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This chapter develops a model of strategic problem-solving in public agencies, generalizing from work on policing, regulation, and organizational problem-solving. Pragmatism adopts an ecological approach to public problems, understanding them as complex, interdependent, and only partially decomposable into simpler and more tractable problems. In response, agency problem-solving must begin in a focused way by identifying areas of tractability, but must build towards more holistic solutions. Pragmatism also supports more proactive problem-solving, in which agencies adopt a preventive stance towards public problems. Strategic problem-solving requires agencies to develop specific competencies for problem analysis and for collaboration with other stakeholders.

The chapter begins by considering what we mean by ‘health’ and by ‘inequalities’. When taken together health inequalities are often considered to be wicked problems – issues that are complex in terms of causal pathways, difficult to define and with no immediate solutions. They can pose challenges to traditional approaches to policy making and programme implementation. Furthermore, methodological approaches need to fit with the nature of the ‘problem’ i.e., responding to causal relationships in complex settings. Complexity theory provides one such approach. The chapter applies complexity theory to health inequalities by unpacking these concepts across the following dimensions: scales and boundaries; non-linear dynamics; self-organisation; and co-evolution. In so doing it is argued that we must avoid the temptation to control, isolate and reduce components of dynamic social systems to discrete elements and consider the interactions between histories, contexts and agency so as to be able to fully understand and respond to health inequalities.

Resource and environmental managers frequently must deal with ongoing change, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict, often meaning that there is not one obviously correct way to manage situations. In that context, this chapter introduces key concepts related to resource and environmental management: complex social and ecological systems, the Anthropocene, wicked problems, ambiguity, and tipping points. The characteristics of each are described, and their significance explained. In addition, experiences from Tanzania, the Philippines, the United States, and India are presented to illustrate the importance of these concepts in practical resource and environmental management situations. Rangarirai Taruvinga shares a guest statement in which he explores the pressures and options related to social-ecological complexity in Swaziland in Africa.

This chapter describes a collaborative research initiative bringing together academics and practitioners interested in how those engaged in policy and practice use, misuse or fail to use, knowledge on health promotion to modify and improve their work. It starts from the premise that health promotion is a ‘wicked issue’ and draws on theories of knowledge exchange and translation in an effort better to tackle complex problems. The chapter employs two contrasting examples: a series of knowledge translation workshops at Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, and the author’s experience as a consultant to WHO Regional Office for Europe during the preparation of its 2012 European Action Plan for Strengthening Public Health Capacities and Services. Both case studies highlight the importance of context, culture and politics in knowledge translation. The chapter also offers insights into how academic researchers should endorse their role in complex processes of knowledge translation.

This chapter identifies problems of sustainability as systemic action problems and presents illustrative case studies in environmental governance: the management of energy, water, and food systems. It begins by examining the widely discussed idea that problems of sustainability are wicked problems, and argues that systemic complexity and decisional complexity are the factors fundamentally involved in such problems. This opening discussion of the nature of sustainability problems and the case studies that follow bring together and illustrate thematic strands of the preceding chapters, including the costs, benefits, and hazards of complexity, the respective roles of market and government mechanisms, and trans-boundary environmental governance. The illustrative cases concern the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Australia’s National Water Management System, and the changing patterns of food production in the Mekong Region of Southeast Asia. The cases progress in this way from the local and regional to the national and international, and all are concerned in one way or another with relationships between water, food, and energy systems: the widely discussed water-food-energy nexus.

Explaining how policies may be changed over time is a fundamental theme common to the study of public policy and governance. Scholars have developed several competing perspectives on how and why policy change occurs; while policy practitioners are largely focused on the successful negotiation and implementation of policy improvement and occasional major policy reforms. This chapter focuses on frameworks for explaining how policy agendas shift, how policy change occurs, and how some proposals for change are constrained. In the real world of complexity, wicked problems and mediatised debate, the authority and capacity of the state are subjected to many countervailing pressures. The explanation of policy change must take account not only of how Ministers are involved in setting priorities and mobilising political support, but also how public agencies manage the policy process – including their contributions to policy framing, policy design, engagement, evaluation, and managing conflicting views within civil society. In the governance era, policy change has become a complex and nuanced enterprise. This chapter reconsiders the utility of classic accounts of policy dynamics concerning evidence-based policy, ideology, and populist partisanship in addressing complex policy challenges.

