Request for Proposal - “Advocacy Effectiveness”
Quantifying the effectiveness of existing techniques to shift the food system towards being more plant-based
Deadline: September 1, 2024
Rationale
Increasing global levels of animal product consumption are associated with numerous negative outcomes, including public health problems, poor farmed animal welfare, and detrimental environmental impacts. Advocates are using a wide range of strategies and approaches, some of which are much better understood than others. We need rigorous empirical research about the effectiveness and impact of understudied approaches.
For example, while individual diet change interventions are relatively well-studied, we need more robust research on how advocates can encourage a plant-based or plant-forward transition in public and private institutions (e.g., schools, hotels, hospitals); work effectively with legislators on laws and regulations; influence corporate policy; leverage shared goals to work cooperatively with environmental and social justice advocates; as well as many other questions of institutional and systemic change.
Goal
Proposals submitted under this RFP should address the effectiveness and impact of strategies or approaches to changing the food system that have not yet been subject to much empirical research.
We will not consider proposals for research that can be described as all of: focusing on diet change, studying a population in the Global North, and primarily relying on self-reported data. This is because self-report diet change research from the Global North is perhaps the most common type of research relevant to animal protection. However, proposals that include one or two of these elements will be considered.
We will not consider proposals for basic impact monitoring and evaluation work using a pre-post design or other methods that prevent rigorous causal inference unless the intervention cannot be studied using traditional methods of causal inference (e.g., randomized controlled trials/RCTs). If this is the case, you must justify it in your application and a funded project will require pre-registration of research design.
Details
Successful proposals will answer one or more of the following questions as they pertain to understudied advocacy approaches.
How effectively do current advocacy approaches reduce animal product consumption? For example:
To what extent does a food waste intervention reduce consumption of animal products, relative to no intervention?
Is intervention X or Y more cost-effective for reducing the use of animal products in public schools over a two-year period in a given country?
Which interventions are most tractable for reducing consumption or improving welfare of farmed fish and invertebrates?
What does the best available qualitative and quantitative evidence say about the long-term impact of disruptive protest on animal product consumption?
How effectively do current advocacy approaches reduce reliance on industrial animal agriculture? For example:
What types of advocacy, education, or policy initiatives have been most successful in preventing or slowing the entrenchment of industrial animal agriculture in populous low- and middle-income countries?
Which tools or approaches have been effective in supporting a just transition from animal- to plant-based agriculture in a given country?
What effect would a 5% increase in government funding to R&D on plant-based or other alternatives to animal products have on the growth of the industry and consumer behavior?
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