Tackling Wicked Problems Through Transdisciplinary Imagination

Question: What is a wicked problem? Answer: Climate Change, for example:

i.e. an extremely complex problem that can’t be solved by any simple method. Also, as one contributor to this book, John Schooneveldt, remarks, ‘Wicked problems cannot be understood in the context that give rise to them’ (p. 141). (It’s a bit like trying to remove the plank from one’s own eye, to quote a biblical image.) The whole drift of this book is to introduce and justify a more open approach to making decisions that affect the environment, labelled ‘Open Transdisciplinary Inquiry’, sometimes including the word ‘Imaginative’. This means an inquiry or research method that seeks to break down barriers between various disciplines or specializations, and provide windows of understanding between them. In each chapter of Part 2, the various kinds of knowledge or worldview are specified as part of the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter, and in the theory section (Part 1, p. 65) there is a table listing the various kinds of knowledge. Muslim readers and the billions of other believers should note that ‘religions’ are given a very small place at the bottom of this table, in the row ‘Socio-Cultural’ and the column ‘Epistemological Divides (multiple constructions of knowledge)’, together with ‘humanist’ and ‘agnostic’. As the final chapter acknowledges (p. 290), ‘The course recommended here, ... has been to base their collective inquiries on the full set of knowledges currently informing the Western tradition of knowledge.’