This photograph shows what were formerly residential lots later abandoned in a part of Detroit, Michigan:

According to an expert, these instances require us “to think about innovative and productive ways to manage and transform vacancy for long-term sustainability” not only in Detroit but in like areas (Dr. Toni Griffin, Professor in the Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design commenting on the presentation, “Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit,” accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umqU1xj5yPA).

I want to take up Dr. Griffin’s challenge and recast what you see (and don’t see) in that picture in equally policy relevant ways for “low-density” (mixed-use) grasslands in parts of Africa with which I am familiar.

I

Let’s start with the obvious points raised by the above photo.

In reality, the space bounded by the two edge sidewalks isn’t vacant. What you don’t see are not just the biophysical activities on the ground and below, you also don’t see the socioeconomic relations that crisscross the space even now. For all I know, new construction could be happening the day after tomorrow or the lot was the site of a crafts fair a week before the photo was taken.

Far-fetched, you say? Consider the description of one such project on one Detroit lot:

The Heidelberg Project, founded by Tyree Guyton in the mid-1980s, is perhaps Detroit’s most well-known – and controversially discussed – outdoor art environment. Spanning a block of vacant houses and lots, the project comprises a dense assemblage of discarded objects. . . (accessed online athttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2026.2676282)

And yet, the blisteringly obvious in the photo is that the space is NOT vacant. It’s full of repurposed objects (about which, by the way, you know little unless described further). Such however is the powerful imaginary that “vacant” still carries with it.

II

So what?

Just what does this mean for “the management of vacancy,” be it in peri-urban Detroit or low-density (mixed use) rangelands of East or Southern Africa?

It means we have to think more granularly than snapshot reality could ever permit.

For example, what if the former settler ranches in parts of Africa now subject to the mixed (arable, horticultural, animal) uses are in fact the result of that having, as Dr. Griffin put it, “to think about innovative and productive ways to manage and transform [really-existing] vacancy“?

In Detroit, white urban farmers have moved into some of these depopulated neighborhoods. In Africa examples, the racial demographics are largely reversed, but the analogy remains strong: Just as this urban farming has been mistakenly criticized as failed gentrification (the first wave of Detroit urban farmers never saw themselves as gentrifiers), so too arable and agro-pastoral farmers are mistakenly criticized for falling short of specialized livestock rearing or crop production thought to be more suitable by governments and their experts.

More important (for me) the policy implications differ depending on the benchmark against which to assess really-existing use variety on the ground. Is it any wonder that “gentrification”, like “dryland livestock ranching”, have no agreed-upon definitions? (Academics are still debating the causes and consequences of gentrification here in the US.) Is it any wonder then that both concepts are never so fiercely argued over as when they’re offered up as “solutions”? Ideal types are just another version of blueprint development.

Read the finer essays of George Steiner, John Berger, Adam Phillips—or if you will, Helen Vendler, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jane Hirshfield, Lydia Davis—and you encounter in each an analytic sensibility, sui generis. No need here for a shared point of departure to understanding complexity’s implications for public and private.

Indeed, there are times when the very different analytic sensibilities posed by the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham, Robert Lowell and (yes, even) J.H. Prynne achieve actual policy relevance. I say this knowing it’s outrageous to demand policy relevance from poets. But I suggest you also can read them and others that way.

Ammons and regulation

Policy types fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts, A.R. Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear, he is not talking about “ignorance as bliss.”)

For those working in policy and management, how could it be that “the less we know, the more we gain”? In order to make our exercise here more interesting, what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking government regulation?

–By way of an answer, jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:

Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.

You may want to reread the poem once more.

Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming less separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital whole. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I.

So what? How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know?

–When pressed by an interviewer, Ammons’s response illuminates much about how knowing less is gaining more: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.

Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision of even the categories of “policymaking” and “regulation.” Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsion to “get it right the next time around” there is more importantly a next time to make it better. Again, not just to make a specific regulation better, but to revise what we mean by “regulating.”

To recast (revise, redescribe, rescript, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to make room for—empty your mind for—resituating the cognitive limits of “regulation.”

Jorie Graham and the climate emergency

No one could accuse Jorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, not a homeopathic whiff, of environmental optimism, techno-social-otherwise, in the poetry I’ve read of hers.

Which poses my challenge: Can we readers nevertheless find something to move forward with from her recent poetry? Is there some thing that I can see of possible use in my own response to the climate emergency?

In answer, consider the lines from her book, Sea Change:

                                                                         the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever, 
                                                         so that it's not a 
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
                                                         also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
                                                         ground is bursting with
                                                         sunlight, inquire no further it says. . . 

There’s that tumbling out and after-wash of words and the turns of phrase. Witness though how they bounce off and back from, in this case, the hard left-side margins and that right-side enjambment.

Some might call her rush of words a compulsion to continue but for someone with my background and training, it’s difficult not to see this as resilience-being-performed as the dark messages bounce back or forth. Following Graham, we readers make resilience happen.

Robert Lowell and alertness

“Design” too often assumes one can macro-design the micro. Anyone who has tried to implement as planned knows how plug-and-play designs don’t work in complex policy and management, as contingency in the form of situation, context and even invariably get in the way. (For my part, it’s difficult to imagine two words scarier in the English language than business schools’ “designing leadership.”)

