Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies

The Role of Evaluation

Rodney Hopson, Fiona Cram, Rodney Hopson, Fiona Cram

• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503605565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Evaluierung & Bewertung im Bildungswesen

Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Ecologies is a call to action, focusing on the role that evaluators can play in addressing social and economic problems. Evaluation extends beyond theories and methods, encompassing a range of proven approaches for addressing ecological complexities that drive inequities around the globe.

Bringing together leading thinkers and problem-solvers, this collection traverses the range of contexts at the frontiers of the field—from inadequate food supply and housing to unemployment and poverty. Editors Rodney Hopson and Fiona Cram demonstrate the effects of an engaged approach to evaluation, in which three considerations take center stage: its relevance, the relationships it engenders, and the responsibilities it requires. This is a handbook for tackling the social and economic problems of the twenty-first century which, though wicked, are amenable to the tools of the trade.

Part I

Foundations

1

Tackling Wicked Problems in Complex Evaluation Ecologies

RODNEY HOPSON and FIONA CRAM

Technologies live in complex ecologies.

The meaning of any one depends on what others are available.

Turkle, 2011: 188

“Complexity” is taken to mean complicated when actually it means that simple interactions among different agents can produce emergent order.

Agar, 2004a: 412

RECENT GLOBAL, NATIONAL, AND LOCAL SHIFTS suggest our world is growing more intolerant, bitter, and divisive as multiple sectors and stakeholders scramble for identity, purpose, and control. With the rise of global terrorism and discrimination, the massive effects of climate change, and epidemic proportions of poverty and greed around the world, questions are being raised about the recognition of and support for peoples who are already underserved and underrepresented. For some peoples this is new, but for many it is just a continuation of decades, if not centuries, of entrapment in ostracized spaces and places. Vulnerable peoples can be found in every society, no matter what religions dominate, in developing and developed countries, in the global north and the global south, and under every political regime. Indigenous peoples, women and girls, LGBTI+ peoples, dissident peoples, to name but a few, have been pushed to the margins of their home places because they are not quite the right “fit” and are somehow less acceptable or desirable. If this marginalization spans generations, it is likely that people will have internalized the trauma of wars or enslavement that first led to their marginalization. It is also likely that many will have internalized a belief that their current place is the natural order of things, believing the mythology of their deficits.

Wars and dictatorships have also forced people to leave their homes to travel to presumed safer, kinder places. However, the bodies of children washing up on beaches signals the danger of these attempts, along with the grief and loss of parents who cannot ensure a future for their offspring. If these displaced people survive their journeys across water they may find themselves in a “no-man’s-land,” interned in makeshift refugee camps waiting, waiting, waiting for an invitation to move forward. For some, self-immolation is the only form of protest they have left amid the anger, sadness, and hopelessness that descend on them as months in limbo turn into years. Even staying in a home place can be difficult as drought and famines bring hunger, malnutrition, and death.

Those who live in first world comfort have become somewhat inured to the images on their television screens of the despair of others in far-flung places. Even so, their home place is no guarantee of well-being. In their own backyard, early preventable death (for example, by heart disease, by suicide) is a symptom of their home place’s tolerance for inequity, racism (and other “isms”), anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. Humanity and our social relations are in crisis.

And amid humanity’s crisis, the natural environment is steadily being degraded and lost because nation-states are driven by imperatives other than sustainability (for example, profit, development). Sometimes these pressures are from without, as superpower countries manipulate political climates and corrupt leaders to ensure that minerals and oils are mined and exported. These same superpowers are known to force local farmers off their traditional lands as they buy up great swaths of food-producing land to ensure freedom from hunger for their own people. Even if a country is committed to environmental protection and sustainability, global water and air currents can undermine these efforts as pollutants produced by other nations have an impact on their home place. Our natural environment is as much in crisis as our humanity, and the butterfly effect of globalization is real: “intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Arnove et al. 2013: 1).

