The Consensus-Crisis Paradox: Reframing Slow-Moving Crises to Unlock Industrial Transformation

John H. Howard, 6 May 2025

In Australian public policy, there exists a recurring and debilitating condition: the consensus-crisis paradox. It occurs when broad agreement exists about the seriousness of a problem, yet decisive action fails to follow. This paradox is particularly visible in industrial and innovation policy.

Policymakers, researchers, industry leaders, and the public generally acknowledge that Australia’s economic model—anchored to resource extraction—is unsustainable. And yet, despite reviews, rhetoric, and roadmaps, substantive structural change remains elusive.

We are in a Slow-Moving Crisis

This inertia stems not from ignorance, but from the nature of the challenge itself. Australia’s industrial policy challenge can be described as a paradigmatic slow-moving crisis. Despite decades of awareness, the country has not managed to diversify its economy away from volatile resource exports.

The failure to develop strong, innovation-intensive industries has left Australia exposed to shifting global markets and weakened its long-term productivity performance. In contrast, peer nations such as Germany, South Korea, and Israel have adopted more deliberate strategies for industrial modernisation.

Germany’s Fraunhofer model, which integrates applied research with industry needs, has helped underpin its advanced manufacturing sector. South Korea’s strategic investment in industrial capabilities, supported by coordinated government-industry roadmaps, has propelled it into high-value technology markets. Israel, with its focus on defence-driven innovation and public R&D investment, has created a globally competitive ecosystem of start-ups and advanced industries.

These cases highlight the importance of long-range coordination, mission-led investment, and institutional capability in driving structural diversification. By comparison, Australia’s institutional lock-in, policy drift, and the absence of a cohesive development framework have left its economy vulnerable to exogenous shocks and secular decline—placing its resilience, sovereignty, and intergenerational equity at risk. Australia's failure to shift towards a more diversified, knowledge-based economy exemplifies the features of a slow-moving crisis.

Unlike acute emergencies that command immediate response, slow-moving crises unfold incrementally, generate diffuse impacts, and lack triggering events that galvanise action. They are politically inconvenient, institutionally complex, and narratively underpowered. The economy continues to operate without a cohesive plan for moving up the global value chain—placing its resilience, sovereignty, and intergenerational equity at risk.  

Slow-moving crises of this nature are not confined to industrial policy. Similar dynamics can be observed across domains such as demographic transition, environmental degradation, housing affordability, cyber vulnerability, and cultural and heritage loss. In each case, broad societal acknowledgment coexists with fragmented and inadequate policy responses. The danger lies in the illusion that time remains abundant—until it doesn't..

Understanding the Consensus-Crisis Paradox

The consensus-crisis paradox has received increasing attention in contemporary policy scholarship, especially in relation to complex and protracted challenges such as climate change, infrastructure reform, and economic transition.

The paradox refers to the phenomenon where high levels of agreement among experts, stakeholders, and even the public fail to translate into sustained policy action. This is not simply a matter of political gridlock, but a structural feature of how problems are defined, delegated, and deprioritised over time.

Researchers such as Sabatier, Heikkila, and Béland have noted that shared recognition of a policy problem does not eliminate uncertainty about solutions, nor does it resolve underlying conflicts over values, timing, or institutional control. In fact, consensus can sometimes create a false sense of closure—a belief that because the diagnosis is settled, the system will automatically self-correct. In practice, this breeds inertia.

In Australia’s case, long-standing agreement about the risks of economic overreliance on resource exports has not yielded an integrated national response. Instead, action is diluted by short-term fiscal pressures, federal-state fragmentation, entrenched interest group dynamics, and ideological positioning. The paradox is compounded by the structural characteristics of slow-moving crises: dispersed costs, long timelines, and the absence of catalytic events that force change.

Understanding the consensus-crisis paradox is essential for identifying why reform stalls, and what kinds of interventions might break the deadlock. These include constructing new frames of reference, investing in institutional coordination, and redefining success in terms of system alignment rather than isolated outputs.

The Architecture of Slow-Moving Crises

Slow-moving crises resist policy resolution due to a confluence of structural, cognitive, and institutional dynamics. They are characterised by incremental deterioration, ambiguous tipping points, and long feedback loops that obscure the costs of inaction until they become irreversible.

Several distinct features define their architecture:

• Temporal Diffusion: Slow-moving crises unfold over decades, not years. This temporal ambiguity reduces the urgency for action, especially when political cycles, budget horizons, and institutional planning are misaligned with long-term risks.

• Distributed Responsibility: The causes and consequences of these crises are rarely attributable to a single actor or agency. Responsibility is spread across multiple stakeholders—public and private—creating ambiguity about who should act, and on what scale.

• Asymmetric Impacts: The effects are not experienced equally. Certain groups or regions may feel the brunt long before others, complicating political incentives for comprehensive reform. This often leads to fragmented or compensatory policies rather than systemic intervention.

