Chasing the Impossible. Sustainable Development Is a Wicked Problem, but It Can Be and Should Be Tamed!

Abstract

Since 1972, the majority of scientific workshops has been trying to solve the problems that the authors called attention to in the first report of the Club of Rome. A lot of good intentions and relatively modest results characterize the efforts of science, and the politicians are not more successful than scientists in this field. The climate is changing, biodiversity is diminishing, and environmental damage poses a threat to human health continuously. The UN calls for international cooperation to solve the problems, but it often turns out that the parties do not even agree on the problems itself. Sustainable development is one of the most commonly used concepts in today's public discourse. Everyone wants the world to develop in a sustainable way, but it soon turns out that everyone thinks about the future in a different way. The book “The Limits to Growth” was published in 1972 and an article about wicked problems was born in 1973. The article published in 1973 does not deal with the limits of growth, but with the problems of social planning. It is a pity that while we are always talking about interdisciplinarity and holistic thinking, in practice, different professions do not know each other's scientific results. Rittel's article dealt with the nature of wicked problems. We have not talked about sustainable development then, and no one remembered later that we are suffering so much from sustainable development because every goal is a wicked problem. We should make use of the results of Wicked problems in planning sustainable development. In this article, I am trying to make this connection. This latter article attempts to show that there is no coincidence that there is a lack of consensus on sustainable development goals and greater patience and greater confidence in institutions in the field of SDGs if we are to succeed in achieving our goals.