Don’t Panic About Democracy in EA
At EAG London 2024, Zach Robinson (CEA’s new CEO) highlighted strengthening EA institutions as a top priority. One avenue is democratizing EA organisations. While there’s been abstract discussion on democracy within EA, concrete examples are rare. EA Norway’s governance model — and similar structures in EA Sweden, Denmark, and Finland — offers a practical illustration. In this post, we provide an overview of how things work at EA Norway. We don’t make strong arguments or claims about this being the best solution for everyone.
About EA Norway
Founded in 2017, EA Norway has grown to 300 paying members — alongside over 1,000 affiliated supporters. Its annual budget stands at around 3.8m Norwegian kroner (about €320,000), with 3.25 full-time-equivalent staff handling day-to-day tasks.
At EAG London 2024, the Norwegian delegation ranked third in per-capita terms. Alumni of EA Norway have gone on to work at organisations such as CEA, the Forethought Foundation, 80,000 Hours, GovAI, and Horizon, and have founded CE-incubated Family Empowerment Media. What’s more, 125 people from Norway have taken Giving What We Can’s 10% Pledge. Gi Effektivt, Norways Effective Giving organisation, has raised 110m NOK (~€9.5m) since 2016 and boasts 17% brand recognition among the Norwegian public.
Democracy from the Ground Up
EA Norway’s governance is structured via democratic statutes, which ensure that crucial decisions rest with its membership. Anyone who supports the goals of the organisation and is aged 15 or older can join, subject to a small annual fee. Members receive quarterly updates, financial statements, and strategic plans. They also attend an annual General Assembly, a meeting at which they review reports, debate resolutions, and elect board members.
Inside the General Assembly
Once a year, all eyes turn to the General Assembly, the organisation’s highest authority. An invitation goes out at least eight weeks beforehand, so members can mark their calendars and draft any proposals. Then, at least a week beforehand, the Board shares detailed documents — annual reports, financial statements, strategic updates — ensuring everyone walks in well-prepared.
On the day, the meeting kicks off like a miniature parliamentary session. Members can raise questions and propose changes. Most significantly, they elect the Board, thus holding the leadership accountable. If the Board veers off track, the General Assembly can redirect it. If the membership wants a bold new approach, they can bring it up — and vote it in.
The Board and Beyond
Between Assemblies, EA Norway’s Board has overall authority. Typically comprising four to six members (including a chairperson and a treasurer), the board is responsible for implementing Assembly decisions and holding the General Secretary to account. Terms are staggered so that institutional memory is preserved whilst still allowing new voices to join at regular intervals. Elections take place during the annual General Assemblies.
To ensure a supply of capable and willing candidates, an Election Committee organizes board elections. Comprising up to four members — elected annually by the General Assembly — it informs the membership of upcoming elections, gathers nominations, presents candidates, and submits a Board proposal.
Alongside the board sits a pair of Community Liaisons. Elected by the Assembly each year, these two serve as independent points of contact in the event of conflicts or concerns. They afford members a confidential route to airing grievances — especially helpful if disputes arise with board members or staff.
A Hands-On General Secretary
At the operational helm is the General Secretary. This official oversees everyday activities and supervises staff and volunteers. The role is akin to a chief executive, with one twist: the post is accountable not to shareholders or a founder but to the elected board, which is itself accountable to paying members. In this manner, strategic directives filter from members at the Assembly, through the Board, and on to the General Secretary
Lessons for the Global Movement
Some critics worry that democracy might impede nimble decision-making or divert energy from high-impact goals. Yet EA Norway’s record — attracting steady funding and successfully supporting members with their careers and donations — suggests otherwise.
Other Nordic EA organisations follow similar democratic practices, further indicating that Norway’s approach is neither accidental nor unique. For proponents of more robust institutions, the Norwegian example demonstrates how democracy can keep leadership accountable and engage members without bogging the organisation down in bureaucracy and squabbling or deviating from its core mission of benefiting others.
Whether this model could scale to contexts where democratic membership associations are less common is an open question. Still, EA Norway’s experience serves as an example of the possibilities for democratisation within the movement.
Thank you for writing this up!
I’m somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where I’m a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasn’t resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
Having fee-paying members suits an organization that benefits its members. At EA Germany, the target group for the interventions wasn’t the members, but rather people in earlier stages of the talent pipeline. If I want to contribute to talent pipeline development, I would prefer to donate to the charity I consider most cost-effective. It is unlikely that this would be the national EA group, given the numerous players in this space. Therefore, I would personally hesitate to join a national group that requires fees, unless tax reasons or special insider knowledge lead me to believe this is the best use of my donations.
