This seems very useful for the EA ecosystem, particularly in bringing a more nuanced language for distinguishing between different kinds of interventions and pathways to impact.
But broadly speaking, many of these categories have existed for decades in traditional public health and international development. For e.g. distinctions between service delivery vs systems strengthening, implementation vs advocacy, pilot vs scale-up, technical assistance vs movement-building, etc.
I’d love to see more more EA engagement with the existing literature and practitioner experience from global health and international development. There’s a huge amount of accumulated learning, including around public sector capacity, political economy, implementation failure, market shaping, coalition-building, and institutional incentives, that could strengthen overall thinking in this space.
In that sense, the primary value of this taxonomy may not be its novelty, but its role as a “translator”, i.e. adapting long-standing development thinking into a structure that is legible and actionable for the EA community.
This seems very useful for the EA ecosystem, particularly in bringing a more nuanced language for distinguishing between different kinds of interventions and pathways to impact.
But broadly speaking, many of these categories have existed for decades in traditional public health and international development. For e.g. distinctions between service delivery vs systems strengthening, implementation vs advocacy, pilot vs scale-up, technical assistance vs movement-building, etc.
I’d love to see more more EA engagement with the existing literature and practitioner experience from global health and international development. There’s a huge amount of accumulated learning, including around public sector capacity, political economy, implementation failure, market shaping, coalition-building, and institutional incentives, that could strengthen overall thinking in this space.
In that sense, the primary value of this taxonomy may not be its novelty, but its role as a “translator”, i.e. adapting long-standing development thinking into a structure that is legible and actionable for the EA community.