Tackling wicked problems a public policy perspective pdf

The australian public service aps is increasingly being tasked with solving very complex policy problems. And without wishing to hammer the public sector, it is usually those who try to follow old rules to solve these new wicked problems. Australian public service commission published canberra. Aboriginal, torres strait islander and other first nations people are advised that this catalogue contains names, recordings and images of deceased people and other content that may be culturally sensitive. In the second section, we note that there has been very little attention to the implications for policy and public management of how wicked problems are identified, understood and managed. Tackling the wicked problem of measuring what matters. Tackling wicked problems a public policy perspective pba. Making policy makers, researcher, education leaders, and assessment developers. National collaborating centre for healthy public policy. There is no idealized end state to arrive at, and so approaches to wicked problems should be tractable ways to improve a situation rather than solve it. Contemporary government challenges australian public service commission. Wicked problems are a variety of particularly complex, persistent and resistant problems in public policy.

In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve. Another definition is a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point. They require thinking that is capable of grasping the big picture. The concept of wicked problems has attracted increasing focus in policy research, but the implications for public organizations have received less attention.

They are utilized to tackle complex, wicked problems that involve a lack of consensus about their nature, causes and suitable solutions. This article examines the main organizational and cognitive dimensions emerging from the research literature on wicked problems. Successfully solving or at least managing these wicked policy problems requires a reassessment of some of the traditional ways of. In the areas of public policy, software development, and project design, experts such as peter degrace, leslie. Traditional policy thinking suggests that the best way to work through a policy problem is to follow an orderly and linear process, working from problem to solution. First, a general critique was launched from the perspective of systems. Although the term has been used in a variety of ways and in distinct areas, the origins of the concept are almost always traced back to a 1973 publication by horst rittel and marvin webber in their work on urban planning and design. Pdf some of the most difficult policy problems of the modern era have been.