Delivering broader access to decent, affordable housing is a wicked problem – a seemingly intractable challenge that has incubated in a political space. There are numerous competing explanations of the housing cost crisis and each explanation reveals a particular political leaning and a preference for either incremental action (aimed at protecting the status quo) or deeper structural change, which would be difficult to achieve given that the housing crisis is differently experienced depending on the market position of particular groups and actors (generating divergent self-interest). This chapter unpacks the nature of the housing crisis as a wicked problem, showing how and why remedies are highly contested and single actions are unlikely to deliver the fundamental change that is needed – largely because housing has become the centre of economic gravity in many countries, owing to the financialisation of land and housing and increased reliance on asset sheet growth, as a substitute for productivity growth.

This chapter discusses complex problems from the perspective of turbulence and suggests that the temporal character of problems becomes more visible from this perspective. We call problems that exhibit temporal complexity “unruly problems” because they are hard to fathom, behave unpredictably and irregularly, and talk back when you try to control them. Unruly problems resemble wicked, intractable, or messy problems, but the label unruly calls attention to the dynamic and sometimes paradoxical interaction of problems and solutions. The chapter argues that a strategy of probing is useful for dealing with unruly problems. We identify the elements of this probing strategy using the acronym READS, which refers to the rapid, exploratory, adaptive, distributed, and small character of experimental probes.

This chapter revisits the debate about New Labour’s overall strategy for reform in the public and health services introduced in Chapter 2 in the light of the empirical case study data. It argues that network-based reforms were one important strand of reforming. Performance Assessment Framework is used to conclude that the performance of our networks was decidedly mixed, although there was a subgroup of higher performers. Many of them displayed ‘wicked problem’ conditions. A qualified defence of managed networks is offered and it is argued that ‘wicked problems’ may increase in importance still further in the future: these conditions are pervasive in practice and should be persuasive in policy design. Co-existence of NPM and network governance elements with little sign of more radical organizational changes is found and an ‘ideal type’ of a positive managed network form to guide future health policy making is outlined.

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale of the book and outlines its major themes. It seeks to generate an overall interpretation of health policy reforming under New Labour based on empirically grounded and comparative case studies of managed networks drawn from four health policy arenas. It highlights our distinctive contribution to the debate, bringing in organizing concepts of wicked problems and governmentality. It suggests that if managed networks are to make substantial progress then they need to be supported in three key domains (cross-organizational ICTs, cross-organizational learning, and lateral leadership). It finally provides signposts to each of the chapters in turn.

Management of marine resources by governments is often wrought with wicked environmental problems. These types of problems involve highly complex and controversial issues, high levels of scientific uncertainty on risks, intermingling political/regulatory complexities, a regularly evolving ecological and social environment, and diverse stakeholder values and viewpoints. Productive and lasting decision-making on wicked environmental problems is difficult, especially for marine issues that are more difficult to access, study, and understand. Combine this with more traditional, linear governmental policy or decision-making approaches, and effective marine resource management can seem near impossible. Using the author’s extensive experience as a U.S. federal regulator, this chapter will use the case study on the effects of marine sound on marine mammals to illustrate what makes an issue wicked, including how identity-level conflict further complicates an issue, and the inadequacies of more typical, linear policy or decision-making approaches in taming a wicked issue. For highly complex issues like wicked environmental problems, it is imperative that governments shift their environmental policy or decision-making paradigm from a linear, expert-driven approach to a long-term participatory, iterative, deliberative, and collaborative process. This chapter will also describe such an alternative decision-making approach that brings diverse interests (technical and non-technical) to the table to collaborate, create trade-offs and synergies, and ultimately foster effective action.

