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
We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency. DENISE LEVERTOV, poet; 1967
I
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:
With so many #1 crises competing for our attention, which to choose?
II
The fact of the matter is that there is no choice. 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 information. Real-time action is taken for more granular, context-based reasons. The creators of AI may have a variety of crisis scenarios about the downside of AI. But when the creators say that these scenarios pose threat-equivalent 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.
. . .the 21 year old Korean pianist, Yunchan Lim, established what will be a reference performance for Schumann’s piano concerto at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, two Sundays ago:
Paramilitary officers stationed down Mount Alebban kept the [Moroccan] villagers in check, documenting every move up and down the mount by protestors and clandestine visitors. Signs and banners were drawn on walls and floors at the camp, and sculpted on rocks, producing the [camp] as a site of resistance and refusal: ‘We refuse the depletion of our resources’, ‘we refuse‘ to bow’, ‘this is our land’, ‘we have rights’, ‘we are not leaving’. . .
To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726
And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical beginning
[Maurice] Blanchot contributed a short text entitled “The Refusal.” “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight”. . . Blanchot refused. He said no. A “firm, unwavering, strict” no. Blanchot not only rejected de Gaulle, but politics in general. It was what he later described as “a total critique,” directed against the techno-political order of politics and the state. . . .
Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .
[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)
Huh?A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal
This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. . . .
The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:
Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter? Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave. Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar). Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Syria. We want to live in a people’s democracy. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Italy.
. . . even though theories of liberal deliberative democracy either historicize or imagine people connecting with an abstracted concept of the public through the affordances of literacy, capitalism, and technological advancement, the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)
Another way of looking at this
It’s those different worldviews in “What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews” that call to mind the cultural theory of the late Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas.
For them and their students, different worldviews consist of four basic cultures: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist. Each is defined by where people locate themselves in terms of the degree of social constraints and prescriptions they face (‘‘grid’’, high and low; strong or weak) and the degree of group cohesion with which they act (‘‘group’’, high and low; strong or weak).
“Each way of life needs each of its rivals, either to make up for its deficiencies, or to exploit, or to define itself against” Were high group/low grid egalitarians to eliminate low-group/low grid individualists, for instance, “their lack of a target to be against would remove the justification for their strong [high] group boundary and thus undermine their way of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 4). Or to take the meeting participants in the Tunisian case: While in conventional culture terms they are all Muslims, they could be redescribed as differing in basic worldviews, some being more individualist (the principal questioner) or hierarchical (the facilitators) than others.
What is of interest to us here, though, is that shared tangency among the four cultures where they meet together in the two-by-two typology. “For a few individuals there is a fifth possible way of life, one in which the individual withdraws from coercive or manipulative social involvement altogether. This is the way of life of the hermit, who escapes social control by refusing to control others or to be controlled by others…” (Ibid, 7). While the terms, “withdraws” and “refusing,” capture what we have been discussing, that term, “hermit,” misleads. Those at the meeting know enough about their neighbors different worldviews to know what to withdraw from and refuse to talk about. They’ve already reached the point of knowing when worldviews are incommensurable. (If you think that latter point is depressing, keep in mind that one major reason why Wildavsky, a senior US political scientist, took such an interest in cultural theory was because it kept alive the notion of pluralism.)
So what?
Sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.
The opposite of tolerance as just defined isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.
What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia and other cases.
In its most policy-relevant sense, this kind of caring centers on maintenance and repair of the public sphere. It is knowing enough about others to know that saying to them, “Good God, man, get a grip; we’re adults here,” gets you nowhere, while knowing all the time that these ensuing areas of non-discussion leave the remaining public sphere in need of constant repair. Some might call this repair arising from refusal, tact (see Russell 2018, 1 – 11).
It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us (Stevenson 2017, 106). We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another.
(Other sources:
Russell, D. (2018). Tact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.)
In the above figure, the cost of a disturbance and the cost of its response (the arrows on the right and top] mirror the typology’s horizontal and vertical dimensions (on the left and bottom). As the disturbance severity grows larger, for example, so too is its parallel disturbance cost shown to increase.
Yet methodologically the dimensions of the degree of response change and the severity of disturbance are to be independent of each other. Consequently, as the two costs are manifestly correlated and interdependent, the immediate implication is that the two dimensions are not in fact independent.
So what? Well, one thing this means is that the cost ranking, in particular, from low to high of cope, adapt and transform resilience strategies is not presumptively as shown. That is, you can imagine (if not identify) cases where incremental adapting was less costly than indefinite coping or where transformation was not radically (more) costly.
