Konrad Seifert and I are writing “a field guide to place future generations at the core of policy-making”. To make it maximally relevant to the EA community, please, ask us related questions, share criticism and give feedback on the current version of the book proposal.
Let us know your thoughts, questions and feedback in the comments or via email [email protected] by 31 July 2020. Thank you in advance!
Read the full proposal here (~2700 words). Or get a quick overview below:
Goal
Longtermist scholarship still needs to translate its ideas into policy change to achieve large-scale impact. Our book has two goals:
- Foster coordination and alignment among longtermist policy practitioners by equipping them with (1) models to understand policy-systems; (2) tactics to engage in policy-making; (3) strategies to improve political decision-making; and (4) an agenda for further research.
- Provide evidence-based advice for robustly beneficial policy engagement by combining insights from senior practitioners with the research on social and behavioural processes of policy-making.
Audience
The target audience consists of policy practitioners, inside and outside of government, and scholars of the policy process.
Sources
- Semi-systematic literature reviews; and
- Over 30 interviews with senior practitioners and researchers.
Title
Longterm Political Decision-making: A Field Guide to Place Future Generations at the Core of Policy-making
Abstract
Human civilization faces risks, such as large scale pandemics and climate change, which likely have harmful consequences for future generations, ranging from complete extinction to curtailed potential. For civilization to survive and flourish, political institutions play an important role in building resilient systems through large-scale coordinated action. Yet, future generations are currently neglected in policy-making due to historical path-dependencies and practical difficulties. This book builds on forty years of research developing policy mechanisms to represent future generations. Specifically, the book fills a gap between research and action by providing guidance on (1) understanding policy systems; (2) beneficially engaging in policy-making; and (3) designing strategies to strengthen decision-making. Geared towards policy-makers and academics, the book provides directions for further research and practice.
Table of content
Introduction
Chapter 1: A rationale for longtermist political decision-making
- What is longtermism?
- Why are political institutions key to safeguard future generations?
- Why are current political institutions short-termist?
- Policy problems, solutions and institutional mechanisms for making policy-making longtermist
- What is needed to convert ideas into policy change?
Chapter 2: Understanding the reality of policy-making
- Definitions and illustrations
- What is policy?
- What is policy-making?
- What is governance?
- What are political institutions?
- What is political decision-making?
- Understanding policy-making as a system
- System’s moving parts
- Policy actors
- Political behaviour
- Policy networks
- Policy environments
- Mechanisms of policy change
- What do we know about the dynamics of policy change?
- How do collective decisions emerge from the interactions of moving parts?
- How do individuals, groups and institutions learn over time?
- Levers to influence policy-making
- Influence the information supply
- Shape information processing
- Change network structures
- Change system rules
Chapter 3: Engaging in policy-making: evidence from advocacy, lobbying and epistemic communities
- What can we learn from the literature on influencing policy-making?
- Methodology
- Evidence strength
- Themes
- Definitions of and differences between advocacy, lobbying and epistemic communities
- Impact pathways for influencing policy-making
- Enabling conditions to instrumentalise impact pathways
- Strategy
- Tactics
- The importance of networks
- The importance of framing
- Remarks on evidence-based advocacy
- Ethics
- Monitoring evaluation and learning
- A framework to robustly engage in policy-making
- Define the context: the fit between entry points and what to advocate for
- Understand policy processes and contexts
- Choose a coordinated, insider, collaborative and multi-level strategy
- Network network, frame frame
- Cultivate pragmatism to hedge against idealism
- Preserve, adjust and sustain
- Limitations
Chapter 4: A quasi-systematic review of four strategies to strengthen political decision-making
- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians themselves?
- Four strategies to strengthen political decision-making
- Multi-criteria decision analyses
- Serious games
- Nudging
- Diversity
- Methodology
- Results
- Search and review results
- Strength of evidence
- Strategy expected impact
- Limitations
Chapter 5: An agenda for research and practice for making policy-making longterm
- Studying policy-making
- Convergence of theories
- Current gaps
- Moving from static theories to computational models
- Exploring foundational laws of policy-making systems
- Influencing policy-making
- Trade-offs
- Risks
- Recommendations
Conclusion
Hi Maxime and Konrad,
I am going to give a reply from the point of view of a "policy practitioner", one of the intended groups of audiences for this book. I'm not familiar with "scholars of the policy process" so can't comment on the usefulness for them". I work very much in this space – promoting long-term policy making in the UK parliament.
In short my immediate intuition is that this is medium-low value to policymakers and to me. Although this I would likely read this I doubt I would find it very useful to me.
As others have mentioned chapters 1 & 4-5 and chapters 2-3 seem like a different topics to be read for different reasons.
Chapters 2-3
I think to someone in policy the content of chapters 2-3 seems quite basic. It is stuff that I know (or at least like to think I know). This matches my experience of the EA Geneva research I have read to date: of accurate descriptions of the policy process but quite basic and not very insightful to someone who has worked in policy for a while.
I personally think I would find it interesting to explore an academics' take on policy and see how it compares to my own knowledge. However I wouldn't expect to gain much if anything from reading this. Might be more useful to policy makers more junior in their career as introductory material.
Chapters 1 & 4-5
Chapters 1 & 4-5 seems of mixed usefulness. Chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 4 seems useful but the rest of chapter 4 and chapter 5 seems to be written very much for academics trying to study the field.
I hope that breakdown helps you refine this work. Just some initial thoughts. Happy to chat through and be constructive, especially if August works.
EDIT. Also if for a wider audience worth remembering that there are popular books on this or tangential to this. Like "The Precipice", "The Good Ancestor", "FutureGen", Will's next book, and a few others.
I also want to clarify my statement that this was "low-medium value" was based on the current plan – I think there is valuable stuff here that could be teased out to make this useful to people in policy.
A good book summarising the academic work on how policy is made, how change happens, how external influences work, mapping out the whole space and giving an overview and different perspectives could be really really useful.
I wouldn’t give up on this idea – just maybe develop it further – can talk more if useful.