Overall, I worry that national membership groups in EA lead people to make decisions that are not solely motivated by EA principles. My theory is that the main activities currently undertaken by national EA organizations could be carried out more cost-effectively by fewer players with a broader geographic reach. I fear that membership organizations are not the best structures to critically evaluate their existence and shut down if they believe members’ time and money could be better spent elsewhere.
First and foremost, I think the thoughts expressed here make sense and this comment is more just expressing a different perspective, not necessarily disagreeing.
I wanted to bring up an existing framework for thinking about this from Raghuram Rajan’s “The Third Pillar,” which provides economic arguments for why local communities matter even when they’re less “efficient” than centralized alternatives.
The core economic benefits of local community structures include:
Information advantages: Local groups understand context that centralized organizations miss
Adaptation capacity: They can respond quickly to local opportunities and constraints
Social capital generation: They create trust networks that enable coordination
Motivation infrastructure: They provide ongoing support that sustains long-term engagement
So when you bring up the question of efficiency and adherence to optimal reflective practices I start thinking about it from a more systemic perspective.
Here’s a question that comes to mind: if local EA communities make people 3x more motivated to pursue high-impact careers, or make it much easier for newcomers to engage with EA ideas, then even if these local groups are only operating at 75% efficiency compared to some theoretical global optimum, you still get significant net benefit.
I think this becomes a governance design problem rather than a simple efficiency question. The real challenge is building local communities that capture these motivational benefits while maintaining mechanisms for critical self-evaluation. (Which I think happens through impact evaluations and similar at least in EA Sweden.)
I disagree with the pure globalization solution here. From a broader macroeconomic perspective, we’ve seen repeatedly that dismantling local institutions in favor of “more efficient” centralized alternatives often destroys valuable social infrastructure that’s hard to rebuild. The national EA model might be preserving something important that pure optimization would eliminate.
I am sympathetic to this argument vibes wise and I thought this was an elegant numerate utilitarian case for it. Part of my motivation is that I think it would be good if a lot of EA-ish values were a lot more mainstream. Like, I would even say that you probably get non-linear returns to scale in some important ways. You kind of need a critical mass of people to do certain things.
It feels like, necessarily, these organizations would also be about providing value to the members as well. That is a good thing.
I think there is something like a “but what if we get watered down too much” concern latent here. I can kind of see how this would happen, but I am also not that worried about it. The tent is already pretty big in some ways. Stuff like numerate utilitarianism, empiricism, broad moral circles, thoughtfulness, tough trade-offs doesn’t seem in danger of going away soon. Probably EA growing would spread these ideas rather than shrink them.
Also, I just think that societies/people all over the world could significantly benefit from stronger third pillars and that the ideal versions of these sorts of community spaces would tend to share a lot of things in common with EA.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchin’ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
That sounds like a step towards the glorious transhumanist future to me, but maybe the margins on that are bad in practice and the community centers of my day dreams will remain merely EA-adjacent. Perhaps, I just need to move to a town with cooler libraries. I am really not sure what the Dao here is or where the official EA brand really fits into any of this.
We run something similar in Munich, where we have a coworking space that also hosts EA-adjacent events (including crafting events), located in the middle of the city, allowing people to bike there. So, very sympathetic to the idea of having local groups doing this.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/attendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its members’ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organization’s broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norway’s ability to attract non-member/supporter funding. As a practical matter, “EA org in a small country” may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. That’s relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than “EA org in a small country” does.
I agree with the benefits of local community structures. However, I don’t believe that national EA groups can offer as much as informal local groups. I help manage both formal and informal networks of EA (adjacent) individuals in Munich, and there, I see these points much more clearly. Running a coworking space, hosting in-person events, convening private meetings, and having one-on-ones seem like activities that would fit your list.
Yeah for sure, I think the devil might be in the details here around how things are run and what the purpose of the national organisation is. Since Sweden and Norway have 8x less of a population than germany I think the effect of a “nation-wide group” might be different?
In my experience, I’ve found that EA Sweden focuses on and provides a lot of the things that you listed so I would be very curious to hear what the difference between a local and national organisation would be? Is there a difference in the dynamics of them being motivated to sustain themselves because of the scale?
You probably have a lot more experience than me in this so it would be very interesting to hear!
