PLEA Network

29 January 2020, The Guardian, Finding a way through the Overton climate window is the only way forward. Australia urgently needs political change. We must push for centrist, reasonable policies while still campaigning hard at the margins… To understand the moment we find ourselves in, I’ll defer to a construct that political scientists use to model how political activism can deliver meaningful policy change: the Overton window. The Overton window of political possibilities holds that for every issue, there are range of policy responses that sit on a spectrum from radical to sensible and back to radical. As a rule, support for these policy options will follow a bell curve: policies seen as sensible will also be the most popular. When a policy is seen as sensible and popular, it will offer a window for political action. In a static world this would hardly be a revelation – indeed it would be a recipe for both incrementalism and stasis. Except there’s a twist: the Overton window moves over time, influenced by public activism, policy advocacy and external events. Read more here