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’m sure members typically have a suboptimal level of organisational context. However, that might be outweighed by other benefits. I think the more important question is, ‘Are there contexts in which democratic decision-making processes improve outcomes?’. I would love it if people could point me to some good research on the subject!
Edit: after asking Claude to do some research, the best I could find was this.
There is much enthusiasm among scholars and public administrators for participatory and collaborative modes of governance as a means to tackle contemporary environmental problems. Participatory and collaborative approaches are expected to both enhance the environmental standard of the outputs of decision-making processes and improve the implementation of these outputs. In this article, we draw on a database of 305 coded published cases of public environmental decision-making to identify key pathways via which participation fosters effective environmental governance. We develop a conceptual model of the hypothesized relationship between participation, environmental outputs, and implementation, mediated by intermediate (social) outcomes such as social learning or trust building. Testing these assumptions through structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis, we find a generally positive effect of participation on the environmental standard of governance outputs, in particular where communication intensity is high and where participants are delegated decision-making power. Moreover, we identify two latent variables—convergence of stakeholder perspectives and stakeholder capacity building—to mediate this relationship. Our findings point to a need for treating complex and multifaceted phenomena such as participation in a nuanced manner, and to pay attention to how particular mechanisms work to foster a range of social outcomes and to secure more environmentally effective outputs and their implementation.
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.
Thank you!
I’m sure members typically have a suboptimal level of organisational context. However, that might be outweighed by other benefits. I think the more important question is, ‘Are there contexts in which democratic decision-making processes improve outcomes?’. I would love it if people could point me to some good research on the subject!
Edit: after asking Claude to do some research, the best I could find was this.