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Contributors
John T. Cooper, Jr.
Texas A&M University, Office of Public Partnership and Outreach, College Station, USA
Juan Elizondo
Furr High School, Houston, USA
Jennifer A. Horney
University of Delaware, Epidemiology Program, Newark, USA
Katie Rose Kirsch
Texas A&M University, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, College Station, USA
Jaimie Hicks Masterson
Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA
Michelle Annette Meyer
Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA
Galen D. Newman
Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA
Juan Parras
Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s), Houston, USA
Garett T. Sansom
Texas A&M University, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, College Station, USA
Shannon Van Zandt
Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA
Charles X. White
Charity Productions, Houston, USA
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge those involved in the creation of the Institute of Sustainable Communities, which emerged from the Environmental Grand Challenge. There were people in the upper administration at Texas A&M University, including Karan Watson and Chad Wootton, who helped to make both happen, but we want to acknowledge those from our department, including Forster Ndubisi, Jorge Vanegas, and Walter Gillis Peacock. They were instrumental in the hiring first of John Cooper, Jr. as a community engagement and outreach expert, who pioneered and continues to drive our way of working, and then of John’s long-time mentor and collaborator, Phillip Berke, the first director of the Institute, as a direct result of the Environmental Grand Challenge. Berke brought together an initial group of faculty, including Francisco Olivera from Environmental Engineering, Steven Quiring from Atmospheric Science, Kent Portney from Public Service Administration, Nasir Gharaibeh from Civil Engineering, author Shannon Van Zandt, and the inimitable Jennifer Horney from Public Health, who first suggested this book as a way to capture the processes and outcomes of the work we were doing. This first group was later joined by Wendy Jepson from Geography and Ashley Ross from Marine Sciences as other “Discovery Leads” (along with authors Galen Newman and Michelle Meyer) and have continued to drive the engaged research being done today.
We would also like to acknowledge the first “class” of students to come through the Institute, including Marccus Hendricks, Tiffany Cousins, Leslie Munoz, Matthew Giglio, Isaac Oti, and finally Garett Sansom, who took on a leadership role as Assistant Director and has ensured the day-to-day operations of the Institute. These students got a hands-on education in engaged research, played critical roles in how the rest of us experienced engaged research, and all have gone on to make it a critical part of their research agendas going forward. Texas Target Communities staff members and interns, led by author Jaimie Hicks Masterson, including Jeewasmi Thapa, Emily Tedford, and Amanda Hoque, and others provided excellent support for our field efforts and relationship building. We are immensely proud of each of them.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge our major partners in the field— Charles X. White of Charity Productions; Juan Parras, Ana Parras, Yvette Arellano, Yudith Nieto, and Nalleli Hidalgo and Cinthia Cantu (former Green Ambassadors) and their team at the Texas Environmental Justice
Advocacy Service (tejas); Tracy Stephens, president of the Sunnyside Civic Club; and the Green Ambassadors at Furr High School, led by Juan Elizondo, David Salazar, Fredalina Pieri, and others. These young people are going to save the world. We are thankful to the residents that participated in the work, who opened their homes and hearts to us—sharing experiences, stories, and their invaluable local knowledge.
The engaged research described within has been supported both by internal funding from Texas A&M University, as well as millions in external grant funding from agencies and funders including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others. Furr High School involvement has been funded in part by a $10 Million grant from the XQ Foundation.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: our global story
Jaimie Hicks Mastersona, Shannon Van Zandtb
aTexas
bTexas
“When you know their stories, you grow strength from their survival.”
Sam Collins III, City of Hitchcock, Texas resident
This is the story of community-university partnerships. It is the story of place and of people. It is a story of survival and urgency. It is the story of local knowledge and empirically driven science.
A community
Once I heard a local Houstonian chuckle and say, “smells like money,” referring to the toxic fumes of the refineries along either side of Highway 225, the major highway along “the Houston Ship Channel” connecting the port areas to downtown. Fenceline communities and those vulnerable to hazards do not chuckle at this sentiment.
Instead of “snow days,” Houston schools are more likely to temporarily close from “flood days.” These flood events might not make the national news because they are not always named events like Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Houstonians know all too well the devastation of tropical cyclones and bake the colloquial “hurricane cookies” (or “hurricane cake”) when a hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico.
If Texans embody the independent, rugged spirit of the nation, Houstonians embody that of Texas. Houston is gritty and tough. Houstonians are tougher and fiercely independent. They possess a rugged spirit that do not give up.
In fact, Houstonians deal with pollution, environmental injustice, hurricanes, storm surge, and ever constant flooding. This place has toxic industries
adjacent to neighborhoods and schools-which are also primarily communities of color on the city’s historic East End. Houston has 4600 energy-related companies, refines 14% of the the nation’s petroleum, and produces 44% of the nation’s chemicals (Greater Houston Partnership, 2019). Houston air quality regularly exceeds healthy ozone levels and is ranked among the most ozone-polluted cities in the United States (American Lung Association, 2019). A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of contracting leukemia than children living 10 or more miles away.The residents within the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood in East End Houston along the Ship Channel bear some of the highest cumulative cancer risk among all of Harris County (Linder, Marko, & Sexton, 2008).
