I

It’s easy enough to take “right, center and left” and extrapolate a linear continuum: as when politic moves from the right through the center into the left.

But the straight line becomes V-shaped, when the center is stretched and pulled away from the other two ends, as when the sequence, beginning/middle/end of a story, is made to sag like a hammock.

Think here of the time-consuming catch-up to the contingencies that come in medias res, rendering beginnings long gone (or always disputed) and ends further off than our stories assumed at the start.

That’s what wake-up calls do when they identify intervening crises that stretch time and stretch space out of shape between thought-to-be beginnings and thought-to-be endings.

II

For example, the Covid-19 pandemic was reported to us by several emergency managers as “a wake-up call” with respect to the interconnectivities and vulnerabilities among water, electricity, roads and other backbone infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. In the view of an experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.

Covid-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially for electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of an interviewee. So too shortages in road staff in the aftermath of a vaccine mandate were mentioned by a state emergency manager for transportation as making it more difficult to undertake operations. Covid-19 responses also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

The pandemic combined at the same time with other emergencies. A heat dome episode required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created Covid-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times for some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy.

A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created contention. “We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads: “If we had a catastrophic disaster three months ago that would have been a challenge for us to work through.”

“All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this,” said a state logistics manager of their early response. The interviewee added: “Covid is so unique and out of the box that we’ve developed rules and processes that we’re only going to use during Covid because they don’t make sense in any other disaster”.

In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to front-line managers about interconnectivities, but not even a rehearsal for what is also to come their way in terms of other crises (including the much-predicted magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the two states’ coastline).

III

Many crises are, I submit, V-shaped, notwithstanding their linear scenarios. So what?

Minimally, it means that table-top exercises (a.k.a. rehearsals) based on beginning-middle-end crisis scenarios will inevitably be less V-shaped than required when really-existing contingencies intervene. This is not to say table-tops are not useful. It is to say that the most useful table-tops are likely to be wake-up calls to more crises or different ones than thought pre-tabletop–and also requiring now-NOW attention.

The point is that we are once again back to a key narrative discrepancy in crisis scenarios—between the stated urgency to DO SOMETHING NOW on the one side, and the stated requirement to do so safely with respect to the ends in sight on the other side—while all the time recognizing that both requirements are urged on us and underwritten by the very same unpredictability at the very same scale of analysis, the system level.

On one hand, it is argued we have to experiment even if it risks the limits of survival; on the other hand, being safe means no error should ever be the last trial. This is a discrepancy because it can’t be written off or talked out of; it has to be managed as one of the Anthropocene messes we are in. COVID wasn’t a prequel to another story with its own beginning, middle and end. That is the wake-up call!

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Source: The research, from which are drawn interviewee quotes, is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2121528.

Scene 1

It’s said that Lord Acton despaired over ever finding French, German and British historians who would agreed on an account of the Battle of Waterloo. So too others.

In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal recounts the misadventures of Fabrizio, who makes his way to Waterloo on the eve of the battle. Everything turns chaotic, with confusion around. “A few minutes later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him a ploughed field, the surface of which was moving in a singular fashion. . . .[O]ur hero realized it was shot from guns that was making the earth fly up all around him. . . . ‘But is this the real battle’,” he asks a sergeant”.

Friedrich von Hayek, Nobel economist, picks up the story and asks, “Was the man plowing his field just beyond the extreme wing of Napoleon’s guards part of the Battle of Waterloo?. . .To follow up this kind of question will show at least one thing: that we cannot define a historical fact in terms of spatiotemporal coordinates”. Literary critic, Nicola Chiaromonte, revisits the text: “Certainly the Battle of Waterloo that Napoleon saw and directed (or thought he directed) is not the event Fabrizio wanders into. Nor is the explosion of incidents in which Fabrizio finds himself the same event as the mortal engagement of the soldiers who jeer at him. . .The Battle of Waterloo was all of these, separately and together, plus countless other happenings.” And by no means the last one, a more recent Fabrizio, Tod Hackett, runs to watch the chaotic, confused and eventually disastrous filming of the Battle of Waterloo in Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. 

