Suchergebnisse

AbstractOutside of the field of risk analysis, an important theoretical conversation on the slippery concept of uncertainty has unfolded over the last 40 years within the adjacent field of environmental risk. This literature has become increasingly standardized behind the tripartite distinction between uncertainty location, the nature of uncertainty, and uncertainty level, popularized by the "W&H framework." This article introduces risk theorists and practitioners to the conceptual literature on uncertainty with the goal of catalyzing further development and clarification of the uncertainty concept within the field of risk analysis. It presents two critiques of the W&H framework's dimension of uncertainty level—the dimension that attempts to define the characteristics separating greater uncertainties from lesser uncertainties. First, I argue the framework's conceptualization of uncertainty level lacks a clear and consistent epistemological position and fails to acknowledge or reconcile the tensions between Bayesian and frequentist perspectives present within the framework. This article reinterprets the dimension of uncertainty level from a Bayesian perspective, which understands uncertainty as a mental phenomenon arising from "confidence deficits" as opposed to the ill‐defined notion of "knowledge deficits" present in the framework. And second, I elaborate the undertheorized concept of uncertainty "reducibility." These critiques inform a clarified conceptualization of uncertainty level that can be integrated with risk analysis concepts and usefully applied by modelers and decisionmakers engaged in model‐based decision support.

Purpose
This paper aims to develop a framework for benchmarking the maturity of public sector foresight programs and outlines strategies that program managers can use to overcome obstacles to foresight program development in government.


Design/methodology/approach
The public sector foresight benchmarking framework is informed by a bibliometric analysis and comprehensive review of the literature on public sector foresight, as well as three rounds of semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of a collaborative 18-month project with a relatively young department-level foresight program at the government of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country. The paper frames public sector organizations as "complex adaptive systems" and draws from other government initiatives that require fundamental organizational change, namely, "gender mainstreaming".


Findings
Nascent or less mature programs tend to be output-focused and disconnected from the policy cycle, while more mature programs balance outputs and participation as they intervene strategically in the policy cycle. Foresight program development requires that managers simultaneously pursue change at three levels: technical, structural and cultural. Therefore, successful strategies are multi-dimensional, incremental and iterative.


Originality/value
The paper addresses two important gaps in the literature on public sector foresight programs by comprehensively describing the key attributes of mature and immature public sector foresight programs, and providing flexible, practical strategies for program development. The paper also pushes the boundaries of thinking about foresight by integrating insights from complexity theory and complexity-informed organizational change theory.