Implementation Matters: Why the EA Movement Needs Practitioners, Not Just Researchers

• I used an LLM to help draft this post and it contains AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the EA Global 2026 in London. It was energizing and full of amazing people working on research, policy ideas, and organizational strategy. However,  I left with an unsettled observation that while we are building a movement of researchers and NGO workers, and we're calling that enough, in truth, it isn't.

A Chance Meeting and A Conversation That Stuck With Me

At random I ended up sharing my lunch table with a talented, thoughtful architect, who is genuinely committed to the EA principle of doing the most good. In our conversation she mentioned that she felt that her profession is not often recognized as a ‘high impact’ type as generally understood by the EA movement as a whole. Instead she was looking for ways to add to her training to focus more on AI as that is currently considered a more EA high-impact space. 

But the EA conversations at this conference, in the forums, or in the personal meetings, there was little talk about architects, or engineers, or corporate sustainability officers, or urban planners working in the private sector.

The implicit message? This work doesn't count in the 'high-Impact' conversation

The Absence I Noticed

EAG was full of researchers presenting findings, NGO workers sharing updates, and policy minds thinking through governance; and while these roles are vital for developing the world towards Utopia; there was a noticeable absence: the implementing partners. The people who take these research findings and actually build them into real-world systems.

Having implementing partners in the room matters. We need the movement to shift from writing to doing. But that shift requires people embedded in the places where infrastructure, urban planning, and corporate decision-making actually happen. As Lewis Bollard noted in his opening talk: a 100-page report is essentially pointless if no one acts on it. 

Recalibrating EA's Core Question

One of EA's foundational pillars is truth-seeking. It's baked into the movement's DNA: be rigorous, follow the evidence, and challenge assumptions. I would like to propose a truth-seeking exercise: Is the EA movement actually living according to its own principles?

A central question EA asks is "how can I do the most good?" But that framing, I'd argue, needs a slight tweaking. In the world today, perhaps it should be: "How can I do the most good with the tools, skills, abilities, and position that I have right now?"

This not a rhetorical shift or a deep criticism of the EA movement. It's a survival question in todays economic world. Not everyone can move to an EA hub and take a direct-work role. Not everyone can work in research of their choice or in academia. Honestly, not everyone should. However, the movement's implicit answer, that impact happens through research and NGOs, and everything else is secondary, sends a strong and personal message: your position, your skills, your existing roles aren't where the real work happens.

In my opinion, this connects to a larger critique that HBesceli raised in a May 28 EA Forum post about CEA's stewardship approach. HBesceli argues that the EA community building has become too focused on "growing EA's resources—talent and funding flowing into organizations viewed as high impact or EA aligned" and that success is judged primarily by whether those goals are achieved.¹ Instead HBesceli proposes a different measure in the fore of the question: "Is EA actually a place that embodies and nurtures EA principles, both individually and collectively?"

That's a truth-seeking question we should take seriously, because if EA claims to value rigorous thinking and honest assessment, we should ask questions such as: Are we being honest about where impact actually happens? or, Are we creating a community that embodies our principles including the principle that you should do good according to your honest comparative advantage?

The architect I met might offer the answer of "no." She felt like she couldn't find a path where the EA movement recognized her comparative advantage, and I would argue, more importantly where the EA community couldn't support her. And that's not her failure. It's a failure of truth-seeking.

An Real World Example of Why This Matters Right Now

Architects often work for a the for-profit arenas, designing buildings and urban spaces. Their day job gives them the ability to shape and make impactful decisions  with long term results such as material choices, building systems, water conservation, wildlife considerations, and even sustainable design advancements. These decisions compound over years and generations. A building has the potential to stand for 30–60 years and can influence the area development around it. 

For example, building collisions kill well over one billion birds annually in the United States alone.² This is not a research problem waiting for the perfect policy, but instead  it is a design problem. An architect or engineer making choices about glass treatment, artificial lighting, material specification, and building placement can directly reduce that toll.

Or consider urban heat. Cities are heating faster than rural areas. The decisions about street design, material reflection, tree coverage, and water systems, decisions made by planners, architects, and engineers working in corporate and municipal contexts, determine whether a city becomes a heat island or a livable space for humans and wildlife.

When architects, designers, construction and development companies specify bird-safe glass or design green walls, they are preventing harm against animals at scale. Or when they advise and create new techniques that promote health, and safety for residents and local wildlife such as in areas of water-efficient systems or sustainable materials, they are embedding foundational EA principles into infrastructure that will outlast any individual research paper.  

Lauren Mee Had It Right

During the session titled "Impactful roles outside non-profits," Lauren Mee made a point that shouldn't be glanced over but somehow still is: not everyone can work at an NGO or research institution, and impact doesn't require it. For example those serving in Government roles can direct funding at scale and for-profit companies can shift industry practices that have the potential to affect millions of people. Practitioners embedded in corporate and institutional contexts can amplify EA principles without ever leaving their professional identity, by just asking how can we create global benefit within this project? 

What the EA Movement is Missing Out On

The EA movement has done exceptional work building research, funding institutions, and scaling NGO capacity. But it has also created an implicit hierarchy where research is the center, NGOs are viewed as the implementation arm, and everything else is a side opportunity.

I would argue that this hierarchy is backwards. Research and NGOs are incomplete without practitioners who can say, "Yes, that finding is real. Now here's how we build it into a skyscraper, a city plan, a supply chain, a product line."

EA need architects who understand bird behavior and material science. We need engineers who can design for both efficiency and wildlife protection. We need corporate sustainability officers who see the EA principles not as a constraint on profit but as a framework for creating better infrastructure and opportunities for innovation.

A Small Proposal

When we gather at future EA events, perhaps we should be actively recruiting and creating spaces for implementing partners. Not as "interested outsiders," but as core participants in conversations showing how research can and does translate into actions.

The architect I met could benefit from a strong community that recognizes the work as impactful and connects her to others doing similar translation across sectors. And in turn the world would benefit by having her consider the greater good when she develops her designs. This is a mind shift that costs nothing but intention. And it could make all the difference in whether our research reaches the real world, or ultimately stays on the shelf.

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SOURCES & CITATIONS

1. HBesceli (May 28, 2024). "My disagreements with CEA's approach to stewarding EA." EA Forum. The post argues that CEA's community building has become overly focused on metrics around resource accumulation (talent and funding flowing into EA-aligned organizations) and proposes a principles-first stewardship approach centered on whether EA itself embodies its foundational values. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xsffhcHoexJgH4h4X/my-disagreements-with-cea-s-approach-to-stewarding-ea?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link

2. American Bird Conservancy (September 2025). "New Study Confirms Building Collisions Kill Over One Billion Birds Annually in U.S." https://abcbirds.org/news/bird-building-collisions-study-2024/

Research findings from Kornreich et al. (2025) in PLOS ONE examining 3,100 bird collision cases. The study found that 60% of collision victims died even under the best wildlife rehabilitation care, indicating that previous mortality estimates based solely on carcasses vastly undercount the true toll. Collisions with buildings kill between 365 million and 988 million birds annually (conservative estimates), with recent research suggesting the figure exceeds one billion when accounting for birds that survive initial impact but later die from injuries.

Related sources:

- The Wildlife Society (2026). "Building collisions kill 1B birds every year in U.S."

- Audubon Magazine (2025). "Window Strikes Are Even Deadlier for Birds Than We Thought"

- Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "BirdCast" - migration tracking tool documenting record migration numbers (over 1.25 billion birds in single nights during 2025 migration season)