Die Vergabepraxis orientiert sich an der vorhandenen wissenschaftlichen Forschung über Wirksamkeit und Wirtschaftlichkeit sowie an den Aspekten der Transparenz und der Ökologie.
The award practice shall be based on the available scientific research on effectiveness and cost-effectiveness as well as on the aspects of transparency and ecology.
What is the likelihood of this sentence of the policy having teeth? For example, let’s say people administering this money want to use it for a prototypical low-effectiveness intervention, like opening an art gallery in a poor country. Is there a mechanism in place to stop them? Who decides if a grant was chosen based on scientific research on effectiveness? Can, for example, a citizen sue the city for failing to follow this policy and have a judge rule they misallocated the funds, impose some penalty, and require they act differently in the future?
To me this language seems just vague enough that a motivated politician could use it to fund almost anything they wanted, so I’m wondering what evidence there is to believe this policy will do anything, as this has a great deal of impact on the measure of its effectiveness (so much so that it could flip the sign of your assessment and maybe all they money was spent to buy empty words).
Obviously we can’t know for sure until after we have seen grants awarded and especially seen grants misawarded and what the response was to that, but I’m curious what information we have now about this since I’m unfamiliar enough with Swiss government that I can only make an estimation based on my outside view prior that governments tend to find a way to do whatever they want regardless of what the law says unless the law or popular sentiment can actually force them to do what a policy intended.
They already have a committee allocating the grants which includes some academics, and they said they want to further improve the award practice. We have suggested specific academics they could work with. I’m not sure what it will end up looking like in practice. There are certainly some people in the administration who are eager to preserve the status quo, whereas others seemed quite excited about effectiveness improvements.
I don’t think it’s possible for citizens to sue the government for failing to implement a ballot initiative (or at least that’s very uncommon). But there are many indirect ways to enforce an initiative, e.g., we could talk to the members of the city council who we know and work with them to submit motions to improve the implementation of the initiative. In general, referenda are taken very seriously in Switzerland.
As I wrote above, the bottleneck is likely EA-aligned people with development knowledge wanting to spend a couple of hours per year on this (rather than formal ways of suing/filing complaints if it’s not implemented in the way we’d like). I think even a few small, friendly nudges would go a long way.
so much so that it could flip the sign of your assessment
That sounds like you think it might have been net negative, but I don’t see how that follows from your points. Unless you think the entire budget has literally a zero impact, which I think is very unlikely for the following reason:
I think it’s likely to have a significant positive impact if citizens of a city with a nominal per-capita GDP of $180,000 (source) give more money to people in developing countries (with a per-capita GDP which is ~2 orders of magnitude lower), even if that happens inefficiently. (There’s a lot of EA and non-EA writing on the indirect effects of foreign aid, etc. so I’m not going to elaborate more on that here.)
What is the likelihood of this sentence of the policy having teeth? For example, let’s say people administering this money want to use it for a prototypical low-effectiveness intervention, like opening an art gallery in a poor country. Is there a mechanism in place to stop them? Who decides if a grant was chosen based on scientific research on effectiveness? Can, for example, a citizen sue the city for failing to follow this policy and have a judge rule they misallocated the funds, impose some penalty, and require they act differently in the future?
To me this language seems just vague enough that a motivated politician could use it to fund almost anything they wanted, so I’m wondering what evidence there is to believe this policy will do anything, as this has a great deal of impact on the measure of its effectiveness (so much so that it could flip the sign of your assessment and maybe all they money was spent to buy empty words).
Obviously we can’t know for sure until after we have seen grants awarded and especially seen grants misawarded and what the response was to that, but I’m curious what information we have now about this since I’m unfamiliar enough with Swiss government that I can only make an estimation based on my outside view prior that governments tend to find a way to do whatever they want regardless of what the law says unless the law or popular sentiment can actually force them to do what a policy intended.
They already have a committee allocating the grants which includes some academics, and they said they want to further improve the award practice. We have suggested specific academics they could work with. I’m not sure what it will end up looking like in practice. There are certainly some people in the administration who are eager to preserve the status quo, whereas others seemed quite excited about effectiveness improvements.
I don’t think it’s possible for citizens to sue the government for failing to implement a ballot initiative (or at least that’s very uncommon). But there are many indirect ways to enforce an initiative, e.g., we could talk to the members of the city council who we know and work with them to submit motions to improve the implementation of the initiative. In general, referenda are taken very seriously in Switzerland.
As I wrote above, the bottleneck is likely EA-aligned people with development knowledge wanting to spend a couple of hours per year on this (rather than formal ways of suing/filing complaints if it’s not implemented in the way we’d like). I think even a few small, friendly nudges would go a long way.
That sounds like you think it might have been net negative, but I don’t see how that follows from your points. Unless you think the entire budget has literally a zero impact, which I think is very unlikely for the following reason:
I think it’s likely to have a significant positive impact if citizens of a city with a nominal per-capita GDP of $180,000 (source) give more money to people in developing countries (with a per-capita GDP which is ~2 orders of magnitude lower), even if that happens inefficiently. (There’s a lot of EA and non-EA writing on the indirect effects of foreign aid, etc. so I’m not going to elaborate more on that here.)