Discrepantly, def. “. . .in a discordant or inconsistent manner” The OED also records the word’s first use in English to be from a 1601 translation of Montaigne’s Essays

I

Between you and me, my guilty pleasure is reading histories of ideas. When I read about the evolution of concepts like virtue, liberty, autonomy, the Enlightenment(s), equality, capitalism, the nation-state (or histories of that hyphen), I feel I’m learning something important. At these times, it matters to me that Isaiah Berlin and Jonathan Israel, both historians of ideas, have very different understandings of “the Enlightenment” that matter to them.

But I’m a practicing policy analyst and should know better than to expect anything to be resolved at that level of abstraction. If I’m learning anything, it is learning discrepantly. It’s the discrepancies–and their many varieties–that become unavoidably visible via the comparison and contrast of concepts across a given time and over time.

“All men are created equal,” but its writer still had slaves. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” and its author was free enough to consign his five children to an orphanage. Your culture’s version of the concepts differ from ours as if both sets were something like settled knowledge; but something new always turns up for (re)interpretation–and importantly so both of us are repeatedly told. And then, in case it needs repeating, no major plan–including those for liberty, individual autonomy, Enlightenment, equality and the rest–survives contact with really existing events, situations and contexts.

Some respond to the discrepancies as if they don’t or shouldn’t matter. So what if Jefferson and Rousseau were shits in some roles? So what if our idealized ethics turn situational in practice? Don’t we already have more than enough proof that ideas have independently affected human history?

II

The problem I have with that last question is I’m being asked once again to go off running to levels of abstraction in which I love to thrash about but find still insufficient even when not misleading. Why? Because there is always a knowledge-into-action gap between macro-principle guiding policy and management and micro-operations in implementing or executing policy and management on the ground. Macro-principles do not on their own determine every micro-operation on their own. It takes really-existing practices and skill–particularly those of recognizing system patterns and formulating localized scenarios–to maneuver through the intervening contingencies and conjunctures so as to connect the two poles. And even then there are no guarantees.

That focus on really-existing practices and skill in managing to realize missions and objectives is extremely important. Philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Michael Oakeshott stressed the importance of thinking adverbially. It’s not democracy as a set of macro-principles we are talking about but what it means to act and behave democratically (and not just individually at the micro-level). Do those practices include voting, free speech, assembly or not? If so, how? If not, what practices are denominated when saying people “behave democratically”?

Which leads to my main point: Learning discrepantly is a set of practices as well.

It’s not about talking away or otherwise avoiding inconsistencies and discordance between human values and human behavior. I don’t think of the aforementioned discrepancies as stumbling blocks but as affordances. Learning discrepantly is identifying, managing and improvising practices for decisionmaking because of, not in spite of, the messy middle. It’s another way to take seriously complexity in action. (And this is why there’s also some kind of justice in the first use of “discrepantly” in translating Michel Montaigne’s Essays, a book all about persisting in the face of human complexities, contradictions and limits).

III

So what?

What’s the purchase in recognizing that irreducible discrepancies populate policymaking and public management and that ground the complex, conflicted, uncertain and unfinished there? An example illustrates how this plays out in one very topical case today.

IV

I’m hardly the first to have been struck by an analytic tip evolving in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be analyzed primarily at the local, regional and national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed, first and foremost, globally. For example, the historically noted but isolated urban heat island effect has now become part and parcel of global warming discourse. What I was unprepared for was (1) how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the analytic tip proceeded and 2) the increasing pressures to “re-localize” (recast) issues at a level of greater granularity where policy and management more tractability can be achieved.

Start with society’s critical infrastructures considered to be both cause of and solution to an important piece of the climate change challenge:

Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.

The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)

To me, these passages represent hard-won insights over years of research: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.

But then comes the sweeping updraft of global analytic tip in the article’s next sentence:

These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Well, yes, that’s true, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis and action? Actually, how do really-existing operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels? What, in turn, does climate change look like at these more granular levels of infrastructure operations said to be important for causing and guiding climate change?

Instead, the article, like so many others, is off and running to the international, global and planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s the practice of analytic tip–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further. Why? Because variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management, not least of which at the level of systemwide critical infrastructures. 

