Identifying and prioritizing the factors affecting the effectiveness of non-governmental think tanks in Iran

In today's world, despite significant advances in various fields and technology, public issues are among the most complex issues. Non-governmental think tanks use academic and executive elites in various specialties to analyze public issues and offer solutions to solve them. Given the important role of these centers in the policy-making process and on the other hand their financial and organizational independence from the government, the need to identify the factors affecting their effectiveness is important. This research is based on an exploratory mixed-method which in the qualitative part, after conducting semi-structured interviews, these factors were identified through thematic analysis, and then in the quantitative part, they were prioritized using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). In this study, 28 factors were identified and prioritized in 7 comprehensive categories, which are: "governance factors", "Political factors", "Specialized competencies of think tanks", "Human resource management factors of think tanks", "Organizational factors", "Media factors", "Economic factors".