Beyond Problem‐Solving: The Social Management System as the Subject of Public Policy

ABSTRACT

Public policy analysis has long been organized around the idea that governing consists in defining and solving public problems. Yet decades of debate on problem definition, framing and wicked problems have shown that policy problems are unstable, contested and rarely amenable to definitive solutions. I argue in this article that this difficulty does not stem merely from technical or political obstacles, but from a deeper ontological confusion about what public policy actually intervenes in. Drawing on social systems theory as a theoretical frame of reference, I contend that policy problems are not the objects of intervention but decision‐oriented constructions that make complex situations governable. Because public policy cannot act directly upon social systems, it operates instead on the social management system: the emergent pattern of interdependent management decisions through which societies collectively respond to publicly problematized situations. Public policy is thus reconceptualized as a second‐order form of governance that reorients social management rather than ‘solving’ substantive social problems.