Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

The concept of incrementalism has been widely cited over the past three decades, yet it has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical inquiry. As a result, the highly promising incrementalist framework has contributed surprisingly little to improving our understanding of how decision-making processes can better adapt to humans' cognitive limitations. One indicator of the lack of progress is that policy scholars have never made a sustained attempt to explain how practitioners can become better incrementalists. To see whether the concept's original formulation may be obscuring the way to further progress, we summarize and appraise four enduring criticisms of incrementalism: its alleged lack of goal orientation, conservatism, limited range of applicability, and negative stance toward analysis. While questioning the validity of the critics' claims, we nevertheless propose a way to reframe the incrementalist endeavor, with the intention of stimulating both its critics and defenders to get on with the task of learning more about how individuals, organizations, and societies can proceed relatively intelligently despite the fact that humans rarely have a good understanding of complex social problems and policy options.