Much of what we hear and read today sound like complaints about short-termism and “Why are not people taking the long term far more seriously?” It takes only a moment’s reflection, however, to see how many long-runs are imported, indirectly and ambiguously, into all kinds of policy and management analysis.
“Indefinitely” and like terms squeeze time outwards or towards some later closure, e.g., “There is every reason to believe the present can’t continue this way indefinitely.” Declinism and like concepts slip in comparisons that posit “across time” as the unit of analysis, e.g., “It isn’t a question of will it happen but rather when and where it’s going to happen.” Really existing infrastructures, investments in the forward budget, Net Present Value calculations, talking about path dependencies–all and more add to that archipelago of long(er)-run orientations. Even more explicit “long-runs” appear to exist in order to differentiate them. British historians are apt to talk about the long 19th century as running roughly from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Some Western historians are more apt to talk about the short 20th century running from 1914 (the start of World War I) to 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall).
For me, the analytical crux is not ‘long term versus short term’, but rather complex policy and management crises are differentiated by one or more of these orientations.
II
Start with: “The present rise in health-care costs in the US cannot continue this way indefinitely.” Now, rescript the crisis through three other orientations to “the long run”: “The current crisis in health care is that we can’t predict health-care requirements with the specificity we need for taking action now”; “Health care continues to be characterized by seriatim technology and digital upheavals, one after another”; and “It’s not if, but when the next worldwide pandemic will happen.” In this reframing, “the health-care crisis” reflects not only multiple but different long-run orientations are at work, but their sequencing is a major way for differentiating and tracking time (i.e., “the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as its own health-care crisis”). In this recasting, different crises no longer unfold at different times; rather, differentiating crises are the way we unfold time.
Now complicate that notion of time further. A core urgency moves to the fore when we focus on the nature of the present in any long/short orientation: Where does ‘not knowing the present’ come into play in each orientation? It may turn out that even conventional short-termism – the present matters more than the future – requires more certainty and confidence than warrantable. The virtue of center-staging not-knowing is to remind those preoccupied with various short-runs and long-runs that predicting the future is difficult for the very same reasons learning from the past is difficult: Both require stability in objectives, institutional memory, fallback reserves in case something goes wrong, and low environmental uncertainty. But we are in the Anthropocene: These conditions do not prevail.
III
For many, the absence of preconditions for predicting the future and learning from the past is the problem. For me, it is positive to start from the fact that not-knowing, inexperience, and difficulty are each variable. Why becomes clear when we move to the more granular case level.
Some regional climate change modelling is of such a high resolution today that climate model results can be and are disaggregated in ways of use to some critical infrastructures. It is now possible to project estimates for rising sea-levels, storm surges, and inland flooding in, say, 20-year increments to better reflect those already existing near- and longer-term cycles for infrastructure depreciation and forward investments, among others. Do such modelling results reduce uncertainties related to depreciation and investment cycles? No, not necessarily. Do modelling results increase confidence that action with respect to these cycles can be taken, nevertheless? Yes, possibly: in fact, entirely possible.
NB. For more, please 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
Boris Pasternak, Russian poet and novelist, reportedly said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way. Note that “accomplished”.
I grew up in a career that made much about policy success and failure, and then elsewhere, project or program success and failure. I now think that success and failure are inadequate terms to encompass the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems. What do we do with the fact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, even with setbacks, when it matters”? Reducing the latter behavior to “coping” and “sub-par” seems to me one crisis too many.
It just isn’t that longer time horizons make for persistently mixed results rather than declarations of overall success or failure. There’s also the no-small matter of hope. Hope, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it, doesn’t fail. Yes, hope is disappointed but it does not fail. Hope, in this view, is what accomplishments sustain, and failure is not something we associate with that hope.
Domestically, the Confucian revival [in mainland China] dates to the 1980s, raising the question of whether Orientalism and its objectification of the Orient are a thing of the past — as proclaimed by postcolonial critics — or if Orientalism, now re-appropriated by “Orientals” themselves, has emerged victorious in the age of global capitalism.
Environmental degradation driven by the climate crisis systemically worsens living standards, thereby heightening socioeconomic and political tensions. These tensions often ignite armed conflicts, forcing populations to migrate and creating environmental refugees. The mass migration stems from both the decline of ecosystems and conflicts intensified by resource shortages. As a result, the climate crisis inflicts extensive and lasting damage on ecosystems and human communities, aligning with the definition of ecocide. Recognizing this causal chain highlights the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.
