A good deal of my policy analysis has been informed by semiotics and narratology, or at least the following traces. Someone interested in wicked policy problems (hint-hint: they are said to have no beginning or end) is understandably attracted to small-m metanarratives already in the public’s sociolect that can–no guarantees!–recast these problems into more tractable problems without reducing their complexity. Here the search is for what Riffaterre called the intertext(s), which can account for contradictions without dismissing the complexities of the competing stories.
For example, rising sea levels are frequently credited with increased salinization of the coasts. But that narrative has to be pushed much further to be relevant for global climate change. For another story out there today, the GCC modelers’ story, is that rising sea levels also cause increased storm surges and inland flooding (from the increased inland rainfall). When pushed further, the policy implications change (i.e., seawalls to stop coastal salinization and erosion can only be part of the response, as what is to happen to storm surges and inland flooding in those coastal areas now targeted beyond the ends of the seawall?)
So the policy analyst asks, like Lenin, What is to be done? What are the intertext(s) that could account for the modelers’ story and all the other stories, for good or bad, about global climate change? Riffaterre’s intertext is much like the way Greimas’s node of “both a and not-a hold at the same time” has been formulated for his semiotic square. To my mind, we are also searching for any policy relevant metanarratives around the “neither a nor not-a” node. That is, are there other language games already out there which would describe what is going on without reducing the complexity of all this, but which really isn’t about “global climate change” as currently described and problematized?
That is why, by way of answer, I remain interested in novels. Even the doomer-lit remains a fraction of what is being written about in novels: namely, the messy ways we live. (Russ Ackoff, the organization theorist, argued: Predicting the future is the mess we are in today.) Novels aren’t policy relevant because they offer or prefigure blueprints for the future; they are policy relevant precisely because of the priority they give to the “neither-nor” node of semantic reality.
In my profession, policy analysis and public management, theory and method aren’t separate when it comes to actual, really-existing practices. Theory and method are unavoidably fused for practitioners with whom I’ve worked.
This would be a banal observation if it weren’t for the fact that many practices mean many methods-cum-theories, and the virtue of the many is having more means to reframe, redescribe, recalibrate, revise, readjust, repurpose, rescript, recalibrate, reorient–in a word, recast–difficult policy and management issues. No guarantees, but you get the point: A little theory, as it has been said, can go a long way in practice, and the many methodological considerations across them can take you even further.
Below are fifteen different examples of what this means by way of practice:
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis
6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual
9. What “calling for increased granularity” means
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
12.The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters
13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
14. As the dimensions of a two-by-two typology are meant to be independent, what then to make of this figure?
15. Why the difference matters between ultimate and proximate causes: an example
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
I
A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement there.
That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed, the author stated, was a country-wide land reform.
Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!
This was my introduction to “solutions” in search of problems they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”
II
Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers you asking:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management
I
Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.
In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions that are already orthogonal, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.
Everyone triangulates, ranging from cross-checking of sources to formal use of varied methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of divergent stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are common examples.
Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can actually do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.
II
Return now to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.
Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.
To triangulate asks what, if anything, has persisted or survived in the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that the issue has undergone over time up to the point of analysis. Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple and widely diverse metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case in its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
I bolded the preceding because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.
The methodological problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is any misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.
II
But we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.
The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.
Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.
A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.
III
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I came across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:
Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishes this stuff!”
But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and, most importantly, counter-examples.
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:
Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.
Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.
The goal should remain zero.
It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
Upshot: If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis
Consider the following example (my bolding):
Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies canpotentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war couldbe pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict couldbe over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, software, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict couldbe unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization couldbe over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potentialcould involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .
States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”
The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to “must” would mean that the article–and like ones–began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those could-events and might-be’s.
6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”
I just read an article [1] that demonstrated how the climate and capitalism crises need to be analyzed together in order to better address how emotions such as anxiety and burnout with respect to each crisis are highly interconnected.
I agree. But I worry how readers might conflate advocacy and analysis.
I agree with the author that so much could help improve the situation: “these insights could be deepened by placing them in the context of the care crisis of neoliberal capitalism”; “such reforms could help create the preconditions for deeper post-capitalist transformation”; and “a ‘polycrisis’ lens might usefully decenter the climate crisis while informing a broader analytic framework and political program”.
