1. The problem of prediction

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. This metastasizing feedback cycle does not augur well for the future and predicting that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.

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. 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 has also been 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 think the quoted example predicts the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am instead 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.

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2. The problem of crisis scenarios

“We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency” (Denise Levertov, poet, 1967)

But which is our #1 global crisis? I could pick recent articles from any well-known media outlet. That I choose the online Guardian is not intended to single it out as worse. It’s just that these four competing examples came at around the same time there:

• Here is Francine Prose, former president of PEN, saying that the Trump authoritarian turn is the our number 1 gravest threat today– https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/america-feels-like-a-country-on-the-brink-of-an-authoritarian-takeover.
• Here is George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, saying it’s not Trump, but global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that deserve the global attention–https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security.
• But no, someone else says it’s actually overshooting the 1.5C of warming that is the global unprecedented crisis– https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/26/number-of-people-living-in-extreme-heat-to-double-by-2050-if-2c-rise-occurs-study-finds
• And there is the polycrisis crowd that insists all of this and more are interactively interconnected into one mega, numero uno constellation of sub-crises–https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped

With so many #1 crises competing for attention, which to choose? The fact is that there is no choice to be made.

Not one of the four is at a level of granularity with which to assess whether this #1 is more hazardous than the other #1’s and under what conditions. This is particularly true as the hazards are in terms of uncertainties (i.e., their respective unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.)

Crises of course can be reported in short- or long-form media articles. But in the same way that no decisionmaker should want to take a policy decision on the basis of one piece of information only, so too should decisionmakers treat “this is our number 1 crisis” as one piece of the needed. Real-time action is taken for more granular, context-based reasons.

For example, the creators of AI may have a variety of crisis scenarios about the downside of AI. But when they say that the AI scenarios pose threat-equivalents to nuclear war or worse, you need to remind yourself that they have no equivalent level of detail for the latter as they do the former. In fact, they might be the last people on Earth you’d ask for nuclear war scenarios.

So what? So: Stop fossil fuel; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense expansion; stop imperialism; stop techno-solutionism; be small-d democratic, small-p participatory and big-T transformative; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; renew cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religion, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and

Keep going on and it sounds like crisis kitsch.

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3. The problem with economists

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When rolling electrical blackouts take place, we policy analysts ask our friends, the economists, why.

After a blackout, one tells us it was because of all that underinvestment in the transmission grid you get when treating the grid as a public good. During a blackout, another assures us that having to shed load reflects the negative externalities associated with prices not reflecting electricity’s full cost to consumers, who “thus” over-consume and overload power lines.

Before a blackout, a different economist says energy deregulation will guarantee the reliability we want because it reflects the Efficient Market Hypothesis–remember, the idea that won a Nobel Prize–where nothing can be better than market prices in reflecting what is known about energy supply and demand, like our willingness to pay for transmission.

To which still another adds: Whether or not there is a blackout at all, rational expectations theory–remember, the idea that won another Nobel Prize–tells us that policy interventions are ineffective anyway.

If we aren’t sufficiently convinced and press our colleagues about what we should do to prevent blackouts altogether, they tell us not to worry—as long as electricity services are in market equilibrium, with reserve margins optimal, everything is okay.

II

Not quite granular enough for reliability professionals–but, hey, why ask economists at all? They’ll tell you no one listens to them anyway.

“Energy deregulation was never really tried,” they insist. Society never reallyReally adopted thorough-going cost-benefit analysis, economics in law, market designs engineered for efficiency, and far greater use of randomized controlled trials.

And when an economic market design is adopted whole hog, we have the 2021 Texas power and grid debacle: In the view of the Harvard economist who designed it, the energy market “worked as designed.” “It’s not convenient,” he added, “It’s not nice. It’s necessary.”

All of which is a bit like wanting to believe the Cultural Revolution would have succeeded if only Madame Mao and the Gang of Four were really given the chance. This is not what policy analysts who are reliability-seeking aspire to.

—Latest blog entries include

**”‘Taking stock of situations’: some different implications for pastoralist policy and management“

**”When it comes to today’s tyrants. . .“

**”Thinking infrastructurally: how escape, escapism and the inescapable matter when risk management fails“

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/

1. It’s no news that policy analysts can and do confront not so much discrete events with discrete consequences as unpredictable contingencies coupled (loosely?) with uncontrollable aftermaths, about which there is little causal understanding. For example, one mighty obstacle to identifying root causes of any event is the inability to uncover what counterfactual accidents and disasters had been avoided by those accidents and disasters that happened instead. These conditions mean appeals to anything like prolonged stability in the midst of collectively-evident turbulence should be read symptomatically, namely, as escapism.

But not all escapes are escapism. An example helps.

2. The Precautionary Principle insists on avoiding 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 the avoidance of contingencies and/or aftermaths? You can legislate the Principle, but you can’t control its implementation. To think otherwise is escapist.

More to the point, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoiding or otherwise responding to the dreaded events? Here disaster-averted is escape (the latter being a common synonym for avoid).

3. Unsurprisingly, pressures build to manage the risks not just of escapes but also the escapism. But control is also at the heart of risk management, i.e., the “coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to risk, ” according to the standard-setting international guidelines, ISO 31000 (https://www.eiso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:31000:ed-2:v1:en). The guidelines do admit that “Controls may not always exert the intended or assumed modifying effect,” without however underscoring such aftermaths can increase risks and uncertainties.

4. So what? The next step is to historicize and particularize all this.

It was once common to understand socio-political polarization and fragmentation in both negative and positive senses. Yes, fragmentation can represent negative segmentation of authority, but it can also reflect positive functional specialization. Yes, polarization can represent the inability to speak with one voice, but it can also reflect transparency of issues and keeping trade-offs public. Yes, conflict can be bad, but conflict can also be good. . .and so on down the list of putative negatives in American society that in specific contexts, situations and events can be net-positive. 

