If a Washington, D.C., think tank publishes a voluminous policy paper, but barely anyone reads it, does it have an impact? Not really, according to Todd Moss, long-time development think tank leader and founder of the Energy for Growth Hub. Moss, who joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast, sees a glaring mismatch between many organizations that claim to be in the business of informing policy decisions and the government officials who actually make those decisions. “The top 10 think tanks in the U.S. produced 1,500 reports last year,” Moss said, referencing recent estimates. “Some of them have real nuggets of wisdom, but lots of them are just incredibly boring and pointless, and no one will read them.” For Moss, the insistence on producing heavy reports and staging ceremonial public panels represents a deeper structural failure: losing sight of actual policy outcomes. Busy government officials, buried under back-to-back 15-minute meetings, rarely have the bandwidth to digest 14-page executive summaries, let alone full-length volumes. What they need instead, he said, is clear decision memos, outside experts who understand institutional politics, and — in many cases — years of strategic patience. Moss points to a recent breakthrough his own organization contributed to by deploying that playbook: the World Bank’s decision to lift its long-standing ban on financing nuclear energy projects. Changing the mind of a notoriously risk-averse, multishareholder institution took seven years of painstaking mapping, cross-party coalition building, and direct engagement with inside allies, he said. “I was literally told, you will never be able to change this. We will never do this,” Moss said. “When I think about lessons from this, I think about tactics, alliances, and patience.”
