‘Wicked’, ‘Messy’, and ‘Clumsy’: Long-Term Frameworks for Sustainability

Abstract

Society requires new forms of science and technology to productively accommodate the intrinsic value-laden judgments needed to manage the high uncertainties and considerable long-term impacts of sustainable urban planning. Responses to these ‘wicked’ problems include the development of postnormal science in the early 1990s. In subsequent literature on postnormal sustainability technologies, multiactor approaches to decision making are beginning to emerge. I examine an example: the development in New Zealand of a 100-year vision: the Auckland Sustainability Framework. Developed over fifteen months through ‘messy’ consultation across stakeholders, it has provided a clumsy’ outcome, namely one which enabled multiple viewpoints to be expressed and responded to by others. The process adopted offers evidence in support of the development of sustainability frameworks over much longer timescales than the current norm in local authorities, and indications of how such processes may unfold.