We draw three initial conclusions from [our review of the literature]. First, across the five environmental issues surveyed, the evidence on the contribution of environmental variables to violent political conflict is thin, weak, uncertain, and/or contradictory. Notwithstanding headline claims about climate being “a risk factor for conflict,” for instance, the consensus view of even the mainstream scholars who reached this verdict is that climate is a relatively low risk factor for conflict (evaluated as fourteenth out of 16 factors considered), is particularly uncertain (evaluated as the most uncertain of 16 factors), and is a factor over which there is “low confidence” in the mechanisms through which climate affects conflict . . . Second, scarcity accounts of environmental conflict, which focus on the security impacts of natural resource availability shortages, are particularly unconvincing, there being much stronger evidence on the conflict effects of relative resource abundance, as argued in “resource curse” or “honey pot” . . . interpretations of environmental conflict, and discussed further in the next section. And third, although the body of evidence on climatic variables and conflict is much more extensive than on the other environmental issues considered here, dominating climate–security research, it is no less uneven. Indeed, our assessment is that the evidence is most robust on water and forests, through resource curse dynamics; that it is most extensive but also mixed on climatic variables; and that it is thinnest in relation to biodiversity and pollution.
Take-away: All dominant policy narratives, including those for the climate emergency, come with more granular counternarratives. Does the one negate or cancel the other? No, but it does compel new questions, in this case: What local injustices would this or that global governance produce?
A more complicated “surveillance”
With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings (Eluère 2024). As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’ (Norman 2024), where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’ (Economist 2025a).
A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. . . .
To be clear: The resulting claim — that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible — is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order — which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.
Which however also means. . .
Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .
Have you wondered how narrow the world must be if indeed “power is the master narrative of politics”? What’s more bloviating: The economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome.” Either way, their scapegoating “regulation” is to discipline.
Remember, the very same politicians believe there is not any major legislation or market reform that can’t be corrected once implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong. Also think of those cases where power politics and material interests led to counterproductive outcomes unforeseen by power-makers. There surely had to be cheaper ways for the US to get the oil than undertaking two wars in Iraq.
Nature is on an investment strike in the climate emergency, and the Precautionary Principle insists we avoid positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The question immediately arises, however: Where does the control come from to achieve that avoidance? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its execution. More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoidance of consequential events we can’t control?
“Wicked problems, what do you want from us?” Yet consider all that has been lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So like the absence of official scenario planning in the Soviet Bloc because there were no alternative scenarios to compare against. If everything is political, how then is that not ridiculous? The repeated calls for Big-T transformations are a fixture like baby Jesus in all those Renaissance paintings of the Virgin.
Complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. Just as war and pandemic create their own contingencies, so too the monumental wreckage of human intentions—good ones and bad—unmakes a stable present. Or if you prefer, make a complex one where unrealized intentions criticize everything that happens instead. I want to underscore just how much prejudice any “reliance on hindsight” is in this world of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty. Even if we instead improvise with what’s at hand rather than “rely on the past,” it is as an avant-garde reinvents itself.
If, as so often advised, we are to scale up program and project success, how then do we scale out their failure, which is just as interconnected a phenomenon? The point is that success, just like progress, is something understood at best only retrospectively. This means it is better to talk about accomplishments, admitting all the while that their past and future interconnections are not complete. Even classical ballet, which put perfection before reliability, didn’t have a stable choreography.
To believe Kant, the three most important questions in our lives are future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? That is the pull side: The often ambiguous ends to be achieved through more knowledge and hope are what pull us into the future. There is the push side of present tensions as well: the centripetal pressures of closing in on what we think we really know (or can know) and the centrifugal pressures of opening up what has been taken as intractable, for granted or unknowable. The good news is that ambiguity, like any metaphor, demands to be evaluated.
The litmus test that a policy or management issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. If—and yes it is a big “if”—a simplification can be recast as complex in ways that new interventions are now plausible or if the issue thought to be so complex no further action is possible can be recast to show otherwise, then the gist of the matter has been pushed and pulled beyond the current exaggerations. To recognize that your account can and should go further is, on the other hand, no exaggeration.
No one talks about the War on Cancer now. Have you wondered how narrow the world must be if indeed “power is the master narrative of politics”? What’s more bloviating: The economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome.” Either way, their scapegoating “regulation” is to discipline.
What value added do we get as viewers of Monet’s water-lilies from his having them dusted and washed before painting? But, remember, the very same politicians believe there is not any major legislation or market reform that can’t be corrected once implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong. Also think of those cases where power politics and material interests led to counterproductive outcomes unforeseen by power-makers. There surely had to be cheaper ways for the US to get the oil than undertaking two wars in Iraq.
