P37 Public Action Towards Wicked Problems in a Polycrises Era

Panel Chairs

Corresponding and review group chair

• Marta Ingaggiati: marta.ingaggiati@unimi.it

Co-chairs

• Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz – Professor, University of Brasília
• Patrícia Alencar Silva Mello – Professor, FGV Direito SP, São Paulo Law School, Fundação Getulio Vargas
• Liang Zhu – Assistant Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy, Dalian University of Technology
• Martina Pisarra – Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Milan
• Doriana Daroit – Professor, University of Brasília
• Erika Lisboa – FGV Cidades, Fundação Getulio Vargas
• Tianyi Gao – PhD Candidate, School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China
• Giovanni Barbato – Tenure-track Researcher, University of Milan
• Fernando Deodato Domingos – FGV Cidades, Fundação Getulio Vargas
• Sen Lin – Assistant Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy, Dalian University of Technology

Public organisations increasingly operate in environments characterised by polycrises, wicked problems and grand challenges. Climate change, geopolitical tensions, public health emergencies, digital transformation and cybersecurity threats interact and compound one another, generating demands that cut across policy domains and levels of government. Complexity and wicked problems must be addressed in a timely manner, while safeguarding legitimacy, public trust and societal safety, and while ensuring the provision of public services to diverse and heterogeneous stakeholders.

Wicked problems are simultaneously a matter of the institutional architectures that authorise public action, of the interfaces through which it meets society, of the performance systems through which it is steered and adapted, and of the competing demands that run through all of these and are never definitively resolved. This panel deliberately brings these points together, organising the conversation around four strands:

1. Paradoxical tensions, dilemmas, contradictions, trade-offs and coping strategies to manage wicked problems - Marta Ingaggiati, Martina Pisarra, Giovanni Barbato
2. Wicked problems and state-society interfaces: cross-cutting dynamics and multidimensional effectiveness - Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz, Doriana Daroit
3. Institutional architectures for governing wicked problems - Patrícia Alencar Silva Mello; Erika Lisboa; Fernando Deodato Domingos
4. Performance intelligence for wicked problems: from citizen co-production to adaptive public management - Liang Zhu, Tianyi Gao, Sen Lin

Governments are increasingly expected to ensure safety and security while simultaneously promoting transparency, participation, innovation and democratic accountability, they face demands that cannot be fully reconciled through conventional managerial approaches. The panel invites theoretical, empirical, methodological and comparative contributions that explore how public organisations, public managers and governance networks experience, interpret and manage complexity and wicked problems, and that engage with one of the four strands set out below.

Authors are asked to indicate at the very beginning of their abstract which strand they wish their paper to be considered for. Abstracts that do not specify a strand will be allocated by the panel chairs, who will cluster all accepted submissions into coherent sub-thematic sessions.

1. Tensions, contradictions and paradoxes: non-normative approaches to governing wicked problems

• Marta Ingaggiati, tenure-track researcher, University of Milan
• Martina Pisarra, post-doctoral researcher, University of Milan
• Giovanni Barbato, tenure-track researcher, University of Milan

As public organizations become more global, complex and dynamic, and operate in environments shaped by polycrises, contradictory demands intensify. Public organisations are confronted with demands that may be interdependent, persistent and frequently incompatible: safeguarding security while preserving openness, accelerating digital transformation while protecting equity of access, acting decisively while sustaining participation.

These demands create tensions in managerial action, which scholarship has conceptualized under different typologies. Part of this literature focuses on dilemmas (tension in which each competing alternative presents clear advantages and disadvantages), on dialectics (understood as an ongoing process of resolving tensions through integration in a triadic movement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis) or on dualities (interdependent relations between contradictory elements). Others focus on contradictions (tensions between opposed and interdependent elements), and on trade-offs (capturing the simultaneous presence of two forces pushing in different directions). More recently, a strand of study has emerged around paradoxical tensions, defined as contradictory yet interrelated demands that coexist and persist over time, and that cannot be settled once and for all. This lens focuses on how organisations and decision-makers hold competing demands together, balancing, accommodating and at times leveraging them, without presuming that one pole is legitimate and the other a deviation from it. The question shifts from which objective should prevail to how the tension is sustained, by whom, and with what consequences. Under these conditions, linear problem-solving offers limited analytical purchase. In response, a set of non-normative approaches has been gaining ground in public management: approaches concerned with describing how public actors actually live with contradiction, rather than with prescribing the ideal state towards which they ought to converge.

