The news from home and abroad seems beset with what policy wonks call wicked problems. These are problems “difficult or impossible to solve,” says the dictionary definition, “because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.”
Take the crisis in Gaza, the grinding deadlock in Ukraine, the political chaos of the elections in the Netherlands and Argentina. Wider still we have the lack of global and national accord on climate change and migration. All these are hyper-active playgrounds for those “incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements” of the definition given above.
Perhaps democracy itself will become a wicked problem next year, in which more than half the nation states in the world are due to hold nationwide elections.
The wicked problem of the war in Gaza is set to get worse once the lull in hostilities ends with the present round of exchange of hostage and prisoners.
Both leaderships, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Yahya Sinwar of Hamas, have vowed more fighting and destruction. Netanyahu says Hamas must be destroyed, and Sinwar has said he would repeat the massacre of the innocents of the Israeli towns of October 7 if he could. Despite pleas from President Biden and the key international agencies, neither leader seems to want to prioritise the plight of the non-military civilians.
Neither leadership has offered a strategic path to peace, and reconciliation and mutual recognition between the Palestinian and Jewish Israeli communities.
The impasse in Ukraine, too, is assuming the spectral shape of a wicked problem. Neither combatant can deliver a knockout blow. Russia is bent on the destruction of as much civilian infrastructure and life as possible, but it is at war in a land it can never conquer and occupy. For Ukraine it is still a desperate survival game.
Allies and sponsors on both sides cannot disguise “the incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements” in our definition of wicked problems. These being China and Iran on the one hand, and the West led by America and Germany on the other.
Both Germany and the US are holding back on supplying the best from their national arsenals that might tip the balance on the battlefield. Germany does not want to upgrade the rather elderly Storm Shadow missiles from the UK and France with their more potent Taurus missile, and the US is showing similar ambivalence over sending their ATCM deep attack missiles. This maybe a reflection of the weakness of the Olaf Scholz fractious three-party coalition government and the anti-Ukraine sentiment of the parties of the hard right.
The migration debate has been turbocharged this past week by the victory of Geert Wilders
In the US support for Ukraine is becoming a hot issue for the isolationists of both right and left at the opening of the presidential election campaign. The Biden camp appears to be taking note.
Robert Kaplan, brilliant roving reporter and the expert on the plight of Africa’s populations, told me last week that he considered Gaza and climate change the two prime examples of the different categories of wicked problem, political and global.
The approach to global warming at the upcoming COP 28 meeting in Dubai seems to provide ample proof. The EU wants an ambition mitigation programme for the most climate stressed regions in Africa — but only if China would pay.
The migration debate has been turbocharged this past week by the victory of Geert Wilders PVV Freedom Party in the Dutch elections, and the disclosure that net migration to the UK last year was 745,000 — so much for taking back control.
Though fraught with contradictory political postures and views, migration need to not become a wicked problem, according to Professor Hein de Haas, former head of the Oxford International Migration Institute, in his new book How Migration Really Works. Migrants follow demands of the labour market, he argues. Without migrant labour, and if the restrictions announced by both leading parties at Westminster were implemented, the large parts of the welfare system, NHS included, and the building, transport, and farming industries would be in deep trouble.
The wicked problem’s opposite is a “tame”’ or “knotty” problem, or knotty. These involve solutions by a step-by-step, structured approach. Gaza and Ukraine cry out for constructive, reasoned diplomacy, involving ingenuity, risk taking, and altruism — not too prominent in today’s news.
And knotty problems? Remember Alexander the Great’s approach to the issue of the knot at Gordium? He did for it with his sword.
