I

Here’s my starting point on government regulation (from our 2016 Reliability and Risk):

. . .as long as infrastructure regulation is equated with what regulators do, society will have a very myopic understanding of how regulation functions for critical infrastructures. The regulation of infrastructures is not just what the regulators do; it is also what the infrastructures do in ways that their regulator of record could never do on its own.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not a criticism of regulators to say they never have the same timely information as do those operating the critical infrastructures being regulated. It’s a statement of the obvious cast as a negative. Restate the obvious, but now as a positive: those who have the real-time information must fulfill regulatory functions that the official regulator cannot fulfill. How well they are fulfilling the regulatory functions depends on (1) the skills in real-time risk management of their reliability professionals and (2) where those professionals are located, which for our purposes means the infrastructure control rooms and their respective support units.

From our perspective, it makes little sense for critics to conclude that regulators are failing because formal regulations are not being complied with, if the infrastructures are managing in a highly reliable fashion and would not be doing so if they followed those regulations to the letter.

In practical terms, this means there is not just the risk of regulatory non-compliance by the infrastructure, there is also the infrastructure’s risk of compliance with defective regulations. Either way, the importance of time from discovery to correction of error reinforces the nature of dispersed regulatory functions: A shorter time to error discovery has the advantage of discovering errors that would have propagated into much larger ones if left uncorrected.

II

The upshot for the regulator of record?

If policymakers still insist that the regulator’s task is one of regulating the whole cycle of the infrastructure throughout its operational stages of normal, disrupted, failed, and recovered onwards, then it is better to say that at best the regulator of record is in permanent setback management. At worst, its own activities require the coping behavior we associate with emergency management during crises.

III

And yet the demands on government regulation are increasing at the same time. No one should doubt, for example, that the more interconnected the systems to be regulated and the more complex each system and its own regulations are, the more regulatory and inter-regulatory oversight will have to be given to latent interconnections, risks and the transition thresholds where they shift from latent to manifest.

Regulating ahead for latent interconnectivities is a very difficult task for even one regulator, let alone for something like “inter-regulatory oversight.” This too reinforces the need for a dispersed regulatory regime well beyond the regulator of record.

IV

It should go without saying that the regulatory functions of the infrastructure’s control room (if present) will differ from the health and safety regulations and approaches needed elsewhere in the critical infrastructure. This means we should not expect there to be a single set of procedural or supervisory approaches that can apply throughout the entire infrastructure, however committed it is to service reliability.

The challenge instead is to better understand the institutional niche of critical infrastructures, that is, how infrastructures themselves function in allocating, distributing, regulating and stabilizing that reliability and safety apart from, if not independently of, the respective government regulators of record. That this knowledge will always be for regulators partial and punctured by gaps and ignorance should go without saying.

There is, however, a serious asymmetry in the current design orientation for regulating infrastructure reliability (including safety) and the practice orientation of reliability professionals in and around control centers for the infrastructure. When reliability professionals express discomfort over a design orientation, regulators and others insist that this has to be expressed in terms of formal analysis, where the burden of proof is on the reliability professional to show what in this design orientation is not reliable. That burden of proof, we believe, is the responsibility of the regulator; it is not a regulatory function of the infrastructure, when real-time service reliability matters.

If the subject heading is true, as I believe it is, then policy and management implications are wildly different from what is more often taken for granted or otherwise assumed today.

I

Let start with a lesser known example:

Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].

After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.

At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .

Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.

“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.

accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)

This discovery is also part of an on-going installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described in a recent article as:

In The Artificial Island, the work traces a submerged Neolithic site off the coast of Korčula, discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica. The site, originally connected to the mainland by an ancient road, now lies four to five metres beneath the Adriatic Sea, submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval.

accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/

After being primed by the two texts, take another look at the photo. You can see the submerged island, see its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will submerge even more settlements ahead in the climate emergency.

II

The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen.

I wager that no reader primed as above asks first thing: “What about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement?” Or from the other direction, “What about what’s been preserved from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed?”

