The core of the argument is a paradox. Feasibility considerations are a legitimate and necessary component of policy design: policies must stand a reasonable chance of being implemented and of producing their intended effects. Yet the very act of anticipating resistance can itself become a barrier to implementation. When policymakers assume that citizens will reject a reform, or that stakeholders will obstruct it, they scale back proposals, delay action or abandon them entirely. Citizens, observing this pattern, come to expect weak or retracted initiatives, which in turn makes policymakers even more cautious. The result is a negative feedback loop, or what the authors describe, drawing on earlier work by Zhang and Jing, as a policy loop of unpopular policies, in which mutual suspicion between governments and the public erodes the option space for transformative change.

To ground the analysis, the authors develop a careful conceptual framework. Feasibility, they argue, is a qualified kind of possibility: a policy is feasible when it has a sufficiently high probability of realization, with the threshold set by context, stakes and background conditions. Following philosopher Kirsten Steele, they treat feasibility as a property of projects or multi-stage plans rather than of bare goals, since a goal such as climate neutrality by 2050 can be pursued through more or less feasible routes. Crucially, the study brackets technical and economic constraints, assuming these are known to be satisfiable, and focuses instead on political constraints, especially the behavioral dispositions, emotional responses and anticipated reactions of citizens. Concerns about distributive justice and morality matter mainly in the form of perceptions, such as whether a tax feels fair, rather than as objective properties of the policy itself.

The first case study examines European climate policy, particularly in Denmark and Germany, and identifies a cascade of action gaps. Denmark’s 2019 climate election produced an ambitious Climate Act targeting a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, yet the 2023 election led the Social Democrats to form a centrist coalition with a liberal party known for supporting agriculture, and a subsequent poll found 72 percent of Danish voters wanted more climate action. The government adopted what critics call a hockey stick implementation plan, postponing most reductions until shortly before the deadline. Germany passed its first Climate Action Law in 2019, and its highest court ruled in 2021 that it lacked sufficient detail on post-2030 emissions reductions. Although more ambitious targets and a new super ministry for economy and climate followed, the process stalled: a heating law banning fossil fuel boilers had to be significantly watered down, and a 2024 reform abolished the requirement for immediate action programs when sectors exceed their emissions limits. The pattern, the authors note, is one of setting stronger targets while weakening the consequences of missing them.

The second case turns to international climate governance and the doctrine of International Paretianism, associated with scholars such as Eric Posner and Cass Sunstein’s co-authored work with David Weisbach. This realist view holds that climate negotiations should assume states pursue national self-interest, and that only agreements producing a Pareto improvement, in which no country is worse off, are realistically achievable. Ren and Klausen argue that this reasoning exemplifies the feasibility syndrome. Drawing on philosopher Mark Budolfson’s concept of feasibility wedges, measures that alter the conditions for uptake and can set off a cascade toward a self-enforcing structure, they contend that apparently infeasible arrangements can become viable through sanctions, privileges, reputational dynamics and collective social contagion. Nations that are seen as successful or advanced can trigger bandwagon effects, and fears of free-riding may reflect too little realism, not too much, by naively modeling states as purely rational economic actors while ignoring the power of emotions, values, image and symbolic forces.

The two Chinese cases extend the diagnosis beyond democracies. Property tax is widely regarded as efficient and fair, yet reform in China has proceeded with extreme caution, confined to pilot programs in Shanghai and Chongqing. Zhang and Jing’s explanation is that the government fears eroding political legitimacy, particularly where citizens perceive the tax as double taxation in the absence of visible service improvements. Policy feedback theory adds that decades of land-based finance have entrenched stakeholders whose interests depend on the status quo. The authors suggest several feasibility wedges: earmarking revenues for visible public goods such as education and healthcare, bundling the tax with compensatory measures like reductions in other regressive taxes, and leveraging demonstration effects from successful pilots so that reputational dynamics and peer emulation drive diffusion.