To see how this matters for policy and management, consider a late poem of Robert Lowell, “Notice,” and a gloss on it by Helen Vendler, the late literary critic. Here’s the poem in its entirety, centering around Lowell’s leaving an asylum after a manic-depressive episode:

Notice

The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm –
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression –
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”

The doctor is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train
and copy on the back of a letter,
as if alone:
“When the trees close branches and redden,
their winter skeletons are hard to find—”
to know after long rest
and twenty miles of outlying city
that the much-heralded spring is here,
and say,
“Is this what you would call a blossom?”
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment.

I take up Vendler’s gloss when she turns to Lowell’s last line:

In becoming conscious of his recovery by becoming aware, literally moment by moment, of his new capacities for the most ordinary actions of life, the poet sees that ‘we are designed for the moment’—that our consciousness chiefly functions moment by moment, action by action, realization by realization. Biologically, ‘we are designed for the moment’ of noticing.

For my part, what Lowell is doing in the last two lines is also revisiting the second line, “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm” and making this point: The designs put upon us by ideas and enthusiasms differ from the noticing designed into us in at least one major respect: We notice the ideas-that-design because noticing is not an idea. It’s an alertness. It is a kind of watchfulness—“Is this what you would call a blossom?” It’s the analytic sensibility that saves us from those other designs.

An application of J.H. Prynne for policy relevance

I’m new to Prynne’s poetry and haven’t yet gotten a knack for how to read and interpret the more recent ones. This means I, more than not, don’t have a clue about the author’s intention (which shouldn’t matter anyway, so some say).

Which also means I get to interpret his lines far more in my own terms than others might like. Take the following stanza:

Indefatigable, certainly impracticable, chronic                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    unretractable, spree; indistinguishable
epiphenomenal dink-di flunk, rhetic;                                                                                                                    insurmountable,  unaccountable,                                                                                                                            incommensurate, providentially,                                                                                                                                        turn up your nose as we suppose,                                                                                                                      environmentalism, fiddle-de-dee.

Whatever this means to others, to me it’s a clear example of how many advocates for and against environmentalism overstate their case through argument by adjective and adverb.

Or consider a different stanza:

Casting out terror leaves a vacant spot, your care-free jubilation to out-jest these heart-struck injuries, mimic new disasters; they crowd like fresh battalions, eager spies trying our patience, good out-runs the best.

I interpret “casting out terror leaves a vacant spot” to mean that once we lose widespread social dread over large technical disasters like nuclear plant explosions, we vacate any notion of reliably managing such extremely hazardous systems.

There are, of course, those who celebrate such an eventuality–think of them as eager spies for the other side. But the loss of reliable infrastructures also does injury and harm to many more other people. Indeed, new disasters arise (imagine the effects of a society no longer fearful of jet planes dropping from the air like flies). The new disasters would “crowd like fresh battalions” and “try our patience” by way of increased calls for different policy and management interventions.

But note Prynne’s “good out-runs the best” as a consequence. No problem. For many trained in policy analysis, such as myself, the best is the enemy of the good. That is, better to have good enough when the best is not achievable (which would be to prevent disasters in the first place). What then is good enough in having a disaster? Ironically, disasters are a way to get rid of legacy infrastructures and components that, under other circumstances, one is precluded from doing so because of existing regulation and law. These would be suspended during the emergency.

My reading too far-stretched? In my view, Prynne’s words read as if they are the only ones left legible on the surface of a thick, many-layered palimpsest. A good deal has been effaced or scored away below and down. My point is that those very same words are also left visible on policy palimpsests with which I am familiar.

“Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this“) Angela Merkel, 2015, then-Chancellor of Germany, referring to the migrant crisis in Germany and Europe.

Many migration crises probably need substantive rethinking, if we are to make them more tractable to policy and management (without, that is, simplifying them or obscuring the complexities involved). There are a variety of policy optics to recast complex policy issues, including counternarratives, different methods, other-than-usual analogies, and a more granular, differentiated analysis. More, I believe these already exist.

Below are examples of each type with respect to the currently understood “migration crises”. No pretense is made that these quoted excerpts are relevant for policy and management everywhere. They are offered, with little edit, in the spirit of softening up what look to be crises that cannot be redefined in ways other than currently rendered.

1. Counternarratives

For instance, with regards to the Migrant Victim Narrative, migrants and refugees using smuggling services are almost never only victims, because they need to overcome considerable obstacles and need strong willpower in order to bear the costs and risks usually involved in moving. Yet the images and stories of migrants dying while crossing deserts or seas, or of migrants abused and exploited by smugglers and employers, are the ones that dominate the headlines.

Without denying the realities of extreme suffering and exploitation, the problem is that such narratives typically deny human agency involved in most forms of forced and precarious migration or represent them as an irrational act. In reality, people can be victims and exert agency at the same time in an active effort to defy or overcome constraints. Most vulnerable migrant workers, including victims of trafficking, see an interest in migrating despite being exploited, if only because the alternative of staying at home was worse for them. Therefore, they avoid being ‘rescued’ as in practice this usually means deportation and loss of investments, income and livelihood (e.g., Costello 2015; O’Connell Davidson 2006; Weitzer 2000; Parreñas 2006). For this reason, one of the slogans of anti-anti-trafficking activists has even become ‘rescue us from our rescuers’ (de Haas 2023, 311).

The point is not to trivialize abuses and extreme exploitation, but that reducing migrants and refugees to passive victims is simplifying the reality. Crucially, this ignores the rather inconvenient truth that, for most of them, immigration is a rather deliberate investment into a better future, that most ‘victims’ have migrated out of their own will, essentially because leaving was still much more attractive than staying because of the real hope for a better future that migration represents for millions of people around the world, particularly in the form of labour opportunities and the ability to send remittances back home (Agunias 2009).