The purpose of this panel is to broaden the conversation on how tensions and contradictory demands are conceptualized in public management, and to follow that conversation through its consequences. This means attending to the tensions themselves (e.g., how they are identified, distinguished and located), to the strategies through which public organizations and the actors embedded in them cope (e.g., choosing between poles, separating them across levels, units or moments in time, or holding them together in some workable arrangement) and to the outcome of these strategies (e.g., if harnessed tensions can be generative or become a pathology). We welcome contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Tensions between safety, security and democratic values;
• Managing competing demands for accountability, transparency, performance and innovation;
• tensions, contradictions and paradoxes in cross-sectoral partnership, networked governance and multi-level arrangements and in participatory settings, including co-production, collaborative governance, stakeholder engagement;
• The impact of tensions on value creation and destruction;
• Leadership skills and capacities to navigate complex environments;
• Decision-making and coping strategies under conditions of uncertainty and tensions;
• Sensemaking and boundary-spanning collaborations as paradoxical arena;
• The role of power and agency in tensional contexts, in both processes and decision-making;
• Methodological and theoretical advancements for studying tensions in public administration and public management.

2. Wicked problems and state–society interfaces: cross-cutting dynamics and multidimensional effectiveness

Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz (fernandanatasha@unb.br), Professor, University of Brasília

Doriana Daroit (doriana@unb.br), Professor, University of Brasília

State-society interfaces (such as public policy councils, participatory platforms, and citizen assemblies) are widely recognized as vital arenas for democratic engagement and collaborative governance (Lüchmann, 2020). However, the mere formal existence of these participatory spaces does not guarantee their ability to shape policy or meaningfully engage with pressing societal issues (Callon et al., 2009). To bridge the gap between democratic promise and concrete reality, this strand invites a critical examination of the "cross-cutting" (or transversal) dynamics that drive the multidimensional effectiveness of state-society interfaces (Daroit et al., 2023).

We propose to explore how interactions, negotiations, and networks stretch across organizational, sectoral, and societal silos and promote public innovation. Moving beyond linear metrics of policy success, we encourage discussions on how these cross-cutting practices mobilize actors, public action instruments and resources, generating diverse manifestations of effectiveness that help address wicked problems. This encompasses not just meeting objectives, but also institutional innovation (Andion, 2023), social learning, administrative intelligence (Brugué et al., 2015) and democratic development (Cruz, 2020). We are also interested in how these dynamics operate under conditions of crisis and heightened uncertainty, including the growing role of digital platforms and data infrastructures in mediating state-society relations, and the risks this poses for inclusion and accountability. This strand offers vital insights into how public administrations can foster trust, societal engagement, and welfare. Understanding how state and civil society actors coproduce solutions across traditional boundaries equips public managers and scholars with the strategies to build democratically anchored institutions. Approaches suitable for this strand include collaborative governance, network management, democratic innovations, public action, and policy coproduction. Theories that view effectiveness not as a single, static end-state, but as a complex, continuous process generated through relational dynamics between state and non-state actors are also relevant. A wide array of methodological approaches is relevant to this strand: qualitative studies, including comparative case studies, ethnographies, controversy cartographies are encouraged to uncover the dynamics of state-society interactions. Likewise, quantitative or mixed-methods approaches, such as social network analysis mapping relations across various policy sectors, are highly welcome. By bringing together diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, this strand aims to critically assess how interconnected, cross-cutting dynamics can overcome the limitations of isolated participatory platforms, enabling the coproduction of more responsive and effective public policies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Public action instrumentation for democratic development.
• Multidimensional effectiveness of participatory forums.
• Cross-cutting dynamics, mainstreaming and network management in participatory arenas.
• Institutional innovation and collaborative governance in uncertain contexts.
• Coproduction of public policies for addressing wicked problems.
• Administrative intelligence in complex public management.
• Inclusion, inequalities, and accountability in state-society interfaces in the face of wicked problems.

