Abstract
Policy makers are often called upon to navigate between scientists’ urgent calls for long-term concerted action to reduce the environmental impacts due to resource use, and the public’s concerns over policies that threaten lifestyles or jobs. Against these political challenges, resource efficiency policy making is often a changeable and even chaotic process, which has fallen short of the political ambitions set by democratically elected governments. This article examines the importance of paradigms in understanding how the public collectively responds to new policy proposals, such as those developed within the project DYNAmic policy MiXes for absolute decoupling of environmental impact of EU resource use from economic growth (DYNAMIX). The resulting proposed approach provides a framework to understand how different concerns and worldviews converge within public discourse, potentially resulting in paradigm change. Thus an alternative perspective on how resource efficiency policy can be development is proposed, which envisages early policies to lay the ground for future far-reaching policies, by altering the underlying paradigm context in which the public receive and respond to policy. The article concludes by arguing that paradigm change is more likely if the policy is conceived, framed, designed, analyzed, presented, and evaluated from the worldview or paradigm pathway that it seeks to create (i.e., the destination paradigm).
Highlights
Despite numerous policy initiatives and ambitions at an EU level, Europe is still a long way from decoupling the consumption of resources (measured as total material requirement (TMR)) from economic growth, despite examples of success in improving the material efficiency of production
The apparent gap between political ambition and policy success is in part explained by the EU public’s resistance to resource efficiency policy, as demonstrated by results presented in another article published in this special issue on public acceptability [1], which found that, of the 14 policies considered by those proposing them to be within the existing political paradigm, nine were considered likely to generate either contentious or highly contentious levels of concerns, around the policy’s cost, effectiveness and fairness
The dominant paradigm in society sets a strong context for the public acceptability of introduced policies, and will often set the starting parameters of public discourse of what might be deemed acceptable by the public when considering proposed policies
Summary
Despite numerous policy initiatives and ambitions at an EU level (see [1,2,3,4,5]), Europe is still a long way from decoupling the consumption of resources (measured as total material requirement (TMR)) from economic growth, despite examples of success in improving the material efficiency of production. The apparent gap between political ambition and policy success is in part explained by the EU public’s resistance to resource efficiency policy, as demonstrated by results presented in another article published in this special issue on public acceptability [1], which found that, of the 14 policies considered by those proposing them to be within the existing political paradigm, nine were considered likely to generate either contentious or highly contentious levels of concerns, around the policy’s cost, effectiveness and fairness Underlying this result is the public’s limited prioritization of environmental issues, and the potential for conflict and rejection in the event that more prioritized factors are threatened. The new Circular Economy Package presented a year later [1] was reported to be “not Better Regulation but short-termist Bad Regulation” [9]
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