. and the RAND Corporation.

There’s also a couple of other sub-lists readers of this blog will be interested in.

Take the “Development” think tank rankings. This is the top 5:  (1) Brookings Institution (2)  Center for Global Development, (United States); (3) Overseas Development Institute (United Kingdom); (4) German Development Institute or Deutsches Institut fur Entwicklungspolitik, (Germany); and (5) Chatham House.

The report also notes “… the rise of think tanks in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.” Whether these think tanks offer fresh ideas or anything different from their counterparts in the West–given that they share the same funding sources and ideas–is not discussed in the report.

So who are the top think tanks in Africa?

There are two separate “top 25” lists in which African think tanks are ranked: North Africa and the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. (I already know a few people who won’t like this demarcation.)

In the “North Africa and the Middle East” list, the follow African centers make the cut: Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, (Egypt) at no.3, the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies, (Egypt) at no. 19, theCenter d’Etudes et des Recherches en Sciences Sociales, (Morocco) at no. 22, and the Information and Decision Support Center  in Egypt at no. 25.

As for Sub Saharan Africa, here’s the full list, which apart from proving the dominance of South Africa and, maybe, saying something about the kinds of things and ideas funders throw money at (the Free Market Foundation at no. 3?), doesn’t mean much else:

1. South African Institute of International Affairs, (South Africa)

2. Institute for Security Studies (ISS), (South Africa)

3. Free Market Foundation, (South Africa)

4. Centre for Conflict Resolution, (South Africa)

5. African Center for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes or ACCORD, (South Africa)

6. Centre for Development and Enterprise, (South Africa)

7. Africa Institute of South Africa, (South Africa)

8. African Economic Research Consortium, (Kenya)

9. Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), (Senegal)

10. Center for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA), (Nigeria)

11. Institute of Economic Affairs, (IEA-Ghana), (Ghana)

12. Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA), (Botswana)

13. African Technology Policy Studies Network, (ATPS-Tanzania), (Tanzania)

14. IMANI Center for Policy and Education, (Ghana)

15. Centre d’Etudes, de Documentation et de Recherches Economique et sociale (CEDRES), (Burkina Faso)

16. Centre for Development Studies, (Ghana)

17. Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), (Ghana)

18. Centre for Policy Analysis, (Ghana)

19. Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), (Nigeria)

20. Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA), (Tanzania)

21. Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), (Uganda)

22. Initiative for Public Policy Analysis (IPPA), (Nigeria)

23. Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), (Uganda)

24. Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF), (Tanzania)

25. Kenya Institute

You can download the full report here.