This introductory chapter has three goals. First, the chapter will expand on the definition of wicked problems in complex ecologies of evaluation. Second, this chapter will situate responsibilities, relationships, and relevance as core evaluation themes central to the study and practice of evaluation, building off both knowns and unknowns in our field. Finally, the chapter provides a forecast of the chapters in the book, including setting the context for each chapter and contributor. As such, each chapter will be grounded in real case examples that illustrate how evaluators in complex ecologies of practice, policy, and praxis address wicked problems and reflect on the core themes of the book.

Wicked Problems

Over four decades ago, Rittel and Webber (1973) contrasted “wicked” problems with tame problems, indicating that the former are less easily defined and cannot be treated, as tame problems can, using linear analytics. Rather, wicked problems are socially complex, multicausal, and highly resistant to resolution. Although they were referring to social planning problems, the term wicked problem has since been applied in many contexts where indigenous and other minoritized groups experience injustice and inequities. Wicked problems drive housing segregation, racial and gendered stereotypes and discrimination, disintegration of schools, rising crime rates, and decreased access to healthy food and its related health benefits, to name just a few consequences. They are inherent in the alarming trends of wealth being concentrated among increasingly fewer and fewer people across the world. The wicked problems of humanity also affect the natural system and have deleterious consequences for the fabric of our global welfare. As Thompson Klein (2004: 517) describes, these problems “are emergent phenomena with non-linear dynamics, uncertainties, and high political stakes in decision making.”

The call for action that “wicked problems” might have once prompted has faded somewhat, though there are increasing signs that these wicked problem notions are reappearing (Kolko 2012; Wilber and Watkins 2015; Williams and van’t Hof 2016). In this volume, Mertens and Boland (Chapter 5) introduce us to “super wicked problems.” These issues are characterized by four key features that stress the urgency of evidence-informed understandings of these problems and evidence-informed solutions; namely, “Time is running out; those who cause the problem also seek to provide a solution; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; and, partly as a result, policy responses discount the future irrationally” (Levin et al. 2012: 123). Jahn (2008: 3) writes that responding in an informed way to these problems will be possible only “if society’s capacity for taking action is . . . increased in a sustainable manner and its knowledge base is deepened and broadened.” Rather than be silent and reactionary to the set of shifts and dynamics that reverberate in multiple sectors—education, health, social service, and others—evaluators have a role to play in these times, redefining and representing key principles, ideas, and evidence to inform solutions across a plethora of globally connected arenas. What should the responsibilities of evaluators be? How will evaluators forge relationships with key stakeholders amid this changing sociopolitical milieu? And, what is the relevance of evaluation now and in preparation for the decades ahead?

What Role Do Evaluators Play in Complex Ecologies?

When “complex ecologies” was introduced as a conference theme at the 2012 American Evaluation Association (AEA) conference, several evaluators wondered about the choice of the word ecologies in the conference title. They questioned whether systems or context would be more appropriate terms within the current field of practice. We argued then that ecology offers a broader and deeper lens to capture the nuance, meaning, connectivity, consequences, and potential future implications of wicked problems. And although our colleagues’ terms were not far off, their understanding of ecology in evaluation was less considered, and they were a little resistant to its introduction. None of our colleagues, however, questioned the notion of complexity, even though evaluation has been a late adopter of the term (Bamberger et al. 2016; Byrne 2013; Forss et al. 2011; Nwake, 2013; Rogers 2008; Wolf-Branigin 2013).

We argue that our adoption and championing of the term ecology offers a broader and deeper lens for informing evaluative thinking and analysis about intervening in the complex problems facing our world. Although the concept of ecology is not new in evaluation, its use in this book expands the concept beyond a strict environmental focus to encompass the multilayered complexities that define our current existence. Thus, opening evaluation to ecologies encourages and facilitates a discussion throughout the book of wicked problems, of inequity and inequality and their impacts on change initiatives, and of our roles as complexity, contextually, and culturally responsive evaluators of these initiatives.

Evaluation in complex ecologies spans government, nongovernment, philanthropic, tribal, and community settings. It is essential within sectors that address “wicked” and “superwicked” problems. Evaluation has the potential to add immense value to unpackaging, understanding, and responding to such problems where and when we confront them around the world. However, as a key component of accountability, evidence-based work, and intervention strategies, we evaluators have all too often focused narrowly on methods, tools, and theories. This approach has prevented evaluation from being at the table to inform solutions to real-world problems. Now, more than ever, there are community-level, tribal, national, and international stages for evaluators to contribute to understanding the complex ecologies of inequality and inequity before it is too late. Complex ecologies demand that evaluators be concerned with relationships, attend to responsibilities, and focus on the relevance of their work (see the following discussion).

