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Although network governance has become increasingly popular in both research and practice, its anticipated benefits do not always materialize. Although literature on network governance acknowledges the challenges that result from its introduction, scholars tend to assume these challenges can be managed and rarely analyze how the different participating actors (strategically) react to the tensions surrounding its establishment. As such, the process of how “networking” actors establish, maintain, and negotiate a network remains understudied. In light of these shortcomings, this article zooms in on how actors, in their collaboration efforts with network partners, navigate the tensions between (a) their discretionary space and the parameters set by a central policymaker, and (b) their pursuit of both integration and differentiation. This ethnographic case analysis contributes by, first, revealing how local actors demonstrate agency in maneuvering between these tensions in everyday practice by adopting three strategies—that is, overwhelmed deflection, situational segmentation, and strategic reappropriation—and, second, by revealing how these tensions interact and subsequently affect the implementation of policies in networks.

In this article, we aim to show that the treatment of wicked problems in the literature on public administration approaches is inadequate. We briefly discuss the literature on wicked problems and propose a conceptualization of wicked problems that, we think, shows the core of the problem of wicked problems. Wicked problems, we argue, are wicked because the factual and normative aspects of the issues are intertwined at actor-level. As a result, the phenomena that Rittel and Webber observed at problem level emerge. This has strong implications for public administration. Since actors are deciding on responses, a wicked problem evokes, what we call, a double governance challenge. The governance mechanisms provided in the literature on public administration approaches, also the new ones, do not provide responses to such double challenge. They either assume that actors do not build upon their own, actor-level factual and normative evaluations or that some compiled actor or supra-actor might overcome the limitations of the actors that together constitute the collective level of wicked problem response. Making such assumptions, they apparently conceptualize the wicked problem as non-wicked. Therefore, re-iterating, wicked problems are indeed wicked: solutions that implicitly conceptualize the wicked problem as non-wicked might be perfect, but seem unintelligent. A wicked problem, we argue, does not allow perfect, but instead requires imperfect, but intelligent responses. In this paper, we then discuss four such intelligently imperfect responses. They are necessarily imperfect in the sense that they cannot be considered to completely cover the problem, but intelligent in the sense that they truly acknowledge its wickedness.