Why the difference matters between ultimate and proximate causes: an example
The [anti-baboon poisoning] campaign’s collateral damage is clearest in the compensation record. In March 1953, for example, two Fulani herders received £50 after losing eighteen cattle and six sheep that drank from a poisoned water hole. Officials marked contaminated sites and instructed Native Authorities to notify village heads and Fulani chiefs, but these precautions were unevenly effective, especially given pastoral mobility and the uneven circulation of information. When doubts arose about whether herders had been adequately warned, token compensation was sometimes paid in the interest of preserving local relations, revealing both the administrative limits and political sensitivities of the campaign.
(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6898438)
Of course, colonialism caused this wrongful campaign. But it is also true that the campaign was first proven wrong by Fulani practices, and importantly so.
Another example of why proximate practices, rather than values ultimately, matter
If we follow a practice-focused reading of PB [participatory budgeting] that recognizes the heterogeneity of competing ideas, in-depth case analysis may well suggest that the broader outcomes of participation do not always depend exclusively on institutional design, as PB evolves through a process of contestation and negotiation. Retrospectively, the inclusion of the more participatory second tier in Angola’s PB was certainly crucial, but it would have been difficult for the central government to predict the growing calls for bottom-up participation that have emerged, and continue to emerge, from the complex interactions of different actors and from the very practice of PB on the ground.
Daniel Tjarks (2026). “Participatory Budgeting in Autocracies: Conflicting Logics, Unintended Consequences and Contentious Participation in Angola’s Orçamento Participativo“. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.70132)
Resistance? No, defense.
A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:
As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)
Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.
Just as we must distrust speculative metaphysics, so too we distrust discussions at these levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a run of different events, situations and contexts (cases). That’s why really-existing practices are the starting point of analysis. What is called resistance of state-imposed agendas here might well be better understood, for policy and management purposes, defense of still-evolving practices there.
Some limits of global analytic tip
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 running to 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.
Societal and infrastructural decay, and their practical limits for policy relevance
No sooner than the author says societal decay can be overgeneralized, we’re off and running with how capitalism leads to even greater decay in the life-world. Worse, the decay is over-determined. If not capitalism, it still comes with these earthly bodies and and our all-too-earthly infrastructures. That such thinking deoxygenates policy and management should not be surprising.
What to do? If we don’t like the language game around decay, Wittgenstein tells us: Get another one. Which is what many try to do with talk of “renewal” and such. Others insist that terms like decay, renewal and infrastructures need to be jettisoned in favor of different cosmologies (that is, different life-worlds). But whether appealing to different language games or different cosmologies, we again place ourselves further from current practices in the hope that whatever the ensuing change it’s a big-T transformation rendering these practices and allied disputes moot.
The problem with big-T transformations is that the stories we tell to achieve these ends always highlight a missing part of these stories. Relations, social and otherwise, need to be repaired, if not rewoven, via stories we tell if we are to be transformative. It’s the reparative practices of narrative under unpredictable conditions–not under decay as a certainty–that is the object of analysis when policy and management relevancies matter now and in the next steps ahead.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 