Nor is it satisfactory to counter that Neolithic times had no concepts for presettlement template and rising sea levels. If so, why then do you think future generations, looking back, wouldn’t have their own (different) concepts to understand the submergence underway?

More, what if further research suggests the current understanding of these sites needs to be modified, say: “It turns out evidence is found that the roadway was actually an important runway for animals”–how would that change, if at all, what we are to do, now and in the next steps ahead?

III

So what? What now?

“What do we do now?” is precisely the question that should be first asked. No one, I also wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next?”

I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around these submerged sites? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”

More formally, you may think this example points to what to do with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am suggesting that accomplishments that happen next and here reframe that issue for real time. People already understand what are accomplishments in ways that progress and success are understood by others later on.

Calling something “good enough” borders on the pejorative, as in “good enough for government work.” Less so, but still found wanting, is the sense in which a second-best result is good enough only because the optimal is not–promise, promise–yet realized (think: efficiency benchmarks in microeconomics).

Here are two (hopefully familiar) conditions under which good enough is better than said optima:

1. When it comes to complex policy issues, efforts at full or direct control to achieve results may produce effects well short of what would have been the case had one managed by adapting to the inevitable contingencies in trying to get there.

We of mid-twentieth century US were told that an annual economic growth rate of about 3% and an unemployment rate of about 4%, while no way perfect, were good enough compared to the grief entailed in authoritarian measures to achieve substantially different rates at the same time.

2. Managing for good enough in processes that adapt to contingencies can produce results even better than the initial “best-case scenario.”

Examples include Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela (or on a smaller, lesser known stage, Botswana’s Seretse Khama and Ketumile Masire). Each was a very imperfect person, comrade and leader, but each prevented some fresh hell on earth. They were good enough to take us further than we could have expected, albeit we would want to go further still.

I

Odd that at the same moment demographic decline in China is leading to the prospect of higher wages there, we witness the counter-prospect of massive unemployment via AI-automation everywhere.

Odd that just at the moment that the North’s techno-solutionism and ethics are called into question by the South, pressures mount that the North, as a matter of justice, fund massive climate adaptation in the South.

Odd that just as we better understand that economic growth is an engine of global environmental destruction, we learn that economic growth has slowed down anyway over the last half century due to the lack of growth in real production and productivity.

Odd that generative AI threatens human creativity precisely at the moment when online cultures, if you take the time to search for them, are “far more inventive and daring than the arts, both formally and in terms of the ideas it presents. Ordinary people, it turns out, are far weirder than artists and writers, and more imaginative too” (Dean Kissick in The Drift).

Odd that just as tolerance of medical error indicates hospitals are not high reliability organizations, so too the fact that the emergency operation centers in major localities are not being activated in response to global climate change indicates the latter is not the climate emergency many think it is.

Odd that the calls for breaking up Big Tech because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices are made by those whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. Odd that current capitalist pathologies are said to arise because the earlier capitalism of market productivity has disappeared.

II

Odd that economists began to agree that the storied perfect competition (all price takers and constant returns to scale) would have undermined entrepreneurial capitalism as actually practiced. Odd that a major winner of always-late capitalism would not have been possible without imperfect competition (some price makers and increasing returns to scale).

Odd that, after all those stories about the rising tide of market liberalization lifting all ships, it turns out that still-liberalized capital markets are associated with rougher seas of financial instability

III

Isn’t it odd that on one hand, conventional economic growth and its national measurements are excoriated for a wide range of sins (promoting environmental destruction, rising inequalities), and yet the very same nations are excoriated for having marginalized vast portions of their populations by excluding them from that economic growth, and measurably so?

Isn’t it odd that on one hand there are more and more calls for revising macroeconomic statistics because they don’t take into account all manner of labor (e.g., care or digital work), while on the other hand we quite sensibly continue to take seriously measured declines in economic growth in developing countries, even though we all know household labor is under-accounted for there.

IV

Odder still that these economic odds are not odder, yet?