Flooding in Houston makes up most of the whole state’s losses, and the city’s flooding issues have become a bear weather of impacts to come for other urban areas under increased climate change impacts. As for flooding, between 1996 and 2007 Houston had $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion in insured flood losses for all of Texas. Predictions show that the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events will only increase due to climate change. Climate change is expected to increase the annual probability of Houston receiving large-scale rainfall events from once in every 2000 years to once in every 100 years by 2081-2100 (Emanuel, 2017). While annual precipitation is expected to remain about the same over the next 100 years, the variability-more extremely wet days and extremely dry periods-will increase (Li, Li, Wang, & Quiring, 2019). Events like Hurricane Harvey, and the floods (e.g., Tax Day Flood and Memorial Day Flood of 2016, among others) in the years preceding Harvey, will be a new normal for the city.
The problems described are not a neighborhood problem, or just a Houston problem, but a global problem. Since 1880, the earth has warmed 1°C (1.8°F). With current carbon-emitting trends, by 2100 the earth will warm by 4°C (or 7.2°F). Because of these grave numbers, in April of 2016, 175 of the 196 world countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by curbing the impacts to only 2°C (3.6°F). The Paris Agreement set the record for the highest number of countries to sign an international agreement, and the highest emitters, -such as the United States, China, India, and the EU, all committed to lessening the impacts of climate change, although the United States ceased participation in 2017.
Many cities within the United States continue their commitments to this agreement and other environmental and resilience goals, in hopes of addressing some of these challenges. City-led initiatives and neighborhood-level
resilience efforts can promote grassroots and equitable practices that compliment national efforts or fill a void in national leadership. Houston is a microcosm of global trends and problems. Houston happens to be a living laboratory to understand these complex problems and how cities and neighborhoods can develop just resilience practices for the future.
A way to establish and grow resilience locally is through knowledge sharing. Universities are leaders in knowledge generation. Positioning themselves to engage with local communities in using this knowledge and developing new knowledge is one underutilized and needed avenue to address the complex challenges communities face.
The Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) with the Texas Target Communities Program of Texas A&M University has partnered with civic clubs and nonprofit organizations in inner city Houston, but Houston is not alone. We have worked in rural places in Texas, like the cities of Nolanville and La Grange, and counties including Liberty and Grimes County.We have worked with small communities like Buffalo, Texas with less than 2000 in population, to large multicounty regions, like the Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission. We have worked side by side with communities to think about hazards, and we have been a resource to communities recovering from wildfires, technological events, tornadoes, and flooding. All communities we have worked with say the same things. We want safe places, we want higher quality of life, we want, as Judge of Liberty County put it, “a place we’d be proud for our kids and grandkids to live in.”
So what does that mean for Houston and other communities faced with hazards and climate change? Communities and universities across the country and the world are working together to understand these complex problems to affect change. This book details one such relationship that supports the best science simultaneously with community empowerment.
A university
Rather than using communities as “laboratories,” community groups desire a partnership with researchers to identify problems and issues within the community and develop solutions. Laboratories imply scientists testing their hypotheses in a space without external input or especially input from the subjects of the studies.While many scientists are accustomed to engaging students in field research and data-gathering, they are often accused of “using” communities for their own scientific needs, and failing to build bidirectional relationships that bring real change to communities or address problems
that the community itself identifies. The partnerships community partners want require a shift in the traditional thinking of academic researchers. They require working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, as well as a mode of communication that is unfamiliar to academics, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and how the science can be used to advocate for and institute change.
Fortunately, universities engaged and working with communities is not new. Even at the founding of American colleges, they were “cloaked with a public purpose” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 177). The Morrill Acts of 1860 and 1862 linked higher education to the concept of service with the formation of land-grant colleges.Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to establish cooperative extension services within the land-grant institutions to promote the “spirit of service.” The very concept of extension was to extend the knowledge of universities to communities, mainly farmers and other industries. During this time the settlement house model was pioneered by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House with a communitycentered response to social problems. Other Black scholars and educators working on community issues used a settlement house model in the late 19th and early 20th century (Stevens, 2003). We can also see the community focus and community voice as pivotal to the civil rights movement. In 1970, the University Year for ACTION, “involved more than ten thousand students from over one hundred colleges and universities” (Jacoby, 1996, p. 12).
Boyer identified three areas of successful colleges, one being students that “advance the common good” (Boyer, 1988, p. 296). President Clinton wrote a letter to all higher education institutions in 1994 asking for their help in “inspiring an ethic of service across our nation” (Jacoby 1996, p. 17). Boyer insisted universities were not doing enough (Boyer, 1990, 1996; O’Meara & Jaeger, 2006). Land-grant institutions and other universities were urged to “apply knowledge and provide service to the community” and be the “new American college” (Silka et al. 2013, pp. 42-43).