Nature is on an investment strike in the climate emergency, and the Precautionary Principle insists we avoid positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The question immediately arises: Where does the control come from to achieve that avoidance? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its execution. More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoidance of consequential events we can’t control?
So sayeth Job: “Wicked problems, what do you want from us?” Yet consider all that has been lost by forgoing a one-off tax on windfall profits made because of the Covid-19 pandemic. So like the absence of official scenario planning in the Soviet Bloc because there were no alternative scenarios to compare against. If everything is political, how then is that not ridiculous? The repeated calls for Big-T transformations are a fixture like baby Jesus in all those Renaissance paintings of the Virgin.
Complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. Just as war and pandemic create their own contingencies, so too the monumental wreckage of human intentions—good ones and bad—unmakes a stable present. Or if you prefer, make a complex one where unrealized intentions criticize everything that happens instead. I want to underscore just how much prejudice any “reliance on hindsight” is in this world of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty. Even if we instead improvise with what’s at hand rather than “rely on the past,” it is as an avant-garde reinvents itself.
To believe Kant, the three most important questions in our lives are future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? That is the pull side: The often ambiguous ends to be achieved through more knowledge and hope are what pull us into the future. There is the push side of present tensions as well: the centripetal pressures of closing in on what we think we really know (or can know) and the centrifugal pressures of opening up what has been taken as intractable, for granted or unknowable. The good news is that ambiguity, like any metaphor, cries out to be evaluated.
The litmus test that a policy or management issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. If—and yes it is a big “if”—a simplification can be recast as complex in ways that new interventions are now plausible or if the issue thought to be so complex no further action is possible can be recast to show otherwise, then the gist of the matter has been pushed and pulled beyond the current exaggerations. To recognize that your account can and should go further is, on the other hand, no exaggeration.
If, as so often advised, we are to scale up program and project success, how then do we scale out their failure, which is just as interconnected a phenomenon? The point is that success, just like progress, is something understood at best only retrospectively. This means it is better to talk about accomplishments, admitting all the while that their past and future interconnections are not complete. Even classical ballet, which put perfection before reliability, didn’t have a stable choreography.
Of course, “power” can refer to control, authority, or domination, and obviously this is related to oppression and can be presented as an oppressor vs. oppressed binary. But the anthropological study of power also examines indirect, oblique, diverse manifestations of power and agency. Power is not simply a repressive or oppressive force but also reflects generative dynamics. How well can an LLM, limited to just an abstract, evaluate nuanced analyses of power, such as Robin G. Nelson’s engagement with anthropological world building and everyday life? What about articles that draw on Bourdieu’s “symbolic power,” Sally Engle Merry and co-authors’ “quiet power,” or even Marshall Sahlins’s critique that the very concept of power has lost its interpretive value?
Because I’ve had a career as a practicing policy analyst, I’ve also had a healthy respect for the utility of different methods of problem-solving. What I wasn’t prepared for were all the “vs”: quantitative versus qualitative, positivist versus post-positivist, reductionist versus holistic, and such. The complexity of the policy issues meant that all and more could be required–and anyway these “versus’s” weren’t granular enough to identify which specific methods were being compared or not.
Once the analyst starts thinking in terms of different specific methods, the horizon of candidates broadens considerably. In my practice, methods came to include applications and modifications of middle-range frameworks from one area to another in order to reframe more tractably difficult problems in the latter. New ways to recast the benchmarks and metrics for managing risk, uncertainty and unknowns have been of interest (for other examples, see my Guide).
Below are twelve examples to add to that earlier discussion for a methodologically expanded policy analysis and public management. These map out for the analyst-as-a-professional additional working space not in graduate school training. As always, your comments are welcome.
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
4. The methodological challenge of empty and floating signifiers to analyzing policy (newly added)
5. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
6. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing for the purposes of policy and management
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual
9. What “calling for increased granularity” means
10.Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
12. Etcetera’s are the crisis kitsch of policy analysis (newly added)
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
–A young researcher had just written up a case study on traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement there.
That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed, the author stated, was a country-wide land reform. Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!
This was my introduction to “solutions” in search of problems they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”
–Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers your having to ask:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing right here?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management
I
Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.
In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions that are already orthogonal, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.
Everyone triangulates, ranging from cross-checking of sources to formal use of different methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of divergent stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are common examples.
Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.
II
Return now to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.
Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.
Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple and widely diverse metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case in its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
–I bolded the preceding because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.
The methodological problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is any misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.
