King’s Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience
Research Seminar : Resilience Governance and Wicked Problems
Marie-Christine Therrien
Thursday 22 May, 10.00 – 12.00
The Pyramid Room, Department of Geography, 4th floor, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Professor Therrien is an associate professor at École nationale d’administration publique in Montreal,
Quebec and she is the director of the doctoral program. Her research interests are in resilience indicators
in public administration and in crisis management. She carried out several intervention and evaluation
mandates during her career such as working as an analyst for the public Commission following the
Quebec Ice storm in 1998. She also worked with the Public health department of the Ministry of Health
to evaluate their intervention following the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic. Her current research projects
are on the resilience of essential infrastructures. Dr. Therrien has also worked for the Canadian Red
Cross, the Montreal Urban Community, the Quebec Provincial Government and Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC). mctherrien@enap.ca
Agenda :
10.00 – 11.00 : Formal paper presentation ‘Tightly coupled governance for loosely coupled wicked
problems’, see abstract below.
11.00 – 12.00: Informal discussion on broader theoretical and methodological questions on the
measurement of resilience and its policy space in the context of critical infrastructure and urban
environmental and human security planning. Current work with the department of Geography at King’s is
developing a comparative methodology to assess urban resilience with ongoing fieldwork in London.
Paper Keywords: wicked problems, crisis, complexity, loosely coupled governance
Paper Abstract:
On July 6th 2013, Lac Mégantic in Quebec, a conductor less train transporting 7.2 million liters of
petroleum derails and explodes at the heart of this small 6000 people city. The direct impacts of this
tragedy 47 people are dead in the wake of the explosions and fire, 2000 people evacuated; half of the city
center is destroyed on 1.4 square kilometers. The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) (a federal safety
agency) is called in for an inquiry to explain this tragedy and the provincial police (Sûreté du Québec)
open up a criminal investigation. Lying behind this event and subsequent action including the
nationalization of the responsible company are a string of decisions, organisational relationships and
trade-offs that amount to a wicked problem for governance. New governance tools are necessary to help
organizations address this complexity and be able to read more clearly through the ‘wicked problems’
beforehand. We argue in this paper that the current governance of wicked problems is insufficient and
needs to include a more systemic mode or way of change to address such problems. The Lac-Mégantic
case is useful for understanding how systemic learning and reform sometimes fail in low-efficiency
governance network in charge of composing dealing with wicked problems. We first present how wicked
problems can become crisis from an organizational theory perspective. In the second part of the paper, we
present the limits of current loosely coupled governance of wicked problems. We conclude on how actual
modes of governance are not adequate anymore in at least two aspects: they make it almost impossible to
recognize wicked problems early on; they are unable to recognize weak signals announcing probable
crashes in systems leading to crisis.