Steven Ney

Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World

Successful solutions to pressing social ills tend to consist of innovative combinations of a limited set of alternative ways of perceiving and resolving the issues. These contending policy perspectives justify, represent and stem from four different ways of organizing social relations: hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism and fatalism. Each of these perspectives: (1) distils certain elements of experience and wisdom that are missed by the others; (2) provides a clear expression of the way in which a significant portion of the populace feels we should live with one another and with nature; and (3) needs all of the others in order to be sustainable. ‘Clumsy solutions’– policies that creatively combine all opposing perspectives on what the problems are and how they should be resolved – are therefore called for. We illustrate these claims for the issue of global warming.

The Case for Clumsiness

Most climatologists agree that by burning fossil fuels and engaging in other forms of consumption and production we are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases that float around in the atmosphere. These gases, in trapping some of the sun’s heat, warm the earth and enable life. The trouble is, some predict, that if we continue to accumulate those gases, over the course of the new century the average temperature on earth will rise and local climates will change, with possibly catastrophic consequences. Will this indeed happen? Does climate-change put the future of the world at risk? Can only a radical reallocation of global wealth and power rescue us from this threat? Or should people not be overly worried, as the steady march of technological progress will see us through in the end?

Cultural Discourses in the Global Climate Change Debate

If Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith (1987, 1993) are right, we should have witnessed significant policy movement in the global climate change debate by now. These two political scientists contend that any sustained and meaningful change in policy, regardless of the particular policy area, takes at least 10 years. Although roughly a decade1 has passed since global climate change arrived on the policy agendas of most advanced industrial countries, any observer would be hard-pressed to say with any conviction that much has changed since the Earth Summit in Rio, in 1992.

Messy Institutions for Wicked Problems: How to Generate Clumsy Solutions

The idea that ‘wicked’ environmental and social problems can be resolved with ‘clumsy’ solutions has been increasingly supported by empirical evidence. Clumsy solutions emerge from a new type of dialogue-based problem-solving strategy, derived from what Funtowicz and Ravetz call ‘post-normal science’. How, then, can such dialogues best be organised? We offer an answer by combining the framework from which the notion of clumsy solutions was derived – namely Mary Douglas’ cultural theory – with the many decision-making procedures for addressing wicked problems proposed in policy and organisational studies. Employing the former theory, we explore 17 widely applied decision-making processes. The analysis identifies six methods most likely and seven methods least likely to successfully initiate post-normal dialogue. Moreover, the analysis suggests four processes that ‘almost’ fulfil the criteria for generating clumsy solutions. The paper then explores and suggests ways of extending and augmenting these ‘almost’ cases to enable post-normal dialogues and clumsy solutions.

Social entrepreneurs and social change: tracing impacts of social entrepreneurship through ideas, structures and practices

This article introduces a research framework for systematically assessing and comparing the ways social entrepreneurs generate social change. Based on a review of the academic debate, we discuss the requirements for such a framework. We then develop a conceptual framework that focuses on the entrepreneur-environment interaction in two dimensions. The first dimension suggests we think of social space in terms of ideas, structures, and practices. The second dimension captures the dynamic nature of social change. It looks at the interdependencies between entrepreneurs and their environment as they play out at the levels of ideas, structures, and practices over time. We apply this framework to a real-life case and discuss how it may guide case study research.

Cultural theory as a theory of democracy

Abstract The rapid economic, social, and political changes of the past two decades have placed considerable stress on democratic institutions. Changes in the labour market, new forms of social co‐operation, as well as an ever growing multiplicity of life‐styles have undermined the relevance of many socio‐political arrangements central to democracies in advanced capitalist societies. In particular, growing social heterogeneity has given rise to the question of whom or what organized interest groups actually represent. Moreover, the theoretical approaches used to analyse and assess democratic structures and democratic practices have become increasingly unable to explain current political behaviour. Based on an individualist concept of interest, these theories have consistently ignored the socio‐insitutional, that is the cultural, dimension. In an attempt to realign democratic theory with socio‐cultural reality, this paper is a first stab at systematically introducing culture into democratic theory. The pape...

Culture and national S&T performance: A framework for analysing socio‐institutional factors in RTD policy making

Abstract Since the 1970s, policy makers and researchers have attempted to understand what factors influence national S&T performance. Whereas researchers predominantly aimed at explaining disparate economic development paths by understanding the role of innovation and technological advance in the evolution of economic systems, policy makers hoped to discover those mechanism that would enhance national S&T performance. The work of Mary Douglas provides a framework for systematically comparing organizational and institutional cultures. Although Mary Douglas originally devised the approach to explain her African fieldwork data, successive social scientists, most notably Aaron Wildavsky, Michael Thompson, and Steve Rayner, have adapted the model to suit the needs of policy analysis.

Environmental security: A critical overview

Abstract There are different approaches to environmental security. Time vary widely in terms of their explanatory power, their ambitions, the images they produce and their political implications. As heterogeneous as the approaches may be, the fundamental underlying assumptions are remarkably similar. They are all based on the concept of the person that is bereft of the social dimensions as well as on an antiquated concept of human needs. They also all ignore the social symbolic dimension of security. In that, they are blind to the multitude of social and cultural coping mechanisms that determine individual responses to environmental insecurity

Wenn gute Lösungsansätze keine Selbstläufer werden: Vernetzung als Skalierungsstrategie in fragmentierten Entscheidungslandschaften am Beispiel des Social Labs in Köln

(1) Bill Clinton wird zugeschrieben, eine zentrale Herausforderung im Bereich sozialer Innovationen wie folgt pointiert zu haben: „Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.“ Bill Clinton formuliert damit eine von zwei Positionen, die sich auch in der deutschen Diskussion uber soziale Innovation und die Rolle von Social Entrepreneurship identifizieren lassen.

Social Entrepreneurship in Deutschland: Debatte, Verständnis und Evolution

Wie uberall auf der Welt befindet sich auch die deutsche Gesellschaft in einem grundlegenden Wandel. Demographische Veranderungen, wirtschaftliche Turbulenzen, eine sich standig verandernde globale und europaische Politik sowie, ganz speziell, die noch immer andauernde Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands haben deutliche Spuren in der deutschen Gesellschaft hinterlassen.