I think some form of lobbying for longtermist-friendly policies would be quite valuable. However, I’m skeptical that running lobbying work through a single centralized “shop” is going to be the most efficient use of funds. Lobbying groups tend to specialize in a specific target audience, e.g., particular divisions of the US federal government or stakeholders in a particular industry, because the relationships are really important to success of initiatives and those take time to develop and maintain. My guess is that effective strategies to get desired policies implemented will depend a lot on the intersection of the target audience + substance of the policy + the existing landscape of influences on the relevant decision-makers. In practice, this would probably mean at the very least developing a lot of partnerships with colleague organizations to help get things done or perhaps more likely setting up a regranting fund of some kind to support those partners.
Happy to chat about this further since we’re actively working on setting something like this up at EIP.
I think some form of lobbying for longtermist-friendly policies would be quite valuable. However, I’m skeptical that running lobbying work through a single centralized “shop” is going to be the most efficient use of funds. Lobbying groups tend to specialize in a specific target audience, e.g., particular divisions of the US federal government or stakeholders in a particular industry, because the relationships are really important to success of initiatives and those take time to develop and maintain. My guess is that effective strategies to get desired policies implemented will depend a lot on the intersection of the target audience + substance of the policy + the existing landscape of influences on the relevant decision-makers. In practice, this would probably mean at the very least developing a lot of partnerships with colleague organizations to help get things done or perhaps more likely setting up a regranting fund of some kind to support those partners.
Happy to chat about this further since we’re actively working on setting something like this up at EIP.
I agree with you on the value of not overly centralizing this and of having different groups specialize in different policy areas and/or approaches.