I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.
Thanks so much for your great explanation James and the other ones on the post. Great to see direct engagement from the people running the program.
the theory of change of trying to change the government’s current allocation of makes some sense (I didn’t pick it up in the podcast, but reading back it is there to some degree), but its very difficult. Its always a difficult task influence governments to spend their money in more impactful directions—especially just with science and logic. Advocacy skills might be at least as important to your cause as the data the projects you fund produce.
I would be interested to see if you have examples of philanthropies with small amounts of money and no real carrot or stick, influencing governments with larger amounts of money on the issue. Here in Uganda philanthropies can definitely influence the direction of healthcare for example (HIV, Malaria national programs. etc.), but its largely through pouring significant resources into that area, often more than the government can even which gives them hard power and carrots and sticks to wield.
I’m also interested if Indian governments have shown in any practical way that they might be genuinely interested in cost-effectiveness analysis driving fund allocation? As far as I know in East Africa here cost-effectiveness analysis is almost completely unutilised by governments, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to from any level of government in any intervention here, health or otherwise. I hope India is more switched on than that and might pay more attention. I know nothing about the region really so maybe they do already use it.
Anyway we will see what happens! Obvious clean air is wildly important and causes ludicrous amnounts of suffering and death. It may well be a hard thing to judge the impact on—a rough one for the grantmaker and those doing the interventions. If the quality doesn’t improve obviously that will be a fail, but if it does (as is likely) its going to be hard to pin down the counterfactual impact of the grants. If they do allocate more efforts to rural areas that’s a win you could tick up I’d imagine, but if air quality gets better in general it may well be hard to figure out what portion of it was due to your guys work—even if most of it was.
Anyway thanks again for the reply and all the best with the project!
Hi Nick, thanks for your thoughts.
I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.
Thanks so much for your great explanation James and the other ones on the post. Great to see direct engagement from the people running the program.
the theory of change of trying to change the government’s current allocation of makes some sense (I didn’t pick it up in the podcast, but reading back it is there to some degree), but its very difficult. Its always a difficult task influence governments to spend their money in more impactful directions—especially just with science and logic. Advocacy skills might be at least as important to your cause as the data the projects you fund produce.
I would be interested to see if you have examples of philanthropies with small amounts of money and no real carrot or stick, influencing governments with larger amounts of money on the issue. Here in Uganda philanthropies can definitely influence the direction of healthcare for example (HIV, Malaria national programs. etc.), but its largely through pouring significant resources into that area, often more than the government can even which gives them hard power and carrots and sticks to wield.
I’m also interested if Indian governments have shown in any practical way that they might be genuinely interested in cost-effectiveness analysis driving fund allocation? As far as I know in East Africa here cost-effectiveness analysis is almost completely unutilised by governments, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to from any level of government in any intervention here, health or otherwise. I hope India is more switched on than that and might pay more attention. I know nothing about the region really so maybe they do already use it.
Anyway we will see what happens! Obvious clean air is wildly important and causes ludicrous amnounts of suffering and death. It may well be a hard thing to judge the impact on—a rough one for the grantmaker and those doing the interventions. If the quality doesn’t improve obviously that will be a fail, but if it does (as is likely) its going to be hard to pin down the counterfactual impact of the grants. If they do allocate more efforts to rural areas that’s a win you could tick up I’d imagine, but if air quality gets better in general it may well be hard to figure out what portion of it was due to your guys work—even if most of it was.
Anyway thanks again for the reply and all the best with the project!