2026/02/27 by Guy Peters, Brian Head, Hasan Danaeefard +2
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Policy Transfer and Learning #Public Policy and Administration Research #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/00953997251415534
openalex created_date 2026/02/27 · openalex publication_date 2026/02/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
This bibliometric study maps 52 years of scholarship on “wicked problems,” tracing the field’s evolution from Rittel and Webber’s foundational framing to contemporary debates on super-wicked problems, clumsy solutions, and adaptive governance. We identify four dominant thematic clusters: collaborative governance, sustainability, policy implementation, and crisis management. Co-citation and co-word analyses reveal two emerging fault lines—one emphasizing networked, deliberative governance and another critiquing collaborative feasibility—and point to novel research frontiers, including joined-up government, pragmatic experimentation, and temporal governance for time-urgent challenges. We propose a typology of wicked problems and outline four governance paradigms to guide practitioners.