By Jay Lund
In policy and management, we should always be interested in performance, both overall effectiveness and efficiency of solutions, as well as trade-offs across objectives. These are often depicted on plots of Pareto-optimality, showing the relative performance of alternatives, the performance of efficient (Pareto-optimal) solutions, and trade-offs across these most efficient alternatives, often compared with current performance.
Different policy and aspirational discussions seem to imply different views of what potential improvements exist relative to today’s performance (say for fish and money), as depicted below:
Most political and policy discussions. Solutions which help others will hurt me, so I need to get something in return. (Non-cooperative game.)
Delusional Ideals. There is one ideal solution, which I am advocating, which is better than all the others for everyone. This ideal is usually unavailable in practice. (Ideal cooperative game.)
Usual Reality. Some improvements are available across objectives – where all win. But even agreements that help all are a struggle to implement. (Cooperative game, with a non-cooperative game to allocate overall benefits.)
Tragic conflict. Where small gains to others cause me great loss and my small gains come at great loss to others. (Very uncooperative game.)
Rhetorical presentations of trade-offs in a particular policy discussion often diverge for reasons of different perspectives and self-interest. Indeed, the rhetorical depictions of trade-offs often seem more important to policy than their technical or factual reality. This seems a fundamental problem for enlightened policy-making and governance, if enlightened rationality is an objective of policy-making.
About the Author
Jay Lund is a Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Vice-Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis
Further reading
Null, S.E., M.A. Olivares, F. Cordera, and J. Lund, “Pareto optimality and compromise for environmental water management,” Water Resources Research, Vol. 57, e2020WR028296, 2021.
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