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Most policy-relevant work on climate change in the social sciences either analyzes costs and benefits of particular policy options against important but often narrow sets of objectives or attempts to explain past successes or failures. We argue that an \"applied forward reasoning\" approach is better suited for social scientists seeking to address climate change, which we characterize as a \"super wicked\" problem comprising four key features: time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally. These four features combine to create a policy-making \"tragedy\" where traditional analytical techniques are ill equipped to identify solutions, even when it is well recognized that actions must take place soon to avoid catastrophic future impacts. To overcome this tragedy, greater attention must be given to the generation of path-dependent policy interventions that can \"constrain our future collective selves.\" Three diagnostic questions result that orient policy analysis toward understanding how to trigger sticky interventions that, through progressive incremental trajectories, entrench support over time while expanding the populations they cover. Drawing especially from the literature on path dependency, but inverting it to develop policy responses going forward, we illustrate the plausibility of our framework for identifying new areas of research and new ways to think about policy interventions to address super wicked problems.

Based on a review of citizenship and citizen participation in politics and policy studies, this article reveals diverse concepts of citizens and citizenship and their changing roles within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the pandemic will result in bringing citizens back into the policy process, given that active participation of citizens in solving wicked social problems has been emphasised. Our results suggest that the pandemic will result in a return of public citizens as their voluntary, active participation and coproduction practices are expected to increase.

PurposeThis paper examines the relevance of the wicked problem continuum, particularly the emergence of super wicked challenges for public leadership researchers. Contemporary theorizing on public leadership adequately deals with tame challenges, struggles with wicked problems and remains in the dark with regards to the implications of super wicked problemsDesign/methodology/approachThe wicked problem continuum provides a typology or set of dilemmas running from tame to wicked through to super wicked problems. These different problem types are treated as if they were on a three-zone continuum in which the difficulty of solving or substantially reducing the problem varies from relatively low to very high.FindingsWe delineate the three-problem contexts in the wicked problem continuum and discuss the ideal type of organization thriving in each zone. We then posit two opposing wicked problem interpretations-taming and wilding- for those interested in public leadership. Taming calls for prudent, results-oriented leaders employing tried and tested practices. Wilding demands leaders who test the status quo by seeking alternatives.Social implicationsOn the global leadership agenda, wilding problems—those calling attention to the super wicked zone—are escalating. Despite this, public leaders' training lacks a framework for making sense of these urgent and publicly contentious super wicked problems.Originality/valuePublic policy researchers are beginning to direct attention to super wicked problems such as climate change, and pandemics. This work introduces the wicked problem continuum and demonstrates its pertinence for researchers of public leadership.

Contemporary design has extended its borders from information, product, and service design to tame wicked problems. This article sees it as important to equip design professionals with tools designed specifically for wicked problems, as using tools for simple problems for wicked ones may hinder the process. This is even more important today as designers, especially in the fields of service, social, and transition design, face more and more social issues that are wicked in their nature. Through literature review, it was sought to understand the characteristics of the wicked problems and the visual tools to tame them, like Mess MappingTM, Dialogue Mapping, General Morphological Analysis, and others. One of the findings is that designers should play a collaborative and intermediary role in a group solving/taming wicked problems. This article stresses the importance of a collaborative strategy in wicked problem solving in comparison with competitive and authoritarian strategies. It is important to recognize the role of design in addressing contemporary problems that acquire change. Based on the analysis of the tools, future studies in the area are recommended: to improve the visual ergonomics of the tools; compare the tools designed exclusively for the wicked problems with the ones that can also be used for simple problems; and discuss in the future how these tools work in collaboration with listening and empathy. This is also important because, after all, these tools are all related to complex stakeholder management. Designers should also be better equipped with organizational change and management studies.

The current coronavirus outbreak may provide an illustrative analogy for sustainability challenges, exemplifying how challenges such as climate change may become wicked problems demanding novel and drastic solution attempts.

