Uncertainty in policy: implications for practice

Academics have been writing about uncertainty in public administration since the 1950s (Brown, 1978; Lindblom, 1959), and more recently complexity theory has provided tools for learning one’s way through uncertainty (Eppel, Turner and Wolf, 2011; Kurtz and Snowden, 2003). Uncertainty is different from change. Uncertainty arises from change, but it is also an effect of the social interactions engaged in by public servants going about their business, and of the environment they work in. Research on the way policy is practised provides a way to ‘understand how to conceive of public policy making in an uncertain world’ (Hajer and Laws, in Moran, Rein and Goodin, 2006, p.421). Within this field, the pervasiveness of the effects of uncertainty on the daily work of policy practitioners appears to have been given less attention than it deserves.