LIST OF PANELS

Public policy scholars increasingly deal with wicked, unstructured, or messy problems (Head 2022). To address such problems in policy design, there is an increasing call for participation of various actors in general and in research more specifically – discussing here concepts such as ‘transdisciplinary research’, ‘citizen science’, ‘dual modes of science communication’, ‘public engagement’ and many others (Hou et al., 2022; Hodgkinson et al., 2022). In this session, we would like to reflect on the role of these participatory research approaches in policy design, and for problem structuring (Simon, 1973), more specifically.

Participatory research introduces new arenas for policy design – from traditional formats such as roundtable discussions to new formats such as participatory modeling and scenario building, serious gaming, or citizen science. Participatory research may thus also bring additional actors into policy design processes, amongst them researchers and stakeholders from different societal sectors such as businesses, civil society organizations, and even individual citizens. Through policy recommendations and at times even co-operation and co-design with decision makers, participatory research may not only bring new knowledge into scientific policy advice but also new dynamics of defining problem structures and solutions, with more or less uncertain, complex, and conflictive issues and correspondingly also more or less complex policy mixes. Still, we do not yet fully understand the potential effects of participatory research on (i) transforming “ill-structured problems” into “well-structured ones” (Simon 1973, Hoppe, 2011), (ii) the resulting complexity of recommended policy mixes (Kirschke & Kosow, 2021), and (iii) the effects of policy recommendations on policy design including changes in evidence-based and interest-based policies.

Therefore, this panel asks about the different formats of participatory research and how they may affect policy design in wicked problem settings.

References

Head, B. W. (2022). The Rise of ‘Wicked Problems’—Uncertainty, Complexity and Divergence. In Wicked Problems in Public Policy (pp. 21-36). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Hodgkinson, I. R., Mousavi, S., & Hughes, P. (2022). New development: Citizen science—discovering (new) solutions to wicked problems. Public Money & Management, 42(2), 133-136.

Hoppe, R. (2011). The governance of problems: Puzzling, powering and participation. Policy Press.

Hou, X., Li, R., & Song, Z. (2022). A Bibliometric Analysis of Wicked Problems: From Single Discipline to Transdisciplinarity. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1-31.

Kirschke, S., & Kosow, H. (2022). Designing policy mixes for emerging wicked problems. The case of pharmaceutical residues in freshwaters. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 24(5), 486-497.

Simon, H. A. (1973). The structure of ill structured problems. Artificial intelligence, 4(3-4), 181-201.

This panel welcomes papers dealing with the design of participatory research and its effects on policy design. Participatory research approaches are here broadly defined, including all those approaches aiming at involving non-researchers into actual research processes. Such approaches can take different forms, including different types of transdisciplinary research, citizen science, or participatory forms of science communication, just to name a few. Such approaches can also involve different types of actors, to various degrees, and at different steps of the research process.

As the panel seeks to understand the effects of participatory research on policy design, we welcome papers that address at least one of the following research questions:

1. How do participatory research approaches affect the structure of public policy problems, including, but not limited to more or less emphasis of the uncertain, complex or conflictive character of these problems?

2. How do participatory research approaches affect the polices that are ultimately recommended, including the diversity or coherence of policy mixes?

3. Does participatory research affect the character of policy design to be more evidence-based, interest-based, or more balanced?

In addition, we invite all papers to discuss and reflect upon the following:

4. Do answers to the above-mentioned questions depend on the format of participatory research, including different forms of transdisciplinary research, citizen science, or more or less dialogic forms of science communication?

5. Do answers to the above-mentioned questions depend on the types of actors participating in respective formats, including their resources, power relationships, and interests?

We welcome both conceptual and empirical work such as:

· Reflections, evaluations and meta-perspectives on participatory research and policy design

· (Comparative) case studies of participatory research connected to policy design focusing on environmental and sustainability research and policy fields such as resource management (e.g., water, energy), climate change, or biodiversity.

We further particularly welcome contributions from various regional contexts and scales, for a better understanding of the effects of participatory research in various regional contexts.