Examples of “policy sihouettes”

Following the shadow, one comes to the body . . . Hugh of St. Victor

Follow the shadow and you come to the body–or in one religious sense, follow the Old Testament and you come to the Gospels. A modern version of this mysterium is the concept of “policy silhouettes”: These are policies and projects that look full-bodied, but in reality they are shadows cast by really-existing implementers, managers, operators and staff who are, well, out of sight until you find them.

Examples?

–Considering the importance of carbon emissions, CEO total salary should be calculated by deducting a percentage of carbon tax amount linked to total carbon emissions of the company currently. (comment from the online Financial Times)

–My chief difficulty with most remedies to the Ukraine crisis is that they start by boarding a time-machine to correct long-ago events. This gives their solutions a theological air, which address the world as it should have been, not as it is. (https://www.ft.com/content/12cfb5ca-a5d9-4137-a8d4-cf2454d95e8c)

–“We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” But taking immediate and effective control is the last thing governments can do under conditions of the Anthropocene. (https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.754)

–It’s important to remember that even many of the historic left wing forces in the US basically accepted the settler program and many of the early American anarchist and socialist utopian projects, for instance, were quite literally white settler projects that often directly displaced indigenous people — and I don’t mean in the general sense that we all occupy indigenous land or whatever it is people say at the beginning of board meetings nowadays, but in the literal sense of anarchist communes being built on important seasonal sites that were still in use up until that point. (https://illwill.com/new-battlefields)

–The rise of the state, along with the securities it provided, represented progress. So too did the emergence of representative institutions, constitutional government, trial by jury, marriage by choice, the free professions, the choice of a trade, the system of taxation, the institutions of public service, schemes of welfare, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the presumption of innocence – all of which Hegel celebrated in the Philosophy of Right. It would be odd to toss these achievements aside as mere indices of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ‘the dialectic of enlightenment’ or ‘power’ or ‘governmentality’ or ‘logocentrism’ – all of which have been variously condemned by the hermeneutics of suspicion. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2022.2095754)