I

“Restore” is a very big word in infrastructure studies. It’s been applied to: (1) interrupted service provision returned back to normal infrastructure operations; (2) services initially restored after the massive failure of infrastructure assets; and (3) key equipment or facilities reactivated after a non-routine “outage” as part of regular maintenance and repair.

To be clear, what follows are overlapping examples, but good-enough for our purposes:

–An ice storm passes through, leading to a temporary closure of a section of the road system. Detours may or may not be possible until the affected roadways are restored. This is an example of #1.

–An earthquake hits, systemwide telecommunications fail outright, and mobile cell towers are brought in by way of immediate response to restore telecom services, at least initially. This is an example #2.

–A generator in a power plant trips offline. Repairs are undertaken, nvolving manual, hands-on work so as to return the unit back on line. This kind of sudden outage happens frequently and is considered part of the electric utility’s standard-normal M&R (maintenance and repair). This is an example of #3.

II

Now think of “rangeland restoration” in these terms of 1 – 3, e.g.:

#1: Stall feeding, which is here part of normal operations, is restored after an unexpected interruption in its version of a supply chain. Trucking of water and livestock, which are also part of normal livestock operations there, are temporarily interrupted.

#2: Grasslands have been appropriated for other uses (the infamous expanding agriculture), requiring indefinite use of alternative livestock feed and grazing until a more permanent solution is found.

#3: A grassland fire—lightning strikes are a common enough occurrence though unevenly distributed—takes part of the grasslands out of use, at least until (after) the next rains. Herders respond by reverting to more intensive alternative intensive grazing practices for what’s left to work with.

III

Now, here are two important implications:

First, rangeland equilibrium—and ecological disequilibrium for that matter—have nothing to do with these comparisons. The benchmark here is the normal operations of pastoralism as an infrastructure with respect to the use of pasture assets. Yes or no: Has routine stall feeding been restored back after an interruption in supply? This is pre-eminently the issue of infrastructure reliability, not range ecology (i.e., the former is an output matter, the latter more an input issue).

Second, the issue of overgrazing is often a sideshow distracting from what is actually going on infrastructurally. Because normal operations—remember, it’s the benchmark used here for comparisons—always has had overgrazing in its operations.

What, for example, do you think the sacrifice grazing around a livestock borehole is about? There is nothing to “restore” the immediate perimeter of this borehole back to. In fact, that “overgrazed perimeter” is an asset in normal operations of the livestock production and livelihood systems I have in mind.

III

So what?

As I read them, calls for “rangeland restoration” are a contradiction in infrastructure parlance, namely: “rangeland recovery back to an old normal.” Recovery in infrastructure terms is a massively complex, longer term, multi-stakeholder activity without any guarantees following on immediate emergency response to outright full system collapse.

I

The key problem in my view with the notion of “rangeland carrying capacity” is the assumption that it’s about livestock. The notion wants you to conjure up livestock shoulder-to-shoulder on a piece of land and then ask you: How could this not be a physical limit on the number of livestock per unit of land? You can’t pack anymore on it and that has to be a capacity constraint. Right?

Wrong. Livestock numbers on a piece of land are not a system. The number of pipes, rods and valves are not a nuclear power plant. Yes, livestock systems that provide continuous and important services (like meat, milk, wool. . .) also have limits. But these limits are set by managing physical constraints, be it LSU/ha or not. More, this management combines with managing other constraints like access to markets, remittances for household members abroad, nearby land encroachment, and much else.

Can herders make management mistakes? Of course. That is why pastoralists-to-pastoralists learning is so important.

From this perspective, it’s not “rangeland carrying capacity” we should be talking about, but “rangeland management capacity”. Or better yet, “rangeland management capacities,” as there is not just one major type of pastoralism, but many different pastoralist systems of production and provision of livestock-related services.

