ABSTRACT

Wicked problems continuously emerge in the field of environmental governance. Characterized by goal conflicts, complexity, and uncertainty, wicked problems typically call for participatory policy designs. However, the effects of participation are widely unclear, given the indefinite nature of solutions to wicked problems. This research sheds light on this debate by developing and applying a systematic structural approach to assess policy mixes for emerging wicked problems. Based on a review of literature in the field of public policy and environmental governance, we identify eight assessment criteria matching three dimensions of wicked problems: coherence, consistency, congruence to address conflicts; comprehensiveness and diversity to address complexity; and adaptability, reversibility, and robustness to address informational uncertainty. The concept is demonstrated taking as an example two recently proposed policy mixes to address pharmaceutical freshwater pollution in Germany. This concept demonstration suggests that policy mixes resulting from desk research and participatory processes differ in the way they address wicked problems. These results contribute to systematically assess the role of participation in designing policy mixes for emerging wicked policy problems and open up for more advanced discussions on the role of structural approaches in public policy analyses.

摘要

环境治理领域的恶问题不断涌现。以目标冲突、复杂性和不确定性为特征的棘手问题通常需要参与式政策设计。然而，鉴于解决棘手问题的不确定性，参与的影响还很不明朗。这项研究通过开发和应用系统的结构方法来评估针对新出现的邪恶问题的政策组合，从而阐明了这一争论。基于对公共政策和环境治理领域文献的回顾，我们确定了八项评估标准，这些标准与邪恶问题的三个维度相匹配：连贯性、一致性、解决冲突的一致性；解决复杂性的全面性和多样性；以及解决信息不确定性的适应性、可逆性和稳健性。以最近提出的两个解决德国制药淡水污染的政策组合为例，证明了这一概念。这一概念演示表明，案头研究和参与过程产生的政策组合在解决棘手问题的方式上有所不同。这些结果有助于系统地评估参与在为新出现的邪恶政策问题设计政策组合中的作用，并为更深入地讨论结构性方法在公共政策分析中的作用开辟了道路。