The Crawford School: Its legacy, impact and future
By Peter Drysdale, Emeritus Professor of Economics and the Head of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and Editor-in-Chief East Asia Forum at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.
The Crawford School’s foundation was rooted in the work of Sir John Crawford himself and his leadership in shaping the impact of the old Research School of Pacific Studies. The legacy which gave the School huge international standing at its creation was the power that its scholarship brought to bear on shaping not only Australia’s understanding and economic policy strategies towards Asia and the Pacific, especially Japan, China, Indonesia and India, but also the region’s understanding of its own potential, notably through its embracing openness and the idea of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The ANU school of thought about Asia’s economic development that has influenced policy leaders in capitals around the region is the Crawford School’s lodestar. Crawford was its new institutional home, and the School’s international standing is sustained by that legacy.
The other two legacies that Crawford inherited from its progenitors were national research centres, such as the Australia-Japan Research Centre, the Indonesia Project and China Economy Program, deeply engaged in collaborative research across the region and its pioneering graduate teaching program that produced a generation of distinguished alumni in the region. Crawford was the University’s leading edge of international graduate training at scale, integral to its core academic and research mission.
The big issues in Australia’s public policy have to be managed in the international context of its Asian neighbourhood. Australia’s leverage and influence globally crucially depend on how its public policies measure up in its globally important region. While the times have changed dramatically in the two decades since Crawford’s formal launch, that circumstance has not and will not change. The frontline of the trade, economic and development challenges, after the fracture of the global order and the rise of geopolitical competition, the imperative of climate and environmental change, and the impact of the digital revolution for Australia is in its region. Its leading school of public policy will be judged by how well it understands and deals with that national reality. It will only maintain its standing as a leading international public policy school through its impact in the region.
The Crawford School’s future will be defined by its eminence in Asia and the Pacific. That has to be its laser-sharp future focus because that is where the main policy decisions will be made and the institutional arrangements framed that affect Australia in the coming decades. Australia’s policy strategies and institutions have to be tuned to achieving national objectives in the crucible of developments in our region, and we shall be judged by how well we prepare the policy strategies and institutions we shall need to navigate them. How successfully we interact with Tokyo, Beijing, Jakarta, and New Delhi will also critically affect the outcomes we seek elsewhere in the world, in Washington, Brussels or in London.
Historically Crawford scholars have mixed it with key policy makers – prime ministers, presidents, finance ministers, and policy authorities across the region. That must be the benchmark of performance and influence.
There are structural issues that now need attention if this aspiration is to be achieved. First, there is the important question of how to weld essential synergies between policy expertise in Crawford and regional expertise in the College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP), ensuring that the School, now part of the College of Law, Governance and Policy, embraces regional knowledge that has been central to its legacy. A structure that articulates the relationship between CAP and Crawford is essential to maintaining top class regionally literate scholarship and ensuring Crawford has the resource structure to do its job. Second, Crawford’s graduate program needs to be properly staffed so its quality and competitiveness make it more sought after in the region. And third, its executive programs need to be directed to top level policy education. Attention to these issues will help secure Crawford’s standing and future.