State universities across the nation, particularly those that are land grant, face increasing pressure to engage meaningfully with their communities and state residents. The Kellogg Commission on the Future of the State and Land-Grant Universities advocated for community engagement “by integrating teaching, research, and service” (Silka et al. 2013, p. 42). In 2004, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching established the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement to recognize universities for their service to community partnerships and reciprocity (Carnegie, 2006). Other groups have pushed for community engagement
along the way, such as the National Science Foundation, Campus Compact, the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, the Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N), and the list goes on.
In total, 100 years have passed since the extension service model moved research into communities, and today universities aim for community “inclusivity, mutuality, reciprocity” (Driscoll, 2009). In the last decade, over and over again, researchers have called for more authentic community engagement and liberating service-learning to go beyond outreach and lip service of change and moving “toward community” (Driscoll 2009; Frank 2015; Trencher, Bai, Evans, McCormick, & Yarime, 2014, Stoecker 2016). Universities are moving away from fitting communities into their courses and research projects and moving toward designing courses, research, and new processes to tackling pressing local problems. Universities are embedding such efforts into organizational structures and institutional commitment (Frank, 2015). The main message is universities also want higher quality of life in communities. We feel that universities in this age of climate change and environmental inequities can move toward resilience scientifically and in practice by moving toward community.
Organization of the book
The authors and their collaborators describe in the chapters that follow how we-a team of interdisciplinary academic researchers working handin-hand with practitioners and communities-undertake engaged research that seeks to bridge the uncertainties of science and the multiple and sometimes conflicting interests present in communities vulnerable to impacts from climate change. We offer both successes and failures, best practices and lessons learned, in our efforts to engage in vulnerable communities and to directly work with them to identify research questions, develop approaches to collaboratively answer these questions, and to return the gained knowledge in such a way as to facilitate both learning and action.
The book is useful for university administrators and researchers who wish to build meaningful relationships with communities in their state or region, thereby strengthening their real and perceived contribution to society. Put more simply, universities (especially, but not exclusively, public universities) are under increasing pressure from state legislators and external funders-including federal funding agencies and private foundations and donors-to produce research that transforms communities by addressing
locally identified and defined problems. This book is also for community organizations-both public and nonprofit-as well as local, regional, and national philanthropic institutions (i.e., foundations) that have as part of their missions the application of science to the betterment of society-solving real problems and reducing negative impacts.
The book is in two parts. The first part offers case studies of research projects that have resulted in positive resilience outcomes for communities and their stakeholders. While each case shares peer-reviewed research findings, it also explains and discusses the funding sources, field methods, and short- and long-term outcomes for the community, demonstrating the ways in which the science benefited from its interdisciplinarity, as well as how community input changed the research process. Specifically, Chapter 2 describes why it is challenging to understand and solve “wicked problems” (through theory). Universities can move from theoretical purity toward productive action when we include multiple forms of knowledge. Chapter 3 describes the case for equity and supporting the most marginalized in resilience planning. Chapter 4 explains the creation and formation of the IfSC and how this hub of connection supported researchers and residents. Chapter 5 describes the various “Discovery Leads” or interdisciplinary group of faculty and the research they focused on with community partners. Chapter 6 explains how we were able to break down disciplinary walls along with challenges and lessons learned while working across disciplines in an academic institution.
Part II focuses on the process of creating, growing, and sustaining interdisciplinary working groups of researchers and methods of engaging meaningfully with community groups and residents. It addresses ethical behavior for researchers working with community groups, beyond that which is required by human subjects review in universities. Chapter 7 describes the work of the IfSC community partners and their relationship with science and researchers. Chapter 8 describes projects codesigned and coproduced by interdisciplinary scholars (and their students) and local residents to understand hazard risk in socially vulnerable communities and resulted in the empowerment of learners within the university and the community. Chapter 9 describes the university’s engagement framework with partnerships in service-learning and engaged research, called integrated impact. The integrated impact model describes how staff of the university engage communities in parallel to engage faculty and students. Chapter 10 describes the IfSC rules of thumb for ethical community engagement. The chapter highlights best practices for holistic community engagement above traditional research methods; toward the inclusion of diverse voices in a broader
engagement and planning process that empowers community action and compliments a community’s own adaptive capacity and resiliency. Chapter 11 discusses program evaluation and its role in engaged research similar to the IfSC. The chapter highlights ways to use the program’s mission statement and identified stakeholders to go from reporting successes to full evaluation of impact and the challenges that engaged research produces for traditional evaluation styles. Finally, Chapter 12 describes our lessons learned and dissects things we would change for other universities who may undertake what we implemented.
