Over
the past few months, policy failures in health care reform and climate change
have stunned the world. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised. At the
heart of both problems are “policy thickets” that must be untangled before
significant progress can be expected. What do I mean?
A
policy thicket can be analogized to a patent thicket. Patent thickets occur
when so many patents overlap in a particular domain of innovation that no
single company can successfully navigate the thicket with relevant licenses to
legally bring a new product to market.
Policy
thickets can be defined as occurring when complex, large-scale technological
systems cut across so many legal, administrative, political, or social
jurisdictions that it becomes impossible to effectively resolve who has
jurisdiction over their governance, let alone to adjudicate conflicts among
multiple claimants.
When
policy thickets occur, problems can take many forms. Lapses can occur in
governance simply because no one knows where proper authority lies. By some
accounts, this played a major role in the failure of oversight over the
adequacy of the New Orleans levies pre-Katrina. Irresolvable political conflict
can also occur when overlapping jurisdictional claims impede coherent policy
development and the ability to resolve fundamental value differences.
Arguably,
U.S. infrastructure policy suffers from a plethora of policy thickets, both in
health care and energy, as well as in many other fields. Siting a single
renewable energy facility requires approval from dozens of local, county,
state, and federal agencies, as well as private utilities. Under such
circumstances, the possibility of imagining coherent energy planning for even a
single municipality, let alone a state or country becomes impossible. Absent an
untangling of the policy thicket, ad hoc, small-scale changes are possible (but
hardly socially, politically, or economically efficient), but large-scale
reform is not.
Policy
thickets are the accretion of over a century of the simultaneous construction
of technological systems and political authority over them. Undoing them will
be a constitutional challenge of the first order, albeit a critical one. We’re
rapidly moving from the era of technological construction to the era of
technological reconstruction. That reconstruction will be more manageable if we
open our eyes to and fix our attention upon the problem of policy thickets in
the complex intertwining of human relationships and technological
infrastructures.
About the Author: Clark Miller is associate
director of CSPO and associate
professor of science policy and political science.
