Tackling Wicked Problems

Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination

John Harris, Valerie A Brown, Jacqueline Russell, John Harris, Valerie A Brown, Jacqueline Russell

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136531446
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Biological Sciences
• Categoria: Ecology

From climate change to GM foods, we are increasingly confronted with complex, interconnected social and environmental problems that span disciplines, knowledge bases and value systems. This book offers a transdisciplinary, open approach for those working towards resolving these 'wicked' problems and highlights the crucial role of this 'transdisciplinary imagination' in addressing the shift to sustainable futures.

Tackling Wicked Problems provides readers with a framework and practical examples that will guide the design and conduct of their own open-ended enquiries. In this approach, academic disciplines are combined with personal, local and strategic understanding and researchers are required to recognise multiple knowledge cultures, accept the inevitability of uncertainty, and clarify their own and others' ethical positions. The authors then comment on fifteen practical examples of how researchers have engaged with the opportunities and challenges of conducting transdisciplinary inquiries.

The book gives those who are grappling with complex problems innovative methods of inquiry that will allow them to work collaboratively towards long-term solutions.

Part 1

The Ideas

1

Towards a Just and Sustainable Future

Valerie A. Brown, Peter M. Deane, John A. Harris and Jacqueline Y. Russell

Introduction

[T]here is an unexpected quality about the [sociological] imagination, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable… There is a playfulness of mind at the back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world. (Mills, 1959/1970, p233)

This is the first human generation in which the majority will live in crowded cities, whose actions will flood low-lying islands and whose rate of resource use exceeds 2.5 times the production capacity of the planet (Melkert and Vos, 2008). Well-founded projections suggest that future supplies of the air we need to breathe, the water to drink and the food to eat are in doubt (Schneider et al, 2007). Global issues such as these generate local issues. And it is the sum of the local issues that has generated the global issues in the first place. Thus, we can appear to be locked in an endless spiral from which there is no escape.

As for many other issues facing the world this century, the human need for food, energy and water at first appeared to be satisfied by the monolithic solutions of intensive agriculture, the harnessing of fossil fuels and the building of large dams. However, each claim of a miracle solution was tempered by subsequent events. Intensive agriculture left sterile soils; the release of fossil fuel gases endangers our planet’s protective atmosphere; and big dams displace whole societies and threaten major river flows. The longerterm outcomes indicate the chronic inability of narrow solutions to inform sustainable decisions in times of social and environmental change. Patterns of thought of a previous era can create serious problems for the next.

Fortunately, there are ways to frame the issues other than giving up or persisting with solutions that prove to be part of the problem. Rittel and Webber (1973) identified a class of problems that fits these planetary dilemmas. They called problems such as complex social–environmental issues ‘wicked problems’ and contrasted these with ‘tame problems’, which can be solved with existing modes of inquiry and decision-making.

A wicked problem is a complex issue that defies complete definition, for which there can be no final solution, since any resolution generates further issues, and where solutions are not true or false or good or bad, but the best that can be done at the time. Such problems are not morally wicked, but diabolical in that they resist all the usual attempts to resolve them (Rittel and Webber, 1973).

Since wicked problems are part of the society that generates them, any resolution brings with it a call for changes in that society. As well as different forms of governance and changes in ways of living, resolution of wicked problems requires a new approach to the conduct of research and to the decision-making based on that research. Rather than following the fixed trajectories of pre-existing research pathways, addressing wicked problems involves the inquirer and decision-maker in exploring the full range of investigative avenues.

So what can we ask of the decision-maker of the future? Certainly not to reject the powerful tools that led to the capacity to reduce disease, increase world food production and put a human on the moon. Rather than limiting the focus to any single avenue of inquiry, the requirement here is to be open to different ways of thinking, to use imagination to the full and to be receptive to new ideas and new directions that match the times.

The task is therefore to draw on all our intellectual resources, valuing the contributions of all the academic disciplines as well as other ways in which we construct our knowledge. And that brings the challenge of developing open transdisciplinary modes of inquiry capable of meeting the needs of the individual, the community, the specialist traditions, and influential organizations, and allows for a holistic leap of the imagination.