II

There are other rangeland-related points that need stressing as well, including:

1. No large critical infrastructures can run 24/7/365 at 100% capacity and be reliable, and pastoralist systems are no different. This means comparing pastoralist livestock systems to some kind of “optimized” grassland ranching or intensive dairy production is ludicrous if only because the latter is more likely to headed to disaster anyway.

2. Indigenous populations and their land rights are now taken by progressives as an essential part of democratic struggles (and not just in the Americas). But where are pastoralists holding livestock and claiming their land rights in the literature on this indigeneity?

3. Restocking schemes are routinely criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands (as perceived by the experts). Yet government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., holding grain, wool or oil in order to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are routinely recommended by the experts, decade after decade, be the countries low-resource or not.

4. We hear about the need to move infrastructure change away from powerful actors towards more inclusive low-carbon futures. But where is the focus on pastoralists already practicing such futures? We hear about the methane contributions of livestock to global warming, but what about the reverse climate risks associated with curtailing pastoralism and in doing so its pro-biodiversity advantages?

5. When was the last time you heard pastoralist livestock exports from the arid and semi-arid rangelands of the world being praised for reducing, considerably, the global budget for virtual water trading from what it could have been?

And yet, that is exactly what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does.

—Latest blog entries include

**Major Read: Development as repair & maintenance

**The violence of policy palimpsests, revisited

**Colonial violence & domestic terror: another example of how genre renders center-stage

**“The mind-bogglingly valuations of AI companies”

**So what happens next? Or: another publication ends where we all–repeat, all of us–know it should have begun

**Sixteen short examples on how differences in genre affect the structure and substance of policy and management [4 newly added]

—Special announcement

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene, along with a useful schematic, can now be found at

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene (links to the Guide and schematic)

This working paper updates many blog entries prior to paper’s June 2023 publication.

—Those interested in newly updated extensions of the Guide, please see:

**”Major Read: Sourcing new ideas from the humanities, fine arts, and other media for complex policy analysis and management (newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/07/03/major-read-sourcing-new-ideas-from-the-humanities-fine-arts-and-other-media-for-complex-policy-analysis-and-management/

**”16 examples on how genre differences affect the structure and substance of policy and management [newly added]: https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/12/07/sixteen-examples-on-how-differences-in-genre-affect-the-structure-and-substance-of-policy-and-management-4-newly-added/

**”Major Read: Instead of “differentiated by gender, race and class,” why not “differentiated by heterogeneity and complexity”? Ten examples of racism, class, capitalism, inequalities, border controls, authoritarianism, COVID and more” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/31/major-read-instead-of-differentiated-by-gender-race-and-class-why-not-differentiated-by-heterogeneity-and-complexity-t/

**”New method matters in reframing policy and management: 13 examples (revised and updated)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/11/new-method-matters-in-reframing-policy-and-management-13-examples-revised-and-updated/

**”Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact, and deglobalization” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/18/emerging-counternarratives-on-migrants-border-controls-digital-networks-remittances-child-labor-covids-impact-and-deglobalization/

—Other major new reads:

**”The ‘future’ in HRO Studies: the example of networked reliability” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/10/17/the-future-in-hro-studies-the-example-of-networked-reliability-as-a-form-of-reliability-seeking/

**”The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/07/25/major-read-the-siloing-of-approaches-to-discourse-and-narrative-analyses-in-public-policy/

**”A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/08/21/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-resent/

—Key blog entries on livestock herders, pastoralists and pastoralisms are:

**”New Implications of the Framework for Reliability Professionals and Pastoralism-as-Infrastructure (updated)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

**”Twelve new extensions of “pastoralists as reliability professionals” and “pastoralism as a critical infrastructure” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/20/new-extensions-of-the-framework-for-pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-a-critical-infrastructure/

**”Other fresh perspectives on pastoralists and pastoralism: 17 brief cases (last newly added)” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/05/11/other-fresh-perspectives-on-pastoralists-and-pastoralism-17-brief-cases-last-newly-added/

**”Recasting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in pastoralist systems: the detection of creeping crises” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/18/recasting-traditional-ecological-knowledge-tek-in-pastoralist-systems/

**”First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples” https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/08/12/four-briefer-points-of-policy-relevance-for-pastoralists-and-herders/

Earlier blog entries discussed the key notion of “policy palimpsest” in public policy and management. The upshot is that current statements about complex policy issues are the composites of arguments and narratives that have been overwritten across time. A composite argument rendered off a policy palimpsest reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved—but none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening the layers, effacements, and erasures. Arguments have been blurred, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes.