This “Battle of Waterloo” is very much the power that political scientist, James G. March, described long ago as “different parts of the system contribut[ing] to different decisions in different ways at different times”. Of course, it can and should be countered that war, like capitalism, are their own powerful engines of contingency, but so too it can and should be said of, say, evolution and that irreducible particularity of being.

Scene 2

Contingency is the chief feature of battle and the chief feature of contingency is surprise—not that power defined as the ability of A to get B to do something B would not have done.

To appreciate this point better, puzzle over the power that contingency plays in A getting A to do what A would not have done otherwise. Here is the poet and literary critic, T.S. Eliot:

My writings, in prose and verse, may or may not have surprised other people; but I know that they always, on first sight, surprise myself. I have often found that my most interesting or original ideas, when put into words and marshalled in final order, were ideas which I had not been aware of holding. It is ordinarily supposed that a writer knows exactly what he wants to say, before he sits down at his desk; and that his subsequent labours are merely a matter of a better choice of words, a neater turn of phrase, and a more orderly arrangement. Yet I have always discovered that anything I have written—anything at least which pleased me—was a different thing from the composition which I had thought I was going to write.

Stay with the range of evidence that those “most interesting or original ideas”—those most powerful ideas—are the ones you don’t know until you set them down before you:

• “A writer doesn’t know what his intentions are until he’s done writing,” says poet, Robert Penn Warren. Even when the writing is done, poets “are apt to discover that what they decide to express is not everything their poems say,” writes Anne Stevenson, herself a poet, adding: “Nothing in my experience is more important about the writing of poems than that they should surprise you; that while you are submitting to their rigorous demands of rhythms and sounds they find a way of saying things you never meant to say or never knew you knew.” “I never consider a poem done until a friend has seen it and put that extra glare of light on it,” said poet, C.K. Williams. “It’s a very strange thing—as soon as you give the poem to someone else, even before they read it, it shifts a little, it becomes slightly something else from what you had thought it was, and you begin to look at it in a slightly different way.”

• “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” asks a character of novelist, E.M. Forster. “Therefore, till my work is finished, I never know exactly what result I shall reach, or if I shall arrive at any,” wrote Alex de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill. “I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it,” said political scientist Aaron Wildavsky.

• “You never know what you’re filming until later,” remarks a narrator in Chris Marker’s 1977 film Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge. “You start a painting and it becomes something altogether different. It’s strange how little the artist’s will matters,” adds Picasso (and any number of other artists). In like fashion, “one important reason for making drawings, I imagine, is not to draw a likeness of what one sees, but to find out what it is you see,” adds poet and art critic, James Schuyler.

• Harrison Birtwistle describes his process of composing a piece of music: “I know what it is before I’ve even written it, but in other ways I don’t know at all. As I unravel it, it never turns out to be what you think it’s going to be”. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel novelist, manages to make all this sound commonplace: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing”.

Managing this mess called thinking in these ways becomes the way the pell-mell of distractions and their insights manage you. Nor does any of this stop us from ghostwriting our earlier thinking later on.

Scene 3

If your point of departure in thinking about power is that ability of A to influence B to behave otherwise, then the person I am after having learned what I really know or think has enormous power over the person I was before being distracted and surprised by that discovery.

Conversely, there is an enormous powerlessness in not being able to think or know when few if any words or images exist for the purpose—“the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me,” despairs von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos.

But it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about that A making that B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is primarily about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. Nor is it good enough to equate power to complete control.

At least when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated or dispersed by interests, full stop. The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go.

Scene 4

Better to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.

It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett considering being a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” as in war links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.

The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”

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The upshot: Cascades of one infrastructure failing after another and catastrophizing about any infrastructural failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.

