[Keynote] The anticipatory policy designer’s paradox: Managing for simultaneous change and durabilit

Ben Cashore is the Li Ka Shing Professor in Public Management, and director of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES)(Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore). He specialises in global and multi-level environmental governance, comparative public policy and administration, and transnational business regulation/corporate social responsibility.

September 26th. 5.30pm-7pm. (Paris time)
Location: Sciences Po, Salle 931, 9 rue de la Chaise, 75007, Paris. 

Abstract:

While great strides have been made in anticipatory policy design in the last 20 years, further advances are hindered by failing to fully identify, or incorporate, an enduring paradox: how to simultaneous manage for change and durability. I show that achieving climate and sustainability goals in general, and what I refer to as Type 4 environmental problems, require much more careful attention to assessing just what needs to be changed if effective and durable results are to be achieved, and what needs to remain unchanged. Application of this question to my previous collaborative work on super wicked problems (SWPs) and the four problem (4PT) framework produces several design insights that must be integrated if policy officials are to overcome the “policy creation euphoria, implementation depression cycle” of 30 years of climate and sustainability governance. 

First, problem features must be assessed against the degree to which they fit into super wicked features. 

Second, constellations of policy elements chosen following change and durability assessments will facilitate efforts to find the “easiest to pull, but hard to reverse” policy levers. 

Third, policy designers must identify the “causal influence logics” that the lever is expected to trigger, and the durable path dependent trajectories that produce progressive paradigmatic change through several steps. 

Fourth designers must assess whether, given these first three tasks, the policy mix under consideration did, or could have, any chance of changing the problem for which it was created.

I illustrate these arguments by discussing the German government feed-in tariff program, forest legality versification designed to weed out illegal logging from global supply chains, Carbon tax in British Columbia and Giant Ibis conservation in Cambodia. I conclude by discussing that there are two distinct path dependency projects: those that can target a specified and durable outcome such decarbonizing energy supplies or maintaining biodiversity conservation in a specified protected area; from those that require creating durable thermostatic institutions and durable objectives only through constant changes in policy settings and calibrations. While thermostatic institutions carry more difficult design obligations, their creation holds potential in achieving the Paris Accord’s objective of limiting warming to no more than 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and related Type 4 sustainability challenges.

Keynote session facilitated by Philippe Bezes (CNRS, Sciences Po, CEE) and Charlotte Halpern (Sciences Po, CEE and LIEPP).

Full workshop programme available here. 

Contact : charlotte.halpern@sciencespo.fr

This keynote is organized during the workshop “Urban Heat Island and critical environmental thresholds: comparing the Singapore and the Ile-de-France Region”, co-convened by NERI (NUS) and LIEPP’s environmental policies research group (Sciences Po, Université Paris Cité) together with the Sciences Po, Centre for European studies and comparative politics (research group State and public policies), and with the support of the 2024 PHC Merlion programme and in partnership with the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (NUS) and the Centre for Earth politics.