The second Chinese case is even more striking. In early 2016, the CPC Central Committee and State Council issued guidelines calling for halting construction of new gated residential compounds and gradually opening internal roads in existing estates, framed as a way to improve land-use efficiency, ease congestion and create more permeable neighborhoods. The initiative collapsed almost immediately. Social media amplified sensationalized fears of crime and property-value loss, while no pilot projects, staged rollouts or compensatory measures were attempted. Confronted with escalating resistance and the risk that discontent would spill over into other policy areas, the government withdrew the reform. Ren and Klausen read this as a textbook instance of the syndrome: no real backlash had yet occurred, but the expectation of one was enough to halt the policy, and the government never seriously considered how communication strategies or feasibility wedges might have changed the outcome.

From these cases the authors distill the mechanisms of the syndrome. There is paternalism toward the public, the assumption that voters have not foreseen the consequences of their preferences, which resonates with psychological research showing that people are poor at forecasting their future wellbeing and underestimate hedonic adaptation, the process by which people adjust to new circumstances. There is the rigid anticipation of stakeholder resistance, in which policymakers negotiate with voices that have not yet spoken. There is the anticipation of uptake difficulties, treated as fixed constraints rather than dynamic challenges addressable through design, framing or education. And there is risk averseness, the fear that a single failed implementation will permanently stigmatize a policy and reduce trust in government, alongside fear of backlash effects in which the public turns against the broader direction of policy. Each mechanism is individually understandable; together they become pathological.

The remedy the authors propose is calibrated rather than naïve. They argue that policymakers should possess the virtues of courage, commitment and perseverance, understood as rational dispositions justified on consequentialist grounds, since policymakers who hold them achieve better results. They invoke the notion of rational hope, developed by philosophers such as Adrienne Martin’s contemporaries Jonathan Lear and Arnon Meirav, as a pragmatic strategy under uncertainty: hope sustains effort when evidence alone might counsel retreat, much as athletes facing a stronger opponent perform better when they sustain belief in victory. Behavioral research supplies concrete grounds for optimism. Threshold dynamics mean that small increases in the number of people adopting a behavior can unleash rapid chain reactions, as seen in the swift spread of the #MeToo campaign in 2017. Hedonic adaptation means that initially unpopular interventions, such as Stockholm’s congestion pricing introduced in 2006, gain acceptance once positive effects are felt, provided policymakers fight through what one traffic director called the valley of political death. Norm cascades, repetition and skillful framing can normalize new behaviors, and historical moral revolutions, from the abolition of footbinding to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, show that seemingly entrenched practices can collapse with surprising speed.

The study’s most subversive conclusion concerns democracy and authoritarianism alike. It is widely assumed that voters in Western democracies directly shape policy, yet politicians fear that citizens will not accept the consequences of their choices and shy away from implementing what they were elected to do. It is equally assumed that Chinese policymakers, unbound by electoral pressures, can enforce bold reforms quickly, yet they too anticipate resistance and delay or dilute initiatives accordingly. Policy making dynamics, the authors find, are remarkably similar across regime types, blurring the line between democratic and non-democratic governance. They are careful not to advocate reckless ambition: the point is not that feasibility concerns are illegitimate, but that they should rest on an accurate, not exaggeratedly pessimistic, understanding of human psychology, and that conditions of uptake are dynamic and can be actively shaped. Abandoning a policy may sometimes be justified, they conclude, but it should be for genuine political reasons, not mistaken assumptions about feasibility or ignorance of the wedges that could make bold transitions possible after all.

Subject of Research: Political feasibility bias in public policy making and its effects on ambitious reforms

Article Title: The feasibility syndrome: a challenge to public policy

Article References: Ren, P., & Klausen, S. H. (2026). The feasibility syndrome: a challenge to public policy. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00140-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00140-4

Keywords: feasibility syndrome, public policy, political feasibility, climate policy, hedonic adaptation, norm cascades, property tax reform, China, policy feedback, behavioral science, International Paretianism, feasibility wedges