Mission Impossible? Explaining De-Amalgamation Success Through Heresthetic, Rhetoric and Opportunity Costs

In general, most people would deem the pursuit of de-amalgamation, by a forcibly merged local government against the wishes of an incumbent state government keen to protect its legacy, as “mission impossible.” However, precisely this outcome recently occurred. In this paper, we seek to explain this surprising success principally with reference to the concept of heresthetic, which is said to be the political art of bringing about surprising wins. In so doing, we first introduce the theory of heresthetic, before seeking to push recent extensions to the literature regarding opportunity costs, a little further. Following this, we develop a heuristic that draws on both heresthetic and its better-known cousin rhetoric. Thereafter we consider our case study of a surprising de-amalgamation with a view to testing the explanatory power of the hueristic. We conclude with some reflections on what public policy practitioners and scholars alike might learn to assist them to bring about surprising wins in the future.