An approach to wicked problems in environmental policy making

摘要

In environmental policy making, the objectives are part of the decision-making problem. Policy making for sustainable development involves problems with lack of clear and definitive problem formulation which are to be solved by various stakeholders who judge the solutions with different values. In addition, risks and uncertainties involving future events and risks and uncertainties associated to the costs, benefits or effectiveness of a given policy add complexity to the decision making. Because of these characteristics, modeling and assessment methods alone are not enough to provide an adequate decision making support. In other words, policy making involves the existence of "wicked problems. This paper presents an approach to support the solution of wicked problems in policy making for sustainable development.