Abstract
This paper examines the impediments to applying best-practice scientific and economic advice to sustainability policy, commonly described as the knowledge–action gap. The polluter-pays principle remains politically fragile and inconsistently applied, despite strong first-principles justification, anthropological evidence of fairness norms, and sustained public support in survey research.
Market-based instruments designed to correct market failure through externality pricing have often relied, implicitly or explicitly, on the information-deficit model: the assumption that improved information will lead to more informed decisions and policy support. Behavioural economics suggests, however, that policy implementation depends not only on information, but on cognitive biases and the institutional environments through which knowledge is translated into action. Scientific consensus alone fails to generate durable policy change when filtered through political incentives and media systems that privilege episodic over thematic framing, reinforcing short-termism and obscuring systemic risk.
The paper further examines the tyranny of the status quo, showing how incumbent industries strategically deploy doubt, delay, and complexity to slow reform without contesting underlying scientific or economic principles. These strategies exploit well-documented cognitive limitations, including loss aversion, status-quo bias, and difficulty reasoning about diffuse, abstract, and long-term harms. Together, these dynamics help explain why economically efficient and publicly supported sustainability policies repeatedly fail to be implemented, and why addressing behavioural and institutional translation mechanisms is critical to closing the knowledge–action gap.