There were three stages in the development of environmental thought in the United States. The first stage occurred in the 1960s, when the environmental movement focused on protecting human health, safety, and welfare from visible harms caused by pollution. The second stage encompassed less visible and less demonstrable dangers, such as smaller amounts of hazardous wastes and toxic substances that were possibly carcinogenic, whose sources and effects could not be easily identified and quantified. In the third and current stage, the emphasis shifts to maintaining biodiversity and the “health” or “integrity” of biological systems. The new conservationism poses problems known as “wicked” problems, which value-neutral science is unable to state or answer. This chapter first considers the distinction between science and “trans-science” as well as the concept of “wicked” problems, along with risk assessment and environmental regulation. It then examines the new environmentalism and its limitations, including an emphasis on the “health of ecosystems”.

This chapter examines traditional differences between science and non-science, theories and practices related to instruction, and learning with technology. Furthermore, it focuses on the concept of design for learning and its role in e-learning. The vision of the chapter is to show the relationship between technical advancement and effective practices in online learning. It continues the discussion by elaborating on important topics such as wicked contemporary problems, a rhetorical design perspective, and human–computer interaction. Later parts of the chapter discuss the usability perspective toward instruction and learning with technology along with the triangulation of individuals, activities, and artifacts, referred to as a communication triangle. Various strategies and models in the chapter help explain the preceding issues, with specific illustrations.

Using the cultural theory pioneered by Dame Mary Douglas, this chapter argues that ‘wicked’ transboundary problems can best be addressed with ‘clumsy’ or ‘polyrational’ solutions, i.e. policies and strategies that combine a variety of perspectives on what the issue at hand is, and how it should be resolved. It also discusses the ‘messy’ institutional settings in which such creative solutions can be expected to emerge, and explains why relatively little polyrationality abounds in international governance. After contrasting the disastrous impact that the WHO’s Health for All by the Year 2000 strategy had on the battle against malaria with the successful 2008 Global Malaria Action Plan, the chapter concludes by spelling out how international organisations can contribute to the emergence of clumsy solutions and messy institutions.

This chapter addresses the ‘wicked problems’ in health and social care, against historical policy failures in the care of older people. The cases contrast Regional, a large network, spanning public, voluntary, and private sector organizations with Metropolitan, a smaller network, across the public and private sectors. Despite efforts towards inclusivity, Regional network makes slow progress in the formulation of strategy and precise targets. It fails to develop a collective leadership and local authority leaders struggle to influence health care professionals and cross-sectoral partners. Metropolitan makes better progress, working within a tighter group of mainly health care professionals, to achieve specific targets. But it fails to develop external links and secure resources for its work. The cases illustrate that a high degree of inter-sectoral complexity creates specific demands to manage both organizational and knowledge boundaries through collaborative practice.

This final chapter recapitulates the major findings of the book as well as suggesting a future research agenda. It seeks to bring networks back in to the literature on health policy reforming under New Labour where they have been too often neglected. It offers a qualified defence of managed networks as a governance mode under pervasive ‘wicked problem’ conditions. It reviews some other recent UK studies of health care networks which broadly confirm our findings. It also outlines the utility of the governmentality perspective adopted. It is then argued that at least some networks will endure so that they are more than ‘yesterday’s reform’ and warrant further attention. It considers the differences in the health policy context between 2002 and 2012 but argues that networks still have an important role to play. It finally outlines a possible future research agenda.

The governing capacity of states is highly dependent on organizational factors. In this chapter, we develop our theoretical perspective by showing how an organization theory approach to the state helps uncover new aspects of the state and governing. Essential properties of governing are highlighted: environmental complexity; wicked problems and overload. It is argued that governments are far from the rational, coordinated, and problem-solving entities as which they are routinely presented. Failures and frustrations concerning the realization of ideals lead to visions of improved governing, and to reforms. The conditions for governing are shaped by the increasingly organized character of social life.

This chapter focuses on what problem situations middle managers face in turbulent times, and how they seek to resolve these problems. Based on a survey of middle managers in Norwegian municipalities, the survey results show that these middle managers encounter many different kinds of problem situations of varying character. Surprisingly, the data indicate that when these managers seek to solve problems they do so by using few resources and there is little variation in the resources they utilize. These findings question the normative approach of the wicked problem literature. At the same time, the survey suggests that middle manager problem-solving is better characterized as a form of craftsmanship than as a rational–analytical process. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.