Wicked Problems and Cooperation

Today I reviewed the Rittel and Webber 1973 piece on planning and wicked problems as well as skimming through Craig Thomas' Bureaucratic Landscapes which details the unmandated cooperation between agencies to increase and protect biodiversity in California. Both provided some valuable insight.

The Wicked Problem piece is a highly regarded paper that develops a concept that is used very frequently today, especially in environmental management circles. The concept is built out of the lack of solutions and whole-society utility failures of the great society and war on poverty programs. Turns out we could not engineer our way out of these issues. Many of society's problems are beyond the capacity of mechanical solution. Simply defining the problem and locating it become highly controversial and invoke challenges and conflict.

One source of these problems is social heterogeneity. Advanced societies have not conformed to a standard set of values and preferences. Instead their differences have increased. Many different publics exist within a society with different preferences and beliefs. When a problem is shown to have many possible solutions, and those solutions depend upon the definition and location of the problem, and the outcomes of the solutions themselves are hard to measure or observe and are rife with normative assessment, the true/false dichotomy to choose solutions in engineering is replaced with a good/bad value-laden one. These values are fought over between the publics and professional administrators and planners cannot be deferred to for technical solution.

Fire is definitely one of these problems, as is biodiversity. We don't want fire, but without fire fire is worse. We want endangered species but we also want socioeconomic activity and accessibility to our public lands. These situations of tradeoffs between different definitions, locations and solutions of problems are wicked indeed. Collaboratives are described as better ways to handle these problems. But as Koontx and Thomas point out, this does not mean that they actually are.

The one other interesting point I wish to share at this point from the Thomas book is the declaration that mandated coordination is less effective than unmandated coordination. This question is interesting in that in Colorado community wildfire prevention plans (CWPPs) are mandated at the county level along with a collaborative approach. This might be an interesting experiment for investigating the difference between mandated and nonmandated collaboration. The constitutional level rules about collaboration can influence outcomes further down the line.