A Healthy Metaphor?: The North Sea Consultation and the Power of Words

The North Sea Consultation was set up to resolve conflicting claims for space in the North Sea. In 2020, this consultation process resulted in the North Sea Agreement, which was supported by the Dutch Parliament and cabinet as a long-term policy; however, the fishing sector felt excluded, left the consultation process, and does not support the...

Revisiting Rittel and Webber's Dilemmas: Designerly Thinking Against the Background of New Societal Distrust

In this article, we posit designerly thinking as a family of design approaches that some believe are able to effectively respond to wicked problems. We will scrutinize this premise by revisiting Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber's 1973 article in which the notion of wicked problems was originally introduced. In it, Rittel and Webber note the...

The Wickedness of Rittel and Webber’s Dilemmas

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...