But then the author asserts that “this must be a form of polycrisis analysis deeply influenced by Feminist and ecological Marxism”. Also, some could-reforms “must prioritize public transit over private cars, circular economies, and extended producer responsibility to reduce extraction as far as possible”. Indeed and also specifically [my bolding below]:
To a large extent this requires the decommodification of care, involving ‘universal guarantees in place that all people will be entitled to care,’ along with expanding publicly funded childcare, physical and mental healthcare, elderly care, and care for those with disabilities (ibid: 195–196). It also requires revitalizing community infrastructures – like libraries, community centers, parks, and public spaces – that have decayed under decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity (particularly in poor communities) (Rose 2020). More broadly, ending the care crisis requires social programs that dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the emotionally distressing dynamics of debt and unemployment by improving economic security for all.
I have no problem with these requirements! My problem is with the paradox: Conditions are sufficiently uncertain that we cannot say the proposed reforms would actually work, but we are certain enough to say that these proposed reforms entail must-requirements of varying degrees of specificity.
Now there is nothing “illogical” about taking that latter position. It’s what we expect from policy advocacy. This is what policy advocates do; theirs is not to analyze the uncertainties and certainties case-by-case; that’s my job as a practicing policy analyst. Policy analysts of course make recommendations and that is an advocacy of sorts. But they do so in the face of that case-specific determination of what is “sufficiently certain” and “certain enough.” For advocates, the determination is a settled method over the range of cases.
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothing
Why? Because there is no closure rule. Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; be small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and. . .
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual
I
For me, the crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?
What’s at work are the two blades of a scissors. One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations.
Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.
II
For example, consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by do-that-then). But if cities also view their building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among these developers and builders.
That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be obvious.
9. What “calling for increased actionable granularity” means
I
When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for an actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind of abstraction from the get-go.
What then does “actionable granularity” mean?
II
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.
Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.
III
One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.
Where so, there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.
From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or “‘a case’ in its own right.”
I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism deferred to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
Assume the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:
Even with all that detail, it’s fairly easy to critique the above. Do we really believe that well-established evidence and high certainty are as tightly coupled and correlated? In fact, each dimension can be problematized in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.
But the methodological issue at stake here is to compare like to like.
That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:
This latter typology has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies eventually lapsing, it is hypothesized, into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between decisionmaking by majority-rule and by compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.
In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more typologies the better by way of finding something more tractable to policy or management.
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
The paragraph I’ve just read before typing this is bookended by two quotes:
Just before: “Therefore, rather than being schools of democracy, ACs [associative councils] may be spaces where associative and political elites interact and, therefore, just reproduce existing political inequities (Navarro, 2000). Furthermore, these institutions may have limited impact in growing and diversifying the body of citizens making contributions to public debate (Fraser, 1990).”
Just after: “The professionalised model results from a complex combination of inequalities in associationism and a specific type of participation labour. Analysing the qualitative interviews, regulations and documents was fundamental to understanding the underlying logic of selecting professionals as the main components.”
Now try to guess the gist of the paragraph in between. More of the same? Well, no. Six paragraphs from the article’s end emerges an “and-yet” that had been there from the beginning of the article:
Nevertheless, an alternative interpretation of professionalisation should be considered. The fact that ACs perform so poorly in inclusiveness does not mean that they are not valuable for other purposes, such as voicing a plurality of interests in policymaking (Cohen, 2009). In this respect, participants can act as representatives of associations that, in many cases, promote the needs of oppressed and exploited groups (De Graaf et al., 2015; Wampler, 2007). Suffice it to say, for example, that labour unions or migrants’ associations frequently send lawyers or social workers to ACs to defend their needs and positions. Problems with inclusion should not take away from other purposes, that is, struggles to introduce critical issues and redistribution demands to the state agenda. Other studies have already shown that groups make strategic decisions to achieve better negotiation outcomes in the context of technical debates (Grillos, 2022). Thus, the choice of selecting professionals can be a strategy to improve the capacity of pressure in institutional spaces dominated by experts. (my bold; accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251319065)
Methodological upshot: What the counterfactual is to economic analysis, the and-yet counternarratives are to policy analysis.
12. The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters
The large-scale infrastructure is never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and so many more, each claiming a special purchase that demands our attention. A less banal observation is the cross-cutting methodological default line once each discipline poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up further analysis to the global, while others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.
