Start with mess

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.

accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)

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.

accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/

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.

I

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. . .

(Florian Malzacher accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00796-x)

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.

(accessed online at https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/780-good-taste-bad-taste-no-taste-why-taste)

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.

—Latest blog entries include

**”Am I in the canon of policy analysis?“

**”Thinking infrastructurally about herd and herder mobility and their centrality in pastoralist development“

**”It’s a tough situation, these everyday’s“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Other major new reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This question is what philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, calls “a systematically misleading expression.” Like the ghost in a closet, there is no canon in my profession as a practicing policy analyst about which to provide an answer. A book of mine from over thirty years ago continues to be cited in the academic literature, but I doubt–with one or two exceptions (google “J.W. Kingdon”)–that there is a widely shared canon of classic texts in graduate school curricula for policy analysis (universities being the key way canons are transmitted).

This is as it should be.

Practicing policy analysis is about being topical right now when it matters to the decisionmaker, and you can’t be topical and definitive at the same time–at least definitive in the sense of being able to say, Here is a policy memo, brief or report that will stand the test of time.

Oddities happen–famously George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” on Soviet containment–but I’d be the first to admit the memos and briefs requested of me remain in the Great Unread. Hopefully, read once by the right person in the right position at the right time, but even then there is the crevice between hope and experience.

Nor is there anything new here, and not just for practicing policy analysts. The Great Unread is a term from literary history, e.g. almost all the novels from the 19th century remain unread, save for canonical fractions. But I am unaware of a methodological parallel to the latter’s “distant reading” efforts: that is, the use of computational methods to determine patterns, if any, in the corpora of the now archived memos and briefs as has been done for 19th century British and French novels. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if evaluative developments on the academic side are already underway.

So what?

It is worth pausing on just how manifoldly contingent is that “right person in the right position at the right time” in policy analysis as practice, since “contingent” here embraces so many different scales of evaluation.

---

Sources.

Barré, J, et al. (2023). “Operationalizing Canonicity: A Quantitative Study of French 19th and 20th Century Literature.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 8(3). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.88113

F. de Cristofaro and S. Ercolino, Eds (2026). Experimental Criticism: Franco Moretti and literature. (Translated by R. Braude) Verso, UK.

Practices such as enabling livestock mobility, providing supplementary feeding, diversifying livestock species and breeds, diversifying sources of income, adopting new technologies and so on, all aim to reliably supply livestock goods and services in the context of a highly variable resource base.

(Chatikobo and Ben Cousins, eds. 2025; accessed online at https://plaas.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/UWC-PLAAS-Research-Report-Livestock-Climate-Change-and-Land-Reform-in-Southern-Africa.pdf.pdf)

For me, the above quote is spot-on and pitch-perfect: Herd/er mobility is best introduced and discussed in combination with other (context-dependent) practices. Yet it’s fair to say that mobility of herds and herders is often singled out as central for pastoralist response to environmental variability. Certainly, the singling out of the consequences of restricting mobility remains notable for a field of otherwise case studies.

I want to offer a different reason for why really-existing practices associated with herd/er mobility deserve special attention over other practices in the epigraph. To telegraph ahead, mobility is special because its associated practices are best understood as the interconnections and their different configurations managed by herders for what are still called the factors of livestock production (land, water, labor).

Livestock “moving between different sites with variable forage resources within a mosaic of harvested crop fields, open pastures and thickets” (Semplici et al, 2024; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928) necessarily refers to more than the uni-directional interconnection of livestock and herders moving from a ‘here’ to a ‘there’; shifts in reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivity are also being managed with respect to that mosaic as part and parcel of “mobility”.