Student dissatisfaction with assessment and feedback is a significant challenge for most UK  Higher Education Institutions according to a key national survey. This paper explores the meaning, challenges and potential opportunities for enhancement in assessment and feedback within the authors' own institution as illustrative of approaches that can be taken elsewhere. Using a qualitative design, a review of assessment and feedback, which included an exploration of students' perceptions, was made in one College of the University. The findings highlighted variations in assessment and feedback practice across the College with dissatisfaction typically being due to misunderstanding or miscommunication between staff and students. Drawing on the review, we assert in this paper that students' dissatisfaction with assessment and feedback is not a 'tame' problem for which a straightforward solution exists. Instead, it is a 'wicked' problem that requires a complex approach with multiple interventions.

This article examines the emphasis on facts and data in public discourse, and the belief that they provide a certainty necessary for public judgment and collective action. The heart of this belief is what I call the “myth of the Absolute,” which is the belief that by basing our judgment and actions on an Absolute we can avoid errors and mistakes. Myths of the Absolute can help us deal with wicked problems such as climate change, but they also have a downside. This article explores the experience behind these myths, to better understand how they describe and mediate our experiences of uncertainty, then relates these myths to debates about climate change. I conclude by describing how to engage these myths in a way that promotes better public discourse—and thus better public judgment and collective action—by telling these stories in such a way that we poke and prod wherever the story is not.

The world is not on track to achieve Agenda 2030—the approach chosen in 2015 by all UN member states to engage multiple stakeholders for the common goal of sustainable development. The creation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) arguably offered a new take on sustainable development by adopting hybrid and principle-based governance approaches, where public, private, not for profit and knowledge-institutions were invited to engage around achieving common medium-term targets. Cross-sector partnerships and multi-stakeholder engagement for sustainability have consequently taken shape. But the call for collaboration has also come with fundamental challenges to meaningful engagement strategies—when private enterprises try to establish elaborate multi-stakeholder configurations. How can the purpose of businesses be mitigated through multi-stakeholder principle-based partnerships to effectively serve the purpose of a common sustainability agenda? In selecting nine scholarly contributions, this special issue aims at advancing this discourse. To stimulate further progress in business studies, this introductory essay, furthermore, identifies three pathways for research on multi-stakeholder engagement processes in support of the Decade of Action along three coupling lines: multi-sector alignment (relational coupling), operational perception alignment (cognitive coupling) and goal and strategic alignment (material coupling).

Despite the burgeoning literature on the governance and impact of cross-sector partnerships in the past two decades, the debate on how and when these collaborative arrangements address globally relevant problems and contribute to systemic change remains open. Building upon the notion of wicked problems and the literature on governing such wicked problems, this paper defines harnessing problems in multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as the approach of taking into account the nature of the problem and of organizing governance processes accordingly. The paper develops an innovative analytical framework that conceptualizes MSPs in terms of three governance processes (deliberation, decision-making and enforcement) harnessing three key dimensions of wicked problems (knowledge uncertainty, value conflict and dynamic complexity). The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides an illustrative case study on how this analytical framework describes and explains organizational change in partnerships from a problem-based perspective. The framework can be used to better understand and predict the complex relationships between MSP governance processes, systemic change and societal problems, but also as a guiding tool in (re-)organizing governance processes to continuously re-assess the problems over time and address them accordingly.

Digital solutions are increasingly used to address “wicked problems” that are locally embedded but require global approaches. Scaling these solutions internationally is imperative for their success, but to date we know little about this process. Using a qualitative case study methodology, our paper analyzes how four digital solutions driven by the United Nations are built and how they scale internationally. These solutions address wicked problems through artificial intelligence, blockchain, and geospatial mapping, and are embedded in networks of partners which evolve during scaling to create unique ecosystem roles and configurations. We identify different ecosystem roles and find that the specific properties of digital solutions – modularity, generativity and affordances – enable either adaptation or replication during scaling. Building on these insights, we derive a typology of four different types of international scaling, which vary in their ecosystem versatility (how the ecosystem changes across locations) and the local adaptation of the application (the problems the solution addresses). This study presents a new way to examine the replication and adaptation dilemma for ecosystems and extends internationalization theory to the digital world.