A policy’s founding idea becomes a cognitive barrier to its own revision.

Evidence

At the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the small-fields policy appeals to a sense of responsibility that goes beyond enhancing economic trade. To them, the Groningen reservoir is a national strategic resource. This is not surprising, as this was exactly the reason why the small-fields policy was implemented in 1974. The Lubbers administration realized that the immense Groningen reservoir was something to treasure, now that the nuclear era did not seem to be the remedy for future energy problems. The small-fields policy itself was in fact a result of settlement of a controversy. For quite a while, the Netherlands had known that it was sitting on a giant gas bubble, but it did not immediately realize what that could mean. It did not only mean revenues, deriving from tax revenues and the international contracts that had been made, it also implied a certain independence regarding energy supply. This realization is, until this date, part of the culture at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, delivering a cognitive barrier to change, which is something worth elaborating on further in terms of path dependence, as will be done in the remainder of this chapter. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 1085

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘the policy that can’t be argued out of existence’ — how the original rationale for a rule becomes the reason it can never be repealed.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism is subtle: the barrier is a correct memory of why the policy was wise, so evidence of current inefficiency reads as irrelevance rather than refutation.