A lot follows by way of implications. Here I highlight the violence in all this. Another term for “effacements and erasures” is lacerations, and composite arguments are formatted to hide the still active scaring from suturing together this and that fragment into this or that composite argument. The role of the policy analyst is to surface the scars and what has been excised.

I recently came across a far better illustration of the palimpsest violence and the analyst’s duty of care than I could ever provide. It’s from the art historian, Androula Michael, and her analysis of the work of artist, Kara Walker, on slavery. It’s spot-on–this is about surfacing the missing that is still there–and I quote at length (the only edits are deletion of internal endnotes):

Against Erasure: Kara Walker and the Reactivation of Silenced Histories

7  In response to historical erasure and collective forgetting, the task becomes one of reanimating buried memories through the archive — of reactivating traces and layering over the so-called historical truth another reality: that of the absent, the erased, the silences of history. This approach is strikingly visible in Kara Walker’s series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), in which her cut-out silhouettes of Black figures are superimposed onto official historical illustrations. The original volume — richly illustrated with maps, diagrams, portraits, scenes, and texts relating to major events and figures of the Civil War — was part of a broader series of publications and public commemorations aimed at promoting reconciliation between North and South. While its editors claimed to “narrate events just as they occurred” (Guernsey and Alden, n.p.), the narrative systematically omitted a significant portion of the reality. Kara Walker poses the critical question: how is it that African Americans and the lived experience of slavery are so conspicuously absent from this work?

8  On the rare occasions when African Americans are depicted, they appear only through a textual framing that emphasizes, with strategic distance, the federal government’s designation of Black people as “contraband of war,” entirely sidelining their human experiences, subjectivities, and humanity. Kara Walker’s opaque Black silhouettes disrupt the legibility of the original images.

The stark contrast between black and white is visually striking. The scale of the figures — sometimes oversized — imposes the presence of those long excluded from official history. Anonymous yet monumental, they belong to an aesthetics of stereotype: archetypal, distorted, and yet turned against itself. They reactivate the racialized codes of the slaveholding imaginary only to detonate them from within.

9  Their radical blackness acts as both a screen and a mirror, a surface upon which repressed memories are projected. They invade the space, contaminate the image, and haunt the historical scene. These are visual specters: neither fully present nor entirely absent. Figures that evade immediate readability, that unsettle and disorient. Walker summons these ghosts — the erased Black bodies of American history, the forgotten violences, the suppressed narratives. The specter is that figure of the past which returns to haunt the present precisely because it has not been acknowledged, reckoned with, or worked through. In Walker’s work, the absent become visible — but in a form that resists pacification, or any straightforward restitution.

(accessed online at https://journals.openedition.org/angles/9759)

I submit that many composite arguments, including those not related to the world-historical stain of slavery, deserve such treatment.

Preliminaries

While this blog entry centers on one subset of the many varied camps and audiences “doing development,” what follows doesn’t aim to undermine the others’ values and principles. The climate emergency has to be mitigated, income inequality and wealth must be reduced, wars are to be stopped, and much more needs to be done. My argument is that, if you are looking for accomplishments in these areas, start with repair and maintenance of what now has been left.

My bête noire are the controlists inside and outside development who endanger us as much as do the wider economic and political forces they cannot control. The controlists I’m talking about believe that the inputs to complex sociotechnical processes can be specified and stabilized, that processes to transform inputs into outputs can also be identified and activated as required, and that the outputs produced are in turn the best possible with low and stable variability as well. But it doesn’t work that way.

