Research On Policy Marketing Of ‘Wicked Problems’

With the fragmentation of social structure, the decentralization of social profits and the diversification of social appeals, the mission of public managers has not simply limited to solving social problems, responding to social requests, and achieving public value, they become facing more tasks including choosing management focus, allocating public resources and balancing interest conflicts. Consistently, the public management problems have changed gradually, from the single, direct and simple problems to the high value-conflict, non-structural and high-uncertainty complex problems. Western academy named this sort of public problems ‘wicked problems’, which incorporates different conflicted values and sub-problems and relates to multi stakeholders. This concept not only reflects a certain problem type, but also indicates a common feature of current public problems.This study argues that policy marketing plays a significant role on reaching a consensus for wicked problems, and therefore, considers the policy marketing of wicked problems as research subject and analyzes two questions:(1) how traditional NPG based policy marketing should be designed and modified for wicked problems;(2) what pattern of policy marketing of wicked problems is, and which kind of action logics it follows in practice.Through literature review, theoretical analysis and text analysis, this study draws several conclusions. First, besides a type of public problems, wicked problems are a type of classification criteria and evolutionary trend, and their three features are the continuum judging pedigree which constituting a three dimension analyzing framework. Second, there are two stages of policy marketing of wicked problem: recognizing the chaotic wicked problems, and interplaying among diversified subjects, which can be further divided into content recognition, value creation and knowledge transfer process. Finally, the Chinese policy marketing of wicked problems follows the logic of performance legitimacy and relies on infrastructure power and fault tolerant space, which is different from the theoretically logic of process legitimacy.