Biorisk, Recovery from Catastrophe, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Many social movements find a lot of opportunity by attempting to influence policy to achieve their goals . While longtermism can and should remain bi-partisan, there may be many opportunities to pull the rope sideways on policy areas of concern.
We’d like to see a project that attempts to carefully understand the lobbying process and explores garnering support for identified tractable policies. We think while such a project could scale to be very large once successful, anyone working on this project should really aim to start small and tred carefully, aiming to avoid issues around the unilateralist curse and ensuring to not make longtermism into an overly partisan issue. It’s likely that longtermist lobbying might also be best done as lobbying for other clear areas related to longtermism but as a distinct idea, such as lobbying for climate change mitigation or lobbying for pandemic preparedness.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
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.
Longtermist Policy Lobbying Group
Biorisk, Recovery from Catastrophe, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Many social movements find a lot of opportunity by attempting to influence policy to achieve their goals . While longtermism can and should remain bi-partisan, there may be many opportunities to pull the rope sideways on policy areas of concern.
We’d like to see a project that attempts to carefully understand the lobbying process and explores garnering support for identified tractable policies. We think while such a project could scale to be very large once successful, anyone working on this project should really aim to start small and tred carefully, aiming to avoid issues around the unilateralist curse and ensuring to not make longtermism into an overly partisan issue. It’s likely that longtermist lobbying might also be best done as lobbying for other clear areas related to longtermism but as a distinct idea, such as lobbying for climate change mitigation or lobbying for pandemic preparedness.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
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.