Assignment 1: Wicked Problem and Stakeholder Mapping
Lack of Access to Healthy
Team Complexity: Amrita Khoshoo, Chun Zheng, Cathryn Ploehn, Devika Singh
Introduction
In our Transition Design seminar, our group was tasked to look into and gain a better understanding of a specific wicked problem. Our team chose to focus on the lack of access to healthy food.
Food insecurity is a highly complex issue that negatively affects humanity on a global scale. According to the United Nations, nearly 821 million people worldwide were undernourished in 2017. In this same year, 1 in 8 Americans lacked access to healthy food, equalling 40 million adults and 12 million children (source). This issue can be classified as a wicked problem because there are multiple interconnected, contradictory, and fluid causes that make food insecurity difficult to solve.
Below, we’ll detail our attempt at deciphering how this wicked problem was created, and continues to be reinforced and perpetuated at all levels of scale.
The Process
Our process can be divided into three major phases:
- Exploratory research
- Wicked problem mapping
- Stakeholder mapping
Exploratory Research
During this phase, we collectively gathered, read, and synthesized as much information as we could around food insecurity. Our goals were to understand the social, political, economic, and historical aspects of the issue. Our research spanned policy papers by international organizations, studies on food deserts in the United States, and reports about the state of food in education.
Wicked Problem Mapping
Armed with a broad understanding of this issue, we collectively started mapping various causes. In our first attempt, we brainstormed unfiltered by writing out all possible causes on post-it notes. We then clustered these causes around specific, higher level themes.
To gain a more concrete sense of this issue, our next step involved mapping our causes to four major trends. Because food insecurity is multidimensional, complex, and messy, sorting causes into major themes helped us better approach our problem map.
This approach helped us visualize the numerous lines of connection, dependency, and intersection within trends and between trends. We gained a better understanding of systemic positive feedback loops and how they are reinforced at global, federal, and local levels. Further, we realized that causes are not insulated. This wicked problem is reinforced and perpetuated by many different competing and aligned causes. There is no single source. As we begin thinking about intervention points, we’ll need to be mindful of the idea that one tiny change within this web of connections can have giant ripple effects throughout.
Mapping wicked problems and stakeholders was challenging. Initially, it was hard to wrap our minds around this issue. We found ourselves overwhelmed by the vastness of the problem and the number of causes contributing to it. Drawing district lines between overlapping, contradictory, and intersecting causes was difficult. We were able to work through this by approaching the problem in a step-by-step way and reframing how we understood it by scaling in and out.
Stakeholder Mapping
Based on our wicked problem map and connections we had identified, we started thinking through key stakeholders and the lines of conflict and agreement between them. We then focused in on the three main stakeholders that had a significant number of connections between them. By focusing in on these stakeholders, we gained more robust and nuanced insights into food insecurity.
Insights: Major Trends
We made sense of this highly complex issue by dividing our causes into four major trends (high-level insights below):
- Systemic inequality
- Ecology
- Dominant food production methods
- Perception and culture around food
Systemic Inequality
The legacy of systemic inequality has led to issues like redlining, especially in Pittsburgh. Redlining results in condensed, low-income areas that are systematically denied access. Populations in these areas lack access to nutritious food due to the absence of grocery stories, underdeveloped transit systems, or the unaffordably high cost of healthy/diverse foods (perpetuated by income inequality). These low-income areas remain underdeveloped because of the absence of government grants or private investment money. Development money is lacking because of issues with perception, gentrification, and decreased economic viability. Structural inequality creates a vicious cycle. Lack of funding perpetuates low income, poorly developed areas. In turn, low income, poorly developed areas do not attract funding needed due to the perceived short term investment risk.
Finally, unequal employment opportunities mean populations in these areas face more challenges when trying to break this systemic cycle. The system is fundamentally stacked against these areas, perpetuating a lack of access.
Ecology
The global capitalist economy favors big agribusinesses. This is compounded by slow-moving and fragmented climate and environmental regulation. Food production methods and land grabbing practices, paired with centralized agriculture and the lack of regulation, leads to greater pollution. Agribusinesses are known to take large, biologically diverse areas of land and introduce mono-crops and fertilizers. Mono-crops and food production chemicals harm ecological diversity by killing symbiotic components of an ecological system that has been fine-tuned over thousands of years. This cycle is reinforced by the dominance of global capitalism and its tenets of profit maximization and efficiency. Harming biodiversity leads to a less resilient, less sustainable, and less nutrient providing food system. Further, this cycle adds to global climate change, systems of inequality, and the loss of place-based knowledge.