This is not to morally justify human rights abuses, or to deny states’ responsibilities in upholding the rule of law and preventing exploitation by criminals and employers, but to acknowledge a lived reality in which migrants exert their agency within such severe constraints.

The implicit underlying assumption often seems to be that migrants, particularly when they are perceived as poor, uneducated and non-Western, somehow do not know what they are doing and that they would have stayed at home if only somebody had told them about the terrible circumstances in which they have ended up. On a deeper level, this seems based on often barely conscious, colonial stereotypes of non-Western people as somehow less capable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves (see Said 1978), or to act in their own best interests. In other words, such patronizing, condescending victimhood narratives continue to portray the non-Western and low-skilled other as ‘less rational’ who must be ‘sensitized’ and ‘informed’ about what is best for them: staying at home. . . .

de Haas, H. (2024). Changing the migration narrative: On the power of discourse, propaganda and truth distortion. IMI Working Paper No. 181/PACES Project Working Paper No. 3. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam (accessed online at https://www.iss.nl/en/media/2024-06-pacesimi-181-wp-n3dehaasfinal)

2. Different methods

Irregular migrants need to be able to safely report labour exploitation and exercise their labour rights without fear of deportation. We therefore propose creating a special temporary work permit – call it a ‘redress work permit’ – specifically for irregular migrant workers who have come forward to claim their rights and whose employment conditions, while working illegally, were found to constitute a significant breach of their fundamental rights. Such a redress work permit could be included in European laws either by amending the current Employer Sanctions Directive, or as part of a new EU Directive on Labour Standards for Irregular Migrant Workers in the EU. . .

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/702670/IPOL_STU(2022)702670_EN.pdf

3. Not-your-usual analogies

I argue that detained migrants become valued not only for their exploited labour, but as bedspace occupants who trigger rent payments from ICE to corrections firms. . . . As detention occupants, migrants’ cash value for others is more than metaphorical. Formally and institutionally, they are made fungible, exchangeable, transformed from people with lives and stories into chargeable bed days.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.12992

Beds have been the center of urgent political struggles — be they in prisons, detention centers, hospitals, or nursing homes. Our virtual conversation series centers “bed activism” [as] complex forms of resistance and visionary care that emerge from the intimate spaces of sick, disabled, detained, and imprisoned peoples. It connects a long-term vision of connecting communities and movements at the nexus of abolition feminism, migrant justice, and disability justice.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/the-reciprocal-politics-of-bed-space-activism–creative-resistan#:~:text=Beds%20have%20been%20the%20center,%2C%20detained%2C%20and%20imprisoned%20people.

4. More granular, differentiated analyses

Between 2010 and 2019, over 2 million people have crossed the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Europe, escaping conflicts, persecution and poverty and looking for a better chance in life (D’Angelo, 2018a; UNHCR, 2020). Since the mid-2010s, this phenomenon, widely labelled as a ‘Refugee Crisis’ (Crawley, 2016), has been at the centre of media and academic debates, with considerable attention being devoted to the humanitarian concerns over search and rescue at sea and the implementation of the European Asylum System (Crawley et al., 2017; Spijkerboer, 2016; Vassallo Paleologo, 2016). . .Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glob.12312

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review/article/platform-work-exploitation-and-migrant-worker-resistance-evidence-from-berlin-and-london/30DF1A5FD18F4B86983332ABE401E88E.

5. A migration example combining different counternarrative, method, analogy and differentiation

Managed retreat is increasingly recommended as a response to rising sea levels confronting coastal communities, cities and major ports. We already have climate migrants in coastal Louisiana and like places, and the idea is to manage this out-migration more systematically.

What’s missing are assessments of the track records in the various managed retreat strategies already out there. The management of moving capitols, for example, has not been without its major problems. Relocation of large numbers of people is even more notoriously difficult in humanitarian work.

With respect to the latter, one such place to start thinking about managed retreat on the West Coast where I live and have done my research is the following:

Every time I visit South Sudan, the angels’ response to my criticisms never varies. “What would you have us do?” asked one exasperated aid worker as we sat drinking cold beers one night by the bank of the Nile. “If we leave, people will die.” He was right. A decade of government withdrawal from the provision of services, enabled by the humanitarian presence, and campaigns of government violence, partly paid for from humanitarian resources, had created a situation in which some people in the camps in Maban would probably starve if it were not for the aid agencies. The only solution the humanitarians can envision is to continue with this dystopic system.

Joshua Craze (2023). “The Angel’s Dilemma” (accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-angels-dilemma-craze)

Imagine, that is, not a massive withdrawal and resettlement of peoples from the coastline but rather masses of people who stay behind having nowhere else to go practically and who need, above their own resources and ingenuity, indefinite humanitarian aid in order to persist.

                   

I

When I started doing narrative analysis of public policy, big-M metanarratives were getting the attention. These were the grand overarching storylines criticized by the likes of Lyotard and Baudrillard (think today of criticizing “the Enlightenment Project”).

