First Page
1561
Abstract
"Wicked problems." It just says it all. Persistent social problems-poverty, food insecurity, climate change, drug addiction, pollution, and the list goes on-seem aptly condemned as wicked. But what makes them wicked, and what are we to do about them?
The concept of wicked problems as something more than a generic description has its origins in the late 1960s. Professor Horst Rittel of the University of California, Berkeley, Architecture Department posed the term in a seminar to describe "that class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing." Rittel and his colleague Melvin Webber later refined the concept in a 1973 publication, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, in which they developed their now-famous list of ten distinguishing properties of wicked problems:
1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good- or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or exhaustively desirable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Recommended Citation
JB Ruhl and James Salzman,
Governing Wicked Problems,
73 Vanderbilt Law Review
1561
(2020)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol73/iss6/1