Responsibility

Thoughts on managing societal responsibility around matters of climate change policy, especially transport.

The text theorises how differences in the shape of expected and actual rates of policy delivery may render a zone of despair. And how global perception of issues limits policy intervention at local level, where they are most needed to affect practical change. Both risk engendering a void in transactional responsibility: One that prevents issues being adequately transacted across the entire societal structure, tending to a failure of policy.

My conclusion:

1. Ensure policy actors are presented with comprehensible problems that are within their agency.
2. Despair at the slow initial rate of change will risk societal disconnection and policy abandonment.
3. Meanwhile confidence and familiarity will gradually accelerate the rate of delivery.
4. But only if policy processes adequately transact across society, without voids.
5. So it is important to differentiate structurally inadequate process from initially slow delivery.
6. Consequently one should primarily monitor the adequacy of process, not the pace of delivery.

Avoiding the zone of despair

In February 2022 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced one of the most negatively worded, and altogether depressing reports, one is ever likely to read. Even the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Committee has elevated its tone beyond the normal “keep calm and carry on” lingua of Whitehall.

The frustration, perfectly articulated in the film Don’t Look Up, is not unique to this topic. Cassandra‘s clarity of future vision is by definition not apparent to others until later. And in the meantime the very disconnect between her and the rest can come to represent a risk in itself: If the gap between insight and practice grows too wide, the seer is rendered nothing but a harbinger of doom.

My theory is that experts are inclined to see change as a direct trajectory through time, from now to some future objective, implying a constant rate of change between. Yet actual human societal change can start very slow, then accelerate rapidly once a change becomes societally familiar, “normal”.

For example, sales of electric cars in the UK have grown from almost nothing over the last ten years by roughly doubling sales volumes every 12-18 months. Thus only now are battery electrics mainstream choices for new car buyers, and likely within a couple of years the norm.

Thus any analyst expecting a steady uptake of electric vehicles in line with the commitment to end internal combustion engine vehicle sales by 2030 may, until just recently, have found themselves in a “zone of despair” – here defined as where the gap between their linear expectation of change and the somewhat exponential actuality of societal change is greatest. That, I suspect, is where many observers are now on a range of less well-developed decarbonisation policy agendas.

This is not a manifesto in support of naive techno-optimism. Rather an appeal for an appreciation that a temporal gap can open up wherein the risk of disillusion, or vice versa, expecting people to run before they can walk, can itself overwhelm policy delivery, and lead to a void in transactional responsibility – defined here as issues which are too complex or difficult to be understood across society, and which consequently become issues for which “someone” must be responsible, but none knows who. Into that void may fall every conspiracy theory, natural enemy, or administrative inefficiency imaginable.

Moving beyond global perceptions

Spain, to generalise too much, may become an interesting test case: Hitherto a laggard, by Western European comparison, on electric vehicle adoption and associated infrastructure. Yet historically capable of affecting rapid change between extreme policy positions. For recent example, consider the current proliferation of domestic solar panels following the abandonment of the Rajoy-era Impuesto al Sol (sun tax), which had, until 2018, inhibited grid-connected solar energy production from homes.

Spain has her own unique challenges around vehicle electrification. Notably a significant proportion of shared garage parking, which will tend to complicate decision-making around charging infrastructure. And a tendency to over-value asset holding, which can lead to vehicles being replaced infrequently. But other issues are familiar from other early-stage markets elsewhere in Europe, not least acute “range anxiety”: Cars are typically an extension of person (albeit here perhaps better understood as family) and thus must be capable of every journey, including those exceptional, very occasional journeys that cannot be covered from one home-based battery recharge.

This need to cover exceptional journeys provides a plausible political expectation for the dominance of national bodies in the provision of charging infrastructure, since such facilities are inherent to journeys by national road network. Likewise the involvement of government is indicative of electrification being perceived as engineered public infrastructure, in the vein of the national road or railway network, not as fuel purchased from commercial providers, as is currently via petrol stations. Yet emphasis on national government could just as easily be revealing of how vehicle electrification is seen: As a fundamentally global problem, which by philosophical definition of sovereign Spain, can only be communicated through the nation state.

Whatever the explanation, the prevailing emphasis is ultimately limiting:

• Almost all actual car journeys are within regional communities or more local, so any emphasis on national infrastructure is unlikely to deliver the correct balance of facilities to support the majority of actual travel, and thus have limited impact on electric vehicle uptake beyond breaking perceived range barriers.
• Facilities which are not inherent to their locality risk being rejected locally: As the title picture illustrates, if next-to-nobody in Malasaña (a young, but not-so-wealthy, inner district of Madrid) drives an electric car, is it any surprise to find charging facilities vandalised?
• Roughly half the tax-raising powers in Spain exist at regional, not national level, so emphasis on nation will tend to reduce funding opportunities.
• Expectation upon any branch of government naturally eschews the potential for more commercial, employment, or collective-driven initiatives.

