duct tape and water, courtesy Metropolitan Library System, used with permission, some rights reserved

It’s just geographical coincidence that Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber were at Berkeley in 1973 when they published their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (pdf), less than 30 miles as the American white pelican flies from Sherman Island at the downstream mouth of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But as we await tomorrow’s unveiling of the latest effort to fix the Delta, it’s worth revisiting Rittel and Webber, because I’ve seen few better case studies of “wicked problems” than this:

Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about “optimal solutions” to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no “solutions” in the sense of definitive and objective answers.

The most useful formulation of the “wicked problem” thesis, for me, involves two elements. The first is that one’s definition of the problem suggests the solution path. The second is that there is no unique problem definition, but rather multiple possible definitions, suggesting multiple different solution paths, based on the values and the interests of the person doing the defining.

Watching the Bay Delta Conservation Plan pre-show, as all the players stake out their ground prior to tomorrow’s announcement by the state of California and the Feds, has been to see Rittel and Webber reified. Consider a few of their criteria for what counts as a “wicked problem”, and how these criteria might apply here:

• There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem
• Wicked problems have no stopping rule
• There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
• Every wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem

Nowhere is this more obvious than the valiant attempt by Californians to constrain the definition of the problem the BDCP is attempting to solve (quoted from the recent state-federal joint recommendations – pdf):

the two coequal goals of providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem

The explicit mantra – “coequal goals” – was an attempt to sidestep the core of the wicked problem – the lack of a definition. Was the ecological collapse of the Delta the problem? Or was it the lack of water supply reliability? Each problem definition, separately, suggested a different set of solutions. So the state’s political leadership tried to duct tape them together, really tightly.

In fact, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Reform Act of 2009 has a lot more duct-taped in. The protection and enhancement of the Delta itself (carefully defined in cultural, recreational and agricultural terms as “an evolving place”, for example), and some particularly critical language about state government’s policy to “improve the water conveyance system” and “to reduce reliance on the Delta in meeting California’s future water supply needs”.

“There is no problem,” one of the state’s smart senior water politics-policy people told me when I was out in California last year. “There are multiple problems.”

Increasingly, I’m seeing the Sacramento Delta argument turned, from the traditional water conveyance and water users v. fish frame to a focus on levees. Here’s the San Jose Mercury News editorial board:

The primitive conditions of the levees guarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are shocking. The Delta is mostly below sea level. It provides water to 65 percent of Californians, including more than half of Silicon Valley, and those fragile levees are the only thing preventing salt water from San Francisco Bay from spoiling the fresh water flowing from the rivers.

Hundreds of miles of levees were built out of sand and dirt by immigrants, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow load, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Saying they’re primitive is kind. They are at extreme risk of collapsing in an earthquake or flood. State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, calls them “California’s Katrina waiting to happen.”

But neither Brown nor the Legislature has even tried to expedite repairing the levees. Last week, the state ballot proposition for an $11 billion water bond was postponed again, this time until 2014. That’s fine because we can’t imagine that porker passing anyway, but the $1 billion in absolutely necessary repairs to the levees should have been done years ago.