Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World is a powerful and original statement on why well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail, and how effective, efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems can be found. It takes its cue from the idea that our endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four ways of organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking.

MARCO VERWEIJ is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Singapore Management University, Singapore. He is also associated with the James Martin Institute of Science and Civilization in the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. The empirical part of his research concerns public policy regarding international issues such as climate change, development aid, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The theoretical part of his research is concerned with making a contribution to the linking of several social science-theories (in particular cultural theory and relational models theory) with social neuroscience, evolutionary biology, human complex systems and a-life modelling, and game theory.

MICHAEL THOMPSON is a Social Anthropologist. His early work was on the processes by which something second-hand becomes an antique, or a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage, Rubbish Theory (1979). His current interest is in the democratization of decision processes in areas (such as technological choice and Himalayan environment and development) that have tended to be treated as merely technical.