I
Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own.
What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.
II
In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, infrastructural or otherwise beforehand, let alone as the disaster unfolds. If there is electricity or tap water afterwards, it is intermittent. Hospitals remain few or too far. In these situations, the only thing between you and death is you. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.
Self-organizing groups, however, is also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in high-income countries. Increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff and emergency managers,
I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect.
A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established. Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads.
III
So what?
Two photographs show people organizing themselves to remove the rubble outside. If I’m right, the function served in each could differ significantly, depending on role that reliable critical infrastructures have had up to the disaster. It’s important to know that this picture, and not that other, is of removing rubble from the only road to the water treatment plant, for example.
Why is that important?
These days we’re told it’s important to dismantle capitalism. Well, major disasters dismantle physical infrastructures all over the place. And yet the infrastructures are always treated as part of capitalism writ large and modernities writ small.
If capitalism has colonized crisis into every nook and cranny of the world, it’s hardly useful then in explaining the presence or absence of the institutional niche just mentioned. You’re better advised to look to complex adaptive systems theory, rather than current power theories, for insights into real-time responses and their immediate aftermath.
For more on the limitations of theories of power (direct, indirect, dispersed), please see Part III of When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene). See also section II.28 of the Guide discussing other examples of “thinking infrastructurally”.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 