Bringing Lessons from Crisis Management into the Realm of Wicked Problems

Addressing wicked policy problems and satisfying strong citizen expectations behind them is a fundamental imperative for policy makers. Yet they do so against a backdrop of financial stringency, complexity in governing... [ view full abstract ]

Addressing wicked policy problems and satisfying strong citizen expectations behind them is a fundamental imperative for policy makers. Yet they do so against a backdrop of financial stringency, complexity in governing systems, crowded agendas and decreased confidence in the capacity and motives of government. Policy makers can continue to muddle through in navigating these pressures or look to other fields such as crisis management to learn lessons that may be help them better address wicked problems.

Crises in many ways seem to represent the ultimate in wicked problems. They can be complex, large scale, impact detrimentally on entire communities and bring strong citizen expectations for resolution. Yet perhaps counter-intuitively, crises may not be quite as wicked as we might expect. Perhaps more so than any other aspects of the public sector, crisis management involves government marshalling its energies and resources – often in a whole of government fashion – to tackle a phenomenon that generally has an acute phase with a beginning and end. While wicked problems often remain ‘wicked’, despite government efforts over many years and indeed decades, acute crisis conditions generally come to and end – notwithstanding longer term issues of investigations, future risk mitigation and so on.

In this light, the objective of this paper is to assess whether governments seeking to address wicked problems, can learn lessons from the concepts and practices of crisis management. It will ground its discussion in an empirical examination of whole-of-government responses to crises in Australia, and in particular the response to the 2011 Queensland Floods. Ultimately, we argue that debates surrounding the challenges of responding to wicked problems, can indeed gain insight from engaging with the challenges of what seems to be the most ‘wicked’ phenomenon of them all.