For example, we’re told that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that “policy:” ratcheting up or digging down. So often today the road taken is the former:
In our attempt to understand contemporary archival politics, it would seem much more beneficial to pay attention to the concrete political issues in which community digital archives are involved, such as, for example, armed conflict and civil unrest (e.g. The Mosireen Collective 2024; Syrian Archive 2024; Ukraine War Archive 2024), gender queerness (e.g. Australian Queer Archives 2024; Digitial Transgender Archive 2024; Queer Digital History Project 2024), forced migration (e.g. The Amplification Project 2024; Archivio Memorie Migranti 2024; Living Refugee Archive 2024), post-colonialism (e.g. Talking Objects Lab 2024), rights of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Archivo Digital Indigena 2024; Digital Sami Archives 2024; Mukurtu 2024), racial discrimination (e.g. The Black Archives 2024; Black Digital Archiving 2024), or feminism (e.g. Féminicides (2024); Feminist Archive North 2024, Rise Up 2024).
You may wonder at the methodological finesse taking place in this passage, namely: equating the concrete with the abstract. This transmutation is made easier because it is not really-existing archival practices that the author describes, but rather “the politics of digital archival practice.” Rather than being case-specific, these politics face outward and upward. They’re “political agendas,” not micro-practices. Such is why the author can write he is “attending to the politics of digital archives at the level of concrete archival practices,” while in no way differentiating concrete practices, processes and interactions of each of the bolded categories and how they work themselves out relationally, case by case and over time.
Lesson? Just say you’re talking about politics and you’re taken to be more practical than practical?
I however come from a profession, policy analysis, whose propensity is to dig down rather than to ratchet up analysis, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. The “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important in terms of policy relevance for them alone to determine how to move the analysis forward. To equate policy with politics is to miss practices, processes and interactions that matter.
In the infrastructure case of digital archives, I suspend judgment over the author’s conclusion precisely because no concrete practices of digital archiving are detailed over a range of different cases. Please note: He may well have them at hand and to be clear, I am happy to search out practices that float something in and through passages such as:
Similarly, the temporality of community-based digital archival enterprises seems neither ephemeral nor unfathomable. Rather, it plays a crucial role in rearticulating the historical subjectivities of various Queer, Indigenous, post-colonial, and other marginalized communities. And indeed, such enterprises and the rise of participatory and collaborative archiving can surely also be seen as examples of ‘collectivization’ and ‘socialization’ or even of ‘the dialectics between the individual and the society’–the very conditions of politics and historicity that Étienne Balibar (2024) sees ‘the digital’ as precluding.
13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.
What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer Arnold Schoenberg.)
Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.
While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.
14. As the dimensions of a two-by-two typology are meant to be independent, what then to make of this figure?
In the above figure, the cost of a disturbance and the cost of its response mirror the typology’s vertical and horizontal dimensions. As the disturbance severity grows larger, for example, so too is its parallel cost shown to increase.
Yet methodologically those main 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 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-16352-30042
15. Why the difference matters between ultimate and proximate causes: an example
The [anti-baboon poisoning] campaign’s collateral damage is clearest in the compensation record. In March 1953, for example, two Fulani herders received £50 after losing eighteen cattle and six sheep that drank from a poisoned water hole. Officials marked contaminated sites and instructed Native Authorities to notify village heads and Fulani chiefs, but these precautions were unevenly effective, especially given pastoral mobility and the uneven circulation of information. When doubts arose about whether herders had been adequately warned, token compensation was sometimes paid in the interest of preserving local relations, revealing both the administrative limits and political sensitivities of the campaign.
Of course, colonialism caused this wrongful campaign. But it is also true that the campaign was first proven wrong by the Fulani, and importantly so among others. Actionable granularity for really-existing practices is better found in proximate causes.
Discrepantly, def. “. . .in a discordant or inconsistent manner” The OED also records the word’s first use in English to be from a 1601 translation of Montaigne’s Essays
I
Between you and me, my guilty pleasure is reading histories of ideas. When I read about the evolution of concepts like virtue, liberty, autonomy, the Enlightenment(s), equality, capitalism, the nation-state (or histories of that hyphen), I feel I’m learning something important. At these times, it matters to me that Isaiah Berlin and Jonathan Israel, both historians of ideas, have very different understandings of “the Enlightenment” that matter to them.
But I’m a practicing policy analyst and should know better than to expect anything to be resolved at that level of abstraction. If I’m learning anything, it is learning discrepantly. It’s the discrepancies–and their many varieties–that become unavoidably visible via the comparison and contrast of concepts across a given time and over time.
