"Wicked problems," public policy, and administrative theory : lessons from the GM food regulatory arena
By: Durant, Robert F
.
Contributor(s): LEGGE JR, Jerome S.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: Thousand Oaks : SAGE, July 2006Subject(s): Política Pública | Teoria Administrativa | Ciência Política | Mercado | Tecnocracia | Regulação | Opinião Pública | Valor Social | Democracia | Estudo de Caso | Estados Unidos | Europa | União EuropéiaAdministration & Society 38, 3, p. 309-334Abstract: As societies worldwide struggle to address what policy analysts call "wicked problems" such as world hunger, malnutrition, and ecological sustainability, analysts from a variety of perspectives have questioned the administrative states abilities to deal with them. Ascendant since the early 1990s as a prescription for remedying these shortcomings is a market, technocratic, and non-deliberative theory of administration that some have called "neo-managerialism" and others the "managerialist ideology." This study uses European attitudes toward promoting the use of genetically modified (GM) foods as a "policy window" for exploring how well or ill-suited the neo-managerialist philosophy informing the U.S. governments promotional campaign was with the factors driving European opposition to GM foods. Causal modeling of the "calculus of dissent" that led to a the European Union (EU) moratorium on GM foods suggests that deliberative (rather than neo-managerialist) theories of administration are better suited for the "collective puzzlement of society" that wicked problems require
As societies worldwide struggle to address what policy analysts call "wicked problems" such as world hunger, malnutrition, and ecological sustainability, analysts from a variety of perspectives have questioned the administrative states abilities to deal with them. Ascendant since the early 1990s as a prescription for remedying these shortcomings is a market, technocratic, and non-deliberative theory of administration that some have called "neo-managerialism" and others the "managerialist ideology." This study uses European attitudes toward promoting the use of genetically modified (GM) foods as a "policy window" for exploring how well or ill-suited the neo-managerialist philosophy informing the U.S. governments promotional campaign was with the factors driving European opposition to GM foods. Causal modeling of the "calculus of dissent" that led to a the European Union (EU) moratorium on GM foods suggests that deliberative (rather than neo-managerialist) theories of administration are better suited for the "collective puzzlement of society" that wicked problems require
Click on an image to view it in the image viewer
There are no comments for this item.