6 - Policy panaceas

Summary

What is a policy panacea? One answer is that it is a solution that has been broadly applied, and panaceas are often talked about as being successful in this way. This is not the same thing as whether the policy is successful in producing the desired outcomes; it may or it may not be. The theory of panaceas I develop in this chapter is agnostic about this second type of success. Rather, the theory developed here is about the features of a policy that enable its spread: its evolutionary success as a panacea. For to spread, policies are often expressed in apolitical, highly legible terms and supported by top-down governance, and at the expense of more extensive cooperation across groups.

In this chapter we are doing two things at once. First, we are unpacking the dimensions that enable the panacea problem that I just mentioned. And in so doing, we discuss key issues of environmental policy analysis. Panaceas are about overgeneralizing, usually beyond the evidence, but how do we think about the trade-offs involved in making generalizations? In the first section of this chapter we tackle that question.

From there, we move on to discuss a set of enabling factors for the spread of a policy panacea, starting with a set of psychological biases and heuristics that we all have, and which lead us to favour the spread of a preferred solution, even in the face of contrary evidence. From here we discuss another social aspect of panaceas, and this comes from the fact that preference for any specific policy is closely related to one's social affiliations, to one's membership in a group. And here we tie this conversation back to our previous discussion of intergroup dynamics and the synergy between intergroup conflict and intragroup cooperation.

In the third section we discuss the role of politics. We have already talked about the role that apolitical framings can play in our discussion of the tragedy of the commons and collective action problems in Chapter 1. Panaceas are likewise often cast as apolitical, technical solutions; this helps them garner support by decision-makers who might feel threatened by the spectre of political controversy.