Source
Roig Boixeda, P., E. Corbera, and J. Loos (2025). “Navigating a global crisis: impacts, responses, resilience, and the missed opportunity of African protected areas during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Ecology and Society 30(4):28. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16352-300428
We are told to go beyond the enclosures of genre. My preferred way of doing so means working across a wide horizon where genre differences recast enclosed narratives, e.g.:
The artist, collector and critic Roger de Piles presented a defence of painting as make-up (la fard) in his 1708 Cours de peinture par principes. . .Piles argued that ‘it is well known that all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive, and that the greatest deceiver in this art, is the greatest painter’.
Or to bring the point home, I may say this practice is evidence-based, while you insist that all such evidence is little more or less than testimony of someone or another–and we know the limits of eyewitness testimony! But “testimony” itself is a differentiated genre and can have cross-genre synergies that are policy relevant. Brazil’s leading literary critic, Roberto Schwarz, describes a play of his:
The most striking formal feature of the play, in my view, is the length of the characters’ lines. They don’t stop at the point that psychology or the art of realistic dialogue might dictate. They only end when their reasoning is complete. This turns some of them into miniature essays. The play becomes a sort of cantata of counterposed viewpoints, spoken or shouted at each other, on the brink of social transformation, in a space of crisis and public argument that transcends psychological theatre and the bourgeois view of life. The issues at stake decompose the individual, go beyond him, exceed him.
(One early boss insisted my official correspondence should have sentences no longer than seven words or 13 syllables, when writing to him at headquarters.)
In other words, grabbing one practice to reinterpret another practice from elsewhere also means reminding oneself of intra-genre differences. And with those differences come limitations. Postcards are a genre, but they really don’t do well in reducing paintings and sculptures to the same size for comparison’s sake. Or to keep to my point, if by “evidence-based” I reduce my comparison through one and only one method or framing, then I must at the same time admit the policy and management limitations, often evidential in their own right, of doing so. (This is why I agree with those who say the real contribution of social sciences is the mixed methods sample survey.)
From another direction, recasting is the policy analyst’s curatorial exercise of assembling not only new installations, but also reinstallations–both of which defamiliarize in order to create a new viewing public or reanimate an existing one. And let’s not forget that this curatorial function of (re)installation can be improvisational as in bricolage:
. . .the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were forced to practise bricolage after the accident caused by the earthquake in Japan on 11 March 2011. In order to try to mitigate the effects of the accident, the plant’s operators working in Reactor 1 engaged in multiple acts of bricolage, diverting the functions of whatever was at hand to address the situation. For instance, as their monitoring system had ceased to function, they diagnosed the state of the reactor using sounds, and the colour of steam, as this was their only option. Likewise, as the water pipes inside the nuclear plant were no longer working, they had to change the function of a diesel pump so that it would pump water directly into the reactor.
It was argued that for the classical ballerina, “every posture of her dance must be so natural and full of taste that any moment of it could serve as a model for an artist or sculptor.”
So too in policy we find professionals even today calling for blueprints and implementation according to the plan. But just as ballet, painting and sculpture are different genres, so too the stages of the now classic policy cycle–agenda setting, policy formulation, adoption, implementation (including operations), and evaluation–are themselves different genres. This difference is why “implementation”–let alone really-existing versions of the other stages–is easily a permanent critique of something as abstract as “a policy cycle.” (There’s no little irony that the early promoters of the policy cycle thought it a more professional way of describing what others up to that point considered low and meaning cunning in “the politics of the budgetary process.”)
So what? Implementation is often said to be defacto policymaking, in the sense that operations make the real policy on the ground. That, however, misses implementation and “policy-making” being different genres, the importance of which is that implementation offers the prospect of a different closure (beginning–middle–end) than, say, setting the agenda and initial policy formulation–or for that matter, evaluation. Which leads us to the next point.
III
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .
Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.
For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation/operations about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.
That policy instead is the music and that implementers/operators are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. So too that evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.
Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its operations is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, think of repair and maintenance as part and parcel of formal and informal evaluations. Yes, even classical ballet had no stable choreography, yet how still to separate the dancer from the dance when performance is not just evolving maintenance but also its own kind of repair?