“All men are created equal,” but its writer still had slaves. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” and its author was free enough to consign his five children to an orphanage. Your culture’s version of the concepts differ from ours as if both sets were something like settled knowledge; but something new always turns up for (re)interpretation–and importantly so both of us are repeatedly told. And then, in case it needs repeating, no major plan–including those for liberty, individual autonomy, Enlightenment, equality and the rest–survives contact with really existing events, situations and contexts.
Some respond to the discrepancies as if they don’t or shouldn’t matter. So what if Jefferson and Rousseau were shits in some roles? So what if our idealized ethics turn situational in practice? Don’t we already have more than enough proof that ideas have independently affected human history?
II
The problem I have with that last question is I’m being asked once again to go off running to levels of abstraction in which I love to thrash about but find still insufficient even when not misleading. Why? Because there is always a knowledge-into-action gap between macro-principle guiding policy and management and micro-operations in implementing or executing policy and management on the ground. Macro-principles do not on their own determine every micro-operation on their own. It takes really-existing practices and skill–particularly those of recognizing system patterns and formulating localized scenarios–to maneuver through the intervening contingencies and conjunctures so as to connect the two poles. And even then there are no guarantees.
That focus on really-existing practices and skill in managing to realize missions and objectives is extremely important. Philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Michael Oakeshott stressed the importance of thinking adverbially. It’s not democracy as a set of macro-principles we are talking about but what it means to act and behave democratically (and not just individually at the micro-level). Do those practices include voting, free speech, assembly or not? If so, how? If not, what practices are denominated when saying people “behave democratically”?
Which leads to my main point: Learning discrepantly is a set of practices as well.
It’s not about talking away or otherwise avoiding inconsistencies and discordance between human values and human behavior. I don’t think of the aforementioned discrepancies as stumbling blocks but as affordances. Learning discrepantly is identifying, managing and improvising practices for decisionmaking because of, not in spite of, the messy middle. It’s another way to take seriously complexity in action. (And this is why there’s also some kind of justice in the first use of “discrepantly” in translating Michel Montaigne’s Essays, a book all about persisting in the face of human complexities, contradictions and limits).
III
So what?
What’s the purchase in recognizing that irreducible discrepancies populate policymaking and public management and that ground the complex, conflicted, uncertain and unfinished there? An example illustrates how this plays out in one very topical case today.
IV
I’m hardly the first to have been struck by an analytic tip evolving in my profession, policy analysis: What used to be analyzed primarily at the local, regional and national levels, at least when I started out in the early 1970s, must now be addressed, first and foremost, globally. For example, the historically noted but isolated urban heat island effect has now become part and parcel of global warming discourse. What I was unprepared for was (1) how “the local” has been consigned to analytic oblivion as the analytic tip proceeded and 2) the increasing pressures to “re-localize” (recast) issues at a level of greater granularity where policy and management more tractability can be achieved.
Start with society’s critical infrastructures considered to be both cause of and solution to an important piece of the climate change challenge:
Infrastructures should be understood as plural, active, and dynamic, producing a range of impacts, both planned and unplanned, on the places and societies they traverse and inhabit. These insights reinforce the characterization of infrastructures as socio-technical networks, while their multiple and often ambiguous effects partially challenge the intentionality presumed in [Michael Mann’s 1984] conceptualization of infrastructural power. For example, recent scholarship highlights the unanticipated costs or forms of violence that infrastructures can impose on disenfranchised communities and regions.
The socio-technical nature of infrastructures is clearly reflected in their politicization and contestation, which reveal competing social interests across multiple scales. Commonly regarded as background systems, infrastructures rarely occupy public attention until they fail to meet expectations, whether through malfunction, inadequate supply, or clashes with users’ interests and needs. Increasing attention has also been paid to infrastructures’ negative externalities, or “public bads,” including ecological, social, and psychological harms, revealing both conflicting local perspectives and broader changes in societal priorities and beliefs, as well as new forms of collective identity and agency, manifested in labor strikes, acts of sabotage, or protests. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1368431026145776; internal citations deleted)
To me, these passages represent hard-won insights over years of research: the units and levels of analysis are socio-technical, networks, across scales, contingent on context, and often with unanticipated and unintended impacts.
