The failure of analytic tip in Infrastructure Studies

I’m hardly the first to have been struck by the analytic tip in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be dealt with at the local, regional and even national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed first and foremost globally (think “global warming”). What I was unprepared for was how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the tip proceeded.

Let me give an example from the field of Infrastructure Studies. To be clear, I agree with every word in the following:

Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.

The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)

To me, this passage represents hard-won insights over years of research, namely: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.

But then comes the irresistible updraft in the article’s next sentence:

These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Well, yes, that’s true of course, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis? Indeed, how do actual operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels?

The article, like so many others, is off and runningto the international, global and now planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s analytic tip after all–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further, especially as variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matter so often and so directly for policy and management.

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NB. For more on this analytic tip, see my 1994 Narrative Policy Analysis.