The Technopolitics of Wicked Problems: Reconstructing Democracy in an Age of Complexity

IF 0.4 3区社会学 Q4 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Critical Review Pub Date : 2022-04-03 DOI:10.1080/08913811.2022.2052597

Anke Gruendel

引用次数: 2

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Complexity” is ubiquitous in contemporary political commentary, where it is invoked to justify innovative governance programs. However, the term lacks analytic clarity. One way to make sense of it is to construct a genealogy of the notion of “wicked problems,” a concept that highlights the intractability of complex problems and problematizes the technocratic management of complexity. The term wicked problems originated in science planning in postwar Germany and urban planning in the United States. In both cases, planners rejected a naïve optimism about the potential of technical expertise in favor of recognizing that many problems transcend the knowledge possessed by experts. This appreciation of complexity led to attempts, still ongoing, to accommodate both participatory and expert-based decision making in the face of wicked problems, producing a form of technical democracy in which problem solving requires the orchestration of conflict.

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邪恶问题的技术政治:在复杂时代重建民主

摘要“复杂性”在当代政治评论中无处不在，它被用来证明创新治理计划的合理性。然而，这个术语缺乏分析的清晰度。理解它的一种方法是构建“邪恶问题”概念的谱系，这个概念突出了复杂问题的棘手性，并使技术官僚对复杂性的管理成为问题。“邪恶问题”一词起源于战后德国的科学规划和美国的城市规划。在这两种情况下，规划者都拒绝了对技术专业知识潜力的天真乐观，而是承认许多问题超出了专家的知识范围。这种对复杂性的认识导致人们在面对邪恶问题时，试图兼顾参与性决策和基于专家的决策，这一尝试仍在继续，产生了一种技术民主形式，在这种形式中，解决问题需要协调冲突。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Critical Review POLITICAL SCIENCE-

CiteScore

1.30

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society is a political-science journal dedicated to advancing political theory with an epistemological bent. Recurrent questions discussed in our pages include: How can political actors know what they need to know to effect positive social change? What are the sources of political actors’ beliefs? Are these sources reliable? Critical Review is the only journal in which the ideational determinants of political behavior are investigated empirically as well as being assessed for their normative implications. Thus, while normative political theorists are the main contributors to Critical Review, we also publish scholarship on the realities of public opinion, the media, technocratic decision making, ideological reasoning, and other empirical phenomena.