The difference between reliability professionals and active micro-operators: some livestock and pastoralist examples

I

Reliability professionals are central to translating statements of systemwide policies, laws and regulations into reliable real-time operations within and across the system infrastructures. This means reliability professionals are neither macro-designers located in the infrastructure’s headquarters nor micro-operators at individual facilities. Instead, they operate in between the macro- and the micro-levels, working in a very important middle domain within the infrastructure as a whole.

In this domain of expertise, infrastructure reliability in systemwide operations is achieved only if macro-designs are modified into different scenarios that take into account local conditions affecting infrastructure operations and where the real-time better practices that have evolved across a diversity of really-existing cases of operations are applied so as to ensure achievement of the original reliability mandates of policies, laws and regulation.

II

For example, the land board’s longstanding policy may be that livestock watering boreholes should be spaced 8 kilometers (5 miles) apart in order to reduce the effects of overgrazing. Indeed, land board members and staff may still insist it is their policy, even when your map of actual livestock water boreholes shows conclusively that boreholes are not spaced 8km apart on the ground. Does your map of allocated boreholes mean the 8km rule is not really land board policy?

No, it doesn’t

It is better to say that any such policy has to be modified in practice because variability in site conditions, aquifers, range composition and livestock characteristics differ so much (e.g., the hardveld is not the same as the sandveld). Furthermore, actually-existing practices for siting and spacing livestock borehole evolving across all the land boards and all their sitings, and this more up-to-date knowledge helps them in the placement of new livestock water boreholes (e.g. more knowledge and mapping now exist about the underground aquifers).

In other words, to say this map of livestock watering boreholes shows that the spacing policy was NOT in fact implemented misses the fundamental point that the policy was indeed implemented by land board members and staff in ways that cannot be attributed to their being expedient or corrupt, full stop. Even if the latter were true in some cases, no policy can be reliable if it is one-size-fits-all.

III

The chief implication of the preceding example is that the locus and focus of “implementation” shifts from micro-site—”drilling his borehole right here and right now”—to the middle domain where reliability professionals convert macro-policies into local contingency scenarios—”siting the borehole this side differs for us from siting the borehole that side”—and where better practices that have emerged out of all siting and spacing activities since the policy was adopted are used to modify new placements under the overall 8km policy.

This means that the micro-operators at any individual site—the drilling rig and operator, the borehole owner(s) and their specific herds and herders—are not the only unit and level of analysis for the actual implementation, here and now of the 8km policy. Implementation of borehole siting and spacing also takes place when teams or groups of reliability professionals adapt borehole siting and spacing in light of both locally contingent conditions and newer systemwide practices developing across different conditions relevant for up-to-date, reliable borehole placement.

IV

This also means that active micro-operators and reliability professionals–or at least their roles–need to be distinguished from each other. One or two drilling rig operators may be preferred by livestock owners because of their skills in getting results. But these drilling rig operators are reliability professionals when they also work with land board members/staff in the latter’s effort to identify more reliable scenarios for actual sitings as well as more up-to-date systemwide siting/spacing practices. Here they are in the role of reliability professionals because they have a bigger picture of borehole siting and spacing than when they work as a single driller at a single site with a specific livestock owner.

Or take another example. When the paravet is great one-on-one, developing unique relationships with each of his or her clients, then s/he is a micro-operator. When that same paravet acts according to his or her official job definition–“A para-veterinary worker is a veterinary science expert who, as part of a veterinary aid system, performs procedures autonomously or semi-autonomously”–then that system and team component points to his or her being a reliability professional. (Note these networks can be informal and not just formal ones.)

Last but not least, a case study rich in examples of networks of reliability professionals, involving pastoralists and others, is to be found in: Alex Tasker & Ian Scoones (2022). “High Reliability Knowledge Networks: Responding to Animal Diseases in a Pastoral Area of Northern Kenya,” The Journal of Development Studies 58(5): 968-988.