Designing policy mixes for emerging wicked problems. The case of pharmaceutical residues in freshwaters

ABSTRACT

Wicked problems continuously emerge in the field of environmental governance. Characterized by goal conflicts, complexity, and uncertainty, wicked problems typically call for participatory policy designs. However, the effects of participation are widely unclear, given the indefinite nature of solutions to wicked problems. This research sheds light on this debate by developing and applying a systematic structural approach to assess policy mixes for emerging wicked problems. Based on a review of literature in the field of public policy and environmental governance, we identify eight assessment criteria matching three dimensions of wicked problems: coherence, consistency, congruence to address conflicts; comprehensiveness and diversity to address complexity; and adaptability, reversibility, and robustness to address informational uncertainty. The concept is demonstrated taking as an example two recently proposed policy mixes to address pharmaceutical freshwater pollution in Germany. This concept demonstration suggests that policy mixes resulting from desk research and participatory processes differ in the way they address wicked problems. These results contribute to systematically assess the role of participation in designing policy mixes for emerging wicked policy problems and open up for more advanced discussions on the role of structural approaches in public policy analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• complex problems
• environmental governance
• micro pollution
• participation
• water pollution
• resource nexus

Acknowledegment

The authors thank attendants of the ECPR General Conference 2020 and the ICPP5 2021 for very constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. The authors also thank the student assistants Seyed Taha Loghmani Khouzani and Shuvojit Nath for their support in preparing the submission of the article, as well as the special issue editors and the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Annex Table 1 provides a detailed overview of the two mixes. As to the stakeholder mix, we only consider instruments directly addressed at pharmaceutical residues. Thus, instruments of this compilation directed at other micropollutants than pharmaceutical residues (e.g., at pesticides) are omitted from the mix as it is considered in this paper.