Controlists are found across the political spectrum from left to right and in the middle; they are found at the top of hierarchies and at the bottom and in between. They are embedded in professions that matter for public policy and management (not just engineers or economists, but designer-ecologists for example). Their cumulative effect is that what used to be singled out as “government blunders” are far more widespread and non-denominational these days.

None of what follows, however, will stop controlists from asserting rights as our techno-managerial elites. They will continue to give directions because the latter are “evidence-based,” or because they know that incentives and behavioral nudges work, or better yet, they say they know that getting the institutions or the price right means the right behavior follows. All this is so, even when it’s blisteringly obvious we’re in unchartered times.

I’m interested in how to manage better in spite of the controlists, while nevertheless facing the wider forces that no longer can be controlled (if they ever were). My audience here are those working in Anthropocene who recognize not only are we being harmed by the wider forces under no one’s control, controlists are inflicting further injury through their blunders in insisting otherwise. What we know, instead, is that development carries on by better means.

How so? Because manage when you can’t control and you cope even when you can’t manage. Managing means maneuvering across processes to transform inputs you can’t control into outputs that you still can use for your livelihoods. Coping means planning the next steps ahead for outputs over which can no longer managing as reliably as you’d like. You do this because, right now when it matters in real time, you cannot control inputs, processes and outputs any more than you can cut clouds in half. And if things can’t be managed better now, why ever believe the promises of evergreen controlists to manage, well, far better?

My argument, in brief

My audience is, in short, those who want to manage better what is left behind by controlists and the forces they cannot and could not control. From this point on I call this domain of interest, development as repair and maintenance. This is the subset of development audiences who are focused on repairing what we can and want to maintain.

Controlists will of course see this as suboptimal, or anti-utopian, or the quietism of despair. Again, we won’t convince them otherwise. We have instead to rely on our own experiences and the increasing numbers around us.

Many of us have come to realize the centrality of repair and maintenance in development from different directions, no one of which is all that new. Some remember the recurrent cost crises of governments in the 80s and later. Others see the deteriorated facilities and critical infrastructures on the ground. Still others shutter in the face of the overhang of commitments relative to resources (think welfare-state pensions) and wonder how to square that and other such circles. There is also recognition that “doing development” in light of these changes is a decidedly “developed” world problem as well. More contributing factors could be itemized but the realization remain the same: “Doing development” is unavoidably about repairing and maintaining the infrastructures that make us a “we.” It’s also about other aspirations, but we know that development is unavoidably about repair and maintenance throughout.

How the latter happens is the subject of the next section. That discussion is followed by an example of how development-as-repair-and-maintenance recasts a controlist-dominated green finance and humanitarian aid (namely, the setting of thresholds and triggers for resourcing). The blog ends with a short conclusion on further policy and management implications.

What is development as repair & maintenance?

Let me start where you, the readers, are. Like me, you’ve attended presentations where we’re told of the enormous losses to be incurred if we did not make huge capital investments for a better society and economy. At a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, I was told that:

**The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–so as to restore area wetlands and mudflats;

**Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion to locally adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and

**We should expect much more sea-level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap in Antarctica and Greenland.

It’s not surprising that the actual mitigation interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work demands posed by the bulleted challenges. And so too before and elsewhere. I remember a meeting half a century ago about water point development in Machakos Kenya. The good news that day was that after overcoming implementation difficulties, construction was underway for the planned water supply! The bad news was that even if everything was constructed as planned, the project wouldn’t cover even the population increase in new water users over the plan period.

So, how can we talk about repair and maintenance when capital development needs are so massive? It’s been my experience–I stand to be corrected–that none of these estimated losses take into account the losses already prevented from occurring by operators and managers who avoid supply failures from that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment. (No guarantees!)

Why are these uncalculated millions and millions in savings important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae? Because it is from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations proposed by controlists for climate restoration and recovery. It is from other pools of real-time reliability professionals in healthcare, education and social protection that any master strategies for poverty and inequality and the transformation of society will be modified necessarily on the fly and necessarily in the face of unpredictable/uncontrollable contingencies.