‘Transdisciplinary’ is taken here to be the collective understanding of an issue; it is created by including the personal, the local and the strategic, as well as specialized contributions to knowledge. This use needs to be distinguished from a multidisciplinary inquiry, which is taken to be a combination of specializations for a particular purpose, such as in a public health initiative, and from interdisciplinary, the common ground between two specializations that may develop into a discipline of its own, as it has in biochemistry. These distinctions are explored by Lawrence in Chapter 2. ‘Open’ transdisciplinarity includes the disciplines, but goes further than multi-disciplinarity to include all validated constructions of knowledge and their worldviews and methods of inquiry.

Before this book can move on to develop a conceptual framework in Chapter 3 and its related methods of inquiry in Chapters 4 and 6, it needs to be clear about why being transdisciplinary in the broad sense requires the use of imagination. Without exhausting the possibilities, imagination is associated with creativity, insight, vision and originality; and is also related to memory, perception and invention. All of these are necessary in addressing the uncertainty associated with wicked problems in a world of continual change.

In a practical sense, imagination has been central to the work of anyone who is involved in change in the society in which they live. This includes artists, philosophers, scientists, inventors, citizen activists and community leaders the world over. It should come as little surprise that imagination plays an essential role in decision-making on complex issues. Accepting a central role for the imagination does not mean that we abandon standards for assessing the validity and reliability of the knowledge so generated; it indicates the potential for change and shows us where to look.

We are accustomed to thinking of imagination as the enemy of scientific research, undermining the long-held primary goal of objectivity. This false premise ignores the common experience that it is imagination that provides the creative spark for scientific inquiry (Midgely, 1995). Controlling fuel emissions, urban violence and biodiversity loss are only a few examples of wicked problems widely acknowledged as needing to combine critical exploration with the capacity for creative thinking. Rittel and Webber (1973) point out that wicked problems such as these require us to welcome paradox (conflicting propositions can reveal root causes) and tolerate uncertainty (recognizing that there can be many solutions). An active imagination is a primary requirement if one has to deal with paradox, uncertainty and complexity.

Imagination is also required to overcome the current cultural limitations in the way that we think. Our modes of inquiry have become sharply divided among compartmentalized interests, competition for resources and self-justifying belief systems. Taken together, these create the identity that establishes the disciplines and professions as legitimate entities. These divisions have crept into our currently accepted understanding of the nature of the world even though they are humanly constructed divisions (Brown, 2008). Ideas for solutions to a wicked problem can emerge from each of the separate knowledge compartments, with little consideration of how the different contributions fit together, even though each may make a major contribution in its own right.

In times of change, the roles of the decision-maker and the researcher draw closer together. For just and sustainable decision-making, it is necessary to explore possibilities and to bring everyone along with you. In a transdisciplinary inquiry, a researcher is faced with open-ended inquiry, and with bringing together people with radically different understandings of the world. To make these linkages, decision-makers and researchers must use their imagination to place themselves in others’ shoes.

On the Ground

How, then, would an imaginative transdisciplinary inquiry address a wicked problem? The examples in Boxes 1.1 and 1.2 require solutions that challenge the current practices of the society that generated them. The first problem, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), concerns the need to avoid serious risk; the second, space travel, the challenge to grasp an important opportunity. By definition, a wicked problem has to be approached as an open system, one in which there are multiple views of how the world works and diverse ways of constructing new knowledge. An open and inclusive framework is needed to guide the attempts to address wicked problems. One such framework with its associated forms of inquiry is the topic of this book.

The dilemmas of climate change and the examples in Boxes 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Rittel and Webber (1973) propositions. Since responses to wicked problems involve changes in the society that generated them, solutions are only too likely to generate fresh problems. The many inter-related causes interact with multiple interests in the outcome, so the issue cannot be reduced to a single causal factor or a simple solution.

The question that needs to be answered for the wicked problems in Boxes 1.1 and 1.2 is: ‘Who owns the problem?’ This translates into ‘Who owns the river?’ for POPs; and to ‘Who owns space?’ for Sputnik. In each case, the questions were answered quite differently across the wide range of players, making it evident that some new approach was needed to enable any form of concerted action. Many of the supposedly integrative responses to complex, dynamic issues still privilege the original single-track thinking of their different knowledge domains. For POPs, the economic imperative for the continued use of chemicals remains the driver for the decision-making in spite of the economic, social and environmental evidence of the harm they cause (Secretariat, Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 2009). For space travel, for a decade the competition between technical specialists in all the specialized fields involved barred the way to a solution. Finally, the introduction of the efficient multidisciplinary organization of NASA, on the one hand, and the development of a national educational curriculum that fostered creative thinking, on the other, led to greater American inventiveness and the era of space (Logsdon et al, 1995).

