1. Introduction
Government policy and legislation can address many problems on a much larger scale than individual actors. Legislative advocacy campaigns have the potential to leverage the vast resources and unique enforcement mechanisms available to governments to greatly improve the quality of life of humans and other animals, making this approach a potentially highly cost-effective way to create positive change.
The purpose of this document is to act as a short guide to the basic principle of public policy and legislative evaluation for groups considering advocating for policy and legal change, including background information the group should gather, research methods available, and factors that should be considered.
There are numerous mechanisms that interest groups can use to achieve their policy aims including; directly advocacy towards decision-makers, media campaigns, direct action and protests or, where available, direct democracy mechanisms such as ballot initiatives or referendums. The efficacy of each mechanism will vary depending on the context and issue, but the results are the same – policy change.
Interest groups that are successful in their advocacy efforts have the potential to have a huge counterfactual impact, achieving policy change many years before it may have occurred otherwise, if at all. For example, lobbying in the United States is responsible for lower taxes on solar power, increased taxes on tobacco, and the establishment of a program to detect asteroids. In animal advocacy, one recent victory is the 'End the Cage Age' initiative. This initiative spearheaded by Compassion in World Farming EU led to a commitment by the European Commission to phase out the use of cages for hens, sows, calves, and numerous other farmed animals. These successes can be achieved by groups with little previous experience in the area; a prominent recent example is Lead Exposure Elimination Project’s success in lobbying the Malawi government to enforce its laws against harmful lead in paint. Tactics used for legislative campaigns vary in difficulty but are all achievable by contacting representatives, surveys or petitions, providing research on the issue to decision makers, or organising large demonstrations and protests.
Even with this large potential to have an impact, there is also the potential to do harm by advocating for policies that have negative effects on the targeted group or flow-through effects on other groups. For example, there is evidence that a carbon weighted meat tax could increase rather than decrease the overall number of animals farmed for food by incentivising chicken production. Even discounting the possibility of actively harmful policies, given the wide range in impact found between different interventions (source)(source), failure to target the most impactful policies means advocates will relieve significantly less suffering than they may otherwise have done. Weak policies also come with the risk that advocacy shifts the government's policy focus to less impactful improvements, potentially reducing welfare compared to what would have occurred without the group's efforts.
Given this risk, it is important that advocacy groups carefully evaluate the policies they are considering campaigning for, before they launch their campaigns.
2. Understanding the Political System and Legislation
The first stage before launching a policy advocacy campaign is understanding both how new legislation is passed or amended and the advocacy methods available to you as an advocate in a country. These could include:
- Drafting and amending legislation
- Legislative proposals introduced by the Government
- Legislative proposals introduced by members of parliaments
- Can influence members of parliament or ministers to introduce or support bills
- Response to call for evidence or public consultation
- Drafting and amending regulations
- Regulations and rules adopted by the administration
- Opportunities for advocates to reform such rules and regulations at regular intervals during consultations
- Official petitions with trigger thresholds for response or debate, such as European Citizens’ Initiative, petitions to the PETI Committee in the European Parliament, or petitions with over 100,000 signatories in the UK.
- Referendums called by members of parliament (for example in the UK) or the public (only in certain jurisdictions, such as Switzerland).
- Ballot Initiatives called by the public (only in certain jurisdictions, such as Massachusetts, California, in the US)
- Litigation for holding government accountable for how laws are interpreted, implemented, and enforced
Researching and understanding the steps involved in policy change in your target country can give your organisation a clearer picture of the tactics available for advocacy and the conditions that must be met to succeed. This is useful both for your advocacy and for identifying the routes that have the highest probability of success given your policy aim, particularly when complemented by an analysis or existing knowledge of which political actors are likely to be more aligned with your policy aims. For example, maybe you identify significant support for reducing stocking density for egg-laying hens from Members of the Parliament, this would allow you to use a private members bill. Perhaps there is little political support for a policy, but strong public support suggesting a direct democracy mechanism, such as a ballot initiative or a referendum, may be more successful.