But just as there were varieties of Enlightenment (not just the very different French and Scottish versions, but others: Dutch, Naples, English, German, etc.), there are small-m metanarratives far less grand and far more local (think of the many, many varieties of capitalism currently being differentiated [1]). Some observers, of course, have tried to find family resemblances across the disparate versions (an Urpflanze of Enlightenments or Capitalism). But the more granularity the levels of really-existing context, situation and/or event, the harder it is to dismiss the narrative priority of this particularity in seeking policy relevance now and in the next steps ahead.

Small-m metanarratives have always been around, both conceptually and empirically, in the form of those narratives that center on how both “a” and “not-a” positions can be the case at the same time. More recent explications of conceptual held by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Paul Ricoeur are illustrative:

Through a reconstruction of Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture, I show that his mediation of oppositions transforms dichotomies into internal tensions. Universality is historicized without being relativized; practice is structured yet generative; objectivity is socially produced yet binding. The result is not inconsistency but a dynamic relational framework that preserves theoretical depth at the cost of stability. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6293418)

Ricoeur argues that genuine political compromise acknowledges the irreducible plurality of legitimate value frameworks. . . .Based on this understanding, I argue that successful compromise becomes not a matter of finding the lowest common denominator but of generating new social arrangements that honor multiple justificatory logics simultaneously. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-026-09731-8)

For example, sustainable development has had to address how that term is not an oxymoron, but in fact can accommodate very different positions (e.g., https://www.academia.edu/164914632/Taking_Complexity_Seriously). In so doing, the metanarrative functions as a repair of fragmented conditions, however indefinitely. (Narratives have always been more than storytelling; they also seek to repair, stabilize or weave anew.)

II

The harder problem has been identifying small-m metanarratives that are about “neither ‘a’ nor ‘not-a'” positions but still policy or management relevant. It would appear we are in an entirely different language game here, if not cosmology. To return to our examples, when it comes to Enlightenment, one can think of Asian approaches to an enlightenment that differs vastly from the Western versions mentioned. So too “policy messes”–situations without agreed upon beginnings and an agreed upon ending, but rather exist in an indefinite present time–fall outside convention notions of policy narratives as stories having beginnings, middles and ends or policy arguments with premises and conclusion (https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/30263/1/648154.pdf). (Terms like wicked policy problems and now polycrisis also convey an intractability outside the policy and management realms.)

If or where so, one can then argue that what is “neither sustainable development nor not-sustainable development” might be a policy mess or a form of Asian enlightenment(s). Even so, it still is difficult to see where this gets us in the absence of a particular case and its specifics for analysis.

III

We are left then to refine our understanding of those specifics of context, situation or event. An earlier blog outlines what is meant by actionable granularity [2]. What needs underscoring here is the importance to a policy analyst of the first step in any really-existing policy analysis, namely, asking and answering: What is the problem? (Or better yet: What’s the story or stories here?)

It’s banal to say we should define our terms upfront and that different problem definitions entail different problem solutions (i.e., to ask or answer a question assumes you know what would qualify as an answer, were one given). What is less banal is recognizing the necessity of defamiliarizing taken-for-granted problem definitions treated as givens.

For example, the policy narratives we tell ourselves today are all about crises and their intractability to political resolution. It’s another matter, however, to say these contexts, situations and events more resemble “settlements of commotions,” as when royal and counter-royal forces brokered an indefinite cessation of physical battle [3]. You can call such settlements “political” and “polarized,” but that misses the point that indefinite stalemate is itself a form of tractability. Tractability here is a small-m metanarrative that intractable crises occlude. Why? Because the latter are all about big-T transformations that are, we are told, better able to do away with the tractable/intractable binary. Ha!

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Endnotes

[1] https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2026/04/01/rethinking-capitalism-and-its-upsho

[2] https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/12/09/actionable-granularity-what-is-it-why-does-it-matter-what-to-do-about-it/

[3] I’m reading a history of British satire which makes just this point (Ian Sperrin [2025]. State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English Literature. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.)

While about recent French literature, this too can be said of many policy narratives and their compositors in many places:

Once a thief of fire, the writer is now a sentinel of the present or a witness of memory, a psychiatrist or a judge, a tailor, a social worker, a priest or investigator, a psychologist, a lawyer, or even a mechanic of the soul: stitching back up, getting better, helping, healing, and saving are the guiding principles for twenty-first-century literature at a time when literature has become a way of coping with terrorism, thinking about the climate crisis, protecting the subject from the logics of digital surveillance, coping with health crises and lockdowns, and rearticulating forms of universality compatible with varied experiences as well as those that suffered from previous domination.

So what? is answered with:

In the face of doctrines in which “literature is called on for assistance,” I have responded with both interest and perplexity: whether this new transitivity [from representing good to doing good] is seen as a fruitful and effective return to humanist literary optimism or an improvised and utilitarian response to the existential and social distress of the contemporary subject remains largely a matter of opinion.

Either opinion is ok with me at a time when, to paraphrase philosopher David Hume, opinions rule the world.

---

Source.

Alexandre Gefen (2024 [2017]) Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Tegan Raleigh, Volume 28 of Culture & Conflict, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston: 236 -237 (accessed online at https://ibrary.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/94387, internal footnotes deleted)

Instead, the ongoing retreat of neoliberalism is occurring in a piecemeal and tacit way. It is driven not by politicians and intellectuals acting as the vanguard of a class war—that battle was won long ago by the capitalist camp—but by a governing class, custodian of the prevailing regime, which mostly sees itself as reacting to unforeseen shocks the best it can and coming to terms, as it figures it should, with the formidable geopolitical challenge that is China. In such a conjuncture, fondness for the Gramscian concept of a historical interregnum does not pass muster. There is no organic crisis to speak of. The accumulation regime is solidly entrenched, and faring well on its own terms. It is not the case that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. The new is already busy replacing the old, only this process is unfolding gradually, bereft of doctrine and theoretical coordinates, shepherded by the establishment and conforming with the interests of the already privileged.

(accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/articles/nathan-sperber-beyond-neoliberalism)

1. New Narrative: The last thing you should expect is the end of pastoralism(s)

I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:

Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including: 

• Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments.
• Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries. 
• Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism.
• Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations. 
• Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles. 
• Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities. 
• Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape. 

No surprises here. This is the gist of what we’ve been reading for years. But the obvious question remains from the standpoint of our framework of pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralism as a critical infrastructure: How many pastoralists see this in the same way or for similar reasons?

I don’t know that number, but I most certainly see how some herders believe their pastoralist systems are changing dramatically but nevertheless adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to.

To see how, turn to a recent article that describes the parallel case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are also collapsing but who act differently than expected.

In his 2024 “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are totally convinced of the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is already underway–respond predictably by moving to the countryside and but then act unexpectedly there. They did not “go back to nature” nor did they eschew all things modern and technological:

Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14661381241266936

Now turn this lens toward pastoralists. Say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are collapsing and that collapse is inevitable. We nonetheless must ask: So what?

So yes, pastoralists tell you they now use new tools while acquiring different skills, but still continue to milk the goats, process milk and collect local herbs. Yes, you see them cutting firewood for cooking but relying on electricity where available. Yes, they readily undertake money-paying jobs off-site to support household livelihoods, including those related to livestock. Yes, you see them breaking away from the specializations of older pastoralisms and developing more versatility and newer options related to that livestock.

Yes, there are pastoralists, like some urbanites, who are alarmed by current events and situations. But their response is more like whistleblowers who still live among us while pressing: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing” (see the above link).

2. New Narrative: Not only is pastoralism harder to assetize than other critical infrastructures, it’s also too-big-to-fail in positive respects

Livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks and such are treated as assets. But the question here is: “Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures today?” My answer: not entirely, and significantly so.

Start with the fact that the current privatization literature focuses on how schools, health facilities, and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these changes in negative terms.

If so, why then are persistent failures and difficulties in establishing—read: assetizing—fixed-point pastoralist schools, stationary pastoralist health facilities, and settled livestock projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization, or which is presumably a positive outcome for some.

Or to put the point from another direction: By viewing pastoralism as hard-to-assetize infrastructure, we see a different longer-term operating horizon at work than we would be the case, were its assets financialized as easily as it has been for other infrastructures. Indeed, for this reason and others, I suggest that pastoralism, as a global infrastructure, is too-big-to-fail in significant respects (and which, in turn, explains the persistence of pastoralisms).

Too big to fail has been used negatively in the 2008 financial crisis to describe systematically important banks and financial institutions. I use the term in its more mixed positive sense where variation in policy and management practices centers around the logic of requisite variety in critical infrastructures, like pastoralism, with highly variable inputs and mandates for low and stable (reliable) outputs. According to the principle of requisite variety, these conditions and mandates produce a set of dynamic management options and improvisations that, while no longer looking like older pastoralism–e.g., herding households now use plastic buckets instead of earthen gourds–nonetheless serve the same functional role as in the older systems. This pressure to generate and assemble new or improvised options to transform highly variable inputs into reliable outputs is global because critical infrastructures (and their logic of requisite variety) are global.

This notion that different practices (resources, options, strategies) can serve the same function (as part of a dynamic process variance to translate high inputs into low and stable outputs) is especially crucial to recasting narratives of herd/er mobility for more relevant policy and management purposes.

3. New Narrative: Herd/er mobility is very different today, and so too its policy and management implications differ from current understandings

I want to offer a different reason for why really-existing practices associated with herd/er mobility deserve special attention. To telegraph ahead, mobility is special because its associated practices are best understood as the interconnections and their different configurations managed spatially and temporally by herders for what are still called the factors of livestock production (land, water, labor)

Livestock “moving between different sites with variable forage resources within a mosaic of harvested crop fields, open pastures and thickets” (Semplici et al, 2024; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928) necessarily refers to more than the uni-directional interconnection of livestock and herders moving from a ‘here’ to a ‘there.’ Shifts in reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivity are also being managed as part and parcel of “mobility”. The policy and management implications are major.

II

Let me start with an extended quote that gets to this take-home message directly (Nori 2019):

To tackle the uncertainty settings embedding their livelihoods, pastoralists strategically adapt their range, herd, and household resources and continuously reconfigure use as much as the interrelationships amongst land, livestock, and labour according to conditions. This dynamics and constant recombination creates a mosaic of strategies where concepts such as intensification, diversification, and the individual, public, and collective fade and combine according to places, seasons, and periods in what d’Elie (2014b:4) describes as ‘”patching up” (Van Wageningen, Wenjun, 2001; Takayoshi, 2011; Hadjigeorgiou, 2011; López-i-Gelats, 2013; Manoli et al., 2014; Moreira et al., 2016; Ragkos et al., 2018). Connections with other societal actors—including urban dwellers, market agents and farming communities—help expand available opportunities and contribute to an overall diversification of livelihood patterns to complement and support their livestock-centred economy. . . .