A partnership
Today we are thrilled to have played a role in shaping the future of communities and neighborhoods across Texas and we are blessed to have sustained relationships with the amazing people we have met in the process. We are not achieving liberated service learning in the fullest sense, as Stoecker (2016) describes it, but very few do.This is our attempt at the ideal of liberated service learning, and this is how we are trying to do it. It is not perfect and sometimes we get it wrong, but there are things we feel like we are doing right.We are a connection of people building and growing toward something (Stoecker 2016). All we have required of our students, faculty, and community partners is to believe in themselves and in the process. Here is our story and the story of our partners. Their story is bound up in ours. They have changed us. And we continue to pursue
authentically engaged action research that moves beyond grants and funding and “toward community.” As Alexis Cordova of Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service said, “we are not at liberty to give up.” Here lies a fragment of hope: The people make a place resilient-that fierce, never give up mentality. With that spirit we can make our communities a little better. The many people the IfSC has been fortunate enough to work with are the diamonds in the rough of this imperfect place and our home. There is no other privilege in the world than to listen and learn. We look forward to sharing what we have learned.
References
American Lung Association (2019). State of the Air 2019. Available from: https://www.lung. org/assets/documents/healthy-air/state-of-the-air/sota-2019-full.pdf Boyer, E. (1988). College: The undergraduate experience in America. New York: HarperCollins Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Boyer, E. L. (1996). Scholarship of engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1(1), 11–20.
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement). (2006). Higher education: Civic mission and civic efforts. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation. Available from https://civicyouth.org/PopUps/higher_ed_civic_mission_and_civic_effects.pdf Accessed 12.03.19.
Driscoll, A. (2009). Carnegie’s new community engagement classification: affirming higher education’s role in community. New Directions in Higher Education, 147, 5–12. Emanuel, K. (2017). Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall. National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12681–12684.
Frank, A. (2015) Reaching the summit: explorations in meaningful learning through community engagement. In: International higher education teaching and learning (hetl)--scholarship of teaching and engagement (SoTE) conference (20-22 January 2015). Orem UT: Utah Valley University.
Greater Houston Partnership. (2019). Advanced manufacturing. Available from https:// www.houston.org/why-houston/industries/all-industries#Manufacturing
Jacoby, B. (1996) Foundations and principles of service-learning. In Jacoby, Barbara & Associates Service-learning in higher education: Concepts and practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Li, Z., Li, X., Wang,Y., & Quiring, S. (2019). Impact of climate change on precipitation patterns in Houston, Texas, USA. Anthropocene. p. 25.
Linder, Stephen, Marko, D., & Sexton, K. (2008). Cumulative cancer risk from air pollution in Houston: Disparities in risk burden and social disadvantage. Environmental Science & Technology, 42(12), 4312–4322
O’Meara, K., & Jaeger, A. J. (2006). Preparing future faculty for community engagement: Barriers, facilitators, models, and recommendations. Journal of Higher Education Outreach Engagement, 11(4), 3–25
Rudolph, F. (1962). The American college and university: A history. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press
Silka, L., Glover, R., Hutchins, K., Lindenfeld, L., Blackstone, A., Elliott, A., et al. (2013). Moving beyond the single discipline: Building a scholarship of engagement that permeates higher education. Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 11(4), 41-52.
Stevens, C. (2003). Unrecognized roots of service-learning in African American social thought and action, 1890-1930. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 9(2), 25–34
Stoecker, R. (2016). Liberating service learning and the rest of higher education community engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Trencher, G., Bai, X., Evans, J., McCormick, K., & Yarime, M. (2014). University partnerships for co-designing and co-producing urban sustainability. Global Environmental Change, 28, 153–165.
CHAPTER 2
A case for engaged research and practice
Shannon Van Zandt
In a time of rapid environmental changes due to climate change, it is imperative that scientists engage with communities to speed the transfer of knowledge and to identify problems that are salient and pressing to those communities. The urgency of climate change impacts no longer permits the transfer of knowledge through more traditional, detached methods that require community members to seek information or wait for traditional media or politicians to translate research into actionable information. This urgency is driving scientists and communities to work together. The type of engaged research that is now required draws upon a long effort by applied scientists to address the pressing problems of society.
The social sciences in particular originated out of a desire for science to serve humanity. As an applied social science, urban, or city planning professionalized this aim, seeking to solve problems related to the health, safety, and welfare of the general public as the industrial revolution sped urbanization across Europe and North America. Planners had early success with problems of civil engineering—addressing the physical needs of urban and rural residents, eradicating problems of sanitation (e.g., sewage) and the distribution of various services to the public at large. But after those relatively easy problems had been addressed, planners were asked to turn their attention to problems that were much more stubborn. These more stubborn or “wicked” problems are characterized by diverse demands coming from an
increasingly differentiated public. The demands, rather than being of one voice, were of many, conflicting voices. In other words, planners were being asked to solve problems that were defined differently by different groups.