While you are becoming familiar with the methods of policy change in your target region it is also important to review all existing legislation and understand the existing legislative landscape. This should involve your key decision makers and/or research staff gaining a clear picture of existing legislation and key stakeholders. Typical research questions include:
- Which articles, acts or regulations are currently in force?
- How is each piece of legislation connected to one another?
- Which acts or articles give powers to which institutions?
- Which legislation are relevant regulations written under?
At this stage, we advise you to consult the Collar Animal Law Forum and other resources as well as World Animal Protection’s index for your target country or, if possible, consult with local animal lawyers. If they cover the region you work in, these resources should provide you with a good overview of the major pieces of legislation in your country. World Animal Protection also provides some suggestions for reforms to each area of legislation that could be campaigned for.
After gaining an understanding and broad overview of the structure of existing legislation, your next aim should be to identify all of the reforms that could be made to improve the current system. These should extend from broader reforms to the regulatory system as a whole, such as the introduction of an animal welfare commission, or aiming to ban ‘factory farming’ to narrow campaigns targeting specific welfare improvements such as banning the castration of pigs. Particular areas that are worth considering are, the field of animal welfare:
Legislation
- Changes to the regulatory system as a whole
- Are some animals excluded from existing protections? Or are there expectations for certain activities?
- Does it apply to imported goods?
- What are the existing enforcement mechanisms?
Regulations
- Are there specific rules applying to farmed animals?
- How detailed are these rules?
- How do current standards compare to other countries, certifiers, and recommendations from existing academic research?
- What type of cruel practices in breeding, on farms, during transport, and at slaughter should be regulated, or even prohibited?
Advocates should also consider other legal fields than animal welfare, such as:
Agricultural policy
- Subsidies supporting animal agriculture (direct and indirect) including magnitude and conditions for receiving them (source and source)
Fiscal policy
- Taxes on products, an example of this is Meat Taxes (source)
- VAT reduction on plant-based products (source)
Environmental policy
- Regulation of emissions on farms and slaughterhouse
Public health policy
- Regulation of the use of antimicrobials on farms
- Official nutritional guidelines
3. Understanding Current Conditions
Even with a full understanding of the regulatory system and existing regulations, without an understanding of the scale of various industries or groups of animals used or affected by humans, the main campaign priorities will be unclear. A good approach is to develop a spreadsheet with the number of animals used in various industries, their average life expectancy and information on the conditions the animals are raised in or the ways in which they are affected by human activity. Common sources of data for this are industry or government or bodies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, as well as academia, such as Our World in Data. This work would allow organisations to understand where most years of animal life are spent and where most individuals are affected and killed. Groups of animals that should be considered include animals used on farms (including invertebrates), in entertainment and in experiments; as well as companion animals, wild animals and liminal animals. Although farmed, liminal and wild animals will almost always make up the vast majority of animals affected by human activity. Advocates should balance this against public opinion, political climate, potential intended consequences, and other factors that affect the tractability of an intervention.
This broad overview of the existing number of animals used and affected provides a great starting point for more practical scoping of various industries. Given the numbers used and the lifespans of the animals in various industries or affected by humans this should identify priority species and industries for further scoping. Advocates can then gain further understanding of these priority issues by finding more detailed industry statistics on the main welfare issues or the structure of the supply chain.
For farmed animals this can be done by breaking down each life stage that an animal experiences from birth to slaughter. Taking note of causes of mortality during each stage, any painful procedures or handling and the main welfare concerns raised by academics, members of the industry or the public. The main welfare issues for an animal's welfare can be determined by viewing the research of various outcomes on available welfare indicators or by using a validated overall assessment method. More on this topic can be found in Animal Ask's report on measuring animal welfare. If possible, it can also be beneficial for farmed animal policy to conduct on-farm welfare assessments for the main priority species.
