A GROWING DISCONNECT: Note from the 2019 Keynote Speaker

From the climate crisis that threatens unparalleled catastrophic ecological impacts, to ongoing rapid extinctions of flora and fauna around the word, to ocean degradation, the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence tells us that humans are not doing enough, at almost any scale, to significantly dent these ecological crises. At the same time, the world has never seen such an impressive scale of finance, market and technological (FMT) policy experimentation and instruments from which to choose. 

 

 

I argue that a key disconnect is that there are two very different coalitions who support FMT interventions: those who are curious about how FMT tools might help uncover creative policy mixes for addressing growing environmental challenges; and those who believe that successful design of FMT tools gives the answer as to whether environmental problems can be addressed. The instrumentalist coalition and the ideological coalition look similar. They go to the same conferences, participate in the same dialogues, and provide funding for research grants and even faculty hires.  

 

I argue that one reason for ongoing degradation is that the ideological coalition is winning, by far, over the instrumental coalition. There are three reasons for this.  First, professional environmental institutes and schools created during the first two waves of environmentalism have slowly shifted from an emphasis on “bioenvironmentalist” world views to largely reinforcing anthropogenic needs in general, and utility in particular, through the domination of market-liberal world views and likeminded institutionalist perspectives.  Second, powerful interests have sought to prioritize technological and market solutions over regulation, by providing funding for research, teaching, training, and stakeholder dialogues, that through covert and latent means, train students that they are scientifically proven to be more effective and efficient for addressing environmental problems. Third, the trend toward “data driven” social sciences has undermined the theoretical, qualitative, and conceptual skills needed for addressing enduring environmental challenges caused by utility seeking efforts. This is because the ontological bias behind most data driven social science research is to prioritize anthropogenic needs that inadvertently treats utility as the goal, rather than the cause of catastrophic environmental problems we face.

 

 

As a corrective, I offer three solutions. First, those designing, and justifying, policy innovations must be required to distinguish the problem in question according to 4 different conceptualizations: Type 1 win/win collective action such as “tragedies of the commons”; Type 2 win/lose optimization that prioritizes utility as a moral philosophy; Type 3 win/lose compromise orientations in which tradeoffs are internalized, and Type 4 win/lose prioritization in which, to be solved, the specific problem in question must be given priority over others. Second, policy designers must be required to project forward multiple causal change processes their innovations might be expected to unleash. Third, a narrow, rather than broad, set of stakeholders whose interests align with the problem definition in question must be engaged in policy dialogues around the causal process they can help nurture. This requires rendering explicit that whether, when, and how, powerful economic actors are engaged will be adjudicated on instrumental grounds. Failure to do so risks their highly successful efforts to date: i.e. converting environmental problems in which humans are the cause, to economic problems in which utility is the solution.

 

 

Cashore, Benjamin. 2018. “Bringing Bio-Environmentalists and Social Greens Back In:  Reflections on Fostering Transformative Change within US-Based  Professional Environmental Management Programs.” Paper Prepared in Anticipation of Delivery to the Yale Faculty Research Seminar Series, New Haven CT, March 7.

 

Cashore, Benjamin, and Steven Bernstein. 2018. “The Tragedy of the Diffusion of the Commons Metaphor: Bringing the Environment Back in to Environmental Studies.” Ostrom Workshop, Bloomington, Indiana.

 

Cashore, Benjamin, Steven Bernstein, David Humphreys, Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers, and Katharine Rietig. 2019. “Designing Stakeholder Learning Dialogues for Effective Global Governance.” In Policy and Society, Special issue, ‘Designing Policy Effectiveness: Anticipating Policy Success’, edited by Azad Singh Bali.

 

Cashore, Benjamin, and Nihit Goyal. In development 2019. Anticipating negative feedback and avoiding premature equilibria in the low carbon path dependent processes. WRI Expert Perspectives Policy Brief.