**The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications (Research report for a US National Science Foundation project by Emery Roe & Paul R. Schulman) https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf
**”Control, Manage or Cope? A Politics for Risks, Uncertainties and Unknown-Unknowns.” Chapter 5 in The Politics of Uncertainty: Changes of Transformation (eds. Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling). Routledge, UK. (2020) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/16532
Below is the full abstract from an excellent review of case material on river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada:
Despite millions of dollars being spent annually to restore degraded river ecosystems, there exist relatively few assessments of the ecological effectiveness of projects. An evidence-based synthesis was conducted to describe river restoration activities in Newfoundland and Labrador. The synthesis identified 170 river restoration projects between 1949 and 2020. A practitioner’s survey was conducted on a subset of 91 projects to evaluate ecological success. When the perceived success of managers was compared to an independent assessment of ecological success, 82% of respondents believe the projects to be completely or somewhat successful whereas only 41% of projects were evaluated as ecologically successful through an independent assessment. Only 11% of practitioners’ evaluations used ecological indicators, yet managers of 66% of projects reported improvements in river ecosystems. This contradiction reveals a lack of the application of evidence to support value-based judgments by practitioners. Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted. If we are to improve the science of river restoration, projects must demonstrate evidence of ecological success to qualify as sound restoration. River restoration is a necessary tool to ensure the sustainability of river ecosystems. The assessment conducted in this study suggests that our approach to planning, designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating projects needs to improve. An integrated-systems view that gives attention to stakeholders’ values and scientific information concerning the potential consequences of alternative restoration actions on key ecosystem indicators is required.
Skinner, S. W., A. Addai, S. E. Decker, and M. van Zyll de Jong. 2023. The ecological success of river restoration in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada: lessons learned. Ecology and Society 28(3):20. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-14379-280320
My problem is not their main finding: “Despite reporting that monitoring data were used in the assessment it is doubtful that any meaningful ecological assessment was conducted.”
I don’t know what world the authors or you, the reader, live in. But in my world, a 40% success rate in river restoration projects is huge! I mean, really significant. Indeed, I come from a project implementation background where conjoining, “success” and “ecosystem restoration,” is like waving a red flag in front of a phalanx of critics at the ready to disagree.
His ghastly lack of proper education, his imperfect mastery of the German language, especially of written German, and his complete disregard of logic, were patent. No well thought-out document ever came from his pen, merely vague directions. He fought shy of committing himself. By his order, minutes of conversations were as a rule withheld from the other party. Conferences were bound to break down over his monologues. It was exceedingly difficult to obtain decisions … If made, they were mostly unclear, leaving scope for arbitrary interpretations … and there was no appeal. The “Führer” has decided; to resort to him once more would be blasphemy … No adviser could gain permanent influence. Hitler’s reactions could be skilfully manipulated by “news,” but the explosive effect could not be gauged beforehand. A fairly good memory for facts and figures enabled him to bluff even experts … His violent diction and the tone of his voice intimidated … A smatterer in everything, he was an expert in bluffing. “This last half-hour, while I was resting, I invented a new machine-gun and a contrivance for bridge-building, and composed a piece of music in my head,” he once intimated to a late companion from Landsberg prison, who was duly impressed … He had not the patience to read a lengthy document, but claimed to know Clausewitz by heart. And he often got away with it.
(Erich Kordt, a key foreign affairs official in the Third Reich, quoted in full from an edited 1948 review of Lewis Namier, historian, of Kordt’s Wahn und Wirklichkeit, reprinted in the TLS, November 29, 2019: 38.)
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
Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.
The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. Since this does not augur well for the future, that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.
But what is post-now?
As everything critical happens in real-time–in this “constant-present”–then post-now is by definition outside now-time. For example, if the mess we are now in is largely the difficulty of predicting the future(s), then post-now has nothing to do with those futures that matter to us in now-time. Post-now isn’t about such anticipations.
So what is post-now? It’s where you cannot not want to be because you have no need to anticipate anything in being alive there. It’s like a report from a distant planet, wholly like ours, except its present has fast-forwarded in a way unimaginable, and predictably so, for us, at least for now.
What then is “predictably unimaginable”?
In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.
Current practice is we start with the worst-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.
Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to even think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. In this way, we approach a “predictably unimaginable” that is not oxymoronic.
But you have to remember that imagining is not predicting, and both are downstream of the case-specific granularity
–Consider the following example:
Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].
After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.
At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .
Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.
“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.
This discovery is also part of an on-going installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described in a recent article as:
In The Artificial Island, the work traces a submerged Neolithic site off the coast of Korčula, discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica. The site, originally connected to the mainland by an ancient road, now lies four to five metres beneath the Adriatic Sea, submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval.
After being primed by the two texts, take another look at the photo. You can see the submerged island, see its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will submerge even more settlements ahead in the climate emergency.
–The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen, now and ahead.
I wager that no reader primed as above asks first: “What about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement?” Or from the other direction, “What about what’s been preserved from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed?”
That is, no one, I wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next here?” I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around these submerged sites? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”
More formally, you may imagine this example entails or otherwise predicts the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am suggesting that really-existing accomplishments that happen next and at that site go to reframe the pertinent issues. People already understand what are case-specific accomplishments in ways that broader progress and success are understood by others only later on.
As everything critical happens in real-time–in this “constant-present”–then post-now is by definition outside now-time. For example, if the mess we are now in largely the difficulty of predicting the future(s), then post-now has nothing to do with those futures that matter to us in now-time. Post-now isn’t about such anticipations.
So what is post-now? It’s where you cannot not want to be because you have no need to anticipate anything in being alive there. It’s like a report from a distant planet, wholly like ours, except its present has fast-forwarded in a way unimaginable for us, at least for now.
Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.
The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. Since this does not augur well for the future, that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.
From a management perspective, a country is overcrowded and overpopulated when its mess and reliability professionals have few ideas about how to keep people residing, employed, and productive there.The Netherlands and Singapore risk becoming (more) overpopulated and overcrowded only when increasing numbers of residents there want greater well-being yet choose to leave, even if they are uncertain as to whether their greater well-being lies somewhere else. They are pushed out, rather than pulled elsewhere. There is a story here, but it is unique and does not have the same ending for everyone. It is a contingent narrative, provisional on how the networks of professionals translate the patterns and scenarios involved for where they are.
Theatre is – more than any other artistic medium – a medium of pragmatics. The permanent possibility of mistakes, glitches, and loss of control are not unavoidable flaws but the core of the medium. Instead of ignoring these obstacles, embracing them is a key strategy for creating a tension that emphasizes its very aliveness. This proximity to the unexpected has conceptional, even philosophical consequences but very concrete reasons: always involving many people, always being collaborative (even though the hierarchies between director, actor, scenographer, technicians etc. might be strong), always trying to create alternative worlds with analogue means, and most of all, always being a medium where the reception of the artwork happens in the very moment it is produced. No photoshopping possible. Theatre refers directly to the shared present, to the time spent together by the artists and spectators. Live arts are always in negotiation. . .
Fair enough, but let’s turn the statement inside out. Say in our research we observe situations or events full of glitches and mistakes, involving many people having to negotiate without complete control but pragmatically seeking to realize something major, all in real time right now (as in: “no one can test real-time”). Would we call that theatre, and if so, with what added purchase?
I don’t know about you but I have observed such circumstances in my own research, and if by observer you wish to term me spectator, then fair enough, this too is theatre. But so what? What do we get from seeing such events as “live arts”?
II
Let’s focus on what for me is the most obvious and pressing point: Is there then an aesthetics to the behavior I observe in infrastructure control rooms and field incident command centers when their personnel operate under conditions of systemwide uncertainty and emergency? Certainly, you see virtuosi of skill, timing and improvisation in the midst of scripted and unscripted situations. That’s not news. What is newer, or odder, is to press the question of how to evaluate or judge these “live arts” within the practices of the arts.
As a way into this, Robert Boyers, author and essayist, complicates those two words so important to policy judgments–excellence and accomplishment–from an aesthetics perspective:
In the domain of aesthetics, it seems to me, unless you get down to the nitty-gritty, you are always going to be revolving in an ether that allows for just about any kind of interpretation. Excellence obviously leads us in some contexts to think about accomplishment, right? A term that in the arts, for the most part, most people will no longer resort to. Who wants to be merely an accomplished painter? All sorts of people are accomplished. You can make a good drawing in the studio, and not be regarded by your peers as an artist. When you look at a Soutine painting. . .you’d never think of its excellence as having principally to do with its being highly accomplished. That wouldn’t be what would come to mind. It is of course highly accomplished, but that word itself would seem at once inadequate and misleading.
I for one have spent a lot of time at the nitty-gritty level in arguing why accomplishments (my term) are so important in evaluating the effectiveness (a kind of excellence) of real-time professionals seeking to prevent emergencies or responding to them once they occur. So what else am I to see aesthetically if I shift focus from accomplishment and excellence in these live arts of interest to me?
III
I read Boyers as suggesting an answer: It’s at the granular levels of a really-existing emergency–e.g., “every major forest fire is unique”–that we are more likely to see one (primary) interpretation: This indeed is an emergency requiring immediate and urgent action Now it doesn’t take a genius to focus on one set of implications in treating emergencies as urgent: Saving the forest from burning down, preventing the electricity grid from separating and destroying itself, ensuring the urban water supply from being (further) contaminated by Cryptosporidium or worse–all and more mean saving infrastructures that have been persistently criticized for bias and erasures.
Or to put that charge in the terms offered here: Emergencies, to the extent they reinforce or exploit an aesthetics of erasure and bias, fail the more widely they are seen as misdirection and propaganda. I hope the reader sees how topical this point is in today’s politics.
It’s pretty rich hearing the critics say that no one listens to their critiques of society, economics or politics because the critiques strike at the heart of the power structures–patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalism, racism, fascism, imperialism, militarism, colonialism. News flash: No one listens because the critiques come with how-to details erased. Even bearing-witness is more policy relevant than critiques when the latter fail to recognize the former is the only option leave behind.
Another critique gets my derision: “What’s the development problem here—people aren’t as poor as before?” Who though can refute a sneer? asked a critic of Gibbons’ Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
When is inventing the ship not also inventing the eventual shipwreck? Answer: “When sailing the ship across a variety of conditions proves to be reliable in real time, right now when it matters.”
What also drives me up the wall is the emphatically and inescapably unidirectional decline being described as if there were no cultural gain from economic imperatives. Certainly, the ubiquitous “coping” implies little, if no, gain, notwithstanding how ingenious the improvisation and learning. And how could there be, when the critics’ culture comes from past legacies of empire and colonialism into a present and future that are, in every nook and cranny, capitalist–or worse imperialist–through and through, again and again.
Are others struck by the incongruity between a present narrativized by one group as all but the Plague of Cyprian (bringing virtually everything to an end as in the Roman Empire before) and the demand by many in the same group to dismantle narratives, demystify myths, and dispel imaginaries, all in the name of that being a Good Thing, if you will a manufactured realism as empyrean cosmopolitanism?
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” [Hermann Göring] shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”
“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” (accessed online at https://www.mit.edu/people/fuller/peace/war_goering.html)
You can take the old bit about Congress as today’s only joke.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 