The Government’s 2025 Climate Action Plan is released, complete with the usual choreography of ambition, alignment, and reaffirmation. There are targets. There are warnings. There were declarations that this plan will be “at the centre of social and economic development.”
And yet—for many of us working in and around governance, something familiar stirred beneath the surface.
Not cynicism exactly. Not disinterest. Something quieter. A sense of stuckness.
The Feeling Behind the Policy
The Climate Action Plan is not without merit. It builds on past commitments. It holds the line on core targets. It makes no dramatic departures. But it also introduces few new measures—and in doing so, it risks feeling like a performance of progress rather than a deepening of it.
In systems terms, it’s what psychologist Paul Watzlawick might have called a classic case of first-order change: the attempt to solve a problem using the very logic that created the problem in the first place. His term for it? Stuckness.
Stuckness is a Systemic Condition
This isn’t about blaming civil servants or political leaders. Stuckness is not a failure of intelligence or intent. It’s a relational condition that emerges when systems become:
- Saturated – filled with so many plans, reports, and frameworks that nothing new can land
- Fatigued – worn down by cycles of consultation, strategy, and deferred implementation
- Symbolically closed – performing responsiveness through gestures that don’t touch the roots of the issue
In such a field, even well-crafted plans risk becoming part of the noise.
Symbolic Work and Affective Climate
It’s tempting to call out plans like these as merely symbolic. But that misses the nuance. Symbolic work—the use of policy language, rituals, and framing to signal alignment and action is not inherently bad. Sometimes, it’s necessary. It buys time. It maintains legitimacy. It holds the system together when it isn’t quite ready to move.
But symbolic work without relational repair leads to what some describe as relational fatigue: the quiet erosion of trust, the sense that “we’ve seen this before”, the feeling that no one’s really listening.
In these moments, the affective climate of governance shifts. There’s a heaviness in the room. A loss of energy. Sometimes, the most honest question is not what should we do next?
But rather: what are we no longer able to feel here?
Beyond the Rush to Act
Public servants are often under immense pressure to act. To implement. To innovate. To deliver outcomes on tight timelines in complex environments. But the truth is, not all stuckness can be solved with more doing.
Sometimes, what’s needed is the opposite:
- A pause.
- A deeper sensing of what’s actually going on.
- A willingness to name that the problem may not be “out there”, but in the way the system has been trained to respond.
What Becomes Possible If We Stay With the Question?
This is not an argument against planning or targets or strategy. It’s an invitation to deepen the conversation beneath them.
What if we got better at noticing:
- When saturation is present, and nothing more can be taken in?
- When symbolic closure is protecting us from reckoning with loss?
- When relational fatigue is shaping the field more than any formal policy ever could?
In moments like these, what becomes possible may not be a new policy or a better plan.
It may be the cultivation of readiness—the slow, relational work of making space for change to be absorbed, not just announced.
Closing Thought
The Climate Action Plan 2025 will shape decisions in the months ahead. But it also offers a mirror. It reflects not just our climate strategy, but the state of our governance system, what it’s ready for, what it’s avoiding, and what it can no longer carry.
Let’s not rush past that reflection. Sometimes, transformation doesn’t begin with a bold new policy.
But maybe it begins when we find the language for a reality that has long resisted simplification.
Note: This reflection draws from a broader line of inquiry I’m pursuing through proposed doctoral research at the University of Limerick, where I’m exploring how governance systems respond—or don’t—to disruption. My research asks: What shapes the field of relational readiness in policy systems? And how might concepts like stuckness, symbolic closure, and affective climate help us understand when systems are truly open to change and when they are simply going through the motions?
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