Two additionally important causes included fracking practices and intense climates. Fracking practices pollute soil and groundwater and intense climates affect farming and people’s ability to travel for food.
Dominant Food Production Methods
As seen with ecological causes, global capitalism favors centralized food production. Corporate farms land-grab large swaths of arable land, destroying ecological diversity in the process. These agribusinesses introduce mono-crops and pollutants that decrease ecological diversity and promote the dominance of one type of food. This leads to a less resilient, less sustainable food system. Sustainability is also decreasing at the local level because the market favors food outside of the bioregion.
Agribusiness is high labor, low margin industry, which feeds into and perpetuates cycles of inequality. These businesses also evade regulation and control through ag-gag laws that prevent whistleblowers from leaking corporate farming bad practices.
Perception & Culture around Food
The perception and culture around food are based on the intersection between dominant food production methods and systemic inequality. Government and corporate agriculture construct and deploy new narratives around food which displaces public perception and understanding of food traditions and rituals.
The ramifications of systemic inequality, such as family/community stress, displacement from farmlands, and disruption of land cultivation knowledge are amplified by mass consumerism. This manifests in the imposition of marketing and easy access to addictive, unhealthy foods.
Insights: Stakeholders
Through the process of mapping our wicked problem, we identified a few interesting stakeholders — stakeholders that we might have been overlooked had we used a more linear exploration approach.
We decided to give our stakeholders specific personas. This helped us think more critically and robustly about each of our stakeholders’ needs.
Our primary stakeholders:
- Agribusiness: Monsanto
- Eco-diversity: Earthworms in the soil
- Vulnerable populations in low-income areas: residents in Wilkinsburg
Stakeholder Conflicts and Alignments
We had two important takeaways from mapping the conflicts and alignments between our three primary stakeholders.
- Support of the government: To sway regulation in their favor, agribusinesses push for a greater voice in the government. This desire has a number of direct conflicts with eco-diversity and vulnerable populations. Agribusinesses’ domination in government leads to less strict environmental policies, which leads to habitat destruction. Further, it leads to fewer dollars appropriated to social/labor services, which may benefit vulnerable low income or labor populations.
- Habitat destruction: Agribusinesses consume large spans of arable land in order to maximize profits. In the process, they destroy the natural ecosystem. Things like mono-crops and food production chemical degrade soil health, contaminate water, and disrupt food chains. This disturbs the intricate chain of interactions that evolution has been perfected over thousands of years. This has a number of conflicts with ecological diversity. Ecological diversity would need stronger environmental protection laws that aim to improve ecological and nutritional diversity and sustainability.
Reflections
We enjoyed working through this exercise as a team. A few of our main takeaways include:
- Wicked problems are highly complex and tangled. Food insecurity is affected by a number of issues at all levels of scale. These issues are interconnected, conflicting, and interdependent. Further, these problems are comprised of positive feedback loops. This means consequences can be causes and causes can be consequences.
- Framing how we approach this issue is important. Scaling in/out or finding a new perspective was often helpful. Instead of looking at the causes of food insecurity, we found it worthwhile to consider the major causes behind access to unhealthy food.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential. These wicked problems touch numerous disciplines beyond design that have an equal stake in defining and understanding the issue.
- This wicked problem is connected to many other wicked problems. We found a number of connections to declining pollinators populations, poor air quality, and obesity.
- Causes are not insulated. This wicked problem continues due to many different causes. There is no single silver bullet solution. When we move into identifying intervention points, we’ll need to consider that one change might have large effects across the entire system.
A few challenges we faced included:
- It was challenging to start deciphering causes and the connections between them. Causes were overlapping, contradictory, big, and small. We were able to work through this through a methodological, step-by-step approach. Reframing how we understood causes was also important.
- Connecting to the point above, it took us some time to develop a comprehensive and self-explanatory visual language.
- It was difficult to think about stakeholder needs, desires, and fears in ways that were not slightly edited versions of the same idea.