Ecology, like complexity, is not a concept that evaluators tend to use. Ecology represents the diverse natural, physical, and organizational realities and settings of projects, programs, and policies. The physical aspect of an ecology recognizes our built environment and opens an ecology to a critique based on principles of universal design; that is, whether physical spaces (for example, accommodation, business places) are accessible and usable by all peoples regardless of their age, ability, disability, or size (Human Rights Commission 2010; UniversalDesign.com 2016). From an evaluation perspective, there is an additional inquiry about whether, and how, physical spaces facilitate and support initiative success. Within health this form of inquiry dates to Hippocrates in 400 BCE, with a recent review finding that the built environment of health care providers can contribute to patient safety (Huisman et al. 2012).

The “organizational” aspect of an ecology is akin to the human or social system or interactions between and among people. This aspect includes political, patriarchal, and other hierarchies that at a company, community, or country level work to contain and constrain people within what is (often inaccurately) considered to be their “proper place.” Capra (1997: 6) writes that it is necessary to see “patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and racism [as] examples of social domination that are exploitative and antiecological.”

When social systems are studied the role of the natural system is often minimized or viewed as a constant (Liu, Dietz, et al. 2007). The natural realities of ecology are captured for instance in indigenous perspectives that recognize the interconnected nature of humanity with the natural world. Hawaiian Hannah Kihalani Springer (1997, in Meyer 2008: 219) says, “I am shaped by my geography.” Manulani Meyer (2008: 216) adds, “Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing.” Similarly, Cajete (2000) writes about Indigenous communities living a “symbiotic” life in which the natural world is a cocreator of that life and its accompanying “symbolic” culture. These interdependencies, among people and between people and the natural environment, ensure well-being and survival.

Evaluators are encouraged to lift their heads up from decisions about method to look about and think about place and space, to contemplate the land on which they stand and the cultural contexts in which they work. Meyer (2008: 224) writes, “Our senses are culturally shaped.” They are therefore influenced by what we have each uniquely experienced by growing up and being in place, in an ecology. Meyer (2008: 217) calls this our “sensual history” and describes the land as “an epistemological cornerstone”:

Indigenous people are all about place. Land/aina, defined as “that which feeds,” is the everything of our sense of love, joy and nourishment. Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor . . . Consideration of our place, our mother, is the point here. And she is more than beautiful, or not. She is your mother. (Meyer 2008: 216; original emphases)

Other disciples have embraced ecological thinking for some years. In this volume, we highlight more deliberately how the ecological paradigm has manifested. A key figure in Robin Lin Miller’s (Chapter 4) disciplinary background of community psychology, James G. Kelly, and his colleagues write, “The essence of the ecological perspective is to construct an understanding of interrelationships of social structures and social processes of the groups, organizations, and communities in which we live and work” (Kelly et al. 2000: 133). Kelly (2006) has also written autobiographically about the influence of place on his own identity: “My identity was bounded by terrain as well as experience.” His expression of identity here resonates with that of Meyer earlier. Invoking ecologies therefore extends to and recognizes the tangible and intangible resources and materials available (or not) in settings where evaluators do their work. A key thread of this book suggests adapting an ecological framing to enhance evaluation methods, approaches, analysis, and meaning making.

Ecologies are complex because wicked problems contribute to the marginalization of peoples based on their race/ethnicity/color, sex/sexuality/gender, age, religion, or other points and intersections of difference from a cisgender, white, male, able-bodied norm. In this context, “Wickedness isn’t a degree of difficulty . . . A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer” (Camillus 2008: 100). Wicked problems are intensely political because ameliorating a wicked problem is often about the redistribution of goods and services to those who may be “less deserving” in the common sense of their wider society. Or a solution may mean putting the needs of social systems aside so that the problems of the natural system can be prioritized and fully attended to.

Our rationale for this volume is that...