Planners and other applied social scientists have long struggled to bridge gaps between theoretical purity and productive action, especially those working in academic settings. For planning academics—one of the few disciplines for whom the production of knowledge is not enough for career success—the struggle has real consequences for the communities in which we work. For planners working in distressed communities, for example, the conflict between individual and group attainment is an inherent source of tension. For example, while individual upward mobility may be considered development in the community, the exit of individuals from a neighborhood may destroy or degenerate the resources available in the abandoned neighborhood, thus undermining development of the community (Wilkinson, 1991).Thus efforts to facilitate individual residential mobility for disadvantaged households often do so at the expense of neighborhood stability. This community development dilemma illustrates one of the problems that planners practicing in all areas face: how to define the public interest and to resolve conflicts over contradictory needs and purposes.
Social problems as “wicked problems”
In a classic article in Policy Sciences, Rittel and Webber (1973) present their “dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Bellwethers of changes to come, they lamented the increasing demands and expectations being placed on planning professionals. Once seen as providing technical solutions to problems that were “definable, understandable, and consensual,” planning professionals of the late 1960s were being asked to evaluate objectives, clarify purposes, reorder priorities, and redistribute outputs among the competing publics.
The “wicked problems” posed by an open, interacting social system required skills beyond the scope of what planners, or at least Rittel and Webber, considered manageable. Constrained by a conception of science that required, at the very least, that problems be describable, they interpreted issues like equity and justice—those involving multiple sources, understandings and consequences—as being dilemmas, issues for which a satisfactory approach could not be found. The logical empiricism to which they had faithfully subscribed would simply not permit them to deal with the type of problems with which they were now being faced; thus the characterization of these problems as “wicked.”
A dilemma, in its most general, definitional sense, can only be generated by an inflexibility in one’s way of knowing, or understanding. Yet, as planning theorist John Friedmann (1993) notes, planning is the application of knowledge to action. If the epistemology held by the planner prevents her from acting, then an impasse has been reached. Coming from a classic technocratic vision of planning, Rittel and Webber make an attempt in their discourse to identify paths of action within their epistemological framework that may be more productive.Yet even the tone of the discourse suggests that they do not expect to be successful.They are reluctant to admit that a purely positivist approach—one based exclusively on data or knowledge that can be observed, measured, and analyzed—is inappropriate for addressing the nature of the problems facing planners. But the lesson here is not that planners are obsolete, but that they must welcome other kinds of knowledge that allow for productive action.
Applying a positivist viewpoint to social problems requires that theories be tested by observing the physical consequences of an intervention to see whether they support or disprove the hypothesis generated by the theory. For this to be possible, the consequences must have a factual, observable record of facts. Rittel and Webber recognize that our diverse public, with their different backgrounds, cultures, and understandings, can interpret the same physical consequences as evidence supporting more than one possible multiple theory. So how can we settle on one theory? And if we are unable to settle on one theory as explanatory of the consequence, we wish to manipulate, how may we proceed?
Empiricists would reject that such multiple interpretations are possible—they would insist that the “real world” is equivalent to the “world of our experience;” it is not relative. The problems as they are manifested must reflect the true nature of the problem, and ought to be measurable in concrete terms. Consequently, they should be consistently and identically interpreted by all members of society, and reflective of only one explanatory theory.The facts, and thus problems described by them, must be agreed upon. But, as Rittel and Webber note, “to describe a wicked problem in sufficient detail, one has to develop an exhaustive inventory of all conceivable solutions ahead of time.” So, it is not just that we have multiple, competing possible solutions, but that we do not have the full set available from which to make the correct choice, even if there were just one. Rittel and Webber suggest that there will never be just one solution, however, since “there are no ends to the causal chains that link interacting open systems, the wouldbe planner can always try to do better.”
Further, we cannot wait for experience to bear out our theories, because “there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem…. Any solution… will generate waves of consequences over an extended—virtually an unbounded—period of time” (Rittel and Webber, p. 163). And still further, “[e]very wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem…. The level at which a problem is settled… cannot be decided on logical grounds.” Thus, wicked problems cannot be successfully demarcated—no criterion exists by which to identify the problem, or a single solution.
When trying to accommodate multiple theories from divergent publics, it is inevitable that theories put forth by some publics will find more favor than others, either for sound scientific reasons (the theories offer superior or more complete explanations of the observed phenomena), or for political reasons (those putting them forth have more power or influence). To make these distinctions—to answer the questions about what we should be doing, and for whom we should be doing it—makes it necessary to impose an additional, normative framework to the process of identifying and selecting solutions.
For planners, problem solving also means that we are experimenting on people. Planners and other applied social scientists like policy makers are regularly implementing policies and programs that have a high likelihood of failure, and planners have repeatedly failed big (not by themselves, but in conjunction with others) on things like urban renewal and zoning. We have made segregation worse, contributed to society’s dependence on automobiles, widened inequalities, placed people in harm’s way, often through intentional activities designed to address some other problem. Society may prefer not to be used as a laboratory for our social experiments, and is typically more concerned with the betterment of their conditions than they are in a search for the truth. Not only do our mistakes substantively impact them, they may even hold us liable.