–Even here, we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition: Just because a tree is shady does not mean each leaf provides shade. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.
The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.
Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often would have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases are unhelpfully empty for policy and management.
–A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I came across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:
Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishes this stuff!”
But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and, most importantly, counter-examples.
4. The methodological challenge of empty and floating signifiers to analyzing policy (newly added)
I
The usual way floating and empty signifiers are distinguished is that the former are terms or concepts with (too) many meanings, while the latter have none. The ready example of a floating signifier in today’s policy discussions is “capitalism,” since it’s
Nothing would seem more policy relevant than capitalism, but even a cursory study of the list identifies no shared or central focus on, importantly, markets and prices. The cumulative implication for policy analysis, my profession, is obvious: Just what is the–or even “an”–anti-capitalist alternative?
II
If capitalism as a floating signifier makes a hash of what it is to be “anti-capitalist,” the opposite is the case for the empty signifier of that equally policy relevant neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is almost always a term used by those whose position is anti-neoliberalism. “Recent scholarship has suggested that ‘neoliberalism’ functions almost exclusively a term used by its critics,” where
An empty signifier, in Laclau’s vocabulary, is a name progressively emptied of specific content so that it can stand for an entire chain of heterogeneous demands: the poorer its intension, the wider the coalition it can represent (Laclau, 1996, 2005). . . .Laclau was entirely lucid about the epistemic price and entirely explicit that it was worth paying, because the point of such signifiers is not to describe but to assemble [and articulate]. . . .
Defenders of the concept argue that neoliberalism names a real macro-phenomenon and that the term’s breadth reflects the breadth of the thing (Peck, 2013; Laruffa, 2024). Our argument does not require denying this: real processes of marketisation, privatisation and financialisation occurred. The question is why they came to be gathered under this name, in this form, on this timeline. . .
A concept that functions as an articulating signifier is unlikely to be disciplined by demonstrations of its descriptive failure, because description was never its principal function, and the productive question may therefore be less ‘what is the correct definition of neoliberalism?’ than ‘what work is the concept doing, for whom, and at what analytical cost?’
Paniagua, Pablo and Vergara, Álvaro (2026). “Neoliberalism As Adversary: The Latin American Construction of an Empty Signifier”. My underlining. https://ssrn.com/abstract=7316099)
The upshot: The analytic costs in relying on and using “neoliberalism”–and by implication other empty signifiers–understandably trouble the policy analyst more than the policy advocate intent on articulating who the adversary is and assembling coalitions to oppose it.
III
Floating and empty signifiers are problematic for policy analysts when these terms, capitalism, neoliberalism and the like (e.g., “cooperative global governance”), are exiled from their specifics and particularities as events, situations and contexts. More, the identification of systemwide patterns (if any) over a range of different events, situations, and contexts–including but not limited to those self-identified as neoliberal or anti-capitalist–is also unavoidable for the analyst.
Why? Because practices surface in pattern recognition and become the signifier of interest–the center of analytic gravity–for the analyst. It’s the practice of protesters waving or holding blank sheets of paper that is significant. Practices for managing assets (A) differ from the older practices of commodification (C), which in turn has changed Marx’s classic formulation for making more money (M’) from M–C–M’ to M–A–M’.
IV
So what? Two implications follow from this reshifted focus to practices.
(1) First, centering the analysis of policy on existing practices helps explain why human values and beliefs are more often the floating and empty signifiers of choice in policy advocacy. Policy analysts are, in my experience, keener at describing the formal and informal routines, procedures, mechanisms and improvisations key critical infrastructures undertake in order that real-time market exchange and transactions take place. In contrast, the policy advocates with whom I’m familiar are more comfortable in focusing on, say, “human greed” and “belief in markets” to explain that which takes place.
The latter quotation marks are not meant to be pejorative, but rather to mark that both signifiers need to be recognized as socially constructed before taking further action (rather than calling for greater detail tout court).
(2) Second, the response of policy analysts to policy advocates’ reliance on empty and floating signifiers isn’t to insist advocates provide these details. Policy advocacy is an entirely different genre than policy analysis. Rather, the burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their signifiers hold regardless of the more granular qualifications or exceptions provided by analysts. (See the point made with respect to the Luttwak quote in the preceding #3.)
5. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:
Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.
Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.
The goal should remain zero.
It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
Upshot: If peer review isn’t solely or primarily about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?
6. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” in the worlds of policy and management add up to one single “must”
Consider the following example (my bolding):
Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies canpotentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war couldbe pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict couldbe over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict couldbe unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization couldbe over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potentialcould involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .
