Avoiding Policy Traps

Taming the Complexity of Central New Mexico Resilient Futures Initiative

I recently participated in a community workshop as part of the Central New Mexico Resilient Futures Initiative (RFI). Funded by a Biden era grant, the RFI’s goal is to generate policy recommendations for increasing the resilience of central New Mexico communities in the face of climate change. These include Sandoval, Valencia, Torrance, and Bernalillo counties.

For those not in New Mexico, these are the included counties.

The RFI started by gathering important background data. First, they conducted a pollution inventory. Second, they created community profiles to tailor their recommendations. Third, they conducted a literature review to gain a strong background before making recommendations. Fourth, they conducted a workforce analysis in order that recommendations strengthen the local economy rather than mere costly interventions.

Now the RFI is conducting community strategy workshops focusing on various topics like transportation, energy, and land use. Early on, the RFI made the decision to focus especially on frontline communities, those who stand to lose the most from climate change. While the background data could be enough research to make reasonable science-based recommendations, the focus on frontline communities necessitated involving those communities in generating strategic recommendations. They will balance the strategies from these community workshops with recommendations made by firms specializing in policy analysis and recommendations.

There is a lot to like about this initiative. The biggest risk it faces is that, like so many policy recommendations before it, the recommendations never actually become policy. Opposition can overcome them, or they can get pared down to the point of being basically different policies. How does one prevent that from happening? Taming Complexity has written a lot about how to make more successful policies. We’ve even done just that for the state of New Mexico in response to their request for information for the Strategic Water Supply initiative. What might we recommend to the RFI?

A knee-jerk reaction might be to par down the recommendations to mitigate against potential opposition from the start. This seems like a grounded incremental strategy, and we at Taming Complexity are nothing if not incrementalists. But incrementalism isn’t just about taking small steps. Take the example of zoning amendments in Albuquerque. Several amendments attempted to appease NIMBYs, with very little success, only for the most radical amendment to the zoning code to pass 7-2! Limiting the geographical area of zoning changes helped, but increasing the scope of the zoning changes from the more tepid amendments actually helped sway previous opponents by being more developer friendly. Knowing the appropriate increments of change can be very important.

It doesn’t always make sense to use compromise as a tool to try to appease opponents. Often, compromise is better used to gain new allies; to build up a constituency of support. Take Albuquerque Rapid Transit, or ART, as an example. The city did a lot of public engagement prior to starting construction, and they altered the plan to try to nip opposition in the bud. But it didn’t work. ART was profoundly unpopular, and despite its success as a rapid transit system, it remains a local political pariah. NIMBYs lost the battle, but won the war. Rather than appease them, or end-around them through state-level mandates, proponents of change could instead focus on building a political coalition supportive enough to actually win. Policies that offer incentives or directly benefit specific groups might make them more engaged, similar to how Israeli housing policy dealt with their NIMBYs.

But that doesn’t mean that you can never parlay with the opposition. In 1970s France, abortion was just as polarized as it is in the US today. To get around this, French abortion policy allowed abortion up to 10 weeks, but had provisions to appease anti-abortion groups. The woman had to affirm distress or emergency, and wait 1 week, during which time she would receive information on child support services. Of course there was no mechanism to actually check either of these things. A woman could simply sign saying she qualified and schedule the procedure for a week later. The compromise was that pro-abortion groups got a substantive victory, while anti-abortion groups got a symbolic victory. Both groups saw the state as validating their values and way of life.

Far too often we refuse to do this. Just look at disagreements over environmental and rewilding policies. For example, American ranchers in the rural west tend to mount strong opposition to wolf reintroduction, despite little evidence that wolves pose a threat either to themselves or their livestock. But environmentalists are little better, overstating the theoretical benefits far beyond what the current state of ecological sciences can comfortably support. In the end, what the ranchers want is to feel heard. They want some acknowledgement in the policy itself that the government values their livelihood and way of life as much as it values wolves. This is especially important as that way of life is dwindling and disappearing.

The same thing played out in Idaho with the reintroduction of Grizzly Bears. The logging industry opposed the protection of grizzlies under the endangered species act, but did not necessarily oppose their reintroduction with other forms of protection. The endangered species act would prevent logging in any areas where the bears lived, which would have been nearly the entire Bitterroot Mountain range. The logging industry was ready to compromise, but conservation activists viewed any compromise as getting in bed with the enemy.

In both cases, conservationists saw themselves as the rational ones, making decisions based on evidence from conservation science while opponents worried about the nearly non-existent risk of being eaten by wolves or bears. But opponents saw the conservationists as being divorced from the reality on the ground. What did they, and the distant scientific bureaucracies they cited for support, know about living off the land in the American West? To opponents, it was a fight over who got a say about how they could live their lives.

In the same vein, the Central New Mexico RFI is admirable for its commitment to evidence based policy. But at the same time they should be wary of relying too much on “the facts” to make policies that will inevitably be political. The opponents who will inevitably arise won’t be convinced. Instead, they are much more likely to feel bullied and ignored. Fortunately, their active engagement of frontline communities in developing their recommendations will help avoid these kinds of errors.

Whatever proposals the RFI produces, from incentives for electrification to reducing vehicle miles traveled, not everyone will be in agreement. There will be NIMBYs. Policies favorable to rural residents might frustrate urbanites in Albuquerque, while appealing to the more numerous Burquenos might make rural residents feel ignored and belittled. The recommendations that come from the RFI will have to keep in mind the importance of values and symbolic compromise if they are to have the kind of impact they desire. But they will also have to make sure they don’t just try to appeal to potential opponents. They should also make sure they are galvanizing potential supports to action and building a positive constituency of support for their policies as well.