Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Associate Professor, Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Management and Accounting, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Business and Public Administration, Faculty of Governance, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
One of the most fundamental topics discussed in the process of public policy is problemology. The mechanism of identifying and prioritizing public issues is one of the essentials of correct and efficient policy making, which frees policymakers from superficial, one-dimensional and short-term views and shapes public demand. If a problem is not identified correctly and for various reasons; such as personal and group interests, to be preferred over more important and effective public problem, or even to be incomplete and misunderstood; It will not only reduce the effectiveness of the political system, but it will also affect future policies; Because misrecognition of the problem will affect its policy making and will not produce a favorable result. One of the most important types of problems is the unstructured or wicked problems. The concept of " wicked problems " has been used in the literature of social, economic and management sciences since the 1970s, and has been greatly expanded since then. Some of the most important public policy problems in Iran have more or less resembled malignant issues. Issues such as the environment and water, the banking system, the tax system, the state of pension funds and exiting the recession have serious similarities to the wicked problems. The literature and knowledge generated on wicked problems can help improve our understanding of public policy in this area.
These problems, which challenge governance structures, skill bases and current organizational capacities, require deep understanding by governments. Recognizing and analyzing such issues requires the use of multiple viewpoints and analyzes far from superficiality. Facing such problems, there is no opportunity for trial and error, and every attempt to solve the problem has heavy consequences, especially when there is no set of solutions. Although the term " wicked problems " is widely used in many fields of research today, there is no consensus on its theoretical foundations and its application to research. With the development and increasing complexity of the systems, it becomes necessary to create special mechanisms of governance, which is referred to as the governance of problems, and in order to maintain a responsive system to solve problems, governments need such governance, which uses people's participation and methods. Reflectors of the issues should act better. Governance of issues is a new type of social construction in the field of problem solving, power play and stakeholder participation. The governance of problems pays more attention to complicated problems, and the emergence of its concept was related to the inefficiency of solving problems, which caused the necessity of governing problems. Therefore, when the governance of problems is mentioned, it mainly refers to wicked problem. The purpose of this article is to study and review the existing literature in the field of wicked problems to lead to the creation of a framework including concepts, approaches and governance in this field. For this purpose, the current research is based on a systematic review method on the existing research in this field. For this purpose, a large number of articles with the title of wicked problems were selected from reliable databases such as Google scholar, Science direct, Springer, Web of Science. Then among them, the articles that had the keywords Wicked problems, Unstructured problems and Wicked problems governance were selected and the rest were discarded. Among the remaining studies, 4 studies with richer literature were selected. The results showed that the concept of wicked problems is often associated with social pluralism (interests and values of multiple stakeholders), institutional complexity and scientific uncertainty. Also, the governance related to such issues becomes necessary due to the complexity and increase in the number of problems, change in the way of people's participation and pluralism of vision. In other words, it is necessary to improve the fields of knowledge about wicked problems in a system, to deal with the underlying causes of such issues, and to improve the cooperation of stakeholders in the governance of these problems. The main strategies for responding wicked problems include: avoidance and denial, mandatory controls, management of small problems, technocratic problem solving, gradual adjustment, stakeholder cooperation, and prevention. Finally, in order to implement the governance of wicked problems in organizations, three factors of policies, interactions and conflicts of political and social stakeholders, and research and development mechanisms should be taken into consideration.
Keywords
Main Subjects
)