Infrastructure control rooms, African parliaments

I

Over time I’ve been struck by an institutional contrast in the claim to providing highly reliable services.

On one hand, we have the state and federal regulators and legislators who pass the laws and standards to be followed by critical infrastructures and, on the other hand, the real-time professionals in the respective control rooms who have had to operationalize the standards in order to maintain system reliability in real time. For insiders, this contrast is not surprising: No plan withstands contact with the enemy, and it isn’t news that frequent but unpredictable shocks and surprises require operationally redesigning official procedures and defective technology so to meet these regulatory and legislative mandates for infrastructure reliability.

So what? More formally, the centralized infrastructure control room turns out to be a unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time. You don’t find other institutions able to do this, nor should you expect to. Infrastructure control rooms are cen­tralized for system-wide response and management by their real-time dispatchers and schedulers, but that centralization entails the rapid management by these reliability professionals of system control variables—such as electricity frequency, natural gas pipe pressures, and waterflows—whose movements can have immediate decentralized (local­ized) interactions.

II

It’s banal to say the state and federal legislatures are not operational control rooms in the sense just described.

But let’s shift the analysis to Kenya pastoralists, at least those who are equivalent real-time reliability professionals in the drylands, and contrast them to the MPs in the country’s Parliament. Two implications are immediate.

First, it’s also no news that the Kenya Parliament, and its MPs, are criticized for many things, i.e.,

African parliaments present a number of shortcomings, including (i) the commodification of parliamentary seats, (ii) the lack of social representativeness of elected representatives, (iii) the fact that elected representatives can be captured by partisan or illegitimate interests, (iv) their lack of competence on most of the subjects they are supposed to debate, and (v) the fact that they do not necessarily deliberate on urgent matters in a timely fashion. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/analysis-of-the-nexus-between-democratic-governance-and-economic-justice-in-africa

Fair enough, but nevertheless to underscore that Kenya MPs, like legislators in much of the West, are not as timely in emergencies as are reliability professionals is hardly noteworthy. (The Sámi parliament in Finland was neither consulted nor informed in advance of proposed US troop and weapons activities in 2024, for example [https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article72359])

III

More, once you start thinking in terms of African Parliaments as lenses to analyze critical service reliability in their respective countries, you realize how little research, with some notable exceptions, has been done on the topic. Or to put the point more properly and comparatively, it’s the respective President and Cabinet ministers who get more attention and analysis. The assumption, of course, has been that parliaments are subordinate to the president, party, or military. But we risk stigmatizing all parliaments in the same sense others, including some MPs, stigmatize all pastoralists. Really, are African Parliaments to be dismissed that easily?

In any case, it’s problematic for academic researchers to recommend that government officials and NGO staff be in authentic collaboration with pastoralists taking the lead, when those very same researchers wouldn’t be caught dead collaborating with the political elites, including MPs. This “development collaboration,” such as it is, is especially problematic when (1) pastoralists bear all the risks if the resulting research recommendations go pear-shaped and (2) government would be blamed anyway when mistakes in implementing the recommendations were not caught beforehand.

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NB. For more on pastoralists as reliability professionals, please see:

Roe, E. 2020. “Pastoralists as reliability professionals.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2020/04/17/pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals/)

———. 2025. https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/