Is competition between and within government R&D agencies a force for innovation and for achieving desired outcomes? Or does competition lead to waste, duplication, and unproductive rivalry? The answer is: it depends. Competition can be a powerful tool leading to desired outcomes if the system of incentives and rewards is structured appropriately. Competition is ubiquitous within the Federal R&D enterprise, and should be examined systematically in order to identify and apply lessons for achieving R&D objectives more quickly and efficiently.
Wicked problems like climate change stress both our ordinary sense-making capacities and our most sophisticated policy tools. While there is overwhelming consensus in the climate science community that human-induced climate change is under way, the specific rates and degrees of change as well as the distribution of impacts are still at best incompletely understood. Uncertainty presents not only scientific challenges but social, political and economic quandaries as well.
Communicating science to the general public is difficult. But communicating science policy creates even more complexity and challenge for many reasons including the public's incomplete understanding of the ways in which policy is conceived, shaped and adapted, how economics are fused with potential actions and how policy outcomes are evaluated and measured. Compounding the problem, science policy scholars are often not experienced nor necessarily comfortable talking to the general public.
Many experts argue that we need to change a number of our large technological systems in order to adapt to the increasing number of challenges our society faces. There are questions about the sustainability of everything from our energy systems to transportation networks. But changing such things is never an easy task. This is partially a result of a phenomenon known as "path dependence," a situation in which initial conditions establish a trajectory, making changes or reversal increasingly difficult.