Organisations can also choose to end practices that are strongly opposed by the public, or practices for which an alternative exists, even though such practices are not the most cruel. For instance, the grinding of chicks in the egg industry is opposed by a majority of citizens in the EU for ethical reasons, and alternatives exist to the killing of day-old chicks, and so a prohibition seems relatively easy to achieve.
The main priorities for each species will vary from country to country due to existing practices, level of intensification, or other conditions such as heat and humidity which can cause severe heat stress for chickens in tropical environments. Political and cultural factors also weigh significantly on the types of practices and the structure of the animal agriculture industry. This information can later be used in your lobbying efforts as well as help identify and determine the optimal policy changes to improve the quality of life of these animals.
4. Policy Evaluation
4.1. Iterative Depth Research
After you have established an overview of the context you are working in and what the possible main causes of suffering for non-human animals are, you can then begin the analysis of the policy options available to you. There are several different aims that you can attempt to achieve through animal welfare policy. This guide is mostly focused on policies that have the greatest effect on the quality of life of farm animals. However, the analysis of this question is a lot more complicated in practice.
Given the number of policy options available to you, a complete analysis of each policy would be very time-consuming and therefore prohibitively expensive. Instead, many research organisations that prioritise different interventions, policies or ideas, use an iterative depth research process. This treats research like a funnel where policies or ideas are reviewed at a shallow depth and are either deprioritized or, if they seem promising on the evaluation criteria, are assessed at increasing levels of depth. This process is iterated upon until a decision is reached resulting in one or a small number of top priority options.
This iterative depth assessment can either be conducted very formally through the use of certain research methods; such as expert opinion, weighted factor models, cost-effectiveness analysis, and informed consideration; or left to a researcher's judgement. Although in the latter case the results of such an analysis will depend much more on the researcher's skill and existing knowledge of the field. If your organisation is interested in more formally conducting research, you can learn more about weighted factor models, cost-effective analysis, informed consideration and expert interviews from the linked sources. However, beyond the broad scoping stage of the research, at this point, having specialist research staff will benefit the outcomes of your research. It is strongly recommended that you either hire specialised staff with the experience to conduct this sort of research or seek assistance from existing research organisations.
4.2. Theory of Change and Evidence Base
Regardless of the method used to evaluate your organisation’s policy, your analysis should aim to develop a broad understanding of the theory of change of the policy. A theory of change is a comprehensive description or illustration of the hypothesised path to impact for the policy or intervention being considered. In policy, this maps each stage of policy implementation from legislation passing through, to enforcement, to the expected effects of the policy on the outcomes of interest or other potential flow-through effects. The main focus of the theory of change is to explicitly map out all the assumptions or stages involved in your perception of how the policy should work. For a simplified example: a policy that provides subsidies for plant-based meats. Do the subsidies lead to a reduction in prices for the consumer? Does this reduction in price cause consumers to substitute away from animal meat products? How can we try to shoot down these initial assumptions, and what information is available to help us do so? Investigating whether these assumptions are true and the magnitude of these effects is vital for evaluating the impact of such a policy.
The most important factor you should consider for each stage of the theory of change is the quality and quantity of evidence to support any of your initial underlying assumptions. For each of the underlying assumptions outlined in your theory of change, you should review the available literature and outline all of the evidence you have that supports or disproves these assumptions. Ideally, the policies we campaign for will have evidence to support a significant effect across their theory of change, as well as a large and high-quality evidence base. This is particularly strong if the evidence to support the policy or methods of evaluation comes from many sources, with different failure states or weaknesses, making the evidence more robust to uncertainty. More on this topic can be found in GiveWell's summary of sequence vs cluster thinking.
The importance of the evidence base of a policy’s impact is often underestimated. When choosing between multiple policies with varying degrees of evidence to support their estimated impact, advocates should assume that options with the weakest evidence base may overestimate their value compared with those with a stronger evidence base. This occurs because of a phenomenon known as the optimizer's curse. Given this risk affecting low evidence policies which appear to have promising impact, advocates should attempt to offset the optimizer’s curse by adjusting the expected impact.
