Using applied social science disciplines to implement creative outdoor cat management solutions and avoid the trap of one‐size‐fits‐all policies

Abstract In the United States, policy conflicts have prevented successful population‐level management of outdoor cats for decades. Wildlife conservation professionals have sought widespread use of humane dispatch (i.e., lethal culling applied humanely), whereas cat welfare professionals have promoted trap–neuter–return (TNR) (cats are trapped, neutered, and returned to the outdoors). These conflicts represent a policy panacea trap, which we argue drives many conservation conflicts. In these situations, the focus on defending a one‐size‐fits‐all policy fails to account for the value differences that shape the different understandings of the problem and desired outcomes associated with each policy, as well as complexities in the social–ecological system. Over the past 5 years, a group of wildlife conservation and cat welfare professionals codeveloped a set of products that have started to be used to help organizations break out of the policy panacea trap. We used a case study to illustrate how efforts grounded in applied social science disciplines, such as science communication, social–ecological systems, and conservation marketing, can help identify a more robust set of policy options tailored to local management and cultural contexts for successful implementation. Shifting the focus to embrace a shared understanding of the broader system helped us identify areas for collaboration, broaden the policy toolbox, and allow space for policy tools originally framed as opposing panaceas. This work helped prepare all parties to have difficult but productive discussions and address shared policy needs. We suggest that many value‐based conservation conflicts would benefit from similar efforts that use applied social science to transform how conflict is addressed, moving beyond policy panaceas that end in stalemate to develop shared understandings of context‐specific policies, and to identify opportunities for creative cooperation that yield real conservation progress.