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Wicked problems continuously emerge in the field of environmental governance. Characterized by goal conflicts, complexity, and uncertainty, wicked problems typically call for participatory policy designs. However, the effects of participation are widely unclear, given the indefinite nature of solutions to wicked problems. This research sheds light on this debate by developing and applying a systematic structural approach to assess policy mixes for emerging wicked problems. Based on a review of literature in the field of public policy and environmental governance, we identify eight assessment criteria matching three dimensions of wicked problems: coherence, consistency, and congruence to address conflicts; comprehensiveness and diversity to address complexity; and adaptability, reversibility, and robustness to address informational uncertainty. The concept, which is demonstrated taking as an example two recently proposed policy mixes to address pharmaceutical freshwater pollution in Germany, suggests that policy mixes resulting from desk research and participatory processes differ in the way they address wicked problems. These results contribute to systematically assess the role of participation in designing policy mixes for emerging wicked policy problems and open up for more advanced discussions on the role of structural approaches in public policy analyses.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) approaches that have emerged in the past ten years point to the importance of engaging the public in dialogues about research. The different variants of RRI share the notion that societal actors, including citizens, need to work together – that is, engage in two-way communication during the research and innovation process – in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society. Yet, sponsors and organizers of dialogues about research often face difficulties in recruiting sufficient numbers of participants or ensuring a sufficient level of diversity of participants. This paper asks what motivates or hinders individual citizens as members of the broader public to participate in such dialogues. It presents empirical findings of the European Union-funded project Promoting Societal Engagement Under the Terms of RRI (PROSO), which aimed to foster public engagement with research for RRI. PROSO used a quasi-experimental, qualitative approach directly involving citizens to address this question. The core of the innovative methodology were focus group discussions with European citizens about hypothetical opportunities to take part in dialogues about research. Three hypothetical scenarios of different dialogue formats (varied by whether they seek to inform the participants, consult or enable deeper collaboration on a scientific issue) were used as stimuli to explore the participants’ willingness (motivations and perceived barriers) to engage with scientific research. Our findings show a preference towards dialogue formats that give citizens a more active role and a greater say in research policy or research funding. They further suggest that those who seek to broaden citizen participation in dialogues about research should consider the role of relevance, impact, trust, legitimacy, knowledge, and time and resources as factors that can motivate or discourage citizens to take part. Based on our findings, we discuss possibilities to promote citizen participation in dialogues about research as part of putting RRI into practice.

This paper reviews the latest research on scenarios including the processes and products for socio-environmental systems (SES) analysis, modeling and decision making. A group of scenario researchers and practitioners participated in a workshop to discuss consolidation of existing research on the development and use of scenario analysis in exploring and understanding the interplay between human and environmental systems. This paper presents an extended overview of the workshop discussions and follow-up review work. It is structured around the essential challenges that are crucial to progress support of decision making and learning with respect to our highly uncertain socio-environmental futures. It identifies a practical research agenda where challenges are grouped according to the process stage at which they are most significant: before, during, and after the creation of the scenarios as products. These challenges for SES include: enhancing the role of stakeholder and public engagement in the co-development of scenarios, linking scenarios across multiple geographical, sectoral and temporal scales, improving the links between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of scenario analysis, addressing uncertainties especially surprise, addressing scenario diversity and their consistency together, communicating scenarios including visualization methods, and linking scenarios to decision making.

Model-based energy scenarios are a widely used tool for supporting economic and political decision makers. The results of energy modeling and the conclusions deduced therefrom, however, depend on the model input data derived from framework assumptions about future developments in the embedding society, which are deeply uncertain in the long term. The challenge to deal with this ‘context uncertainty’ in a systematic and comprehensive manner has only recently started to attract intensified attention in energy research; the search for appropriate methods is ongoing. This paper proposes a new concept for the construction of socio-technical energy scenarios, which combines familiar environmental modeling approaches with new developments in qualitative scenario methodology, and demonstrates the possible application of the concept in model-based energy scenario construction. © 2016 Elsevier

The successful implementation of pervasive computing technologies in healthcare does not only depend on technical issues but also on acceptability and acceptance issues. In this paper we focus on factors that facilitate or inhibit user acceptance of pervasive computing in healthcare. We present selected findings of the research project dasiaPerCoMed - Pervasive Computing in Healthcarepsila. The project is based on two case studies in pre- and post-clinical healthcare. In the first study, the potential of pervasive computing technologies for the treatment of acute cardiovascular diseases is investigated, in the second case study, the potential for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) is evaluated. A qualitative user acceptance analysis of the two case studies shows the following results: the main factor of user acceptance is the perceived medical usefulness. Furthermore, acceptance is strongly inhibited if data privacy or if subjective norms are violated. Usability only presents a decisive factor of acceptance if problems with usability reduce the perceived usefulness.

This paper proposes two criteria to assess and compare the quality of (integrated) scenarios, namely scenario traceability and scenario consistency. From a futures research perspective, both are identified as being central challenges to scenario quality. Traceability is a recognized standard of scenario communication but difficult to achieve in practice. Consistency, simultaneously a construction principle and a constitutive element of scenarios, is not easy to accomplish either. Integrated scenario methodologies, i.e., those approaches combining, e.g., ‘story and simulation’ (SAS), are especially challenged by both issues. In this paper, scenario traceability and scenario consistency are more precisely defined and operationalized to allow for qualitative measurement, assessment and comparisons of different (integrated) scenario methodologies and their resulting socio-environmental scenarios. The criteria are applied empirically to new forms of integrated scenario methodologies. They serve to analyze two explorative case studies combining the systematic yet qualitative cross-impact balance analysis (CIB) with simulation. The criteria allow illuminating whether and on what dimensions and levels these new forms of integrated scenario methodologies do (or do not) support scenario consistency and scenario traceability. The empirical analysis shows that new integrated scenario methodologies combining CIB with numerical simulation present some new answers to the traceability and consistency challenges of classical SAS approaches. The application suggests that the two criteria are appropriate and useful for assessing scenario quality from an academic perspective. Still, further research is needed to understand the relation of traceability and consistency to additional quality criteria that influence the practical usefulness of scenarios from a policy advice-oriented perspective.