II

Let me start with an extended quote that gets to my take-home message directly (Nori 2019):

To tackle the uncertainty settings embedding their livelihoods, pastoralists strategically adapt their range, herd, and household resources and continuously reconfigure use as much as the interrelationships amongst land, livestock, and labour according to conditions. This dynamics and constant recombination creates a mosaic of strategies where concepts such as intensification, diversification, and the individual, public, and collective fade and combine according to places, seasons, and periods in what d’Elie (2014b:4) describes as ‘”patching up” (Van Wageningen, Wenjun, 2001; Takayoshi, 2011; Hadjigeorgiou, 2011; López-i-Gelats, 2013; Manoli et al., 2014; Moreira et al., 2016; Ragkos et al., 2018). Connections with other societal actors—including urban dwellers, market agents and farming communities—help expand available opportunities and contribute to an overall diversification of livelihood patterns to complement and support their livestock-centred economy. . . .

Following the important changes and innovations that have reconfigured pastoral livelihoods, rangelands are being reorganized accordingly as mosaics of different but functionally interconnected landscape units. In order to exploit existing and fluctuating opportunities (e.g. seasonal rainfall—but also market pricing related to religious festivities or localized subsidy schemes—rangelands and more generally pastoral territories are reorganized accordingly as webs of linked nodes. These webs serve to connect and articulate resources, actors, and opportunities at different levels and scales through ‘reticular’ dynamics that make these mosaics manageable and governable (Tache, 2013; Gonin and
Gautier, 2015; Nori, 2010; Apolloni et al., 2018).

Nodes are strategic hubs that concentrate specific resources and opportunities, including strategic range resources, money, information, services, people, and social connections. In rangeland settings these are typically water points (Lewis, 1961), market places, hot grazing spots (Motta et al., 2018), wetland pastures and dryland farming plots, communal range enclosures (Tache, 2013), urban settings and rural towns, milk collection areas (Nori, 2010), and animal health facilities.

Links are lines that cut through rangelands providing for interstitial, albeit relevant, resources and critical connections. These are typically transhumance routes, market channels, range corridors, main roads, and river banks.

The connections between diverse territorial assets and their articulations in the wider reticulum are governed by tailored sets of rules and regulations that define roles and responsibilities. The reiterated and regular presence and passage through certain territories is key to generating and stabilising herders’ territorialities and ensuring tight links between a group/clan/community and its range territories (Gautier et al. 2005; Bonnet et al., 2010).

[accessed online at https://cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0e201842-8218-5bd1-9661-502a6d2863ed/content; my underlines]

Differentiating these links, connections and their reconfigurations, I argue, is especially important in understanding “the reiterated and regular presence and passage” I am calling mobility here.

How so?

III

Livestock move sequentially from here to there, but their inter-relationships with sites along the way are anything but uni-directional.

Reciprocal (bi-directional) relationships are also much discussed in the literature (the stubble for livestock, the manure for the field). Extensively-raised livestock fattened up at special sites just before sale or slaughter are examples of a mediated interconnection between the herders and that off-take. The grazing itinerary of moving livestock across time and space is a kind of pooled interconnectivity guiding the herders and herds involved. More, shifts in configurations are a centerpiece of mobility discussions in the literature, e.g., improvising and responding opportunistically, case by case, as livestock and herders move along the itinerary, if there is one.

In infrastructural terms, what is going on here is not only widening and extending the repertoire of management options (the process variance) in response to task environment surprises and contingencies. Rather, the management itself becomes one of interconnecting (re-assembling) these options in order to transform high input variability into low variance, more stable outputs (including livelihoods). For example, the increased use of cellphones by pastoralists is not only a way to expand real-time management options in the face of task volatility. There is a scale issue here as well that comes with shifting sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pool interconnectivities–and cellphone use is especially adept at accommodating and monitoring scale shifts.

Mobility of herds and herders in this perspective is first and foremost the way herders manage options so as to configure and reconfigure the sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivities in response to input variability. Mobility is special because of its special role in process variance management flexed across scales. My wager is that some webs of herds/ers are better at that than others.

IV

So what?

