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Networks are everywhere. Health systems and public health settings are experimenting with multifarious forms. Governments and providers are heavily investing in networks with an expectation that they will facilitate the delivery of better services and improve health outcomes. Yet, we lack a suitable conceptual framework to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of clinical and health networks. This paper aims to present such a framework to assist with rigorous research and policy analysis. The framework was designed as part of a project to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of health networks. We drew on systematic reviews of the literature on networks and communities of practice in health care, and on theoretical and evidence-based studies of the evaluation of health and non-health networks. Using brainstorming and mind-mapping techniques in expert advisory group sessions, we assessed existing network evaluation frameworks and considered their application to extant health networks. Feedback from stakeholders in network studies that we conducted was incorporated. The framework encompasses network goals, characteristics and relationships at member, network and community levels, and then looks at network outcomes, taking into account intervening variables. Finally, the short-term, medium-term and long-term effectiveness of the network needs to be assessed. The framework provides an overarching contribution to network evaluation. It is sufficiently comprehensive to account for many theoretical and evidence-based contributions to the literature on how networks operate and is sufficiently flexible to assess different kinds of health networks across their life-cycle at community, network and member levels. We outline the merits and limitations of the framework and discuss how it might be further tested.

The global importance of the Amazon rainforest is abundantly evident. It is the world's largest tropical rainforest, home to incredible biodiversity, and arguably an essential part of the earth's already fragile climate system. Exploiting the Amazon beyond planetary boundaries, in other words, beyond a threshold the forest cannot regenerate itself from, may have catastrophic, global impacts. Conversely, Brazil is an industrialized yet developing country far from realizing its potential to become an economic superpower. To this day, millions of Brazilians still live below the poverty line. Hence, Brazil cannot afford to ignore the economic potential of the Amazon's vast resources. The issue becomes how to use those resources effectively and efficiently for economic development. The key is perhaps a sustainable development approach. Considering the diversity of internal (i.e., Brazilian) and external (i.e., foreign) stakeholders, there is no agreement of what sustainable development would mean when it comes to the Brazilian Amazon Region (BAR). The challenge is the fact that environmental and social problems are not just complex problems. According to Brown et al (2010), they are very hard to properly define. Buchanan (1992) concluded these types of problems do not fit within any specific subject matter. In this research, we propose the sustainable development of the BAR as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973). The main purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of stakeholders to confirm this hypothesis. This study employs systems thinking, specifically Peter Checkland's (1989) Soft System Methodology as the conceptual foundation of the analysis of evidence from the field. Preliminary findings are summarized, and conclusions with conceptual and practical considerations are provided. Limitations and opportunities for future studies are also included.
Keywords: sustainable development, wicked problems, Brazilian Amazon, system thinking, soft system methodology.

Networks are everywhere. Health systems and public health settings are experimenting with multifarious forms. Governments and providers are heavily investing in networks with an expectation that they will facilitate the delivery of better services and improve health outcomes. Yet, we lack a suitable conceptual framework to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of clinical and health networks. This paper aims to present such a framework to assist with rigorous research and policy analysis. The framework was designed as part of a project to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of health networks. We drew on systematic reviews of the literature on networks and communities of practice in health care, and on theoretical and evidence-based studies of the evaluation of health and non-health networks. Using brainstorming and mind-mapping techniques in expert advisory group sessions, we assessed existing network evaluation frameworks and considered their application to extant health networks. Feedback from stakeholders in network studies that we conducted was incorporated. The framework encompasses network goals, characteristics and relationships at member, network and community levels, and then looks at network outcomes, taking into account intervening variables. Finally, the short-term, medium-term and long-term effectiveness of the network needs to be assessed. The framework provides an overarching contribution to network evaluation. It is sufficiently comprehensive to account for many theoretical and evidence-based contributions to the literature on how networks operate and is sufficiently flexible to assess different kinds of health networks across their life-cycle at community, network and member levels. We outline the merits and limitations of the framework and discuss how it might be further tested.

Developing the next generation of leaders in government is seen as a strategic challenge of national importance in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This article examines the wicked nature of the UAE's leadership development challenge, identifying patterns of complexity, uncertainty, and divergence in the strategic intentions underlying current leadership development efforts. It then explores the potential impact of re-framing leadership development programmes for government employees using the concept of 'public leadership'. Responding to calls in the literature for situated and context-sensitive explorations of leadership, it draws upon recent empirical research and literature to conceptualise public leadership for the UAE before identifying three potential contributions: an orientation towards collective, public values; a connection into needed skills frameworks; and access to innovations in the design of public leadership development interventions. The article concludes that the re-framing of 'public leadership' has the potential to help make substantial progress on the UAE's strategic leadership development challenge, but is not a silver bullet. Further research on both the concept, and its impact if adopted for leadership development programmes, will be required.