But then comes the sweeping updraft of global analytic tip in the article’s next sentence:
These dynamics are not confined to the local scale: transnational infrastructures are increasingly implicated in broader geoeconomic contexts, as exemplified by the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes, the shutdown of major Chinese ports under Beijing’s zero-COVID policy, and the disputes surrounding the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Well, yes, that’s true, but still: Just what is happening at the lower scales of analysis and action? Actually, how do really-existing operations of critical infrastructures unfold at the local and regional levels? What, in turn, does climate change look like at these more granular levels of infrastructure operations said to be important for causing and guiding climate change?
Instead, the article, like so many others, is off and running to the international, global and planetary levels–understandably so, since that’s the practice of analytic tip–but: Even if what the article continues to say is just as true as the above quotes, that truth needs to be pushed further. Why? Because variation in inter-infrastructural connectivities at the local and regional levels matterso often and so directlyfor policy and management, not least of which at the level of systemwide critical infrastructures.
To insist or otherwise assume that global interdependencies trump or obviate the need to work with the realities of local and regional variation in the ecological and environmental impacts of inter-infrastructural sequential, mediated and pooled interconnectivities runs deeply counter to effective policy analysis and public management. That local and regional accomplishments do not add up to a comprehensive, interdependent global climate change regime is an unavoidable discrepancy that comes, part and parcel, with the practicing global analytic tip. The response is not (to try) to explain away or otherwise avoid the discrepancy but rather to see what it newly affords by way of recognition, namely: What is positively accomplished locally and regionally necessarily takes more policy-analytic importance in a world repeatedly demonstrated to be messily interconnected.
V
I was first introduced to the policy-narrative importance of discrepancy through the work of French literary theorist, Michael (Michel) Riffaterre, majorly his Fictional Truth (John Hopkins University Press). Applying his idea here, one way to account for something anomalous or contradictory–a discrepancy–in a complex policy issue is to look for other narratives whose reading explains or resolves that inconsistency.
One group of experts insists that instituting carbon taxes still remains the best single option for addressing climate change. Another group insists geoengineering solutions are now the only real alternative left. A metanarrative (intertext) that can explain how both discrepant positions hold at the same time is: The planet must rely on techno-managerial elites, even if they disagree, to come up with climate change solutions that the unwashed billions cannot come up with on their own.
This blog asks you to think of “learning discrepantly” as a planet-wide metanarrative to be applied instead.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that human agency–this collective and individual capacity to determine and make meaning from events, situations, and contexts through purposive analysis, reflection, and improvisation–represents the only real global counternarrative to hegemonic policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised human agency in their dominant narratives and scenarios. Without belaboring the point, degranularization is what our techno-managerial elites are doing when recommending the primary focus on taxing carbon production and consumption or on geoengineering solutions because humans leave Earth no other choice. The human agency discussed here, in contrast, is grounded in the fact that aforementioned discrepancies and like abound everywhere and across scales. Indeed, they are first ontological (think initially of “cognitive biases”) and then over-time political, and it’s only when they are political that they can be recast or treated–regranularized–as actionable affordances.
Human agency wouldn’t be a global counternarrative if we didn’t learn discrepantly.
NB. For more on human agency and power, see my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008
The [anti-baboon poisoning] campaign’s collateral damage is clearest in the compensation record. In March 1953, for example, two Fulani herders received £50 after losing eighteen cattle and six sheep that drank from a poisoned water hole. Officials marked contaminated sites and instructed Native Authorities to notify village heads and Fulani chiefs, but these precautions were unevenly effective, especially given pastoral mobility and the uneven circulation of information. When doubts arose about whether herders had been adequately warned, token compensation was sometimes paid in the interest of preserving local relations, revealing both the administrative limits and political sensitivities of the campaign.
Of course, colonialism caused this wrongful campaign. But it is also true that the campaign was first proven wrong by the Fulani, and importantly so among others.
–What would pastoralist policy look like if gleaned solely from statements in leaked government documents and NGO emails?
–When young herders wait around before, during and after herding, are they functioning like gig workers?
–Water, as they say, is life, and the “r” in “water” is for its reliability. Do people understand then that this means adopting, repurposing and inventing water infrastructures as daily lives necessarily change, and not just for pastoralists?
–If we do not routinely ask pastoralists about their voting behavior, what does that imply about our notions of their citizenship?
–As more than half of the world’s population is now urban, should one of the first tasks of pastoralist research be to differentiate the urban populations in terms of being pro-pastoralist, anti-pastoralist, or otherwise (think of the Gen-Z protesters in Kenya)?