3. Institutional architectures for governing wicked problems

Patrícia Alencar Silva Mello, Professor, FGV Direito SP – São Paulo Law School, Fundação Getulio Vargas

Erika Lisboa - FGV Cidades - Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fernando Deodato Domingos - FGV Cidades - Fundação Getulio Vargas

Wicked problems rarely fit within the boundaries of a single organisation, policy sector or level of government. Their governance typically requires sustained interaction among public agencies, private organisations, civil society, scientific institutions and communities, whose resources, authority, knowledge and interests are distributed across different institutional settings. Under these conditions, the capacity to act depends not only on the choices of individual organisations or public managers, but also on the institutional architectures through which collective action is organised, authorised, coordinated and adapted over time.

Institutional architectures comprise the combinations of formal and informal rules, organisational arrangements, roles, decision-making structures, legal and policy instruments, coordination mechanisms and accountability relationships that shape how actors interact around a public problem. They establish who participates, who decides, how resources and responsibilities are distributed, how knowledge circulates, and how conflicts and interdependencies are managed. In the context of wicked problems, however, these arrangements cannot be understood as static institutional designs. They must frequently operate across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries and accommodate uncertainty, experimentation, learning and changing configurations of actors and problems.

This perspective shifts attention from the search for a single optimal governance structure towards understanding how institutional arrangements enable or constrain collective capacity to respond to complex public problems. It also raises questions about the relationship between stability and adaptability: institutional architectures need to provide sufficient predictability, legitimacy and accountability to sustain collective action, while remaining capable of adjustment as problems evolve, new knowledge emerges and actor constellations change.

The strand therefore invites contributions examining how institutional architectures are designed, assembled, orchestrated, transformed and evaluated in response to wicked problems and grand challenges. We are particularly interested in the mechanisms through which heterogeneous actors are connected and coordinated, and in the conditions under which institutional arrangements generate—or fail to generate—the capacities required for collective problem-solving.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological and comparative contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• institutional design and institutional change in the governance of wicked problems;
• multi-level, cross-sectoral and networked governance arrangements;
• institutional architectures of public–private–civil society collaboration;
• governance of innovation ecosystems and other ecosystem-based policy arrangements;
• legal, regulatory and policy instruments enabling or constraining collective action;
• distribution of authority, responsibilities, resources and accountability across organisations and sectors;
• orchestration, coordination and boundary-spanning mechanisms;
• institutional and state capacities for governing complexity;
• experimentation, learning and adaptive institutional arrangements;
• tensions between institutional stability, flexibility, legitimacy and accountability;
• the role of knowledge, evidence and data infrastructures in institutional coordination;
• approaches to monitoring and evaluating complex institutional and governance arrangements.

4. Performance intelligence, citizen co-production and adaptive public management

Liang ZHU, Assistant Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy, Dalian University of Technology

Tianyi GAO (2019202767@ruc.edu.cn), PhD. Candidate, School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China

Sen LIN (senlin033@dlut.edu.cn), Assistant Professor, School of Public Administration and Policy, Dalian University of Technology

Public administrations confronting polycrises must act on signals that are fast-moving, incomplete, and difficult to reconcile. While traditional performance management systems rely on stable indicators and reporting cycles, wicked problems unsettle these arrangements: goals conflict, causal relations remain uncertain, and evidence arrives from diverse actors with differing priorities.

This strand introduces the concept of "performance intelligence": the organizational work through which public organizations generate, interpret, contest, and act on heterogeneous and potentially conflicting feedback. It examines the sites of contestation where citizen co-production, algorithmic assessments, formal targets, and professional knowledge diverge. At these junctures, managers and frontline workers must decide which signals warrant action, thereby reshaping discretion, routines, and resource allocation. Consequently, the feedback process becomes a core component of safety, security, and adaptive capacity, rather than merely a question of performance measurement.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, and comparative contributions that trace these processes across organizational levels and institutional contexts, with a particular interest in perspectives from the Global South. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• The role of citizen co-production and AI in shaping performance feedback and organizational attention;
• Contestation and sensemaking at the intersection of algorithmic assessments, formal targets, and professional judgment;
• The impact of performance intelligence on discretion, resource allocation, and adaptive coordination;
• Comparative perspectives on feedback arrangements, resilience, and safety across diverse institutional contexts.