4.3. Common Factors to Look out for
Common factors that you should look out for in your research, beyond checking the initial assumptions you have about the impact of the policy, are flow-through effects and broader-reaching externalities. These tend to be more difficult to spot during very structured research and for those less familiar with a topic, as these effects are inherently in the unknown unknowns category. In that, it’s possible to evaluate a policy or idea without realising these effects exist. These effects can be both positive or negative, greatly reducing or increasing the value of a policy. In some cases, these effects can even dwarf the direct effects of the policy- perhaps even making it harmful overall.
Some common flow-through effects to consider for welfare requirement-related policies are the effect of the improvement on other abnormal behaviour or how implementing such an improvement affects broader farm management practice. For example, implementing better disease management practices may improve welfare and reduce mortality but allow farmers to stock the animal at a higher stocking density without the same risk of disease. Or placing stringent requirements for straw enrichment for pigs would also result in less tail biting, an abnormal behaviour which can occur due to lack of enrichment, and therefore reduce the need for tail docking further improving welfare.
Beyond the flow-through effects on on-farm outcomes, the effect of policy can affect the whole system of farming. This is partially true for the economic effects of policy reform, with adjustments to the requirements for raising animals affecting the price of products and therefore demand and consumption of the product and other animal products. The most prominent example of this is with policies to ban foie gras, as banning the product results in shifting the consumption to other pâtés or animal products, whereas with a fur ban consumers are forced to substitute for artificial fur.
The final type of flow-through effects are externalities, flow-through effects that affect other cause areas. For example, efforts to improve the enforcement of farmed animal welfare laws by increasing prison sentences for workers who are convicted of cruelty will disproportionately affect those from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Positively banning routine farm antibiotic use on factory farms would reduce the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria which could spark a pandemic. Although these effects are not directly relevant to animal welfare policy, advocates should share concern for many causes and weigh the effect on other areas alongside the effect on non-human animals.
4.4. Assessing the Tractability of a Policy
Ultimately, regardless of the value of the policy your organisation is advocating for, if you fail to achieve policy change then there will be no direct effect on the lives of animals. The campaign itself may change public opinion or encourage change in diet habits however, we could achieve these effects far more efficiently by targeting them directly. If your organisation's aim is for campaigns to be maximally impactful, you would need to select campaigns with a reasonable probability of success.
Highlighted in the section on “understanding the political system and legislation”, the requirements for, and therefore indicators of, successful campaigns vary depending on the method of change used. Although the typical factors you should consider either through existing secondary research or by conducting surveys yourself are; public opinion and support for the issue, the opinions of key political stakeholders, and precedent in other or neighbouring countries. Assessing some of these can be done through desk-based research while the assessment of others, such as the opinion of key political stakeholders, may only really be feasible through campaigners' soft judgments.
A principle in some tension with the tractability of the policy is the counterfactual replaceability. Although a policy may be highly likely to succeed, if this is too strong then an additional campaign to support the issue may have a little effect on its odds of success, or only speed up implementation by a few years. Whereas, a campaign success on a difficult issue may cause the policy to come into force many decades prior to when it may have occurred anyway, if at all. Thus, although ideally, the tractability of the policy we are campaigning for should be high and it should be unlikely to occur without our additional campaigning resources anytime soon. This kind of sweet spot of high tractability and low counterfactual replicability is possible and should be sought out, but in practice, these two factors are often anti-correlated with each other.
5. Conclusion
Overall, working to ensure your organisation is always working on the most pressing important issues for non-humans animals will help ensure your group does everything it can do to minimise the suffering these individuals face in the current system of exploitation. As well as accelerate the movement's progress to preventing all forms of exploitation. However, if the issue is not considered carefully it can lead your organisation to make poor campaign choices which can ultimately lead to much slower improvements to animal welfare or implementation of actively harmful policies. It is therefore particularly important decision makers are well informed about the current context they are working in, the advocacy methods available to them and have an accurate perception of the value of the policy options available to them.
Author: George Bridgwater, Co-Founder and Head of Research, Animal Ask