Wicked thoughts: How magical thinking about collaboration helps deal with complexity in public policy

In academic scholarship, optimism about the potential of collaborative governance to tame complexity is being tempered. In recent scholarship, there is an emphasis on the pervasive political obstacles and governing pathologies that thwart efficient coordination across public agencies and with a range of non-governmental actors (O’Toole and Meier 2004; McGuire and Agranoff 2011; Head 2014; Dickinson 2014). In policy practice, such observations are not new. In fact, reflective actors frequently joke about the bureaucratic snags and political tensions that make the reality of collaboration rather more difficult than the ideal (see Laws and Forrester 2015). This paper investigates this apparent paradox. It asks why actors publicly remain proponents of collaborating to deal with ‘wicked problems’ of complexity despite their privately held ‘wicked thoughts’ about the frustrations and limitations they experience in practice. Through a comparative case study of the work of preventative health agencies in tackling the complex problem of excess alcohol consumption, it unpacks the reasons reflective actors give for pursuing collaboration in spite of stubborn obstacles, and the benefits they derive in their practice. It concludes by defending the pursuit of the ‘magic concept’ of collaboration not because doing so can tame complexity, nor because it can even help deal with apparently wicked problems more efficiently, but because it subjects them to more inclusive and dynamic deliberation ‘downstream’ in the policy process.