Relying exclusively on empirical facts can put social inquiry at odds with the natural and physical sciences, making socioecological problems like climate change insurmountable. Bringing logical empiricism to bear on social problems is a misapplication, at best. Problems of social policy are not experimentally testable—they cannot be falsified without inflicting or worsening already poor conditions. But that does not, or should not, mean that social scientists are unable to offer meaningful or effective courses of action for social problems.
Rittel and Webber offer 10 wicked problems that urban planners face. They can be classified into principles to guide the scientific inquiry into problems of social policy that planners face.
First, Rittel and Webber lament that there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem; wicked problems have no stopping rule; and that every wicked problem is essentially unique. These observations suggest that for science to address social problems, it must be able to identify and articulate a problem. Second, as noted earlier, they observe that solutions to wicked problems are not true-false, but good-bad. In other words, they are normative or valuative, based on conceptions of what is good or bad, right or wrong, not whether they can be confirmed or falsified. Next, wicked problems are unbounded, which stifles the ability for action to be taken. Rittel and Webber note that every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem, discrepancies in wicked problems can be explained in numerous ways, and they have an inexhaustible set of potential solutions. Finally, there is no way to test hypotheses as potential solutions. Rittel and Webber suggest that there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem; every solution to a wicked problem is a one-shot operation—there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error; and finally, the planner has no right to be wrong. So, to move closer to a way to address wicked problems, we must find other ways to find the truth of a situation, to be able to act for good.
Social theory offers alternatives to positivism that make efforts to address these issues
As an approach to understanding and approaching problems of social policy, interpretive inquiry offers some ways to overcome positivism’s shortcomings. Interpretive inquirers abandon the need for a single, unitary definition of a social problem. By recognizing that the same physical actions or consequences may be interpreted differently depending on culture and context, scientists operating in this epistemological model reframe the difficulty of problem definition, and allow each group to define the problem as it has meaning for them.
The ideological character of interpretive inquiry permits issues like justice and equity to rise to the surface and be addressed by participants and policy makers alike. Observable facts may be interpreted within a valuative framework, where priorities and goals may be formulated and objectives may be evaluated. Interpretive inquiry allows us, individually and in groups (but not as a society), to respond to questions like, “What should we be doing?” An interpretive approach is inevitably normative because action only becomes meaningful in the context of the rules and moral codes shared by members of the same group or culture. Traditional approaches to scientific inquiry like positivism or empiricism choose to ignore participants’ values
while studying the underlying or systemic causes of the consequences observed. But interpretive inquirers would argue that this approach leads to an overly conservative view of the participants’ plight and is unlikely to identify a need for change or reform. Yet while proponents of interpretive inquiry expend much effort criticizing a neutral approach, they fail to provide a satisfactory alternative for policy inquiry or formulation.
For public policy to be made, some reconciliation among competing interests must occur. Interpretive inquiry offers little help, since conflicts among them cannot be settled by a simple appeal to the facts, which may support more than one interpretation. At the extreme, this issue leads to radical relativism, where views and ideologies can only be reported, but never explained, analyzed, or otherwise addressed. So, the while goals and objectives can be identified within group, formulating policies that affect more than one group, as all public policies do, becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Proponents of interpretive inquiry are more interested in understanding their world than in addressing its problems as planners. Interpretive inquirers fail to take the next step of applying their second-order explanations to the formulation of policies, which then need be tested through implementation. Hence, planners are still confounded by the inability to test solutions to wicked problems, the lack of opportunity to learn by trial and error, and the prohibition of being wrong.
Picking up where proponents of interpretive inquiry leaves off, critical theorists seek to unite both the empirical and the normative as a basis for action that will transform society. A decidedly interpretive approach, critical theory acknowledges and allows for multiple interpretations, but provides a method of reconciliation which not only captures meanings and values but allows us to critically assess their truth. Incorporating the technical realities based on empirical-analytic sciences, as well as practical realities of communication based on history and culture, Jurgen Habermas offers a third “cognitive interest”—an emancipatory interest that seeks to remove distortions from acts of communication. In this way, Habermas expects that differing views may be reconciled toward a single understanding that in turn should lead to productive action. The promises of critical theory, as planning theorist John Forester puts it, are methods of investigation that are: (1) empirically sound and descriptively powerful; (2) interpretively plausible and phenomenologically meaningful; and yet (3) critically pitched, ethically insightful as well. Further, critical theory also challenges us to overcome the troubling disjunction between actor-focused and institutionfocused research strategies (p. 2).