Three very important implications for policy and management follow, I believe. First, these considerations turn the notion of “capital investments” on its head. We necessarily shift to ongoing operations as a source of innovative change. Ongoing maintenance and repair lead the inevitable re-design and modification practices for the built infrastructure in real time.

Second, the focus on real time has the advantages of highlighting the important roles of both contingency and the long term in all this. Maintenance and repair (M&R) is very often an official stage of infrastructure operations precisely because of the time it takes for the infrastructure to be implemented and then operated as constructed and managed. Consequently, the infrastructure becomes more vulnerable to unpredictable or uncontrollable contingencies along the way that have to be responded to during routine and nonroutine M&R.

Third, and the most important for our purposes, those savings and innovative responses in preventing infrastructure failures from happening are better understood and appreciated as investments in an infrastructure-based economy and society. I argue that actually-existing operations–often most visible in the real time activities of those charged with maintenance and repair–are the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of societal infrastructures faced with uncertainties from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and inadvertently produced by controlists with their policy macro-designs, promised markets, and fool-proof technologies.

If one considers these three implications together, then terms like “short-run,” “adaptive” and “flexible” are frequently not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specific–that is, often improvisational–properties of maintenance and repair under real-time urgencies. Obviously, the livestock watering borehole in Botswana’s Western Ngwaketse and the Contra Costa Country water supply in the San Francisco Bay region differ in kind and degree. But what does not differ is the importance of both as investments in their respective local and regional economies. And by “investments” I mean precisely as just discussed in terms of the real-time operations via repair and maintenance of foundational infrastructures.

So what? A too-brief example of thresholds and triggers in green finance and humanitarian aid

Green finance includes financial risk assessments of the impacts of the climate emergency on economic investments along with the activation of different thresholds and triggers for varied financial instruments, including green bonds and catastrophe bonds/insurance. Central banks are becoming more and more involved in green finance. The establishment and use of thresholds–which if breached, trigger different, at times financial responses–also extend to humanitarian aid and emergency response, whether or not related to the climate emergency.

I want to focus on the use of these thresholds and triggers from the repair and maintenance perspective just offered. I was recently involved in workshop, where one of the participants summarized for me:

I was trying to highlight how a whole institutionalised paraphernalia has evolved in the humanitarian/development space of late focused on early warning, anticipatory action, parametric insurance, early financing, all governed by models, and so creating ‘science-based’ triggers for response etc. It’s becoming more and more significant as climate finance is channelled through these mechanisms, in part a consequence of reduced field capacities/experiences in agencies/governments (in part a consequence of aid cuts that fall on people first). . . .

The problem of course is that this whole financialised ‘technostructure’ as you term it acts to exclude those very people we call high reliability professionals and all the tacit, informal, storytelling and improvisation that goes on that continuously prevents disasters and responds to them in real time.

We know that the models fail (the triggers are based on risk based calculus and don’t embrace uncertainty, in fact they can’t by definition) and so the responses too often are inappropriate, late, inadequate and so on, while at the same time the networks that keep the systems running, governing on the go etc. become deskilled and ignored, making matters worse.

These concerns are very pertinent from the high reliability literature’s reliability-matters test: Would the threshold/trigger, if activated, reduce the task volatility (the unpredictability and/or uncontrollability of the task environment) that real-time operators face? Even if not, does activation of the threshold/trigger increase their options to respond to existing task volatility? Now something that does both is a real investment in economy, society and polity!

So yes, given the ubiquity of humanitarian aid, there clearly must be situations where thresholds/triggers increase task environment volatility for field staff, reduce their front-line options, or do both (see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251318268 for one among many examples). I would, however, feel more confident in drawing a conclusion if situations where the threshold/trigger is or has been a positive resource were also identified (even if, especially if unintended). In either case, other things are also at play. The broader issue isn’t so much the planner/regulator’s Who is going to implement my major controls? as it is the infrastructure operators’ What are my major real-time failure scenarios?