Conceptually, it means treating “mosaics” as more than primarily a set of diverse property relations, or set of species in a habitat, or as a landscape or other unit. Practices associated with herding over time and space are to my mind central, and that is why I appeal to Nori (2019).

Practically, the notion of mosaic complexifies analysis–but usefully so. Why? Because it is now “mobility with respect to the mosaic(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” Again, why? Because the mosaic is the intervening template for understanding interconnected exogenous and endogenous variabilities, now more granular than climate, prices, and conflict.

---

NB. For more on the different types of interconnectivity and their importance from an infrastructure perspective for understanding pastoralist systems, see especially:

https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/when-interconnections-are-the-center-of-analysis-and-management-the-case-of-pastoralist-systems-and-interconnected-infrastructures-upon-which-they-depend/

I

To think of policy and management narratively is to think about narrative structure(s) from the get-go.

It’s not that a policy brief is shorter than the policy report upon which it is based. Things are left out in the former for reasons other than its shorter length. A policy brief and a policy report are different genres, like a novel and a play. Their respective styles, voice, conventions, audiences, and even what they take to be details (formally, their granularities) differ significantly. This means that what’s narrated in one but not repeated in another has implications for policy and management.

II

A wonderful example of why and how narrative structure matters for real-time policy and management lies in comparing two fine publications recently released by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University:

One is “Policy Briefing: Community Solutions to Insecurity along the Uganda-Kenya Border” (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/18207/IDS_Policy_Briefing_214.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).

The other is the report from which the policy brief drew, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Pastoralist Researchers on the Uganda/Kenya Border (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18123).

III

The differences in narrators’ voice is made explicit and obvious via the two documents. The policy report has been written by a local research team in a first-person voice, while the policy brief has been edited from the report in the third-person voice. For that matter, the personal and conversational “we” of the report doesn’t appear at all in the brief, which is not surprising as its editors include those who were listed in the local research team.

IT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD THESE DIFFERENCES ARE NOT A FAILING. What is crucial is that the genre differences pose a huge opportunity for those readers who are policy analysts and managers. That a brief and a report have been written for different audiences, fulfilling different requirements and expectations, would be a banal observation, where it not for one fact: What each genre takes as “the specifics”–to repeat, the respective granularities–are nevertheless both relevant for real-world pastoralist policy and management.

IV

Here’s an example. At one point in the report, a side comment appears: “An old man asked us where we are coming from, and we told him we had come from the office of herders. That is good, he said.”

This notion of an office of and for herders is picked up later in the report’s section, “What can pastoralists do?”. Note the voice and specifics in following passage:

The stories we have heard from women, men, and young people, have affected all of us. We will call for policies that everyone knows and follows. We’re thinking of an office run by pastoralists, with people from each community — Bokora, Jie, Turkana, Matheniko, Dodoth etc. When there are issues, the people from that place know how the issues are arising. . . .

The office should deal with any issues related to pastoralists, not only raids. The representatives would be like teachers, organising meetings, bringing awareness to people what they should be doing. Giving information to the government and NGOs.

The kraal leaders should form a network. The first to know about drought and animal disease is the herder. The herder reports to kraal leaders. Kraal leaders negotiate resource sharing with other kraal leaders. If they agree, they act. If they need further permissions, they go to the broader pastoralist association. If they need further help, they then can reach to government. Success will come if we all believe that any problem that comes has a solution within us.

“Office” is not mentioned in the policy brief, nor is “kraal,” nor is that “network” of leaders. NOR WOULD I EXPECT TO SEE THIS TYPE AND LEVEL OF GRANULARITY IN A POLICY BRIEF. For my part, I think the proposal of such an office is a great idea. I wish I had thought of pastoralists-as-reliability professionals in this way.

But that is not point of this blog entry. Actionable granularity is not and cannot be the province of only one genre in policy or management. The authors of both the report and the brief are to be commended for making this lesson so evident.