To insist or otherwise assume that global interdependencies trump or obviate the need to work with the realities of local and regional variation in the ecological and environmental impacts of inter-infrastructural sequential, mediated and pooled interconnectivities runs deeply counter to effective policy analysis and public management. That local and regional accomplishments do not add up to a comprehensive, interdependent global climate change regime is an unavoidable discrepancy that comes, part and parcel, with the practicing global analytic tip. The response is not (to try) to explain away or otherwise avoid the discrepancy but rather to see what it newly affords by way of recognition, namely: What is positively accomplished locally and regionally necessarily takes more policy-analytic importance in a world repeatedly demonstrated to be messily interconnected.

V

I was first introduced to the policy-narrative importance of discrepancy through the work of French literary theorist, Michael (Michel) Riffaterre, majorly his Fictional Truth (John  Hopkins University Press). Applying his idea here, one way to account for something anomalous or contradictory–a discrepancy–in a complex policy issue is to look for other narratives whose reading explains or resolves that inconsistency. 

One group of experts insists that instituting carbon taxes still remains the best single option for addressing climate change. Another group insists geoengineering solutions are now the only real alternative left. A metanarrative (intertext) that can explain how both discrepant positions hold at the same time is: The planet must rely on techno-managerial elites, even if they disagree, to come up with climate change solutions that the unwashed billions cannot come up with on their own. 

This blog asks you to think of “learning discrepantly” as another, but very different, planet-wide metanarrative to be applied instead.

I’ve suggested elsewhere that human agency–this collective and individual capacity to determine and make meaning from events, situations, and contexts through purposive analysis, reflection, and improvisation–represents the only real global counternarrative to hegemonic policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised human agency in their dominant narratives and scenarios. Without belaboring the point, degranularization is what our techno-managerial elites are doing when recommending the primary focus on taxing carbon production and consumption or on geoengineering solutions because humans leave Earth no other choice. The human agency discussed here, in contrast, is grounded in the fact that aforementioned discrepancies and like abound everywhere and across scales. Indeed, they are first ontological (think initially of “cognitive biases”) and then over-time political, and it’s only when they are political that they can be recast or treated–regranularized–as actionable affordances.

Human agency wouldn’t be a global counternarrative if we didn’t learn discrepantly.

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NB. For more on human agency and power, see my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

—Latest blog entries include

**”Let’s start a list of notable questions typically NOT asked in pastoralist development. . .“

**”The biggest research challenge in High Reliability Management is explaining how China’s massive high speed rail system is as reliable as it is.“

**”Why the difference matters between ultimate and proximate causes: an example from an anti-baboon campaign in colonial Northern Nigeria“

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with a useful schematic, can now be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

This working paper updates many blog entries prior to its June 2023 publication.

—Those interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Major Read: Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/07/03/major-read-sourcing-new-ideas-from-the-humanities-fine-arts-and-other-media-for-complex-policy-analysis-and-management/

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]: https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/27/seventeen-short-examples-on-how-differences-in-genre-affect-the-structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-last-newly-added/

**”Major Read: Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Ten examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID and more” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/31/major-read-instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity-t/

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management: 14 examples (14th example newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/07/major-read-new-method-matters-in-reframing-policy-and-management-14th-example-new/

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/02/23/emerging-counternarratives-on-migrants-border-controls-digital-networks-remittances-child-labor-covids-impact-africa-and-europe-and-global-neoliberalism-newly-added/

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/10/17/the-future-in-hro-studies-the-example-of-networked-reliability-as-a-form-of-reliability-seeking/

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/07/25/major-read-the-siloing-of-approaches-to-discourse-and-narrative-analyses-in-public-policy/

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/08/21/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-resent/

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”New Implications of the Framework for Reliability Professionals and Pastoralism-as-Infrastructure (updated)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/01/16/a-reliability-seeking-economics-in-pastoralist-development/

**”Recasting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in pastoralist systems: the detection of creeping crises” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/18/recasting-traditional-ecological-knowledge-tek-in-pastoralist-systems/

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/20/new-extensions-of-the-framework-for-pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-a-critical-infrastructure/

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/12/four-briefer-points-of-policy-relevance-for-pastoralists-and-herders/

The campaign’s collateral damage is clearest in the compensation record. In March 1953, for
example, two Fulani herders received £50 after losing eighteen cattle and six sheep that drank
from a poisoned water hole. Officials marked contaminated sites and instructed Native
Authorities to notify village heads and Fulani chiefs, but these precautions were unevenly
effective, especially given pastoral mobility and the uneven circulation of information. When
doubts arose about whether herders had been adequately warned, token compensation was
sometimes paid in the interest of preserving local relations, revealing both the administrative
limits and political sensitivities of the campaign.