I

An infrastructure cascade happens when the failure of one precipitates failure in other infrastructures connected with it. The causal pathways in the chain reaction are often difficult to identify or monitor, let alone analyze, during the cascade and even afterwards. Indeed, the fast propagation can be one where “a small mistake leads to a big failure.”

Catastrophizing in the sense of “imagining the worst outcome of even the most ordinary event” would seem to overlap with this notion of cascade. Here though the imagining in catastrophizing might be written off as exaggerated, while infrastructure cascades are real, not imagined.

We may, however, want to rethink any weak overlap when it comes to infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing failure across interconnected infrastructures. Consider the insights of Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (2019, The University of Chicago Press).

II

In analyzing cases of catastrophizing in Leonardo’s Notebooks, an early work of Kant and Shakespeare’s King Lear (among others), Passannante avoids labeling such thinking as irrational and favors a more nuanced understanding. He identifies from his case material four inter-related features to the catastrophizing.

First (in no order of priority), catastrophizing probes and reasons from the sensible to the insensible, the perceptible to the imperceptible, the witnessed to the unwitnessed, and the visible to invisible. In this fashion, the probing and reasoning involve ways of seeing and feeling.

Second and third, when catastrophizing, an abrupt, precipitous shift or collapse in scale occurs (small scale suddenly shifts to large scale), while there is a distinct temporal elision or compression of the catastrophe’s beginning and end (as if there were no middle duration to the catastrophe being imagined).

Last, the actual catastrophizing while underway feels to the catastrophizer as if the thinking itself were involuntary and had its own automatic logic or necessity that over-rides—“evacuates” is Passannante’s term—the agency and control of the catastrophizer.

These four features of catastrophizing take us much closer to the notion of infrastructure cascades as currently understood.

III

In catastrophizing as in cascades, there is both that rapid propagation from small to large and that temporal “failing all of a sudden.” In catastrophizing as in cascades, causal connections—in the sense of identifying events with their beginnings, middles and ends—are next to impossible to parse out, given the rapid, often inexplicable, processes at work.

And yes, of course, cascades are real, while catastrophizing is more speculative; but: The catastrophizing feels very, very real too, and out of the direct control of the catastrophizer as an agent in his or her own right.

In fact, one of the most famous typologies in organization and technology studies sanctions a theory that catastrophizes infrastructure cascades. The typology’s cell of tight coupling and complex interactivity is a Pandora Box of large-scale instantaneous changes, invisible processes, and incomprehensible breakdowns involving time, scale and perspective.

As such, it may be that we cannot avoid catastrophizing, if only because of the empirical evidence that sudden cascades have happened.

IV

The four features, however, suggest that one way to mitigate any wholesale catastrophizing of infrastructure cascades is to bring back time and scale into the analysis and modeling of infrastructure cascades.

To do so would be to insist that really-existing infrastructure cascades are not presumptively instantaneous or nearly so. It would be to insist that infrastructure cascades are differentiated in terms of time and scale, unless proven otherwise. That, in fact, is what our research suggests. At the risk of tooting our horn:

V

Let me leave you with another extension inspired by Passannante’s analysis. If infrastructure cascades, when catastrophized, have endings entailed in their beginnings (leaving only attenuated middles or no middles at all to speak of by way of analysis), the catastrophized cascade turns out to be the entailment of “just before” and “immediately after.”

That is, we are to believe we are in a state where disaster avoidance in-between is not possible and disaster response has yet to start but remains unavoidably ahead. We are expected to experience cascade-as-disaster as a presentism too close at hand for us to think about anything else.

