“Wicked Problems,” Public Policy, and Administrative Theory

Abstract

As societies worldwide struggle to address what policy analysts call “wicked problems” such as world hunger, malnutrition, and ecological sustainability, analysts from a variety of perspectives have questioned the administrative state’s abilities to deal with them. Ascendant since the early 1990s as a prescription for remedying these shortcomings is a market, technocratic, and non-deliberative theory of administration that some have called “neo-managerialism” and others the “managerialist ideology.” This study uses European attitudes toward promoting the use of genetically modified (GM) foods as a “policy window” for exploring how well or ill-suited the neo-managerialist philosophy informing the U.S. government’s promotional campaign was with the factors driving European opposition to GM foods. Causal modeling of the “calculus of dissent” that led to a the European Union (EU) moratorium on GM foods suggests that deliberative (rather than neo-managerialist) theories of administration are better suited for the “collective puzzlement of society” that wicked problems require.