1. Quick definitions first, an explanation below. “Policy engagement”—interacting with policy actors to advance specific objectives; “start locally”: experimenting with actions and recommendations in ways that remain within the scope of organizational influence; “organizational capacity” capability to test, iterate and react to external events in order to preserve course.
Achieving policy change requires organizational capacity to sustain engagement for indefinite amounts of time because (a) organizations have to have sufficient standing within, or strong connections to, the relevant networks in order to be listened to and (b) the funding to hire staff with appropriate experience to react to what arises.
For example, we wrote this announcement because input from the EA community is of high quality and worth engaging with. If, instead, we had written a big online newspaper announcement for international Geneva and beyond, the reactions would likely have been more overwhelming and interactions more likely to harm SI’s standing than here. This illustrates one way in which SI currently lacks the “capacity” to react to big events in its direct environment and thus needs to build up first.
1. Quick definitions first, an explanation below. “Policy engagement”—interacting with policy actors to advance specific objectives; “start locally”: experimenting with actions and recommendations in ways that remain within the scope of organizational influence; “organizational capacity” capability to test, iterate and react to external events in order to preserve course.
Achieving policy change requires organizational capacity to sustain engagement for indefinite amounts of time because (a) organizations have to have sufficient standing within, or strong connections to, the relevant networks in order to be listened to and (b) the funding to hire staff with appropriate experience to react to what arises.
For example, we wrote this announcement because input from the EA community is of high quality and worth engaging with. If, instead, we had written a big online newspaper announcement for international Geneva and beyond, the reactions would likely have been more overwhelming and interactions more likely to harm SI’s standing than here. This illustrates one way in which SI currently lacks the “capacity” to react to big events in its direct environment and thus needs to build up first.