Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global EnvironmentWicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions – diagnoses and prescriptions for environmental ills

Wicked problems. The idea’s not a terribly new one. They were first identified by Horst Rittel in the late 1960s. Rittel was a Professor of Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and he was very concerned to characterise social problems. So the concept emerged in the context of social problems. He contrasted what he saw as some of the relatively easy challenges of the late 19 and early 20 century with the more difficult challenges that he saw facing planners at the tail end of the 20 century. In other words, he felt that we’d done the no-brainers like putting sewers underground, we’d done the sensible things like piping water into people’s homes to avoid typhus and other water-borne diseases. But now we were dealing with a qualitatively different set of problems the erasure, for example, of complete neighbourhoods in the name of urban redevelopment, the problems of siting freeways and transportation systems and so forth. Not only did he contrast the problems that he saw facing society in the late 1960s with those of an earlier historical period, he also contrasted his idea of wicked problems with what he saw as being the much more straightforward puzzle-solving kinds of activities, characterizing mathematics and the natural sciences, which he saw as really dealing with much more straightforward, as I say, puzzle-solving kinds of activities rather than the complex problems of social policy.