Critical theory acknowledges multiple priorities and varied interests—the many forms of meaning within the symbolically structured reality of the social world. But rather than accepting and embracing these “validity-claims”, as proponents of interpretive inquiry do, critical theorists attribute these differences to distorted communication. Critical theorists, thus, eagerly anticipate the challenge of problem formulation. The process of problem formulation would be one in which all parties are able to bring information to the table so that the problem can be agreed upon and a solution undertaken. To reach consensus, Jurgen Habermas’ “ideal speech situation” suggests that undistorted communication will result in all individuals seeing the world in the same way, with all relevant data and information forthcoming. The “good-bad” continuum is an issue that should be resolved to a “true-false” through the ideal speech situation where the truth is uncovered through an examination of assertions. Such an examination occurs much the way psychoanalysis does, where agreement is reached through self-reflection into the underlying causes of incongruities in understandings. Presumably, this method will overcome inequalities among parties, so that all interests are equally represented, and are real interests, rather than nominal interests. The institutional power differentials inherent in relationships between, for example, planner and resident may be overcome, allowing a discourse free from coercion or misunderstanding. Thus, the need for intelligibility in secondorder explanations will be eliminated through philosophical inquiry and contemplation—everyone involved will have the same level of understanding and agreement. Rather than having some solutions confer good results for some and bad for others, and vice versa, consensus reached through the ideal speech situation should lead to a win-win action, in which all parties agree on and benefit from the action undertaken. In reality, without assurance that the values presented are autonomously derived and equally considered through discourse that is truly undistorted, we cannot feel confident that consensual solution will be a “good” one.
An information-gathering environment free from barriers to open communication can only lead to the highest possible level of exchange and thus the highest quality of information available, assuming the presence of all relevant parties. This ideal is difficult to actualize and thus cannot address some of the issues that wicked problems generate. Even a fully realized ideal speech situation need not necessarily lead to consensus, for example. The idea of consensus suggests that rational disagreement is disallowed and even undesirable. In other words, even when achieving undistorted communication, there still may be some disagreement. Liberal political traditions would even encourage disagreement, in the name of diversity. Furthermore, and
even more elementary, the ideal speech situation is just that—ideal. Achieving an ideal speech situation, and through it, consensus, in no way guarantees that a practical political course will be the result. Moreover, it is unlikely that such a situation will ever be realized, or even approximated. Falling short of the ideal, we are left with an approximated, less-distorted speech situation that may or may not lead to a consensual problem identification.
Further, Habermas assumes that the process of uncovering the truth will lead to a defined problem with a closed set of solutions from which to choose. The interrelationships among wicked problems and discrepancies among explanations of wicked problems are issues, in critical theorists’ perspective, that result simply from miscommunications and misunderstandings of the nature or reality of the problem. But Habermas seems to take for granted the transition from communication to action. While integrating his emancipatory interests with the technical and practical interests, Habermas focuses almost solely on perfecting the speech act, to bridge the identified gap between theory and practice. Since successful communicative action is thought to overcome distortions in understanding, it should lead to congruence between policy and action—we should be doing what we said we would be doing. As policy and action come closer together; that is, the more achievement reflects intent, it is less likely that planners will be inflicting unanticipated consequences on the public.
The resolution of conflicts over contradictory needs implies that these needs have been defined well enough to determine their contrariness. Within distressed communities, planners, and residents may identify numerous “symptoms” that characterize an undesirable condition—underemployment, dilapidated housing, crime, a lack of commercial services, for example. Still, an understanding of the relationships between these symptoms and the causes thereof is incomplete. If planners are unable to “know” the causes of these problems, how can they be expected to identify appropriate courses of action, much less predict the outcomes of such courses? This second problem—the problem of knowledge and prediction—has the potential to paralyze planners by limiting their ability to act and their confidence in doing so, and by diminishing their probability of successfully addressing the problem.
To the extent that planners have been immobilized or been made ineffective by insufficient knowledge, the development of their professional identity and legitimacy has been stunted. As a result, planners have sought to overcome this third problem by establishing a place for themselves among decision-making institutions and providing a service that
is not provided by other players. Community development planners, for example, seek to understand the social and economic forces that result in distressed neighborhoods and then to develop tools (usually policies) to counteract these forces. As Friedmann (1993) suggests, they do this by linking knowledge to action. Given the imperfect state of our understanding of social problems and processes, and perhaps even more so with problems that include environmental forces that are not fully understood (or agreed upon), action requires faith, if you will—a capacity for acting with a certain degree of confidence and conviction beyond what is “known,” trusting in experience and understanding to provide the missing information.
Planning traditions offer alternative methods of bridging the gap between uncertainty and action
The technically rational traditions—the rational comprehensive model, disjointed incrementalism, and social reform—stem from a more positivistic basis and require some assumptions to be made as it moves from knowledge to action. These models hold that knowledge generated through social science is complete and accurate; that a unitary public interest can be served; and that only planners have the superior knowledge needed to conceive of and implement plans.These models are both commonly and currently practiced by public sector planners, those working for cities, municipal agencies, state agencies, and other public institutions.Yet they fall short in upholding their own assumptions.