Let me state my conclusion upfront: in the policy and management world I know best, human agency is the only genuinely global counternarrative I’ve encountered.
Because human agency is constrained differently across times, places, and conditions, it plays a more important role than hegemonic or universalized policy narratives like that for human rights. The human agency counternarrative persists — even as dominant policy narratives shift — precisely because it is not tied to any single macro-framework.
First, a working definition: human agency is “an individual’s capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action.” My version emphasizes reflexivity; others might stress self-determination or the capacity to act on one’s environment. Either way, I think the points that follow hold across most reasonable definitions.
II
To clarify what I mean by human agency, consider two examples — one from migration studies, one from research on child labor:
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.
Schapendonk, J. (2021). “Counter moves. Destabilizing the grand narrative of onward migration and secondary movements in Europe.” International Migration: 1 – 14 https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12923
The relationship between young people and organized crime is complex and multifaceted. Young people are victims of acute marginalization, poverty and violence but they do have some agency over their decision making. The data from all studies illustrated how gangs offer young people ways to earn an income but they also provide social mobility, ‘social protection’ (Atkinson- Sheppard, 2017) and ‘street capital.’ In some instances, criminal groups offer young people ways to earn ‘quick and easy money.’ Thus, the young people are not devoid of agency, but their decision making should be considered within the context of restricted and bounded lives.
Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2022). “A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re‐Conceptualizing young people’s involvement in organized crime.” Critical Criminologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09674-5
III
With those examples in mind, let’s first turn to four positions often taken with respect to “human agency.”
There are those who think human agency is among core precepts around which to design large-scale systems involving humans, individually or collectively (think philosopher Kant and “human autonomy”). Others are more apt to focus on the individual or micro-level, where the agent acts under case-specifics. Whether at the macro- or micro-levels, contestation abounds over the term, human agency, if only because of different optics on the micro and macro from psychology, phenomenology, law, economics, and more.
There are, however, two other levels and units of analysis, which are the ones I want to focus on with respect to human agency as the global counternarrative.
Far less mentioned than the micro and the macro are really-existing better practices for realizing human agency–in your or my definitions–that have evolved and over widely different cases. Then there are also the cases where macro-precepts are modified over contingency scenarios that vary subnationally, regionally or more “locally”. In both instances, human agency is better understood as an insistent counternarrative for moving away from the current dominant micro- and macro-level narratives of human agency.
IV
From this vantage point, sweeping claims about human agency applying to or governing all cases are simply unworkable in a world shaped by highly variable system(s) patterns and highly variable local conditions.
Human agency as a counternarrative emerges from a run of different cases; it is not an a priori position from which to assert macro-principles or micro-experience. Human agency in this way becomes sufficiently granular to be actionable when applied and modified to the next case at hand. The limitation of staying at the macro and/or micro positions, e.g., “human rights apply uniformly to every single individual on this planet,” is that these positions degranularize the highly differentiated real-time conditions for taking action between whole system and single person.
An example helps. A recent article “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:
As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)
Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.
Just as I distrust speculative metaphysics, so too I distrust discussions framed around macro-levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a range of events, situations, contexts, and applications. What looks like “resistance to a state-imposed agenda” in one place may look like “the defense of still-evolving practices” somewhere else. Any serious account of human agency as a counternarrative has to be that nuanced if it is to reflect the work in transforming policy and management systems already shaped by macro-principles and a few decision-makers.
The trouble with calls for big-T transformation is not just their gravitational pull toward abstraction. It’s that advocates for such transformations do not sufficiently admit the starting-point legitimacy of really-existing better practices that have evolved but still diverge from master plans. Better a billion small, practice-based just-transitions than the handful currently proclaimed in principle for the globe.
Say, you are a policy analyst tasked by your agency to produce a desk-top report answering, “What’s the risk of flooding in downtown Helsinki due to changing sea levels, storm surges, and inland run-off because of climate change in the next decade or two?”
You look first for existing probability and risk estimates, and not just in official documents but also in the grey literature of engineering and consultants’ reports, including modeling and simulation findings. Unsurprisingly, given the fragmentary findings, you recommend, among other priorities, increasing the resilience of existing flood management and emergency management infrastructures to better respond to the unpredictabilities ahead.
In this iteration, you–and we–start with risk and work our way to calling for more resilience as part of the solution portfolio, especially for the critical infrastructures directly involved in flood and emergency response.