Speaking personally, I can no more object a priori to an innovation like formal thresholds/triggers than I would say herders cease to be pastoralists when adopt cellphones and modern crop insurance. That reindeer herding by some Sami also relies on helicopters for round-ups in no way argues, at least for me, that pastoralism and its improvisations have disappeared. The issue for me is whether the threshold/trigger is a single resource that has multiple uses for operators in the field–or could be made to have multiple uses through more investigation or in different contexts of ongoing operations. So too when it comes specifically to the kinds of repair and maintenance operations discussed here and even more generally. “The examples are legion,” writes Graham and Thrift in an early major article on the centrality of maintenance and repair to economies, adding

maintenance and repair can itself be a vital source of variation, improvisation and innovation. Repair and maintenance does not have to mean exact restoration. Think only of the bodged job, which still allows something to continue functioning but probably at a lower level; the upgrade, which allows something to take on new features which keep it contemporary; the cannibalization and recycling of materials, which allows at least one recombined object to carry on, formed from the bones of its fellows; or the complete rebuild, which allows some- thing to continue in near pristine condition. And what starts out as repair may soon become improvement, innovation, even growth. . .

(accessed online at https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Graham-Thrift-repair.pdf)

Conclusion

Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of global challenges, including but not limited to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by respective central banks and new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.

What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures without which you would not economies, societies and polities. Nor have you seen in the subsequent investments in science, technology and engineering anything like the comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability operations of backbone (actually foundational) critical infrastructures, like water, energy and transportation. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would be for more context-rich practices and research to enhance infrastructure maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof for scaling up to better practices across different cases. (For efforts to protect and extend already-existing pockets of reliability management, please see the calls for a National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management and state government Commissions for Inter-Infrastructure Resilience).

If I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of critical infrastructures as the resilience of an economy, society and polity that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure repair and maintenance–and their endogenous innovations–move center-stage in ways not yet appreciated by those politicians, policymakers and private sector decisionmakers who still operate as if control is to be found and once found, it is theirs.

VI. CONCLUSION: DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM
Surveillance capitalism is not just a business model. It is a system, geopolitical, institutional, and epistemic. It is held together by regulation (or lack of), trade rules, policy, and narratives. It is reinforced by governments, especially the United States, and advanced through international institutions that shape how the digital economy works and who it serves. It is legitimized by expert networks and sanitized through language that turns extraction into efficiency and concentration of power into innovation.

Artificial intelligence has made this system even more powerful. AI technologies—especially predictive models, automated decision systems, and generative tools feed on the data extraction pipelines that surveillance capitalism built. AI provides a new layer of legitimacy framed as progress, innovation, or national competitiveness, even as it deepens asymmetries of power and concentration of market and control. The surveillance capitalist order now markets itself as an AI revolution.

This system did not emerge by accident. It was built through policy frameworks, trade negotiations, legal exemptions, deregulation, development finance, and decades of strategic inaction. And because it was built, it can be dismantled. But dismantling surveillance capitalism will take more than new laws or one-off reforms. It will require structural change of how data is governed, how power is held to account, and how knowledge itself is produced and deployed in policymaking.

This paper has taken a bird’s-eye view of that system. It has traced the foundations of surveillance capitalism, not just to Big Tech companies, but to the governments, international institutions, and expert and academic infrastructures that sustain it. It has argued that surveillance capitalism is not just a market problem, but a governance problem. A democracy problem. A global problem.

The road forward will not be easy. Many actors across sectors, government, academia, and civil society continue to benefit from the system as it is. But cracks are showing. Resistance is growing. What’s needed now is not just critique, but coordination. Not just opposition, but alternatives.

If surveillance capitalism is to be replaced, we must be ready to build something better in its place: a model of digital governance that serves people and the environment, protects rights, promotes the public good, and treats democratic control as a tool.

(accessed online at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism)

With that concluding word, “tool,” the report dies for want of anything like a Plan B.