Engendering transactional responsibility

Modern Spain has evolved a myriad of models through which multiple levels of state and commerce transact with each other and with the individual, family and the professional or geographic human groupings within society. The evolution of liberalising taxi legislation serves as a simple recent example: Such processes can feel distinctly trial-and-error, as different societal interests react to one another. And as the European directive at the root of the taxi case exemplifies, the most difficult problems tend to be those that emanate from out-with Spain herself – those which cannot naturally be counter-balanced and managed using internal policy mechanisms. Decarbonisation was always going to be troublesome once framed as global.

In contrast, the United Kingdom’s policymaking tends to be highly analytical, distilling complex human patterns into numeric models where possible, replacing reactivity with prediction. But that does not eliminate the possibility of issues emerging as too difficult to manage, with the consequent failure of transactional responsibility typically manifest as a policy roadblock: An endless procession of non-arguments for lack of direction or delivery, which reveal only that those involved cannot collectively grasp the magnitude of the actual issues. Add the inherent assumption that analytic machines are infallible – that all policy should be solvable – and these roadblocks risk lingering indefinitely.

So while different where effectively practised, both systems would seem to falter in a similar manner for similar reasons. Presuming neither system is readily changeable itself, the pragmatic solution would be to better frame issues: To ensure policy actors are presented with comprehensible problems that are within their remit of action, and certainly not the type of complex global problem that tends to default to someone else. “Baby steps” may initially seem inadequate, but they build the confidence that should gradually accelerate rate of change.

Having established a plausible model for transactional responsibility, we can be more relaxed around the zone of despair, for an initially slow pace of human change will eventually become more rapid. Herein the value of monitoring process, rather than monitoring delivery of change. This will surey become more important as we move from grand strategy to practical delivery, because delivery can be difficult and often depends on those with narrower overviews. The danger is that we excuse flawed policy process by citing predictably slow initial progress.

Postscript

This text was drafted in the mid-July 2022 calora extremo of south-central rural Spain. While 40+ degree celsius summer heat is nothing new, further extremities are emerging that can be socially disruptive in subtle ways. For example, historically, hot days were balanced by relatively cool nights, which had traditionally concentrated social activity in the late evening. That logic is now challenged by weather systems that sit atop central Spain and continually pump hot air long into the night. Such breaks both expected convention and human bonds, and so may be as dangerous to societal stability as any physical or agricultural manifestation of heat.

Cambio Climático is widely and openly attributed as the cause in polite conversations, even by those on the traditionalist right of politics. But there remains a tangible disconnect between Climate Change as an abstract cause, and Climate Change as a consequence of the behaviour or collective expectation of one’s own tribe. Relatively modest (in proportion to the problem) limits on polluting vehicles accessing the centre of Madrid were rejected, not least by those in the wider Castilla, and not least as an affront to their heartfelt (in a nation-alist sense) ability to travel to the centre of Spain. More broadly, the rejection of modes such as aviation can equate to the rejection of modernity and progress – a potentially existential issue, especially among those born to pre-democratic Spain.

As commented above, Climate Change policy need not be excessively top-down just because the meta-problem is itself global. As the previous paragraph exemplifies, policies that forcibly collide with prior models of social cohesion are unlikely to flourish. Yet the same means one need only successfully embed a policy within social expectation for it to flourish quite naturally. Therein the important distinction between infrastructural and behavioural policymaking.

Thus, in at least the transport context, the first policy transition is perhaps from transport as infrastructure (especially nation-cohesive infrastructure) to transport as means-to-an-end (especially one related to small-scale – individual or group – need or desire). Herein a tension between decarbonisation and national cohesion, for as a rational means-to-an-end, transport offers little national cohesion because most actual transport is far more local.

Addendum: Noel Cass wrote in a similar vein back in March, asking, Behaviour change or system change? How climate action is getting fudged. I consider the wider issue as epistemological. We can agree that capitalism itself is not currently proving a terribly effective mechanism of transacting responsibility across globalised society. However there is an acute risk that blaming “a system” (especially one which nobody ever much understood) serves as just another void in transactional responsibility. Calls for government action here should be interpreted as calls to organised society’s problem-solving mechanism of last resort. But remember that governments are still morribund by their societies’ epistemologies. While radical societal structure or epistemology change may yet be one outcome of Climate Change, such processes historically tend to be hideous disruptive, and should not be part of a planned solution to anything. Existing mechanisms may seem ineffective, at least initially, but should be capable of fostering a degree of societal evolution when adequately framed. As I have tried to argue here, simply putting “global decarbonisation” on the policy agenda does not help anyone engage with it.