I just wanted to share as my experience was so radically different from yours. Based in the UK during the pandemic I felt like:
No one in was really doing anything to try to “make the government sane around biorisk”. I published a paper targeted at government on managing risks. I remember at the time (in 2020) it felt like no one else was shifting to focus on policy change on lessons learned from COVID.
When I tried doing stuff it went super well. As mentioned here (and here) this work went much better than expected. The government seemed willing to update and commit to being better in future.
I came away from the situation with a feeling that influencing policy was easy and impactful and neglected and hopefully about what policy work could achieve – but just disappointed that not more was being done to “make the government sane around biorisk”.
This leads me to questions Why are our experiences so different? Some hypothesis that I have are:
Luck / randomness – maybe I was lucky or US advocates were unlucky and we should assume the truth lies in the middle.
Different country – the US is different, harder to influence, or less sane than some (or many) other places.
Different methodology – The standard policy advocacy sector really sucks, it is not evidence based and there is little M&E. It might be that advocacy run in an impact-focused way (like was happening in the UK) is just much better than funding standard advocacy organisations (which I guess was happening in the US). See discussion on this here.
Different amount of work – your post mentions a “valiant effort” was made, but does not evidence this. This makes it hard to form an opinion on what works and why. Would be great to get an answer to this (see Susan’s comment) e.g. links to a few campaigns in this space.
I just wanted to share as my experience was so radically different from yours. Based in the UK during the pandemic I felt like:
No one in was really doing anything to try to “make the government sane around biorisk”. I published a paper targeted at government on managing risks. I remember at the time (in 2020) it felt like no one else was shifting to focus on policy change on lessons learned from COVID.
When I tried doing stuff it went super well. As mentioned here (and here) this work went much better than expected. The government seemed willing to update and commit to being better in future.
I came away from the situation with a feeling that influencing policy was easy and impactful and neglected and hopefully about what policy work could achieve – but just disappointed that not more was being done to “make the government sane around biorisk”.
This leads me to questions Why are our experiences so different? Some hypothesis that I have are:
Luck / randomness – maybe I was lucky or US advocates were unlucky and we should assume the truth lies in the middle.
Different country – the US is different, harder to influence, or less sane than some (or many) other places.
Different methodology – The standard policy advocacy sector really sucks, it is not evidence based and there is little M&E. It might be that advocacy run in an impact-focused way (like was happening in the UK) is just much better than funding standard advocacy organisations (which I guess was happening in the US). See discussion on this here.
Different amount of work – your post mentions a “valiant effort” was made, but does not evidence this. This makes it hard to form an opinion on what works and why. Would be great to get an answer to this (see Susan’s comment) e.g. links to a few campaigns in this space.
Grateful for your views.