A Relational Approach to Governing Wicked Problems: From Governance Failure to Failure Governance

The book initiates a relational turn in policy making and governance by developing further relational political analysis and by taking relational thinking to bear on not just analytic/descriptive issues, but also to normative/prescriptive issues. The need for such a turn, this book argues, comes from the ever-increasing relevance of addressing the so-called wicked problems of governance like climate change, COVID-19 kinds of pandemics, global economic recessions and refugee crises. The book argues for a need to rethink governance as a process from the relational point of view to spur its potential for addressing these problems. What needs to be rethought is not so much the specific tools or resources of governance, but the very issue of whether governance should be seen in terms of tools and resources in the first place. This book contributes to this discussion by consolidating the relational approaches to governance thus far and by taking them to a next – normative/prescriptive– level.

Peeter Selg is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University, Estonia.

Georg Sootla is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University, Estonia.

Benjamin Klasche is Lecturer of Politics and IR, at the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University, Estonia and Kone Foundation Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.