If I’m reading Patrick’s comment correctly, there are two different ideas going on:
The democratic approach requires greater overhead (e.g., “the overhead for organizing a general assembly”) without producing better results to justify the extra overhead
Fewer / geographically broader orgs would have greater efficiency for ~the usual reasons we might think larger orgs might do better than smaller ones
These effects should be, in theory, somewhat separate—one could envision a nationally focused org without membership/democracy, or a big transnational group with it. Do you think your list of advantages is more about localness or more about being democratic?
I like that decomposition.
There’s something about a prior on having democratic decision making as part of this because it allows for better community engagement usually? Representation often leads to feelings of inclusion and whilst I’ve only dabbled in the sociology here it seems like the option of saying no is quite important for members to feel heard?
My guess would be that the main pros of having democratic deliberation doesn’t come from when the going is normal but rather as a resillience mechanism? Democracies tend to react late to major changes and not change path often but when they do they do it properly? (I think this statement is true but it might as well be a cultural myth that I’ve heard in the social choice adjacent community.)
Perhaps, but I can also imagine that a hand-selected nonprofit board may be able to spot risks and react to them better than a board voted in an assembly. The coordination function of an assembly in trying to fill specific board roles seems lower than if a smaller group of existing board members can discuss it.
Yeah, I think you’re right and I also believe that it can be a both and?
You can have a general non-profit board and at the same time have a form of representative democracy going on which seems the best we can currently do for this?
I think it is fundamentally about a more timeless trade-off between hierarchical organisations that generally are able to act with more “commander’s intent” versus democratic models that are more of a flat voting model. The democratic models suffer when there is a lot of single person linear thinking involved but do well at providing direct information for what people care about whilst the inverse is true for the hierarchical one and the project of good governance is to some extent somewhere in between.
I can see democratic models providing value, but the practical implementation is tricky. I can only speak from my experience in EA Germany, where member engagement in national-level strategy and participation in the national community seemed much lower than what I experience on the international level (in this forum, for example) or even at the city level at times.
I would be more excited about either local structures (cities or small regions with fewer than 10 million people) or larger structures (sub-continents, professional groups, etc.) where people truly form a community in the sense that they see each other in person, or where there is a large enough body to allow for meaningful participation in democratic processes.
Thank you for writing this up!
One thing I’d be curious about is how much the members engage, and have context / more deeply held takes on things they vote on. And particularly if you have thoughts or ideas on how to cultivate deeper engagement.
I think my personal taste in the past was more towards organisations being run this way, but after attending a large general assembly for a (non-EA) charity group I was part of, I was really disappointed with how shallowly or completely not engaged people were with what they were voting on. From memory, I think the decisions that got made were much less cohesive and more random than I think they would have been with another setup, which is something I expect EAs would want to avoid.
I personally haven’t updated too much based off this example, as I suspect this model works better in Norway than it would elsewhere.
I was thinking similarly, Norwegians seem especially accepting of both democracy and EA ideas, so hard to generalize.
I have a hard time understanding why it WOULDN’T work elsewhere, tbh. Have not read about convincing reasons or perspectives as to why the model wouldn’t function well across the world. Have you?
As soon as you start charging a fee to be a member, people will become suspicious that you’re trying to sign them up because you want their cash, rather than being purely dedicated to charity. It’ll also cost you members because they’ll have the choice to either spend the money or not feel fully part of the community. This effect will be worse in some countries than others.
If you don’t get enough members signing up, then the organisation becomes vulnerable to capture by someone who signs up a bunch of straw members who never show up to meetings except to vote once. You can reduce this by adding rules around attendance at meetings, but then this makes it more formal and may cost you more members, especially if people are used to groups being much more casual.
Counterpoint: This seems to work all right for university clubs.
Being from Norway myself, I’m curious about how other national EA organisations are run. Can anyone share? :)
So, I am taking away that the overall point of the post is that a formal global EA group should be created, and it should (and can) follow democractic standards, as has been proven in some national groups. Is that right?
Is there an official EA Global group currently? to me it seems that in essence that is what CEA stands for. And as it is a stand alone organization, would the idea be to
1. change CEA governance, so that it falls under the EA Global group, or for CEA to be democratically structured directly or
2. to create a partner EA Global group that works in partnership with CEA, where the former is governed by its members?
I like the thoughts provoked by this post, and I can’t find much to disagree on, but it feels like it gets into governance details of follow on steps, and we’re still on step 1: a higher level discussion about how/where/if/why an EA Global group should exist. (Note though that I’m not directly involved in meta/community building EA, so it may be background others are aware of but I do not have)