Summary – Understanding the need for localization is not the same as knowing what steps to take and how to take them. To respond well to the existential threats of energy and resource descent, global heating, and soil depletion, a great many small experiments must be conducted, and very quickly. Adaptive muddling is designed for this purpose. It is a process that innovates rapidly yet carefully. It emphasizes small experiments, not the small, incremental steps common in more formal procedures. The difference is subtle but important for a successful social transition. This paper introduces adaptive muddling as a psychologically-compatible decision-making strategy well suited for the urgent transition now facing individuals, neighborhoods, and societies.
Published version at: De Young, R. & S. Kaplan (1988) On averting the tragedy of the commons. Environmental Management, 12(3): 273-283.
More recent release: De Young R. & S. Kaplan (2012). Adaptive muddling. In R. De Young and T. Princen [Eds.] The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift. (Pp. 287-298) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
In Garret Hardin’s 1968 parable of the tragedy of the commons we were given a warning of what the future may hold. Hardin’s analysis of the commons is now known to be deeply flawed and misleading. But the flaws notwithstanding, the warning remains relevant. Unfortunately, the response to that warning has been slow and ambiguous. While there have been small scale advances, no overall strategy for dealing with serious environmental problems and biophysical limits has emerged. This paper outlines previously proposed strategies and their weaknesses, and offers a new psychologically-plausible strategy based on a pragmatic and realistic understanding of human behavior.
Garret Hardin proposed “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon” as a means to force ourselves to behave responsibly. In the ever-changing vocabulary of sustainability studies this is now framed as a collection of nudges. Other writers have suggested that more powerful authoritarian solutions are now necessary, in which environmental planning and enforcement are centralized, expert-designed, and managed by technocrats. One problem with both of these approaches is the natural resistance humans have to the elimination of choice. We don’t like to do what we are forced to do; we resist being manipulated without consent, regardless of the circumstances. And in response, we are capable of creative misbehavior. Both approaches also lead to grim images of the future (e.g., an environmentally-focused totalitarian society, a paternalistic system of nudges) and such images are already part of our motivation problem. Another approach, suggested by Warren Johnson, is based on “muddling through.” It has many things to recommend it, but also some very serious weaknesses, including slowness, incrementalism, and a tendency to compromise.
A new approach which builds upon the last 40 years of behavioral research and a settled understanding about human cognitive functioning and behavior is called “adaptive muddling.” It draws heavily on muddling through, with the difference that the slowness, incrementalism, tendency to compromise, and lack of direction of muddling are overcome.
Current studies of human behavior show that people desperately need to be needed, to have a voice in their destiny, to take action to help themselves and others. People need hope a vision of a future that is worth striving for, ideas on how to create such a future, and the support to test out those ideas, and the confidence that good ideas will be used. Adaptive muddling takes all of these factors into consideration.
Features of adaptive muddling are exploration, stability, and distributed leadership. Stability and support from the larger context, the state or nation or other institutions, encourage multiple small scale explorations of appropriate responses to environmental challenges. Distributed leadership is based on the skills of leaders at local and state levels, and in many disciplines.. These leaders, many of whom will appear at the grassroots level, will have three functions. First, they will provide the vision to create a shared understanding of our urgent situation, the possibility of a solution, and the challenge it offers to everyone. They will show that a decent lifestyle can be salvaged, and that there is the possibility of improving our quality of life in the process. They will create and support the complex process for meeting environmental challenges, clarify the role of exploration and stability, and show that the failure of explorations is an acceptable, and even necessary, outcome of the process.
Adaptive muddling is not utopian, and not a panacea. It cannot deal with multi- or trans-national issues such as acid rain or atmospheric pollutant buildup, nor does it offer quick and easy answers. What it does offer is a structured way for individuals in all areas and at all levels of expertise to make significant contributions to ensure our survival and hope for a livable future. And it does this in a way that is psychologically plausible, something that other approaches have failed to achieve.
Raymond De Young
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Updated: November 27, 2020
Archived: September 10, 2006 at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/48163
Copyright © 2020 Raymond De Young, All Rights Reserved.