Following the important changes and innovations that have reconfigured pastoral livelihoods, rangelands are being reorganized accordingly as mosaics of different but functionally interconnected landscape units. In order to exploit existing and fluctuating opportunities (e.g. seasonal rainfall—but also market pricing related to religious festivities or localized subsidy schemes—rangelands and more generally pastoral territories are reorganized accordingly as webs of linked nodes. These webs serve to connect and articulate resources, actors, and opportunities at different levels and scales through ‘reticular’ dynamics that make these mosaics manageable and governable (Tache, 2013; Gonin and
Gautier, 2015; Nori, 2010; Apolloni et al., 2018).

Nodes are strategic hubs that concentrate specific resources and opportunities, including strategic range resources, money, information, services, people, and social connections. In rangeland settings these are typically water points (Lewis, 1961), market places, hot grazing spots (Motta et al., 2018), wetland pastures and dryland farming plots, communal range enclosures (Tache, 2013), urban settings and rural towns, milk collection areas (Nori, 2010), and animal health facilities.

Links are lines that cut through rangelands providing for interstitial, albeit relevant, resources and critical connections. These are typically transhumance routes, market channels, range corridors, main roads, and river banks.

The connections between diverse territorial assets and their articulations in the wider reticulum are governed by tailored sets of rules and regulations that define roles and responsibilities. The reiterated and regular presence and passage through certain territories is key to generating and stabilising herders’ territorialities and ensuring tight links between a group/clan/community and its range territories (Gautier et al. 2005; Bonnet et al., 2010).

[accessed online at https://cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0e201842-8218-5bd1-9661-502a6d2863ed/content; my underlines]

In other words, even when livestock move sequentially from here to there, their inter-relationships with those sites along the way are anything but serially uni-directional.

Reciprocal (bi-directional) relationships are also much discussed in the literature (the stubble for livestock, the manure for the field). Extensively-raised livestock fattened up at special sites just before sale or slaughter are examples of a mediated interconnection between the herders and that off-take. The grazing itinerary of moving livestock across time and space is a kind of pooled interconnectivity guiding the herders and herds involved. More, shifts in configurations are a centerpiece of other mobility discussions, e.g., improvising and responding opportunistically, case by case, as livestock and herders move along the itinerary, if there is one.

In infrastructural terms, what is going on here is not only widening and extending the repertoire of management options (again, the process variance) in response to task environment surprises and contingencies and mandates for reliable outputs. Rather, management itself also becomes one of interconnecting (re-assembling) these options in order to transform high input variability into low variance, more stable outputs (including livelihoods).

III

For example, the much-remarked-upon use of cellphones by pastoralists is not only a way to expand real-time management options in their face of task volatility. There is a scale issue here as well that comes with shifting sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pool interconnectivities–and cellphone use is especially adept at accommodating and monitoring scale shifts.

Not only are feed-stock and water brought to the herd rather than at the older scales, but livestock are reared and fattened at altogether at different scales and in different than before (e.g., Hoffmann, Schareika, Dittrich, Schlecht, Sauer and Buerkert, 2023). In some cases, the time and space of mobility are best understood as condensed; in other cases, the time and space of mobility are better understood as lengthened, as in livestock export supply chains (e.g., Duffield and Stockton 2023). But either way–now more near-linked or now more far-linked–mobility remains functionally part of the logic of requisite variety.

So what? Conceptually, the unit and level of analysis is now “mobility with respect to the setting and scale(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” This is because setting and scale are the intervening template for understanding interconnected exogenous and endogenous variabilities, now more granular than the critics’ usual suspects of climate, prices, and conflict. That the older temporal and spatial movements no longer occur, again, does not mean that herd/er mobility has disappeared.

As for practically, condensed/enlarged mobility means we are light-years away from the older discussions of the effects of disappearing wet season grazing on herd movements.

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Implications

So then, are we to conclude that everything is hunky-dory and copacetic for pastoralists? No. I am, however, asking you to draw implications for priority policy and management attention from these–well very different–ways of understanding pastoralist development. In the bluntest terms possible, the key here is to shift the policy analytic focus from the economic logic of capitalist relations to the institutional (actually, cybernetic) logic of requisite variety in critical infrastructures found not just under capitalism.

To see how this works by way of implications, focus on the most important finding in the current pastoralist literature. Yes, pastoralists are being displaced from their past herding sites by land encroachment, sedentarization, and climate change, among other economic factors. But the three narratives compel us to first answer much more specifically: So what?

Focus on that subgroup of displaced pastoralists who are reliability professionals, namely those networks of pastoralists (if any) who are skilled in systemwide pattern recognition and localized scenario formulation. One major question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government and international agencies to address this displacement (e.g., see Bürgisser 2023).

That is, where are the policies and management protocols to: (1) compensate such skilled herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill these herders further in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?

By way of answer, I am aware of no such national policies. Yet, it’s precisely these missing pieces that should be on the UN agenda for the 2026 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.

Lastly, the three narratives suggest we spend more time asking ourselves and others, “What is it that we don’t hear in official or formal discussions of pastoralist development but should now expect to?” My list includes the following three:

–“We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity!”

–Pastoralists explain their responses to government, donors and NGOs this way: “We corrected a few things on the ground. Our job, after all, is to protect you.”

–“We refuse to play the game that starts with tables and numbers of livestock. Why? Because the follow-on question, almost immediately, is: ‘Who owns the livestock?’ and, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: ‘But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?’ Which in turn becomes: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities!’ As if the most ethical response weren’t to first determine more effective ways to think about this than one starting with counts of livestock owned and held.

