Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously

Too often we hear that environmental and agricultural problems are just about there being too many people on the planet, or consumers improving their buying habits, or getting the right ethics or virtues or the best science. Framing matters within a single solution, or ‘‘panacea,’’ as Ostrom et al. refer to it (Ostrom et al. 2007), assumes we already know well in advance that the problems can be understood so compactly. Yet it makes little sense to assume that there are easily identifiable drivers for climate change, animal welfare, natural resource management, and sustainable agriculture or engineering, among many other complex problem areas that we face today. Each of these subjects is problematic in multiple ways. Each of them involves interaction between diverse forms of human conduct and complicated biological processes that are not fully understood. The distinguished ecologist Donald Ludwig has suggested that such problems cannot be addressed through the paradigm of management and are best approached as wicked (Ludwig 2001). Ludwig was referring to a 1973 paper in the urban planning literature by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. Wicked problems are not simply complex. According to Rittel and Webber, there are ten aspects to these special challenges that should be respected and grappled with by those who seek to respond to them. They begin by noting that every way of formulating a problem (e.g., as economic, as environmental, as social, etc.) implies some solutions (e.g., carbon trading, regulation, international aid, etc.) and excludes other solutions from being considered. The ontology of problem formulation has implications for the epistemology of problem response. Thus, to describe climate change as an economic problem means that one has already limited oneself to particular economic solutions to addressing it. Because proposed solutions are so closely tied to problem formulations, disagreements among stakeholders who foresee themselves as being impacted differently by the solutions can take the form of