EA Forum Podcast (All audio) “Thoughts on single issue vs. multi issue positioning” by emre kaplan🔸
This essay presents some of my thoughts on whether advocacy organisations should stay focused on a single issue and avoid commenting outside their focus areas.
When you lead an advocacy organisation, you frequently get questions on your stance on other social issues. Some organisations pick a focus area like “animal advocacy” and never comment on anything outside of that area. Some organisations make statements on multiple issues, like current affairs, global politics, environment and so on.
I don’t attempt to cover all arguments or even the strongest arguments here. This is rather a list of considerations that weren’t obvious to me from the start.
My overall tendencies on this question:
- Both single-issue and multi-issue positioning are legitimate options in some contexts.
- Effectiveness of creating a single issue or multi issue organisation depends on the context, and we should let people experiment to organically see which one performs [...]
---
Outline:
(01:44) A general model for issue positioning
(06:00) Some arguments for single issue positioning
(06:05) Expertise is real
(08:39) Limited legitimacy
(09:46) Adopting a single issue policy provides a principled way to stay out of other issues
(10:14) Some arguments for multi issue positioning
(10:19) Being cooperative
(11:15) Smaller movements might have more to gain from a norm of we must fight against all the injustices. Animal advocacy is a small movement.
(12:06) Single-issue platforms might be unviable in low-trust societies.
(14:38) Better to be multi issue by choice than to be multi issue by coercion
---
First published:
June 14th, 2025
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.