From tyranny to hope: Harnessing the power of small decisions to achieve urban sustainability goals

Policy makers and planners aim to overcome the “tyranny of small decisions” to address the triple planetary threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. However, top-down policies intended to prevent the accumulation of small decisions from undermining collective goods and public infrastructure have removed agency from individuals and caused unintended negative impacts on society. Urban areas are a critical context to examine the role of small decisions because of the extreme diversity and density of decisions and decision-makers within them, their increasing growth worldwide, and their outsized ecological footprint on the world. We bring the economic concept of the tyranny of small decisions to the context of urban nature-based solutions, specifically, urban forestry initiatives, to show how under certain conditions small site-level decisions can support critical long-term social and environmental goals—as opposed to the current tendency to see only their potential to derail such goals. We argue that when social and ecological contexts vary at fine scales in ways that require place-based nuance in environmental management, policy makers and planners should seek to understand and support these small decisions, and promote solutions which harness the knowledge of ecological stewards in service of strategic goals. Failing to do so overlooks the power of human-nature relationships and specialized knowledge, missing opportunities to catalyze self-organization and creativity needed to propel cities towards sustainable futures. • Environmental policy makers struggle with the tyranny of small decisions. • Top-down policies can trample small decision-makers’ agency and overlook local knowledge. • In urban ecosystems, small scale decisions are inflection points to address critical problems. • We propose three contexts to empower local stewards in service of strategic sustainability goals. • Enabling local social-ecological knowledge could avoid tyranny and trampling of small decisions.