Issue brief: Unravelling the knot: Addressing wicked problems through stakeholder engagement

This brief investigates the application of a decision making tool for governance designed to tackle complex problems – Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence Based Decision Making.

Publisher SPARC
By Kamran Hakiman Chloe Stull-Lane
Promoting innovative solutions Ethiopia Kenya

This brief investigates the application of a decision making tool for governance specifically designed to these tackle complex, wicked problems – Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence Based Decision Making (SHARED). SHARED is an innovative example of a wider class of ‘stakeholder engagement frameworks’, a common yet understudied response to ‘wicked’ problems. These frameworks involve multiple stakeholders to uncover locally relevant and politically legitimate solutions. SHARED was selected for study as it has a history of application in Sub-Saharan Africa, and strongly foregrounds using evidence and data as key elements for navigating intractable problems.

Our work builds on previous SPARC research focusing on the impact of SHARED in single country contexts. However, to our knowledge, this is the first comparative study addressing factors for success and limitations.

We draw from studies of two SHARED applications from northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia respectively, examining the framework’s strengths and weaknesses in addressing two complex issues. In the Kenya case, SHARED was applied to improve the allocation of public funding within Turkana County, a dryland area of Kenya experiencing chronic water shortages. The Ethiopia case examines the decision-making with regard to reversing deforestation in Ethiopia’s drylands, involving both national and sub-national policies and stakeholders.

Our case studies suggest the following lessons for policy makers and donors seeking to improve decision-making with regard to complex, ‘wicked’ problems:

Addressing complex social problems can benefit from well-defined stakeholder engagement frameworks like SHARED. Nevertheless, the implementation of such frameworks varies depending on the specific issue, context, and available resources. Based on our findings, we propose the following recommendations:

 


Source URL: https://www.sparc-knowledge.org/publications-resources/issue-brief-unravelling-knot-addressing-wicked-problems-through-stakeholder