Wicked problems and sociology: building a missing bridge through processual relationalism

The role of ideations in de-problematizing migration crises (and other wicked problems)

“…After having laid out what a wicked problem (and a relational definition of one) is, and having shown that the "European Migrant Crisis" must be viewed as one, it is time to turn our attention to the main intervention of this article-the role of ideations of the management of crises of this kind. Beforehand, I want to remind the reader of the analytical definition of a wicked problem based on the agreement and disagreement of stakeholders regarding the definition the problem and the solution (see Selg et al, 2022;Selg et al, forthcoming). Above I classified all problems of governance into three categories: simple, complex and wicked.…”

“…A wicked problem cannot be solved and, at best, managed and governed over time which is why these approaches do not fit. This is why Selg and Ventsel (2020), (Selg et al, 2022), and Selg et al (forthcoming) landed on the term "Failure Governance, " a trans-active-and deeply relational-governance approach that focuses on the failure of governing wicked problems. This approach borrows from Jessop's concept of metagovernance that requests, among many things, that policy-makers combine the "optimism of the will" with "pessimism of the intelligence."…”

“…Ideations in forms of beliefs and ideological leanings have played a major role in governing (or better, the opposite) of global crises, like most recently the COVID-19 Crisis (see esp. Selg et al, 2022), for decades in the governance of the Climate Crisis (e.g., Selg et al, forthcoming, ch. 13;Klasche, 2021a,b), and the Migration Crisis of 2015.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Wicked Problems: From Single Discipline to Transdisciplinarity

“…Normally, a policy issue will be called wicked by policy makers when it is difficult to make even gradual progress on its normative and factual issues, because the distance between the parties involved is still large and there are often conflicts. Scholars criticized the essentialist perspective of focusing on the problem itself, and clarified that the existing research does not pay much attention to the complexity of the systems in which wicked problems are intertwined, and the wickedness of the complexity of the systems does not stem from various problems being just interrelated with each other, but from being in constitutive dynamic relations with each other (Selg et al 2021 ). This adds to the problem of dealing with them, and transdisciplinary approaches would be helpful.…”

“…But we found that the study of wicked problems ignores the transdisciplinary nature of the problem itself. According to the frontier research, Selg et al ( 2021 ) saw the intersection between governance and public administration, and sociology for developing a processual-relational methodology as a transdisciplinary approach for studying wicked problems. They take COVID-19 as an example and argue that the specificity of processual relationalism lies in seeing these relations also as dynamic, unfolding processes, not as static ties.…”