Which form of reasoning is needed for democratic decision making on wicked problems?

The proposed presentation will use a critical analysis of deliberative democracy as a current paradigm of democracy research to formulate a more general challenge: How should democratic societies deal with so-called wicked problems, that is, problems whose framing is contested or with regard to which there is no agreement about the acceptability of moves to solve the problem? As the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy write, a central ideal of deliberative democracy is that people come together, discuss the political issues they face, and “decide on the policies that will then affect their lives.” In Deliberative Democracy for Diabolical Times: Confronting Populism, Extremism, Denial, and Authoritarianism, Bächtiger and Dryzek argue that “healthy discursive infrastructures can make democracies work again.” I will argue that this optimism underestimates the seriousness of challenges that are certainly aggravated by things like polarization, but that arise mainly from the fact that in modern individualistic and pluralist societies almost all important problems are framed from conflicting perspectives, each based on particular interests, needs, world-views, values, and social identities. It is these wicked problems that deserve more attention. In the policy process, problem framing plays a crucial role because how a problem gets framed determines the set of options that are relevant for solving the problem. If the problem is framed differently, then the set of relevant options changes. Problem framing consists of two components: determining where to draw the boundary between the problem and its context and selecting a particular conceptual (or ideological) framework to formulate the problem. A major challenge is that there is no rationally justifiable way to decide how a problem should be framed—rationally justifiable in the sense that the justification should be sufficient to convince all those who look at this problem from different perspectives. But if there is no rationally justifiable problem framing, then—it seems—the process cannot be protected from the power struggles that are characteristic for competitive democracies. This power struggle, again, makes it difficult to frame problems in ways that might be more appropriate for the problems in question. The proposed presentation will explore three ideas: first, that it should be easier to agree on a problem formulation than on policies to deal with a problem; second, that agreeing on a problem formulation might incentivize attempts to build consensus and creativity to develop more widely acceptable policy proposals; and third, that a particular form of reasoning which I call Balanced Dialectical Co-determination (BaDiCo) might provide a method to develop policy proposals and problem formulation in a process of co-evolution. There might be no way to rationally justify particular problem framing and policy proposals, but BaDiCo can be conceptualized as a reasonable process to cope with wicked problems. Insofar as this form of reasoning might play a role both in all sorts of political contestation beyond problem framing and in theoretical attempts to make sense of them, it might, at some point, qualify as a new paradigm of democracy research.