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Our lives increasingly take place in ever more complex and interconnected networks that blur the boundaries we have traditionally used to define our social and political spaces. Accordingly, the policy problems that governments are called upon to deal with have become less clear-cut and far messier. This is particularly the case with climate change, environmental policy, transport, health and ageing - all areas in which the tried-and-tested linear policy solutions are increasingly inadequate or failing. What makes messy policy problems particularly uncomfortable for policy makers is that scien

Our lives increasingly take place in ever more complex and interconnected networks that blur the boundaries we have traditionally used to define our social and political spaces. Accordingly, the policy problems that governments are called upon to deal with have become less clear-cut and far messier. This is particularly the case with climate change, environmental policy, transport, health and ageing - all areas in which the tried-and-tested linear policy solutions are increasingly inadequate or failing. What makes messy policy problems particularly uncomfortable for policy makers is that scien.

The idea that 'wicked' environmental and social problems can be resolved with 'clumsy' solutions has been increasingly supported by empirical evidence. Clumsy solutions emerge from a new type of dialogue-based problem-solving strategy, derived from what Funtowicz and Ravetz call 'post-normal science'. How, then, can such dialogues best be organised? We offer an answer by combining the framework from which the notion of clumsy solutions was derived – namely Mary Douglas' cultural theory – with the many decision-making procedures for addressing wicked problems proposed in policy and organisational studies. Employing the former theory, we explore 17 widely applied decision-making processes. The analysis identifies six methods most likely and seven methods least likely to successfully initiate post-normal dialogue. Moreover, the analysis suggests four processes that 'almost' fulfil the criteria for generating clumsy solutions. The paper then explores and suggests ways of extending and augmenting these 'almost' cases to enable post-normal dialogues and clumsy solutions.

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or "minipublics") that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.