This article examines the impacts of problem definition, defined as a social mechanism, in bringing about gradual institutional change. Focusing on a similar process of gradual institutional change in Canada and Australia, it shows that problem definition is one pathway by which actors' interests and behaviors are redefined inside an institutional regime. By tracing the process of federalization of Canada and Australia's immigration regime since the 1990, it demonstrates that problem definition contributed to the rise of subnational governments as legitimate actors in the management of immigration. In these two countries, the specificities of the operation of this mechanism, including the actors mobilized for change, and the content of the policy problem being put forward generated different processes of federalization that nonetheless resulted in inclusive immigration federalism. In dialogue with historical institutionalism, this points to the potential of the mechanismic approach for theory building regarding the consequences of the dynamics of problem definition.

Knowability is the ability to identify a preferable course of action with sufficient confidence to justify adopting that course. This article shows it is not possible to judge the value of a public value proposition with sufficient confidence to justify the use of public authority. The indeterminacy of public value is shown by demonstrating that the necessary conditions to justify a public value proposition include that the evidence sustaining it is not impossible, circular, or unsubstantiated opinion. Those criteria are applied to an exhaustive set of possible concepts of public value, all of which fail at least one of those conditions so public value is unknowable. The implication is not that government is impossible, but that it requires humility, discourse, and compromise.

La integración latinoamericana ha sido considerada usualmente como un medio para un fin, una solución para algún problema. Sin embargo, la discrepancia entre lo que es y lo que ha aspirado a ser sugiere que es un problema en sí misma. Este papel aplica un enfoque conceptual de la literatura en planificación social con influencia creciente para argüir que no es uno cualquiera sino un problema "perverso". Contrario a los problemas 'dóciles', que son los problemas de las ciencias exactas, los perversos son sociales o de la sociedad y, por tanto, un tema de política pública. Los problemas perversos son inter alia difíciles de definir, únicos, inherentemente paradójicos, importantes, sujetos a muchas interpretaciones y, así, sin una solución correcta. La integración latinoamericana, se arguye aquí, tiene estas características y las implicaciones son relevantes para académicos y tomadores de decisión. Si la integración regional continúa siendo abordada como un problema dócil, los resultados probablemente seguirán discordando con las expectativas.

Refugee migration is a very visible and growing wicked problem. In this conceptual article, we outline a framework that identifies types of policies, levels of government (in refugee receiving countries), and causes for refugee migration as factors that create this wicked problem. Many refugee migration policies in Northern countries are mainly limited to being controlling at the national level and palliative at the local level. We further highlight a serious lack of true governing policies that address the push factors that drive people away from unpalatable political and/or economic circumstances in their home countries. Focusing solely on refugee policies may be practical but is not productive when the larger environmental context that prompts refugee migration is ignored in the longer term.

In all Swedish lakes, the concentration of mercury (Hg) in fish exceeds the European Union threshold limit. While the ultimate source of Hg is primarily airborne emissions from fossil energy, forestry plays a small but important role because some forestry operations help mobilize and transform Hg, increasing Hg loads in downstream aquatic ecosystems. Simultaneously, climate change is placing additional demands on forests to provide biomass as a substitute for fossil fuel. Thus, decision-makers are facing a complex situation, a "wicked problem," when it comes to how to handle the problem of forestry's effects on Hg in aquatic ecosystems while at the same time securing other ecosystem services. In order to explore forestry's degree of responsibility as well as possible solutions to this problem in Sweden, a transdisciplinary method has been used consisting of a structured dialogue with actors from relevant governmental agencies, forest companies, and forest associations. The analysis shows that while the issue can be addressed constructively, the complex character of the problem requires consideration of not only management practices for forestry but also current regulatory goals and environmental objectives. The Hg problem represents a class of difficult issues for forestry where stand- or property-based production has an impact on a greater spatial scale. This means that regulating the more direct impacts of forestry needs to be weighed against the implications this regulation may have on the overall issue of ecosystem services.

Chapter 1 introduction -- Part I conceptual and methodological framework -- Chapter 2 the world of wicked problems -- Chapter 3 theorizing the travels of a wicked problem -- Chapter 4 designing the study of a wicked problem -- Part II establishing contexts across time, cultural boundaries, and levels -- Chapter 5 from colonization to today's empires -- Chapter 6 from first rights for individuals to contested human rights -- Chapter 7 from deviant sexuality to LBTI -- Chapter 8 the EU as complex modern organization -- Chapter 9 human rights for LBTI in EU foreign policy -- Part III dealing with a wicked problem at the micro level -- Chapter 10 dealing with a wicked problem in Brussels -- Chapter 11 dealing with a wicked problem in Kampala -- Chapter 12 conclusions.