IV
In explaining how he came to write his 2024 Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, Edwin Frank offers this background,
My thoughts turned again to the Russian novel, and the way it had made such an extraordinary impression on the literature of the world almost entirely in translation. “In translation” was the key, opening the way into the story of the novel, which was, as I suddenly saw it, a story of translation in the largest sense, not only from language to language and place to place but more broadly as the translation of lived reality into written form, something the expansive and adaptable form of the novel had from the start been uniquely open to, which the last century had provided the perfect—what?—petri dish in which it could further develop. On one hand, the twentieth century had been a century of staggering transformation—world war, revolution, women voting, empires falling, cities sprawling, expanded life spans and lives cut short, mass media, genocide, the threat of nuclear extinction, civil and human rights, and so on—a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description. On the other hand we had the novel, emerging from the nineteenth century as a robust presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook up. Hadn’t the two, as the phrase goes, been made for each other?
It’s difficult for me not to see “development” in just these terms. Development remains consumed by twentieth-century languages of transformation, a hangover (yes, the intention is to jar) from a century of already great transformations. And yet development remains what it has always been, the translation of lived reality into reduced forms that look like stories with beginnings, middles and ends, albeit your fiction their non-fiction; your performance their performance.
V
Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the realism I know and experience. For those of us stuck in this unstable in-between, it’s an irony that we are not comfortable, let alone happy, with one future only. There must be multiple futures and choices, stuck as we are indefinitely in the here and now.
And the way we create these futures is to stay in a present that is so complex it cannot be interpreted one way only. This means no one genre is good enough for recasting forward the present. Roberto Schwartz in another essay provides a very pertinent example of this:
In Endgame, [Samuel] Beckett modifies the status of slapstick comedy, making it say something unexpected. As a genre, slapstick expresses a derisory vision of humanity—but as one view among others, with which it normally coexists. There are tragedies, serious dramas, light comedies, and each carries its own assessment of the human being. What did Beckett do? He took slapstick, and rather than conceiving of it as one genre among others, attempted to demonstrate that humanity today resembles its vision more than anything else. In doing so, slapstick ceased to be a conventional genre and paradoxically acquired the privileged function of realism, upsetting the established order of precedence.
Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that only a mad prince orders the seas to be thrashed. But press “forward,” and that’s what our princes do today. That slapstick is realism.
VI
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?”
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 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. It is also to remind us that favored phrases, like “emergence,” should not be assumed to denote the up-thrusting of something organically new but the loss, the profound loss and absence, of what had been there.
II
I recently came across a far better illustration of the palimpsest violence and the analyst’s duty of care than I could 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.
In the era of Trump, you can’t help but feel a bit like Bruno Latour ending up having to defend climate change against the argument that it’s all socially constructed. Today the media report that the US Environmental Protection Agency has suspended use of a dollar value on a statistical life in its pollution cases. I remember way back when this was first introduced, making the same objection: You can’t give human life a price!
No, I am not now, nor was I anachronistically then, in the camp of Trumplethinskin and his dwarves.
Of course, I can appeal to all the standard defenses: It was commodification we were objecting to, Trump’s real reasons for the reversal are venal and punitive, it’s better to keep to a flawed practice than go without it, etc. etc. But it was always—is still always—the case that the burden of coming up with better appraisal techniques, and one that did not ride on the dollar value of a statistical life foregone, was on those of us who objected.
If the EPA goes ahead with this, it’s our duty of care to have better alternatives head.
The most telling feature of present-day crisis thinking is that it’s doubled. Not only are we said to be at the crossroads of so many dire consequences (think Woody Allen’s quip: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly”). But it’s worse than that.
We’re also temporizing while in the crossroads. We’re deluding ourselves with getting by, coping, delaying and waiting. As if the longer we can suspend choice, the greater chance the crossroads will go away. As if these were only rumors to be waited out.
So whether we find ourselves at the last set, but always increasing number, of crossroads or procrastinating with no real escape route. The polycrisis of interconnected crises–that singular noun for multiple phenomena–is fast becoming its own plural, polycrises.
To summarize and recast, our problem is not only crisis-thinking but also its hackneyed metaphors–all those crossroads, all that tarrying while Rome burns, really?
To puncture this thinking requires you to ask: But what about the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems? Do they—both the people and the accomplishments—count for little or zilch, even when terms like “progress” and “success” are no longer as useful? What do we do with the developmentfact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it is does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, even with setbacks, when it matters most”?
When people improvise in order to accomplish, then reducing that to coping and the sub-par seems to me one crisis too many. Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet and novelist, is reported to have said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.
II
So what?
