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Thanks for the efforts Lee and that is sad yes! It would be good to have at least one EA aligned person on that committee.

Disappointing Update on the UK’s International Development Committee Consultation

by leecrawfurd

Mar 211 min read 4

26

Global health & developmentPolicyNews relevant to effective altruismUK policy

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In December a post on here by @Ben Anderson encouraged submissions to the Consultation by the UK Parliament's International Development Committee. Ben suggested proposing lead exposure as a focus for the committee.

The committee's response to the consultation is now out. The report makes no mention of lead, and worse "Given the volume of repeat entries - over a dozen - on lead poisoning, it decided to publish only the first submission received to ensure a fair and representative presentation of proposals."

Despite the disappointing outcome in this case, and what seems a problematic process for publishing submissions, submitting to these consultations is probably still worthwhile in ex ante expected value terms. Tactically it might be worth diversifying EA-flavoured topic submissions in future.

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lrobertsMar 2211

Thanks for sharing!

I couldn't find the quote in the linked PDF. It's maybe at another link (?)

NickLaingMar 2210

Yep I couldn't either

Ben AndersonMar 234

Thank you for this post Lee, I really do appreciate it.

This is definitely a disappointing result and not what I wanted out of this consultation. However for me this does not reduce the potential of this path to impact; of influencing policy outcomes by coordinating submissions to consultations.

The first reason for this belief is the successes in Australia. The second reason is the ICAI consultation I worked on last October, where I coordinated around ~60 submissions, and successfully influenced the consultation’s results. For each of the four questions ICAI asked, they listed the top recommendations given. The top answer that they list for each question directly corresponds to our top recommendation that we gave to attendees to push forward (e.g. use of best buys, cash-benchmarking). A number of our secondary arguments are also prominently included.

However, even with this success they state that ‘we estimate that around 40 responses showed a degree of coordination, but we are confident that this has not changed the substance of the results.’ Meaning either they noticed our coordination but it didn’t affect our influence, or our coordination wasn’t noticed.

I think that this IDC consultation was also different in that we only pushed forward a single argument and provided a single version of that argument. Whereas the usual method is providing multiple arguments to push forward and different variations of them. The benefit of a single argument is the significantly less work required, however as one likely could have guessed, it also results in significantly less success.

For me this only enhances the need to have someone working on this full-time, which we are actually hiring for at the Global Policy Research Group. The contractor position will involve coordinating submissions from the UK/European effective altruism and adjacent communities to significant governmental consultations (on the core EA cause areas) to create policy change.

If you or someone you know would be interested, here is the Application Form.

If anyone has any positive or critical thoughts on this work or this role I am very open to hearing them!

NickLaingMar 224

Thanks for the efforts Lee and that is sad yes! It would be good to have at least one EA aligned person on that committee.