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6898438)

Of course, colonialism caused this wrongful campaign. But it is equally true that the campaign was first proven wrong by the Fulani, and importantly so among others.

Please add yours to the following:

–What would pastoralist policy look like if gleaned solely from statements in leaked government documents and NGO emails?

–When young herders wait around before, during and after herding, are they functioning like gig workers?

–Water, as they say, is life, and the “r” in “water” is for its reliability. Do people understand then that this means adopting, repurposing and inventing water infrastructures as daily lives necessarily change, and not just for pastoralists?

–If we do not routinely ask pastoralists about their voting behavior, what does that imply about our notions of their citizenship?

–As more than half of the world’s population is now urban, should one of the first tasks of pastoralist research be to differentiate the urban populations in terms of being pro-pastoralist, anti-pastoralist, or otherwise (think of the Gen-Z protesters in Kenya)?

(In my personal opinion.)

I’m hardly the first to have been struck by the analytic tip in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be dealt with at the local, regional and even national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed first and foremost globally (think “global warming”). What I was unprepared for was how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the tip proceeded.

Let me give an example from the field of Infrastructure Studies. To be clear, I agree with every word in the following:

Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.

The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)

To me, this passage represents hard-won insights over years of research, namely: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.

But then comes the irresistible updraft in the article’s next sentence:

These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Well, yes, that’s true of course, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis? Indeed, how do actual operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels?

The article, like so many others, is off and runningto the international, global and now planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s analytic tip after all–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further, especially as variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management.

---

NB. For more on this analytic tip, see my 1994 Narrative Policy Analysis.

GMMTV, the producer of Thai BLs, may yet screw this series up, but something very very special has been building over the first three episodes: finding love in spite of dark times.

As now. When we are told that everything–repeat, everything–is political, even something as political as “God’s sons” can transcend itself when the script, music, cinematography, acting and chemistry of the two male leads excel like this. The culmination in the last scene of episode 3 has a life of its own.

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In no way do I recommend off-shore aggregators like https://kisskh.do/Drama/Ticket-to-Heaven–2026-/Episode-1?id=13012&ep=214903&page=0&pageSize=100.

I

Let me state my conclusion upfront: in the policy and management world I know best, human agency is the only genuinely global counternarrative I’ve encountered.

Because human agency is constrained differently across times, places, and conditions, it plays a more important role than hegemonic or universalized policy narratives like that for human rights. The human agency counternarrative persists — even as dominant policy narratives shift — precisely because it is not tied to any single macro-framework.

First, a working definition: human agency is “an individual’s capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action.” My version emphasizes reflexivity; others might stress self-determination or the capacity to act on one’s environment. Either way, I think the points that follow hold across most reasonable definitions.

II

To clarify what I mean by human agency, consider two examples — one from migration studies, one from research on child labor:

Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.

Schapendonk, J. (2021). “Counter moves. Destabilizing the grand narrative of onward migration and secondary movements in Europe.” International Migration: 1 – 14  https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12923

The relationship between young people and organized crime is complex and multifaceted. Young people are victims of acute marginalization, poverty and violence but they do have some agency over their decision making. The data from all studies illustrated how gangs offer young people ways to earn an income but they also provide social mobility, ‘social protection’ (Atkinson- Sheppard, 2017) and ‘street capital.’ In some instances, criminal groups offer young people ways to earn ‘quick and easy money.’ Thus, the young people are not devoid of agency, but their decision making should be considered within the context of restricted and bounded lives.

Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2022). “A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re‐Conceptualizing young people’s involvement in organized crime.” Critical Criminology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09674-5

III

With those examples in mind, let’s first turn to four positions often taken with respect to “human agency.”

