ABSTRACT
As argued in Part 1, uncertainty in decision making on wicked problems in networks also has an institutional side. Policy games around wicked problems do not proceed in a vacuum, but in an institutional context where lasting rules, interaction patterns and stable patterns of perceptions can influence the interactions between the involved parties. Attempts at managing uncertainty can stretch into the institutional aspects of networks. We call this institutional design: efforts to adapt existing institutional provisions to new circumstances or to develop new provisions. Institutional design is not easy since many institutions cannot be directly influenced and, furthermore, they are embedded in a complicated and difficult-to-oversee entirety of provisions. As a result, an attempt to steer may cause all sorts of unintended consequences. With these strategies, we also touch upon normative and political–ideological themes. These include questions such as what are the core tasks of government, and to what degree and under what conditions may government intervene in societal processes in order to change the positions and authorities of other actors? Yet in practice we see many attempts to change the institutional structure of networks. Before discussing various strategies in the next sections, it is first necessary to outline the normative starting points which form the basis of our ideas about institutional design. We do so by placing the idea of institutional design in context: that is, against the background of the discussions about intertwinement and disentanglement which have been waged in Western countries in the past twenty years.