Even so the point remains: Every one experiences time as anfractuous, full of twists and turns at times–why else all the interruptions? No one always experiences time and scale as an excluded middle; what is unimaginable are real-time operations without duration and granularity

cratered bromides, pockmarked and punched through by carve-outs and concessions; we seeking some sort of no-miracles settlement amidst the commotion; the sundial that marks the outside sunny hours only; so true to its date and so false to its subject; a bit like the corpse having to drive the hearse;

that is purely gestural and deeply destructive; only happiest with the work he’s defaced; jumping in with berserk ideas before fading out; the welfare state replaced by the save-yourself-if-you-can mentality of the-only-thing-between-you-and-death-is-you; when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze; on the edge of the burn pit;

some so proficient at describing the water we’re drowning in; akin to Nestlé commercializing water and selling it back; a touch more panic-room chic, shall we?; today’s omnipresent binary of Oppressor/Oppressed; self-important things were better in the past; grandiose proclamations followed by appalled second looks;

otherwise, sofa realism instead of the general strike

The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I felt compelled to refuse the excited request of Tsar Peter the Great that they try out the former’s new execution gallows first on one of their own men. It’s also recorded that Phalaris, 6th century BCE tyrant in Sicily ordered the inventor Perillus to design a huge bronze bull in which to roast the former’s victims alive. Their screams would, that tyrant hoped, sound just like the bellows of a bull. Phalaris was so impressed with the contraption that he tried it out on Perillus, as the first victim.

Civilization, it seems, would be one where Friedrich Wilhelm I, Peter the Great, Phalaris, and all the other tyrants end in their own contraptions. And yet: It’s hardly helpful to know that modern cosmology–string theory plus black holes–implies there is a planet out there, just like this one in every way, except that its US President is being water-boarded for crimes against humanity.

—Latest blog entries include

**”Working pastoralism as a scene-making infrastructure“

**”The value added from rethinking ‘prediction’ and ‘imagination’ in more granular terms“

—When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene can 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)

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

**”Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)“

**”17 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]” structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-last-newly-added/

**”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”

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management (recently added)”

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact (Africa and Europe), and global neoliberalism”

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability”

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy“

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management”

**”‘Learning discrepantly’ for policy & management (updated and expanded)“

**”I understand why others feel compelled to defend the humanities and arts. But their direct relevance for public policy and management has always been obvious.”

**”The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications”

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

**”If not corpse-pastoralism, then what are we seeing? Four other suggestions and key upshot for re-seeing what we thought we knew.“

**”Time to think more radically: three new policy narratives extremely different from current positions in pastoralist development”

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)”

**”A ‘reliability-seeking economics in pastoralist development”

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure”

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples”

—Key blog entries on updating Narrative Policy Analysis are:

**”Updating NARRATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS (1994)“

**”Narrative policy analysis: then, now and ahead”

**”The policy relevance of Michel Riffaterre and Algirdas Greimas: the example of global climate change (GCC)”

I

To be honest, I’ve thought of pastoralists I met as working people. That’s because I saw my grandmother, Ruby (Simpson) Roe, work for years at the assembly line of Ford Motor Company in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Hands-on work is what she did. Now, most herders I met in Botswana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe didn’t dress like her, talk like her, live in a house like hers, but in these eyes of mine they were all working people.

This means the gorge rose when I read Moravia’s ghastly Which Tribe Do You Belong? Ditto ick for Naipaul, who was no better than Ruark on colonial Kenya or Monsarrat about Bechuanaland. Better instead to talk to Bessie Head face to face (I did) or read that great, great, great workers’ novel, God’s Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène (translated by Francis Price).

I don’t wear this background as a badge of merit, but offer it by way of explaining why I’ve found some academic studies of pastoralists also to be alien and alienating. There, herders are portrayed as anything but working people. Why? Because, well, it’s their unique practices and incommensurable world-views that set them–and all of us–apart. Now, I get the part that their tasks are not the same as on automobile assembly lines of the 1940s to 1960s, and yes, I also get the irreducible particularity of Being. But, folks, I can’t shake away working people.

II

All this is my long way of trying to stay open to thinking differently about herder behavior and pastoralism. True, we are very good at critiquing those glossy pictures of smiling Maasai jumping into the air while holding their cellphones, but pointing out (as if it mattered just as much) that the beads being worn have long come from Europe or further afield. I think we are less adept in making lateral connections, e.g., where today young herders wait around like urban gig workers elsewhere.

