Bells were increasingly used not only to summon people to church, but also to provide another prompt for a belief act to those laity who had not attended: the major bells were to be rung during the Mass at the moment of consecration of the Host, and from the late twelfth century onwards we find texts calling upon lay people to kneel and adore where ever they were at that moment…
John Arnold (2023). Believing in belief: Gibbon, Latour and the social history of religion. Past & Present, 260(1): 236–268. (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac012)
I
I suggest that early warnings promulgated as part of official drought management systems are designed to be bells in the above sense: People are to demonstrate their belief in the warnings when issued. They are to take action then and there because of them.
But, as Arnold also reminds us, demonstration of obedience always entails the possibility of failure. Heeding the warning might not work.
Indeed, some early warning systems are designed to fail because they are meant also for non-believers. The latter include, most notably for our purposes, those who subscribe to other types of warnings (e.g., https://pastres.org/2023/05/12/local-early-warning-systems-predicting-the-future-when-things-are-so-uncertain/).
This matters because the stakes are high when it comes to drought for both believers and non-believers. How so?
II
It is important to understand the conditions under which the designers themselves don’t believe in their own bell-ringing systems. In their article, “Drought Management Norms: Is the Middle East and North Africa Region Managing Risks or Crises?,” Jedd et al (2021) examine the efficacy official systems in the MENA region. They conclude:
Drought monitoring data were often treated as proprietary information by the producing agencies; interagency sharing, let alone wider publication, was rare. Government officials described the following reasons for this approach. First, it could create pressure on decision-makers to take action (politicizes the issue). Second, intervention measures are costly, and so, taking measures creates strong and competing demands for financial resources from agencies and/or ministers (increase political transaction costs). Therefore, given existing policies and institutions in the countries, it is unclear to what extent drought decision-making processes would be improved or expedited with increased transparency of monitoring information. . . .
This creates a difficult puzzle: In order to mitigate future drought losses, a clear depiction of current conditions must be made publicly available. However, publishing these data may require that agencies take on the burden of allocating relief if the release of this very information coincides with a future drought crisis.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1070496520960204
III
So then the obvious policy and management question is: When it comes to the efficacy of early warnings for drought, who do you want to start with: believers or non-believers?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 