Precedents such as these suggest that it is highly unlikely that the many interests involved in wicked problems would be willing or able to work together without an active intervention that counterbalances the competitive ethic currently in force. The many interests involved need an open-ended and collective framework that stretches their imagination to include the contributions of each other: a wicked problem in itself.

Box 1.1 Persistent organic pollutants (POPs): Wicked problem 1

The presence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in our drinking water affects every human being on Earth. Even in very low concentrations, POPs are the triggers for a number of cancers and auto-immune diseases. Their solubility in water means that oestrogens from contraceptives and chicken farms, and polychlorinated biphenyls from industry and mining wastes, slip easily into our drinking water and are not extracted by most water treatments. Banning their use would be expected to be a straightforward decision, and the United Nations Stockholm Convention on POPs accepted that recommendation in 2003. Although adopted in principle, the international convention is largely ignored in practice.

Consider if national environmental protection agencies were to become serious about enforcing control of discharges containing POPs into their rivers. There is an obvious benefit from improving the public’s health and lowering the cost of the health services. Water agencies would have lower treatment costs. Communities would avoid the fear of unknown chemicals in their drinking water, pay lower rates, have lower individual health costs and enjoy better health. A signal would be sent to global corporations that the country was serious about reducing pollutants, and so could stir them into cleaner production. The local natural environment would revert to a self-managing system, achieving efficiencies at no cost to anyone. Surely everyone wins?

But each pollutant has a commercial use. Polluting industries pay taxes and salaries, so governments are not over-zealous on enforcement of the safeguards. Scientists learn not to pursue research topics where there is no funding for the necessary transdisciplinary inquiries. Public health officials have been loath to alert communities to risk, citing a greater risk from public panic. Industry organizations arrive at a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on how much community participation it is politically safe to allow. So the status quo of divided interests persists, even in the face of the benefits to everyone from a change and the considerable risks to everyone from lack of change. The wicked problem persists.

Source: Secretariat, Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2009)

The approach taken in this book owes a debt to the classic of yesterday, C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1970). Two important reflections from Mills underpin the ideas of imagination and transdisciplinarity being addressed here. For the first, Mills emphasizes that in all studies of a society there is a need to harness the power of imagination in framing how the participants in the inquiry understand the world. For the second, he recognizes the need for an intellectual device that allows connections between multiple ways of interpreting that world. He puts forward the need for a framework that allows the researcher and the researched to use their own life experience as part of He balances this by recognizing the importance of exploring the ideas of the community of people ‘who will listen and talk’ with each other as the inquiry unfolds (Mills, 1970, p222). Mills’s ideas inform the five chapters in Part 1 of Tackling Wicked Problems.

Box 1.2 Putting a man on the moon: Wicked problem 2

A transdisciplinary solution to a wicked problem has seen the achievement of international collaboration in atmospheric space travel. A matter of superstition only three generations ago, international collaboration on space travel was then outside the furthest imagination. On 4 October 1957, the US was electrified by the Russian launch of the Sputnik, the first humanbuilt object orbiting in space. This happened while Russia was still devastated by the effort of World War II. At that time the US was enjoying the fruits of its economic resource base, technical know-how and scientific research dominating the world. The effect on US morale is difficult to recapture at this distance; but at the time the American population saw this as a serious threat to their national integrity as well as their security. The Russian history of excellence in mathematics and physics, their deeply held values for their country and their capacity for creative thinking had been hidden by dominant Western values of economic progress and efficient production.

The American response was a far-reaching inquiry into the social and technical inadequacies which led to the US being overtaken in technology and science. There were two major findings. Nationally, US education was still of the ‘jug and bottle’ variety, where the expert supplies the learner with the knowledge they believe is needed, leaving little opportunity for experiment and creativity. Organizationally, Taylorism (efficiency dividends) still held full sway; the search for efficiency dividends from breaking complex tasks into small mechanical pieces had led to space ambitions being serviced by a dozen competing speci...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by John Reid
• Part 1 The Ideas
• Part 2 The Practice
• Part 3 The Future
• Glossary
• Index