The rational comprehensive model assumes that knowledge applied to planning problems is full and perfect; it is “unbounded.” In comprehensive planning, the further assumption is made of a perfect understanding of the relationships between the individual parts of a comprehensive plan (land use, transportation and the economy, for example). Planners use this socalled perfect knowledge to gain consensus on the end to be pursued and the appropriate means by which to reach it. Reaching consensus assumes that an ideal speech situation described earlier is present—that every interest is represented, and that agreement can be reached through a dialogue unmarred by power struggles or deliberate misinformation. To enable the transition from knowledge to action, the rational comprehensive model uses the “ignorance is bliss” approach to handling uncertainty—whatever is unknown is disregarded as unimportant in the formulation of both problems and alternative solutions, as well as in the choice of and implementation of solutions.
Yet the rational comprehensive model requires planners to undertake persuasion to gain support for their proposals; this implies a distorted communicative action. Further, identifying a unitary public interest is, practically speaking, impossible. An alternative plan of action may affect an individual or a group in a number of ways, depending on his or her role or capacity (e.g., professional, taxpayer, parent); it is difficult to know what the net effect of a policy will be on the individual in all of his or her capacities. Second, it is unlikely that one policy will be better for everyone than any other policy. And finally, free-riders threaten to undermine the public benefit of a particular policy by seeking private gain at the expense of the public.
Disjointed incrementalism acknowledges such incompleteness in knowledge; rather than trying to overcome it, it embraces uncertainty by taking baby steps along the path from knowledge to action. Like the rational comprehensive model, disjointed incrementalism takes as true knowledge that “on which a consensus is formed among informed people discussing the matter in undistorted communication” (Sager, 1994, p. 8). However, incrementalists acknowledge that complete information cannot be acquired from the start, but that it can be added to and improved upon as the planner moves through the planning process.
By allowing the ends to remain undefined, disjointed incrementalists avoid substantive rationality in favor of simple functional rationality—in other words, as long as each individual action is rational, it does not matter what the ultimate outcome is, since it is almost certain to be better than what they started with. In doing so, however, future interests may be sacrificed in favor of responding to present consensus.The consequences of such a short-term view may be great. These future interests are unlikely to have been articulated because they are unanticipated. A disjointed incremental approach prohibits the identification of future wants.
To their credit, however, disjointed incrementalists embrace pluralism, acknowledging that multiple interests are present, and that determining courses of action among them is a sort of an analysis in itself (Sager, 1994). By presupposing that no one interest has a monopoly on the production of information and analysis concerning a specific plan of action, they emphasize communication and learning as a method for improving the knowledge available for action (Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1970).While such emphases reflect a more sensible grasp of the realities under which planners operate, the underlying assumption on which action is taken is that a unitary conception of interest can be reached through these methods of communication and learning.
In the technically rational traditions, planners hold a singular position in society. Not only are planners uniquely qualified to lead, they are granted considerable power to do so. It is no wonder that the technically rational models are so popular among planners. These models confer planners with perfect knowledge and selflessness, along with power and goodness. Yet, of course, this role for planners is far from what the discipline of planning has been able to attain in the United States. Since the role of the government is and has been so unpopular in the United States, planning has failed to establish its professional legitimacy. This may be one reason that European countries have been more successful implementing policy and action that address climate change, for example. European planners have been much more successful in achieving professional legitimacy and in affecting real change both in local communities and at the state level.
In contrast to the top-down approach of technically rational traditions, the planning traditions based on liberalism use a bottom-up approach to deal with uncertainty. While not abandoning the ideal of a unitary conception of collective interest, emancipatory traditions embrace the idea of self-realization and recognize that independence is necessary for a society in which individuals can develop freely, an idea which contradicts that of a collective will. Rather than seeking to guide society, as the technically rational models do, the emancipatory traditions seek to transform society.
While technically rational traditions favor scientific and technical knowledge, radical planning rejects the universal validity claims of such knowledge, embracing instead the knowledge generated through personal experience and interpretation. The knowledge needed for radical planning comes from practice itself; it is knowledge acquired by the mobilized group during the course of its own actions. Like the technically rational models, radical planning looks to science to offer solutions and tools for societal transformation, but unlike these models, radical planning understands that the choice of solutions will have differential consequences for different groups and interests. Radical planning responds to these multiple interests by encouraging them to organize, articulate their needs, and identify (with the help of radical planners) possible courses of action. Choosing from among the possible technical solutions then becomes a highly politicized and strategic process. Radical planners must help their constituents play to the limits of the public’s attention, by selecting carefully which issues to pursue, when, and how. They must also recognize the uncertain nature of the information available. Here, radical planning seems to take a cue from disjointed incrementalism by taking only steps justified by the available information. While “cautious”