States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”
The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to one or more “must” would mean that the article (and like ones) actually began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those (could- and might-be) events.
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothingfor the purposes of policy and management
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and. . .
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual
–For me, the crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?
What is at work are the two blades of a scissors. One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations. Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.
–For example, consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by that-then). But if cities also view their respective building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among developers and builders.
That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be obvious.
9. What “calling for increased granularity” means
I
When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction altogether. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind of abstraction from the get-go.
What then does “actionable granularity” mean?
II
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.
Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.
III
One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.
Where so, there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.
From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or “a case in its own right.”
I stress this point because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.
10. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.
What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider task environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” according to composer Arnold Schoenberg.)
Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.
While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
The statement that I will be discussing is immediately book-ended by two quotes:
Just beforethe missing statement: “Therefore, rather than being schools of democracy, ACs [associative councils] may be spaces where associative and political elites interact and, therefore, just reproduce existing political inequities (Navarro, 2000). Furthermore, these institutions may have limited impact in growing and diversifying the body of citizens making contributions to public debate (Fraser, 1990).”
Just afterthe missing statement: “The professionalised model results from a complex combination of inequalities in associationism and a specific type of participation labour. Analysing the qualitative interviews, regulations and documents was fundamental to understanding the underlying logic of selecting professionals as the main components.”
Now try to guess the gist of the paragraph in between. More of the same? Well, no. Six paragraphs from the article’s end emerges an “and-yet” that had been there from the beginning:
Nevertheless, an alternative interpretation of professionalisation should be considered. The fact that ACs perform so poorly in inclusiveness does not mean that they are not valuable for other purposes, such as voicing a plurality of interests in policymaking (Cohen, 2009). In this respect, participants can act as representatives of associations that, in many cases, promote the needs of oppressed and exploited groups (De Graaf et al., 2015; Wampler, 2007). Suffice it to say, for example, that labour unions or migrants’ associations frequently send lawyers or social workers to ACs to defend their needs and positions. Problems with inclusion should not take away from other purposes, that is, struggles to introduce critical issues and redistribution demands to the state agenda. Other studies have already shown that groups make strategic decisions to achieve better negotiation outcomes in the context of technical debates (Grillos, 2022). Thus, the choice of selecting professionals can be a strategy to improve the capacity of pressure in institutional spaces dominated by experts. (my bold; accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251319065)
Methodological upshot: What the counterfactual is to economic analysis, the “and-yet” counternarratives are to policy analysis. What would have happened in the former is contrasted to what else is happening during the latter.
12. Etcetera’s are the crisis kitsch of policy analysis (newly added)
Start here: “Policymakers also need to worry about those other factors—societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, geographical, governmental, psychological, technological, ethical, religious etc—that are so undeniably part of policy analysis and management.” Or: The very same people who question the use of GDP as a measure of human health and the environment end up being among the first to urge “Increase government budgets by x% of GDP for health and the environment and social protection and this and that, etc. . .”
That pincushion of etcetera’s indicates things are just critical enough to get a nod, but not that critical to actually have to name. So too Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued “matter” was treated like a pincushion whose surface was hidden by all the sensations, thoughts and properties stabbed helter-skelter into it.
You ask today, “But just what are the important factors?,” and you still get a pincushion of “etc’s” Methodologically, they are the crisis kitsch of policy analysis. But in reality, as Wittgenstein writes: “Again and again, my ‘etc’ has a limit.
Start here: “Policymakers also need to worry about those other factors—societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, geographical, governmental, psychological, technological, ethical, religious etc—that are so undeniably part of policy analysis and management.” Or: The very same people who question the use of GDP as a measure of human health and the environment end up being among the first to urge “Increase government budgets by x% of GDP for health and the environment and social protection and this and that, etc. . .”
That pincushion of etcetera’s indicates things are just critical enough to get a nod, but not that critical to actually have to name. So too Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued “matter” was treated like a pincushion whose surface was hidden by all the sensations, thoughts and properties stabbed helter-skelter into it.
You ask today, “But just what are the important factors?,” and you still get a pincushion of “etc’s”. Woe to us. They’re the crisis kitsch of policy analysis. But in reality, as Wittgenstein writes: “Again and again, my ‘etc’ has a limit.”
Remember all those STEM types who criticized the humanities because “you can offer any interpretation you want without having to prove any of it!”
Now pull that inside out: STEMS types face the AI prospect of being proved surplus to requirements because of algorithms they could never interpret on their own. I just love it, this Schadenfreude!