There are those who think human agency is among core precepts around which to design large-scale systems involving humans, individually or collectively (think philosopher Kant and “human autonomy”). Others are more apt to focus on the individual or micro-level, where the agent acts under case-specifics. Whether at the macro- or micro-levels, contestation abounds over the term, human agency, if only because of different optics on the micro and macro from psychology, phenomenology, law, economics, and more.

There are, however, two other levels and units of analysis, which are the ones I want to focus on with respect to human agency as the global counternarrative.

Far less mentioned than the micro and the macro are really-existing better practices for realizing human agency–in your or my definitions–that have evolved and over widely different cases. Then there are also the cases where macro-precepts are modified over contingency scenarios that vary subnationally, regionally or more “locally”. In both instances, human agency is better understood as an insistent counternarrative for moving away from the current dominant micro- and macro-level narratives of human agency.

IV

From this vantage point, sweeping claims about human agency applying to or governing all cases are simply unworkable in a world shaped by highly variable system(s) patterns and highly variable local conditions.

Human agency as a counternarrative emerges from a run of different cases; it is not an a priori position from which to assert macro-principles or micro-experience. Human agency in this way becomes sufficiently granular to be actionable when applied and modified to the next case at hand. The limitation of staying at the macro and/or micro positions, e.g., “human rights apply uniformly to every single individual on this planet,” is that these positions degranularize the highly differentiated real-time conditions for taking action between whole system and single person.

An example helps. A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:

As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)

Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.

Just as I distrust speculative metaphysics, so too I distrust discussions framed around macro-levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a range of events, situations, contexts, and applications. What looks like “resistance to a state-imposed agenda” in one place may look like “the defense of still-evolving practices” somewhere else. Any serious account of human agency as a counternarrative has to be that nuanced if it is to reflect the work in transforming policy and management systems already shaped by macro-principles and a few decision-makers.

The trouble with calls for big-T transformation is not just their gravitational pull toward abstraction. It’s that advocates for such transformations do not sufficiently admit the starting-point legitimacy of really-existing better practices that have evolved but still diverge from master plans. Better a billion small, practice-based just-transitions than the handful currently proclaimed in principle for the globe.

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NB. See also When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:

As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)

Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.

Just as I have distrust speculative metaphysics, so too I distrust discussions at these levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a run of different events, situations and contexts (cases). What is called resistance of state-imposed agendas here might well be seen defense of still-evolving practices there.

I

Say, you are a policy analyst tasked by your agency to produce a desk-top report answering, “What’s the risk of flooding in downtown Helsinki due to changing sea levels, storm surges, and inland run-off because of climate change in the next decade or two?”

You look first for existing probability and risk estimates, and not just in official documents but also in the grey literature of engineering and consultants’ reports, including modeling and simulation findings. Unsurprisingly, given the fragmentary findings, you recommend, among other priorities, increasing the resilience of existing flood management and emergency management infrastructures to better respond to the unpredictabilities ahead.

In this iteration, you–and we–start with risk and work our way to calling for more resilience as part of the solution portfolio, especially for (though not exclusively) the critical infrastructures directly involved in flood and emergency response.

I argue that it’s a very misleading approach to start out with considerations of risk and resilience and end up with implications for infrastructure change. The analysis looks very different when you begin with the existing infrastructures, how they are actually managed for the physical systems actually operated on the ground, and then look for the risks (and resiliencies) that come with managing the sociotechnical system(s) that way or those ways, now that changing climate conditions have been posed as above.

II

So return to the starting question: “What’s the risk of flooding in downtown Helsinki due to changing sea levels, storm surges, and inland run-off because of climate change in the next decade or two?”

Questions of risk/resilience are only raised after answering two logically and empirically prior questions, if infrastructures start the analysis. First the analyst has to answer:

Q1. What are the infrastructure systems of concern and how are they operated and managed on the ground? It’s of course not just flooding and emergency management infrastructures you are concerned with, but lifeline infrastructures interconnected with the two, not least of which are energy (e.g., electricity), transportation, telecommunications and water supplies (including wastewater). Even more important is the focus on how these systems operate in real time, irrespective of how they are supposed to operate because of design, regulation or technology blueprints.

Q2. What are the standards of reliability and safety to which these systems are actually managed (e.g., if it is managed to a precluded-event standard, what are the events that must never happen—for instance, urban water supplies should not be contaminated by cryptosporidium or LSD, the electricity grid should not island, airplanes should not drop from the sky all over the place)?