Pose questions that offer up new metaphors on the principle that to change reality is at least to change the metaphors that last. Roberto Schwartz, the great Brazilian literary critic, recently described a play of his that tried to interrogate the certainties and contradictions in popular culture:
The problems are numerous: are cultural niches and racial quotas tantamount to prisons? Does a samba school band deserve the Nobel Prize? Is poverty picturesque, shameful, a solvable problem, a crucial world issue? The favela: rather than backward, don’t we all know that it’s the future of humanity? What are its teachings? Is popular culture revolutionary? Is individual success a betrayal? Does the favelado artist compete with contemporary art on an equal footing? Does it compete with him? The proliferation of questions and the critical freedom to confront them don’t guarantee a solution, but they bring fresh air and enjoyment.
Now we wouldn’t typically notice the accomplishments of “fresh air” and “enjoyment” while in the multiple crossroads of planetary polycrises.
But—and this is the thought experiment—if Schwartz’s questions are the ones we could be asking not only in Brazil but also everywhere, then the analyses of everywhere else is, importantly, with respect to samba school bands, the favela, and individual success as betrayal of collective efforts to address poverty variously defined. My wager is that out of these comparisons emerge not only new questions that defamiliarize both what is considered intractable in some places and terms like success/failure, which it turn out don’t get us far enough in a world where failure is not empty of accomplishments and success is not empty of setbacks.
Ecologists have for years studied social-ecological systems, like ecosystems and landscapes; at the same time organization theorists have investigated socio-technical systems, like electricity grids and other critical infrastructures. Because some of the latter are grounded in some of the former (think watersheds and hydro-power), it’s not surprising that conceptual understanding in these different disciplines overlap. In particular, it’s a fairly easy matter to find each highlighting social complexity and system interconnectivities (see Sources for a sample).
What is more surprising, in my view, are key differences, “key” in the sense that their respective policy and management implications differ so. I know far more about critical infrastructures than I do about ecosystems, but I have published about the latter and continue to read relevant literature. What follows are, I believe, well-informed observations, but I welcome correction of these opinions.
Finally, the two major differences identified should not be interpreted as challenging or disparageing the huge overlap between the social-ecological and socio-technical literatures with which I am familiar. A focus on overlaps and their implications for policy and management awaits a longer venue.
II
Ecologists frequently talk about tipping points in systems that have not been (or could not be) managed properly. The human-dominated ecosystem flips from one state into another (and anyone who doubts this is happening hasn’t been following the climate emergency). The new state can and often looks little like the immediately preceding one.
It is also common to talk about large critical infrastructures (again, think of large water supplies) “flipping into systemwide failure,” where operations during systemwide failure look nothing like “normal” that preceded it. But organization theorists are just as interested in the drift of operators away from shared situational awareness and common operating picture of their system that may precipitate outright failure later on. I do not know of any comparable ecological literature on real-time ecologists, e.g., working in the field on ecological restoration or ecosystem design projects, who drift over time from better practices identified across a run of diverse cases in their respective fields.
That focus on real time also differs between the social-ecological and socio-technical. The difference ironically stems from a common assumption shared by both: namely, the respective systems are no longer (if they ever were) stationary: They are dynamic and fast changing. Some ecologists take the lesson to be that the options horizon is necessarily the longer term over which to be more adaptable and flexible. Some organization theorists, in contrast, take the lesson to be that if you can manage more reliably and safely in real time, right now when it matters, why believe those who say they can do better over the longer-term? Again, there may be a track record about which I do not know of staff and consulting ecologists who have been brought into infrastructure control rooms or their immediate wraparound support units in order to provide real-time advice.
III
So what?
It’s inconceivable to me that the two different approaches, each of which share common assumptions about really-existing complexity and interdependencies and each of which promotes interdisciplinary research and boundary work, don’t collaborate more. It is no longer useful for ecologists to refer to critical infrastructures as “engineered” systems when manifestly they are socio-technical throughout and where that “socio” continues to considerably overlap with the “social” in social-ecological.
Nor is it useful for organization theorists to ignore that the mandate of critical infrastructures is to square as much of the circle of service reliability and ecological restoration, at least in real time. And given the priority both disciplines assign to variation and diversity—called requisite variety in organization theory and response diversity in ecology—you’d expect far more cross-references than I have found to date.
So too would you think that given the shared emphasis on “transformation”—long-term regime transformation from the ecological side, real-time transformation of high input variability into low and stable output from the organizational side—there would be more interchange, especially when the center of analytic and normative attention shifts to capacious (essentially contested?) concepts like “governance,” as it now often does in both approaches.
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WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 