PIPS ranked amongst top parliamentary research institutes

Islamabad:The Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services has been ranked in the top institutes in Parliamentary Research amongst global mapping of research services around the world by the UK Parliament. According to latest issue of The Parliamentarian, the journal of Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, UK Parliamentary Office of Science of Technology undertook a comprehensive year-long exercise to place the Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services (PIPS) in the Top Tier of only 41 out of 181 parliamentary institutions worldwide in 125 countries, providing evidence-based policy synthesis, analysis and scrutiny as per the international standards to the parliamentarians.

Dr Vicky Ward at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and Dr Mark Monaghan from University of Loughborough University in England, undertook a detailed comparative analysis of purpose, structure and performance over the five years (2018-2023) for 181 institutes to map 41 top institutes worldwide placed. “The Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services (PIPS), alongside network-oriented models such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Research Services (CPRS) and UK-POST are placed among well-known models for linking individual Parliaments with academic research. PIPS has been recognized as the global centre of excellence based on ensuring five qualitative standards of “impartial, balanced, credible, reliable and timely research services,” to individual members and parliamentary institutions in last five years. Research evidence has an important role to play in the work of parliaments as they scrutinise, debate and pass legislation. Some parliaments have well-known mechanisms for accessing and harnessing research from the academic community, but there are many others whose work is less well-known,” the study added.

The UK POST professors recognized that “PIPS has provided a record 1,500 research-based articles and technical assistance to the individual Members of Parliament, committees and cross-party caucuses” within the first decade of its establishment.” It is a proud moment for the National Parliament of Pakistan that PIPS has been rated in the Top Tier of global mapping of parliamentary mechanisms for accessing academic research in this worldwide rating. Speaker of the National Assembly of Pakistan Raja Pervaiz Ashraf is presently the President of the Board of Governors of PIPS.

The global mapping undertook detailed study of all 192 national parliaments worldwide as well as well total of 173 potential mechanisms using parliamentary engagement and research networks (e.g. the European Parliamentary Technology Assessment Network, International Parliamentary Engagement Network) that enabled them to finally categorise mechanisms into three tiers. These represented level of confidence for best standard as (1 = high, 3 = low) viz a viz the institutions’ ability to provide high-quality academic research evidence that went beyond the provision of internally produced and/or unfiltered information and analysis.