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Additional References

Bürgisser, R. 2023. Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace. JRC Working Papers Series on Social Classes in the Digital Age 2023/04. European Commission, Seville (accessed online at https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130830)

Duffield, M. and N. Stockton 2023. “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” Review of African Political Economy (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679)

Hoffmann E., N. Schareika, C. Dittrich, E. Schlecht, D. Sauer, and A. Buerkert 2023. “Rurbanity: a concept for the interdisciplinary study of rural–urban transformation” Sustainability Science (accessed online at
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01331-2)

Roe, E. 2020a. A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals andS Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, Brighton: STEPS Centre (accessed online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/)

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

———. 2023. “The global infrastructure of pastoralist systems.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2023/06/09/the-global-infrastructure-of-pastoralist-systems/)

———. 2026. “Rethinking pastoralists’ development from their perspective of disasters-averted.” Pastoralism 16 (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.15551)

1. The problem of prediction

Start with mess

Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysis and public management, which is full of wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, policy fiascos, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, coping agencies, crisis management, groupthink, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism called, simply, implementation.

The more mess there is, the more reliability decisionmakers want; but the more reliable we try to be, the more mess produced. The more decisionmakers try to design their way out of policy messes, the messier actual policy implementation gets; but the messier the operations at the micro level, the more decisionmakers seek solutions at the macro level. This metastasizing feedback cycle does not augur well for the future and predicting that future becomes much of the mess we are now in.

What then is predictably unimaginable?

In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.

Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.

Current practice is we start with the worst-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.

Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to even think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge. In this way, we approach a “predictably unimaginable” that is not oxymoronic.

But you have to remember that imagining is not predicting, and both are downstream of the case-specific granularity

–-Consider the following 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 has also been 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.

–-The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen, now and ahead.

I wager that no reader primed as above asks first: “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?”

That is, no one, I wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next here?” 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 the quoted example predicts the need to do something with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am instead suggesting that really-existing accomplishments that happen next and at that site go to reframe the pertinent issues. People already understand what are case-specific accomplishments in ways that broader progress and success are understood by others only later on.

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2. The problem of crisis scenarios

“We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency” (Denise Levertov, poet, 1967)

But which is our #1 global crisis? I could pick recent articles from any well-known media outlet. That I choose the online Guardian is not intended to single it out as worse. It’s just that these four competing examples came at around the same time there:

• Here is Francine Prose, former president of PEN, saying that the Trump authoritarian turn is the our number 1 gravest threat today– https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/america-feels-like-a-country-on-the-brink-of-an-authoritarian-takeover.
• Here is George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, saying it’s not Trump, but global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that deserve the global attention–https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security.
• But no, someone else says it’s actually overshooting the 1.5C of warming that is the global unprecedented crisis– https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/26/number-of-people-living-in-extreme-heat-to-double-by-2050-if-2c-rise-occurs-study-finds
• And there is the polycrisis crowd that insists all of this and more are interactively interconnected into one mega, numero uno constellation of sub-crises–https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped

With so many #1 crises competing for attention, which to choose? The fact is that there is no choice to be made.

Not one of the four is at a level of granularity with which to assess whether this #1 is more hazardous than the other #1’s and under what conditions. This is particularly true as the hazards are in terms of uncertainties (i.e., their respective unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.)

Crises of course can be reported in short- or long-form media articles. But in the same way that no decisionmaker should want to take a policy decision on the basis of one piece of information only, so too should decisionmakers treat “this is our number 1 crisis” as one piece of the needed. Real-time action is taken for more granular, context-based reasons.

For example, the creators of AI may have a variety of crisis scenarios about the downside of AI. But when they say that the AI scenarios pose threat-equivalents to nuclear war or worse, you need to remind yourself that they have no equivalent level of detail for the latter as they do the former. In fact, they might be the last people on Earth you’d ask for nuclear war scenarios.

So what? So: Stop fossil fuel; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense expansion; stop imperialism; stop techno-solutionism; be small-d democratic, small-p participatory and big-T transformative; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; renew cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religion, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and

Keep going on and it sounds like crisis kitsch.

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3. The problem with economists

I

When rolling electrical blackouts take place, we policy analysts ask our friends, the economists, why.

After a blackout, one tells us it was because of all that underinvestment in the transmission grid you get when treating the grid as a public good. During a blackout, another assures us that having to shed load reflects the negative externalities associated with prices not reflecting electricity’s full cost to consumers, who “thus” over-consume and overload power lines.

Before a blackout, a different economist says energy deregulation will guarantee the reliability we want because it reflects the Efficient Market Hypothesis–remember, the idea that won a Nobel Prize–where nothing can be better than market prices in reflecting what is known about energy supply and demand, like our willingness to pay for transmission.

To which still another adds: Whether or not there is a blackout at all, rational expectations theory–remember, the idea that won another Nobel Prize–tells us that policy interventions are ineffective anyway.

If we aren’t sufficiently convinced and press our colleagues about what we should do to prevent blackouts altogether, they tell us not to worry—as long as electricity services are in market equilibrium, with reserve margins optimal, everything is okay.

II

Not quite granular enough for reliability professionals–but, hey, why ask economists at all? They’ll tell you no one listens to them anyway.

“Energy deregulation was never really tried,” they insist. Society never reallyReally adopted thorough-going cost-benefit analysis, economics in law, market designs engineered for efficiency, and far greater use of randomized controlled trials.

