"Wicked Problem" & Domination of Knowledge in a Public Policy

Writer: VSH (13 March 2023)

Having a short lunch break in a coffee shop, I came up with a prompt reflection when over-hearing someone next to my table complaint: "Why do people have to go down the street to protect against a development plan or policy? Sometimes, a national plan or policy aims for the common good for people, but how come do some people still protest?" His/her complaint stroke my brain cell that contains a notion of "wicked problem" which helps us understanding the extent to which scientific knowledge of some domains, being used to support a development policy or plan, is somehow dominant and contesting against that of other domains.

Have you ever seen a loud public protest or demonstration against a professionally designed development policy, law or program? Let take an example of a well-known public protest against American War on Vietnam in the 1970s. What does it mean to you?

My reflection from the idea of a wicked problem is that the bottom-up social movement exemplifies a confrontation between professionalism and unprofessionalism in the national foreign policy of America--between a group of policy intellectuals, most of whom were economists and legal professionals, who were over-confident in shaping a perfect "future history" of America by predicting desired outcomes from Vietnam War, and untrained ordinary people who were in attempt to re-orient the outcomes of the same policy by injecting their voices through public protest. From this example, does it seem difficult for you, readers, to define what knowledge means, and how much should you trust to a scientific knowledge? If knowledge from economists and lawyers who were orchestrating behind the US scheme of Vietnam War was reliable, how come did US people with humanitarian hearts went down the street to protest?

To level down the abstraction, let me take another simpler example at a dentist clinic. When you have a problem with cavity, you will unquestionability entrust a professionally trained person, known as a dentist, to take care of the well-being of your teeth. What would you do if the dentist mistakenly pulled off three different healthy teeth? He then told you not to question his professionalism because pulling other three healthy teeth will secure your long-term oral health. But the problem is that your budget is not enough to pay for the over-service and you cannot wait for the long operation as your ten-million-deal meeting is coming up. In that situation, what would you do?—stay calm and let the dentist do as his professionalism says? Or counterargue against the dentist's wish?

In relation to this phenomenon, UCB-based professors, Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, introduced a notion of “wicked problems” saying that the sophistication or dominance of professionalism in planning theory is fading due to a juncture whereby (1) goal formulation, (2) problem definition and (3) equity issues meet. The juncture is a point of dilemma in which policy designers are suggested to learn the wickedness of a problem before jumping to optimal solutions, even though sometimes there are no solutions.

Likewise, going back to the earlier example of anti-Vietnam War protest, we will see a lot of similarities in terms of professionalism and unprofessionalism in policy making. A significant lesson learnt from these examples is that the ordinary people are in fact the clients who pay—somehow through tax, to the professional policy planners to satisfy the client’s values and interests. It is therefore obvious that social policy planners are no longer “immune” from popular or social attacks in various forms such as demonstrations, protests, or even riots. In fact, the planners of policies, law or any action plan tend to define the systematic issues in syntax of verbs—for instance, how to deal, how to maintain security and how to ensure development impacts, rather than in syntax of nouns—what are the components that an issue constitute? In other word, those planners seem over confident as if they know pretty sure what approaches to be used for dealing the issues, without bothering to find out what are they composed off.

For this reason, this article provides Cambodian policymakers and politicians, in general, with a brief note now how to look at a development issue as a wicked problem, by which it aims public planners not to jump over talking about “optimal solutions” to an issue unless severe qualifications and components of the issue are well recognized, and to bear in mind that scientific or expertise knowledge is not a ready-made answer to all issues.

To iron ambiguities, the idea of wicked problems is simply correlated with the breakdown of Mass Society upon which global societies are believed to be homogenous as interests and values are shared in commonality. For example, America’s Melting Pot, which aims for homogenous societies beautifully made for all and lived by all, now is experiencing a great divide and increased heterogeneity—most people do not hold a common aim or behave in similar ways, but instead share values and interests which differ from those of the other groups.

To proof this, I would turn your attention to a dichotomy of US immigration policy between republican Trump whose protectionism results in an increase of immigrant deportations, and democrat Obama whose DACA program saved some 790,000 young immigrants from deportations. In that context, the ideal of a Perfect Union as stated in the Constitution (a piece of text that brought the colonized America to the first World superpower) may be not homogenously right as the American Pot now is not hot enough to melt down all of its peoples into one platform of uniformity. Obviously, it becomes nothing more than a rhetoric to attract labor from other parts of the world to keep up the engine of America's capitalism. Nonetheless, maybe states like Rhode Island still make more sense to a Perfect Union for a reason that immigrants from different places could be more integrated socially and economically if compared to other diverse States like California and Texas.

The foresaid empirical evidence is not enough in terms of quantity. Yet, it makes enough sense that the current problems in today’s mass societies (heterogenous societies) do not always require a tame solution or a one-size-fit-all solution due to the fact that problems are getting even more diverse or wicked in terms of geographical, racial, social, cultural and economical differences in one society. Hence, I can drop a saying that we are encouraged to look for solutions (verb syntax: how to solve?) but are even more encouraged to study first about the complexity of an issue (noun syntax: what does an issue compose?) before jumping to the verb syntax.

In this circumstance, participation, accountability and transparency shall be more focused to ensure that peoples from different backgrounds of life deserve the right to be heard in the progress of policy planning. In particular, the right to science in policy planning and implementation is a core principle which allows scientists (producers of knowledge) and lay people (beneficiary of knowledge) to be served with their rights to scientific knowledge with freedom and responsibility. A wicked problem is one concern but the inability to embrace an inclusive knowledge co-production in the process of solving the problem is even more concerning.

Thanks for reading my blog!