Once Q1 and Q2 have been answered and only then does our analyst ask and answer:

Q3. What then are the risks and resiliencies to be managed that follow from meeting these standards for those systems as they operate in real time and over time on the ground?

Of course, much of the above (as below) is compressed. Still, it’s safe to say much of the critical infrastructure literature starts with a version of Q3—the risks to be managed (let alone other unpredictabilities)—without answering the two prior questions. Ignoring questions about operational boundaries and standards and starting instead with the third serves to import economic and engineering assumptions about optimal reliability into the analysis that are not empirically correct. When spatial boundaries and reliability standards are not addressed first, it is too easy to reduce “management” to an altogether unrealistic choice: Do I, the decisionmaker, take on more or less risk in light of my optimality criteria? That is one huge way operational mismanagement can and has happened.

III

Now let’s unpack Q2 and Q3 in more useful detail: What are the different standards of reliability and safety? and What are the different risks and resiliencies that follow from these respective standards? What, then, about important interconnections?

1. Infrastructure performance standards and stages (states) of operation.

Our research identified the following four performance standards to which critical infrastructures managed in real time (there could of course be more):

Note that standards are intimately tied to the frequency of different stages of operation in the critical infrastructure: normal or routine operations, sometimes temporarily disrupted and then restored back, at other times tripping over into outright system failure, thereafter responded to urgently as an emergency and eventually to be recovered, from which a new normal may evolve systemwide (though no guarantees!).

In a world of few disruptions let alone outright system failures, normal operations (which are not static!) dominated and were often associated with a precluded events standard of high reliability, i.e., certain events like loss of containment at nuclear reactors, must never happen (think also of those faraway days of the integrated energy utility, where generation could determine transmission and then distribution).

But it may no longer be possible to preclude such events (especially in the infrastructures which this infrastructure depends upon), such that an avoided events standard is adopted. Some dreaded events, on the other hand, may be treated as inevitably creating major infrastructure disruptions or failures (e.g., earthquakes in Indonesia) or can be compensated for in some major safety improvements afterwards (as after Three-Mile Island). (This “compensatory reliability” standard, needless to say, reduces social pressures for a precluded or avoided event standards.)

The take-away point is that the risks and resiliencies to be managed look very different given the standard to be operated to and the stage(s) of operations the (variably interconnected) infrastructure finds itself today.

2. Risks follow from performance standards being managed to.

Below are findings from our research which identified different systemwide risks faced by the central control of a major energy infrastructure, operating under a precluded events standard and depending on the volatility of its task environment and the options available to respond to that volatility:

Under the precluded events standard that the transmission infrastructure must never island, we observed four performance modes of normal operations, ranging from anticipatory exploration of options (just in case) when operations are more routine and many control strategies and options are available, to a real-time (just in time) improvisation of options and strategies when task conditions are unstable (i.e., they are unpredictable or uncontrollable even if predicted). Operators may have to operate temporarily in a high-risk mode (just for now) when system instability is high and options are few.

They may also be able, in emergencies when options have dwindled, to impose onto grid participants a single emergency scenario (just this way) in order to stabilize a situation. These alternative but interrelated performance modes are part of an overall requisite variety of responses needed to match the full range of input variance that operators can encounter in their systems, all for the purposes of reliable output management.

But each performance mode has its own dominant risk from the control room perspective. According to our interviewees, the big risk in just-in-case performance is that someone in the control center is not paying attention to and being complacent with respect to sudden or emerging changes in system volatility or network options variety. “What you want to do is avoid complacency,” a senior utilities control room official said about his operators. When it comes to just-in-time performance, the risk is misjudgment by control operators with so many balls in the air at one time. The great risk in just-this-way performance is that not everyone who must comply will comply with the emergency.

Last but decidedly not least, just-for-now performance (“just keep that online right now!”) is the most unstable performance mode of the four and the one control operators and managers want most to avoid or exit from as soon as they can. Here the risk is tunneling into a course of action without escape alternatives. What you do now could increase the risks later (in effect, options and volatility are no longer independent dimensions). Speaking of a major vessel collision and spill, a support person in the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service noted, “The closer it [a large ship] got to the bridge, the more the options dwindled.” In effect, the few options remaining may be such that to use one risks increasing volatility elsewhere in the infrastructure, if not in the other infrastructures dependent upon it.

