Adrian Cherney is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. His research interests include evidence-based policy, police and ethnic group relations, counterterrorism policing, offender reentry, and institutional legitimacy.
In most cases, policy scholars interested in the role of policy analysts in promoting and practicing evidence-based policy-making rely on very partial survey results, or on anecdotal case studies and interview research. Despite the existence of a large body of literature on policy analysis, large-scale empirical studies of the work of policy analysts are rare, and in the case of analysts working at the sub-national level, virtually non-existent. There has been very little research on this level of policy workers despite the significant powers they exercise in prominent federal systems such as the USA,
Complex or intractable policy problems, often called 'wicked' prob lems, have been a feature of public policy research since the early 1970s. Observers have generally assumed that these wicked problems constitute a distinct category of policy problems, based on the notion that some problems -those characterised as substantially technical or scientific in nature -lend themselves to traditional linear problem-solving methods, whereas other problems that are social in nature tend to be wicked. By examining three cases where scientific knowledge is central to the debate -climate change, genetically modified foods and hydraulic fracturing -we argue that all policy problems can exhibit wicked tendencies, regardless of the amount of scientific information available to decision-makers. Therefore, the reliance on increased information in resolving wicked problems is unlikely to be sufficient or effective.
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