These institutional features, toget

These institutional features, together with policymakers' inability to collect enough information on all possible alternatives or predict the range of consequences associated with each alternative, render the ill-structured problem largely immune from conventional definitional techniques . When dealing with the most common types of policy problems, we have to make difficult choices about both methods and facts in order to maintain our credibility as policy analysts. The wrong method or model can select the wrong facts and give us the right solution to the wrong problem (e.g., the crop-eradication or "technical fix" model as a solution to the problem of cultivating cocaine in bolivia, when definition of the problem should include the dimensions of local power elites and the high demand for cocaine in the United States). Despite these obstacles, let us turn to a " best available" methodology for defining an ill-structured problem