Let me extend that simile to provoke your thinking further. Instead of talking about grazing practices, herd mobility, shortage of herder amenities, overall poor living conditions and their marginal social status, think of practices as performance, mobility and herding itineraries as travel, scant amenities as the role of, say, everyday music while herding, and all that poor or picturesque clothing as, well, fashion in its own right. To do so means we end up describing “scenes” more than “issues”. As in, e.g., the frequently narrativized “downtown” scenes for the arts, music and lifestyle alternatives, where that “alternative” carries a quite different valence that the “marginal” of many pastoralism studies.

In shifting the policy and management focus from issues to scenes, we are explicitly shifting to a central focus on what have called frictional, improvisational contact zones that everyday pastoralism shares with other scenes organized around (alternative) performances, travel, music and fashion. That this analytic shift–probably still far-fetched to some readers!–complicates official and academic policy narratives about pastoralism is a welcome one in my view. How so?

III

If we stick with the conventional view of herders as their own unit of analysis, we’ve been trained to think of informal contact zones as the decreasing space between two blades of modernity’s scissors: One blade is everyday pastoralism commodified by really-existing markets and state interventions; the other blade is everyday pastoralism disciplined into categories from really-existing officials, consultants, and social scientists.

The contact zones I am talking about, however, are a response to the scissors cutting one way only. Whether the zones are formal or informal is not the point. Pastoralism is, to use the phrase, an “infrastructural form.” It is a scene-making device that is exceptionally adept at rendering all that unromantic, unsentimental dust and sand and dirt in photos of herds and herders alive with working relations and affordances that necessarily extend beyond market and state.

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Source. I shamelessly borrow (the errors are my mine alone) from Jennifer Park (2026), “index Magazine and the Downtown Interface: Art, Music, Fashion, and Indie Publics in 1990s New York,” Fashion Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1362704X.2026.2712394

Even [Robert] Fogel, the staunchest advocate of econometrics and the counterfactual method, adopted a more conciliatory approach toward “traditional” historians following the intense debates of the 1970s. Fogel’s shift in tone reflected his intellectual maturation, shaped in part by his debates with noncliometric historians. He told [Douglass] North that his views on historical method grew closer to those of more “traditional” historians like Geoffrey Elton and Lawrence Stone because of a “better understanding about what each of us was getting at.” He moved away from the revolutionary rhetoric of his early career, conceding to his opponents that humanistic history was “complementary” to scientific history and therefore not destined to disappear (Fogel 1979: 2, 48; 1983). . .

Like the proponents of the “old” economic history in their day, he now contended that economic models and statistical techniques served merely as tools to support narrative history, rather than as replacements for it. In his final book on antebellum slavery, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989), he set out to illustrate the complementarity of scientific and traditional methods by integrating cliometric analysis with a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration of the political institutions, social norms, and ethical perspectives that made and unmade the slave system over three hundred years (Fogel 1989). Fogel described Without Consent or Contract as a “narrative history” that fell into the “traditional” rather than the “scientific” mode, because it was a narrative only partly based on cliometric methods. In his opinion, a narrative spanning three hundred years could not be scientific, as there was no scientific procedure for integrating and interpreting the various pieces of quantitative and qualitative evidence used in constructing the story.

(accessed online at https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/doi/10.1215/00182702-12511398/409321/Dehumanizing-Economic-History-Cliometrics-from; footnotes deleted for ease of reading; underlines are mine)

Let’s repeat that last sentence, shall we? There is no scientific procedure for integrating and interpreting the various pieces of quantitative and qualitative evidence used in constructing a longer term narrative.

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 events, situations and contexts (cases). That’s why really-existing practices are the starting point of analysis. What is called resistance of state-imposed agendas here might well be defense of still-evolving practices there.

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 running to 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.

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