But “on net” no longer makes little sense in static terms of pros versus cons of fragmentation, polarization and the like. “On net” has become fuzzier because of complexities that are inescapable when context, situation and event cannot account for or assimilate all that matters for policy and management in real time. This complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. That is to say, we’re dumber until we recognize an unavoidable “it’s-more-complex-than-polarized-and-fragmented” here (albeit maybe not there) and now (even if not then and there). With that recognition comes no workaround for the improvisation ahead.

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NB. For a different recasting of many of these points, see Adam Phillips (2026). “Escapism,” chapter 2 in The Life You Want, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

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

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

Pastoralists take stock of their respective and various situations. Situations, to adapt one definition, are experiences undergone by pastoralists in which things that matter to them unfold in real time. Taking stock means appraising how to interpret these experiences for their next steps ahead. Since situations are based in experience and in the uncertainties of ex ante appraisal, few if any of these situations are strictly identical. As such, different situations can pose different constraints on pastoralist behavior, and in doing so, pose their own situational affordances, as when: “Anything that privileges one line of action over another is a constraint.”

So what?

Well, first of all, not all pastoralist situations are crises or crisis narratives. Situations “may preexist the beginning of a narrative, serve as an opening premise, or emerge at any time, and they may or may not come to an end.” It is true, however, that the constraints and affordances of a situation relate to stakes faced by pastoralists, either individually or collectively, i.e.: “situations generally require at least two elements in relation with something at stake. A desert is a setting, but a hiker lost in a desert is a situation.”

Since time and space are always at stake, situations of waiting pose a continuing issue for pastoralists. The significance of this point requires us to first recognize that immediate situations and inescapable contexts are not the same: “Context is a category of remote understanding; situation is a category of immediate experience. . .” That difference, in turn, is incredibly relevant for really-existing policy and management:

If in some sense a situation, to be a situation, is always at hand, then it is also the case that when a situation gets out of hand, the externality of that out has nothing to do with the position of interpretive mastery that projects an explanatory context. . .Global states of affairs like capitalism or climate change, which remain readily available as contexts, attract the term situation insofar as one wants to emphasize high stakes, urgency, and indeed the ways that they are getting out of hand.

That is to say, it is we–even if not they–who assert that the operative explanatory contexts are climate change and capitalism for the situations undoubtedly experienced by pastoralists around high stakes, urgency and things getting out of hand. This means there is the risk of complacency in reverting to explanation-by-context that must be avoided when assessing pastoralist appraisals of their immediate situations. Suffice it to say, their waiting is more granular and variable in situations than in the contexts we stipulate for them.

We outsiders may of course want to differentiate their waiting in terms of formal identity categories of age, gender, ethnicity, education or wealth and then “show” how elaborations in situations entail elaborations in these categorical terms. But that too is a formalist exercise, more like talking about the formal economy than the informal ones right there and now. (A more informalist view, for example, would consider real-time herd/er mobility as also the management of waiting–managed because the latter has both positive and negative affordances then.)

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The above is a different take on the “relational” from my narrative and infrastructural approaches. It uses and extends a wonderfully suggestive article (all errors of interpretation are my own!): M. Frank, K. Pask, and N. Schantz (2024). “Situation: A narrative concept.” Critical Inquiry 50(4): 659 – 676.

I

Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and operationalize. That is: “Under capitalism” means that even in always-late capitalism, we have

laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, bourgeois capitalism, patrimonial capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, cannibal capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, cloud capitalism, surveillance capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, welfare capitalism, compliance capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, woke capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, global capitalism, agrarian capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, cybernetic capitalism, racial capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .

Oh hell, just stop there. Much of this proliferation looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway.

Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to be able to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list—namely the above—without number?

Or from the other direction, some of the terms do seek to denote specific contexts and levels of granularity and commonalities across cases. But, as others do not, what then does being “anti-capitalist” actually mean?

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2. One answer: Anti-capitalism depends on taking the losers in any such list seriously.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).” But even if true, is the implication that at least some of the capitalisms listed above were “better” then than now?

For example, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad? Didn’t many of our parents and grandparents suffer under conditions of capitalism all along just as we are?

Yet any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of “its” death rattle but of the vitality in morphing through losers after losers after losers? That is, it’s the losers in the above list that first need to be differentiated and tracked.

3. The upshot: Superfluidity of terms in #1 hides a superfluidity of capitalisms’ losers in #2.

So what? According to the Hicks-Kaldor compensation principle, it’s good enough when an economic change means its winners would be better off even if they could compensate the losers of this change. The notion that actual compensation does not need to take place over the course of this history of different losers and losses is now more ludicrous than even imagined initially. To be anti-capitalist is today to be anti anything like Hicks-Kaldor.

We cannot even imagine a happy world in which winners might not be hateful. Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken. (Natalia Ginsburg, 1970, accessed online at https://www.equator.org/articles/our-monstrous-ideas-natalia-ginzburg)

**”Rethinking pastoralists’ development from their perspective of disasters-averted.” Pastoralism 16 (2026): https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.15551

**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

**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

**Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke University Press, 2013) https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30263/1/648154.pdf

**“A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management.” Issues in Science and Technology, August 3 (2021) https://issues.org/national-academy-reliable-infrastructure-management-roe/

**“Fourth of July Democracy: An Epistolary Exchange and a Modest Proposal.” Hedgehog Review (2023) https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/fourth-of-july-democracy

**”A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure,” STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (2020) https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/

**”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

**”Policy Messes and their Management.” Policy Sciences (2016). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11077-016-9258-9

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.)

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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.