Tackling the causes of risks and the drivers of insecurity is complex, time consuming and rarely has an immediate impact. While the causes and drivers of risks lie in the shadows of crises and events and are invisible to most people their symptoms are easily identifiable and understood.
Under the gaze of global media governments are often forced to make instant decisions that rarely have a lasting impact. Buffeted by political, economic and social forces, policy ideas and initiatives are frequently uprooted before they have had time to mature and are soon forgotten. This, in turn, creates a cruel paradox, with governments urged to respond to problems as and when they occur but are frequently left frustrated by their lack of ability to tackle root causes.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when governments attempt to respond to wicked problems. These are problems that are unbounded in scope, time and resources and share a loose set of characteristics. Classic examples of wicked problems at the global and national levels include: climate change, pandemic influenza, organised crime and national security. These problems regularly cascade across systems affecting the international community, nations, and communities.
While politicians, public servants and practitioners recognise the value of a joined- up approach in response to wicked problems,all too often real and perceived pressures of time, resource constraints and a lack of capacity force them to adopt more traditional and limited responses using outdated frameworks and toolkits.
In the first instance, we need to reinvigorate our capacity to grasp and understand the complexity of problems by adapting current processes and methods and in doing so, broaden our ability to identify and understand the fundamental causes of these problems.
This research project will focus on how to develop a better understanding of wicked problems, as well as looking at some specific case studies that may provide the clues to how governments should respond to such problems in the future.
A key focus of our research will be to investigate how policy makers and practitioners can locate and exploit leverage, the key point of power in a system (think of a town, a business or a community) where a small change can lead to a transformation of the whole system.
Leverage may lie in influencing individual behaviour, a specific government policy or developing a new institutional framework. The point, however, is that locating leverage in a system is often a counter-intuitive exercise, insofar as they are rarely obvious to individuals and often not accepted by others. Locating and exploiting leverage relies on an understanding of the underlying drivers of change and the wider issues at play.
Supported by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (Cabinet Office) and the Horizon Scanning Centre (DIUS) this project seeks to better understand the interconnectedness of risks, develop a framework for how we should respond to them and explore potential solutions for policy makers and practitioners.