• Institutional Inertia: Legacy systems, bureaucratic routines, and siloed jurisdictions reinforce the status quo. These systems were often designed for stability and risk minimisation, not for the adaptive challenge of slow erosion.

• Narrative Underdevelopment: These crises often lack compelling public narratives. Their complexity defies simple explanation; their consequences feel abstract; and their protagonists and solutions are unclear. Without a clear storyline, mobilisation falters.

Australia’s industrial vulnerability exemplifies this architecture. As global economic conditions evolve, the gap between current capabilities and future demands grows steadily wider. Without targeted intervention, the systems most critical to Australia’s long-term prosperity risk becoming misaligned with the emerging global context. The implication is clear: governing slow-moving crises requires more than problem recognition. It demands active system diagnosis, institutional agility, and a renewed capacity for long-range policy thinking.

Left unaddressed, such crises eventually reach inflection points beyond which the cost of inaction multiplies. Australia’s industrial vulnerability—like other slow-burning challenges, including demographic ageing, social housing, housing affordability, infrastructure decay, and environmental degradation—is approaching such a threshold. What is required is a new approach to how we define and narrate policy itself—not only what we do, but how we make collective sense of what must be done.

Sense-Making and Policy Framing in Slow-Moving Crises

A critical challenge in responding to slow-moving crises lies in how problems are interpreted and framed—not just by policymakers, but across the institutional and civic landscape. Contemporary policy studies increasingly recognise that what counts as a 'problem' is not a self-evident fact, but the product of framing, discourse, and meaning-making processes. In complex systems, framing shapes everything: what gets prioritised, who is held responsible, which solutions are seen as legitimate, and what trade-offs are deemed acceptable.

The literature on policy narrative, including the work of scholars such as Deborah Stone (Policy Paradox) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) developed by Jones, McBeth, and Shanahan, emphasises that stories—replete with settings, characters, plots, and morals—are central to how policy decisions are structured and contested. These narratives are not ornamental. They are functional elements in building political support, institutional coherence, and public understanding.

Effective industrial policy thus requires more than data-driven analysis or institutional reform. It requires attending to the ways in which problems are socially constructed and symbolically charged. Shifting from a narrative of passive extraction to one of strategic capability or national resilience is not merely rhetorical—it is structurally consequential. It changes who participates, who benefits, and what is possible.

In Australia, policy framing must also be plural. No single storyline will unify a federation with deep regional, sectoral, and cultural heterogeneity. The challenge is not to assert a singular national mission, but to enable coherent alignment across diverse frames—each contributing to a broader horizon of transformation. The policy challenge is not simply to speak to diverse audiences, but to weave a broader national mission from their perspectives.

Practical Implications for Policy Design and Leadership

Several implications follow from this revised understanding:

• Narrative Development Is Strategic Work: Governments, business organisations and community networks should invest in the active curation of policy narratives, drawing on history, culture, institutional memory, and future-facing scenarios. This includes working with trusted intermediaries who can translate national goals into locally meaningful idioms.

• Narratives Must Be Embedded Institutionally: Transition stories must be reflected in budget frameworks, capability reviews, national statements of priorities, and educational curricula. Otherwise, they remain rhetorical and transitory.

• Leadership Requires Narrative Fluency: Senior decision-makers and policy advocates must become adept at narrative framing—not to manipulate, but to align. This includes being able to navigate conflicting interpretations and mediate competing values.

• Evaluation Frameworks Must Account for Narrative Impact: Metrics of success should extend beyond delivery timelines to include whether shared understanding, legitimacy, and capability have been built across the system.

• Narrative Adaptation Must Be Continual: As contexts shift and feedback loops operate, narratives must be revisited. The capacity to learn in public and adjust without losing credibility is central to the stewardship of long-term missions.

Policy narratives differ fundamentally from PR-inspired case studies and popular media-oriented publicity campaigns.

Conclusion: From Convergence to Imagination

The convergence of consensus and crisis now defines Australia’s public policy landscape. Industrial strategy is only one manifestation of a deeper systemic challenge—how to act in the face of long-term, slow-burning risks without sacrificing ambition or legitimacy.

When the policy agenda is dominated by slow-moving crises, the space for big ideas shrinks. Complexity management begins to crowd out strategic direction. Governance becomes reactive. Innovation retreats. The imperative is not only to manage this condition more effectively, but to reclaim narrative as a leadership function.

Australia's economic transition cannot be delegated to market forces or confined to administrative routines. It must be imagined, narrated, and enacted as a shared national project. This requires more than coherence in policy instruments. It requires coherence in purpose.

The task is not to engineer consent, but to construct meaning. And from that meaning, mobilise capability. The alternative is drift. The opportunity is renewal. The work is narrative

This Insight was written by Dr John Howard, Director of the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation. Dr Howard has advised governments and institutions for over three decades on industrial strategy, research policy, and innovation ecosystems. His current work explores how narrative, institutional capability, and strategic foresight can enable long-horizon public policy in complex systems.

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