And when an economic market design is adopted whole hog, we have the 2021 Texas power and grid debacle: In the view of the Harvard economist who designed it, the energy market “worked as designed.” “It’s not convenient,” he added, “It’s not nice. It’s necessary.”

All of which is a bit like wanting to believe the Cultural Revolution would have succeeded if only Madame Mao and the Gang of Four were really given the chance. This is not what policy analysts who are reliability-seeking aspire to.

Pastoralists take stock of their respective and various situations. Situations, to adapt one definition, are experiences undergone by pastoralists in which things that matter to them unfold in real time. Taking stock means appraising how to interpret these experiences for their next steps ahead. Since situations are based in experience and in the uncertainties of ex ante appraisal, few if any of these situations are strictly identical. As such, different situations can pose different constraints on pastoralist behavior, and in doing so, pose their own situational affordances, as when: “Anything that privileges one line of action over another is a constraint.”

So what?

Well, first of all, not all pastoralist situations are crises or crisis narratives. Situations “may preexist the beginning of a narrative, serve as an opening premise, or emerge at any time, and they may or may not come to an end.” It is true, however, that the constraints and affordances of a situation relate to stakes faced by pastoralists, either individually or collectively, i.e.: “situations generally require at least two elements in relation with something at stake. A desert is a setting, but a hiker lost in a desert is a situation.”

Since time and space are always at stake, situations of waiting pose a continuing issue for pastoralists. The significance of this point requires us to first recognize that immediate situations and inescapable contexts are not the same: “Context is a category of remote understanding; situation is a category of immediate experience. . .” That difference, in turn, is incredibly relevant for really-existing policy and management:

If in some sense a situation, to be a situation, is always at hand, then it is also the case that when a situation gets out of hand, the externality of that out has nothing to do with the position of interpretive mastery that projects an explanatory context. . .Global states of affairs like capitalism or climate change, which remain readily available as contexts, attract the term situation insofar as one wants to emphasize high stakes, urgency, and indeed the ways that they are getting out of hand.

That is to say, it is we–even if not they–who assert that the operative explanatory contexts are climate change and capitalism for the situations undoubtedly experienced by pastoralists around high stakes, urgency and things getting out of hand. This means there is the risk of complacency in reverting to explanation-by-broad-contexts that must be avoided when assessing pastoralist appraisals of their immediate situations. Suffice it to say, their waiting is more granular and variable in situations than in the contexts we stipulate for them.

We outsiders may of course want to differentiate their waiting in terms of formal identity categories of age, gender, ethnicity, education or wealth and then “show” how elaborations in situations entail elaborations in these categorical terms. But that too is a formalist exercise, more like talking about the formal economy than the informal ones right there and now. (A more informalist view, for example, would consider real-time herd/er mobility as also the management of waiting–managed in fact because the latter has both positive and negative affordances then. It’s even true: Waiting is still an occupation, put Italian author Cesare Pavese.)

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The above is a different take on the “relational” from my narrative and infrastructural approaches. It uses and extends a wonderfully suggestive article (all errors of interpretation are my own!): M. Frank, K. Pask, and N. Schantz (2024). “Situation: A narrative concept.” Critical Inquiry 50(4): 659 – 676.

But what precisely is capitalism? Today, critics think of surveillance capitalism or woke capitalism, vulture capitalism, casino capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, racial capitalism, or geographic variants: Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Asian capitalism, Rhineland capitalism, Nordic capitalism, Confucian capitalism and, of course, global capitalism. (https://www.the-tls.com/politics-society/economics/capitalism-sven-beckert-book-review-harold-james)

I

Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and operationalize. That is: “Under capitalism” means that even in always-late capitalism, we also have

laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, bourgeois capitalism, patrimonial capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, cannibal capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, cloud capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, aspirational capitalism, welfare capitalism, compliance capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, regulatory capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, agrarian capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, cybernetic capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .

Oh hell, just stop there. Much of this proliferation looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway (and by the way “the presence of markets” is NOT a uniform shared feature of the listed terms).

Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list—namely the above—without number?

Or from the other direction, some of the terms do seek to denote specific contexts and levels of granularity and commonalities across cases. But, as others do not, what then does being “anti-capitalist” actually mean? (And what about all the open-ended permutations and mutations, e.g., the digital racial capitalist society, etc?)

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2. One answer: Anti-capitalism depends on taking the losers in any such list seriously.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).” But even if true, is the implication that at least some of the capitalisms listed above were “better” then than now?

For example, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad? Didn’t many of our parents and grandparents suffer under conditions of capitalism all along just as we are?

Yet any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of “its” death rattle but of the vitality in morphing through losers after losers after losers? That is, it’s the losers in the above list that first need to be differentiated and tracked.

3. The upshot: Superfluidity of terms in #1 hides a superfluidity of capitalisms’ losers in #2.

So what? According to the Hicks-Kaldor compensation principle, it’s good enough when an economic change means its winners would be better off even if they could compensate the losers of this change. The notion that actual compensation does not need to take place over the course of this history of different losers and losses is now more ludicrous than even imagined initially. To be anti-capitalist is today to be anti anything like Hicks-Kaldor.

We cannot even imagine a happy world in which winners might not be hateful. Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken. (Natalia Ginsburg, 1970, accessed online at https://www.equator.org/articles/our-monstrous-ideas-natalia-ginzburg)