Disentangling wicked problems: A reflexive approach towards resilience governance

Abstract

This chapter discusses the complex challenge of dealing with diverging threats in our contemporary hyper-connected society. In recent decades, resilience has become a key notion that has been adopted by policy-makers and academia to embrace the changing risk our society faces. Yet the traditional, modernist rational logic that dominates approaches to resilience management, does not fit with the problem at hand. In this chapter we argue that societal challenges in the current era require a paradigm shift: we need novel perspectives on how to approach the governance of risks and the societal implementation of resolutions. We will argue that the recent focus shift from risk assessment to resilience enhancement in many disaster management communities is an important aspect of this paradigm shift, but that it is by itself not enough to deal with the ‘wickedness’ of today’s complexity.