Note the major policy and management implication of just-for-now performance. If the real time challenge is to increase options and/or reduce task volatility, the most efficient strategy is to adopt and modify better practices already used by like operators in like just-for-now situations. Crudely put, if they are better able to jump a bar of politics, dollars and jerks like yours, then start from their practices.

The take-away point here is that these are systemwide management risks of key importance to the infrastructure’s real-time operators.They are NOT the specific risks of corroding pipes underground, or underwater seepage of flood levees, or the risks of climate change. Of course, the latter can and do affect task volatility and/or options availability, which however are important precisely when they affect and/or shift the more important systemwide management risks identified above. (Note that the above systemwide risks were observed for infrastructures with central control rooms operating under the avoided events standard.)

3. Types of system resilience vary by stage of infrastructure operations.

Our research identified four specific types of resilience for reliability management at the system level, each varying by stage (or state) of system operations discussed above:

• real-time system operators adjusting back to within official or unofficial reliability bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
• Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by these real-time operators (restoration resilience); 
• immediate emergency response (as its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and 
• recovery of the system to a “new normal” by real-time infrastructure operators along with others (recovery resilience)

These four specific types of resilience for reliability management constitute overall systemwide resilience, summarized together as “the system’s capability in the face of its reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities—sometimes called “affordances”—that emerge in real time.”

Please note the implications of this classification. Not only are normal operations NOT static or uniform, resilience options differ depending on whether or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations.

Resilience, here, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. It is not one stable portfolio called “process variance” from which to choose this or that already-existing option depending on the stage of operations. (Again, improvisation in the face of unexpected contingencies and assembly of options just in time are instead found, though never guaranteed.)

Note also that it’s not inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal. It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s sociotechnical systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one disaster after another.

The reality for real-time system operators however, may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability different than the outsiders might think. (One thinks immediately of new media platforms, e.g.: Is the capacity to achieve reliable normal operations in digital platforms—not by precluding or avoiding certain events but by adapting to electronic component failure most anywhere and most all of the time—a key skill set of software professionals and their wraparound support in critical infrastructures for emergency management?)

4. The special importance of inter-infrastructural connectivity during infrastructure failure, immediate emergency response & initial service restoration, and longer-term recovery.

What were latent interconnections between and among infrastructures before a disaster often become manifestly evident in that disaster. The earthquake hits, underground water mains break, leakage spreads first out of sight, and then above-ground sections of the road collapse.

The principal management elements of interest in these changes from latent to manifest infrastructural interconnectivity are: the types of interconnectivity configurations among network elements (sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled between and among infrastructures); the shifts in configurations during failure, response and recovery states (e.g., the road now becomes a firebreak); and the joint improvisations involving more than one infrastructures because the respective control variables of these systems are shared or interconnected (e.g., river navigation, town water supplies, and regional hydro-power depend on changes in related dam water releases and pressures). Here too we see that resiliencies triggered in failure, response and recovery must themselves be differentiated when it comes to practice and interventions.

IV

A final point (for an already overly long blog entry). Much of the above is centered around on-the-ground practices (for infrastructure management and operation in particular). This is because I am a practicing policy analyst by profession–although it might seem a small point to you.

Yet it is a very big point, if your profession or discipline gives pride of place to human values, beliefs and attitudes as determinants of really-existing behavior. I come from a literature which repeatedly finds a low statistical correlation between why people say they act and how they actually act. I come from a profession that constantly asks not what is planned or designed but how it is implemented and operated, full of contingent events, situations and context, notwithstanding the power asymmetries attributed to system operations by outsiders.

In more general and summary terms, the logic of capitalist accumulation has had a clear impact on infrastructure operations over time; the logic of requisite variety has now a clear albeit contingent impact on infrastructure operations in the Anthropocene. The difference between the two is due in large part to shifting infrastructural interconnectivities: then, now and ahead.

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NB. The above has been spliced and sutured together from a number of previous publications and blogs. The original research for the above was undertaken and co-authored with my colleague Paul R. Schulman. As such, I am responsible for any misleading simplifications or hydraulic interpretations that have crept into the preceding.