The Wickedness of Rittel and Webber’s Dilemmas

• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399720934010
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399720934010

Administration & Society

2020, Vol. 52(6) 960 –979

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399720934010

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Perspectives

The Wickedness of

Rittel and Webber’s

Dilemmas

Udo Pesch1 and Pieter E. Vermaas1

Abstract

Rittel and Webber connected their notion of “wicked problems” to

three fundamental planning dilemmas. Many approaches within public

administration theory have explicitly addressed wicked problems yet hardly

paid attention to the dilemmas. We revisit the planning dilemmas to find

out their potential relevance for current administration theory and practice.

We argue that the dilemmas evolve out of the current institutional setup,

meaning that wicked problems cannot be resolved by better administrative

frameworks or methods. Rather societal matters are to be included in

decision-making, for instance, by seeing societal opposition as opportunities

to learn to deal with the planning dilemmas.

Keywords

wicked problems, dilemmas, plurality, normativity

Introduction

The article Dilemma’s in a General Theory of Planning, in which Rittel and

Webber (1973) introduced the notion of “wicked problems,” has become a

modern classic. A Google Scholar search quickly reveals that it has been

1Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Udo Pesch, Department of Values, Technology and Innovation, Faculty of Technology, Policy

and Management, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft,

The Netherlands.

Email: u.pesch@tudelft.nl

934010AASXXX10.1177/0095399720934010Administration & SocietyPesch and Vermaas

research-article2020

Pesch and Vermaas 961

referred to more than 15,000 times. What is also striking is that, in spite of its

age, the article’s relevance has not withered away. On the contrary, Crowley

and Head (2017) counted 10,000 references only 3 years ago.

In their paper, Rittel and Webber argue that the societal problems of

their days were problems that could be called “wicked,” in the sense that

these problems were ill-defined and could never be solved. Rather, they

could only be “re-solved,” because of the irreducible complexity and the

normativity that is intrinsic to the formulation and the resolution of such

problems (cf. Farrell & Hooker, 2013). Decision-makers may seek to

cope with wicked problems, but as Rittel and Webber stress in the final

paragraph of their paper, they can never overcome three fundamental

planning dilemmas. First, there is no way to come to consensus about

what is the societal good. Second, the wickedness of problems is an

intrinsic quality; it cannot be taken away by developing better-suited

approaches of planning. Third is the rising emancipatory demand for

equality conflict with the presence of societal pluralism (Rittel & Webber,

1973, p. 169).

Although the title of the original article indicates the prominence of these

dilemmas, it is both interesting and puzzling to see that none of the papers we

have read (admittedly, we have not checked them all) explicitly refers to

these three dilemmas of planning. With this observation in mind, we will be

the next to revisit Rittel and Webber’s paper (for other examples, see Coyne,

2005; Daviter, 2017; Head, 2019; McConnell, 2018; Peters, 2017) and focus

on the inescapability of the three dilemmas of planning, trying to explore the

way these dilemmas play out in the context of policy and administration.

Here, we will regard administration as the institutional setup that allows soci-

etal problems to be addressed—the organizations, institutions, and structures

that are involved in the process of identifying, defining, and proposing solu-

tions to societal problems (cf. Dahl & Lindblom, 1963; Waldo, 2006;

Wamsley & Zald, 1973).

One of our key arguments is that the planning dilemmas of Rittel and

Webber evolve out of this institutional setup, and as such wicked problems

cannot be resolved by developing better administrative frameworks or meth-

ods. In this, it is important to emphasize that while society itself may change,

the institutional setup remains largely intact. At their core, the planning

dilemmas seem to revolve around the interplay between a changing society

and a fixed administrative apparatus. This implies that the tendency to look at

internal administrative processes needs to be overcome to understand how

the planning dilemmas can be coped with. As such, we will not focus purely

on administrative concerns in our paper, but zoom out and look at societal

developments from a broader perspective.