There is a problem,though. The analysis looks very different when you begin with the existing infrastructures, how they are actually managed for the physical systems actually operated on the ground, and then look for the risks (and resiliencies) that come with managing the sociotechnical system(s) that way or those ways, now that changing climate conditions have been posed as above.
II
So return to the starting question: “What’s the risk of flooding in downtown Helsinki due to changing sea levels, storm surges, and inland run-off because of climate change in the next decade or two?”
Questions of risk/resilience are only raised afteranswering two logically and empirically prior questions, if infrastructures start the analysis. First the analyst has to answer:
Q1. What are the infrastructure systems of concern and how are they operated and managed on the ground? It’s of course not just flooding and emergency management infrastructures you are concerned with, but lifeline infrastructures interconnected with the two, not least of which are energy (e.g., electricity), transportation, telecommunications and water supplies (including wastewater). Even more important is the focus on how these systems operate in real time, irrespective of how they are supposed to operate because of design, regulation or technology blueprints.
Q2. What are the standards of reliability and safety to which these systems are actually managed (e.g., if it is managed to a precluded-event standard, what are the events that must never happen—for instance, urban water supplies should not be contaminated by cryptosporidium or LSD, the electricity grid should not island, airplanes should not drop from the sky all over the place)?
Once Q1 and Q2 have been answered and only then does our analyst ask and answer:
Q3. What then are the risks and resiliencies to be managed that follow from meeting these standards for those systems as they operate and interconnect in real time and over time on the ground?
Of course, much of the above (as below) is compressed. Still, it’s safe to say much of the critical infrastructure literature starts with a version of Q3—the risks to be managed (let alone other unpredictabilities)—without answering the two prior questions. Ignoring questions about operational boundaries and standards and starting instead with the third serves to import economic and engineering assumptions about optimal reliability into the analysis that are not empirically correct. When spatial boundaries and reliability standards are not addressed first, it is too easy to reduce “management” to an altogether unrealistic choice: Do I, the decisionmaker, take on more or less risk in light of my optimality criteria? That is one huge way operational mismanagement can and has happened.
III
Now let’s unpack Q2 and Q3 in more useful detail: What are the different standards of reliability and safety? and What are the different risks and resiliencies that follow from these respective standards? What, then, about important interconnections?
1. Infrastructure performance standards and stages (states) of operation.
Our research identified the following four performance standards to which critical infrastructures managed in real time (there could of course be more):
Note that standards are intimately tied to the frequency of different stages of operation in the critical infrastructure: normal or routine operations, sometimes temporarily disrupted and then restored back, at other times tripping over into outright system failure, thereafter responded to urgently as an emergency and eventually to be recovered, from which a new normal may evolve systemwide (though no guarantees!).
In a world of few disruptions let alone outright system failures, normal operations (which are not static!) dominated and were often associated with a precluded events standard of high reliability, i.e., certain events like loss of containment at nuclear reactors, must never happen (think also of those faraway days of the integrated energy utility, where generation could determine transmission and then distribution).
But it may no longer be possible to preclude such events (especially in the infrastructures which this infrastructure depends upon), such that an avoided events standard is adopted. Some dreaded events, on the other hand, may be treated as inevitably creating major infrastructure disruptions or failures (e.g., earthquakes in Indonesia) or can be compensated for in some major safety improvements afterwards (as after Three-Mile Island). (This “compensatory reliability” standard, needless to say, reduces social pressures for a precluded or avoided event standards.)
The take-away point is that the risks and resiliencies to be managed look very different given the standard to be operated to and the stage(s) of operations the (variably interconnected) infrastructure finds itself today.
2. Risks follow from performance standards being managed to.
Below are findings from our research which identified different systemwide risks faced by the central control of a major energy infrastructure, operating under a precluded events standard and depending on the volatility of its task environment and the options available to respond to that volatility:
Under the precluded events standard that the transmission infrastructure must never island, we observed four performance modes of normal operations, ranging from anticipatory exploration of options (just in case) when operations are more routine and many control strategies and options are available, to a real-time (just in time) improvisation of options and strategies when task conditions are unstable (i.e., they are unpredictable or uncontrollable even if predicted). Operators may have to operate temporarily in a high-risk mode (just for now) when system instability is high and options are few.
They may also be able, in emergencies when options have dwindled, to impose onto grid participants a single emergency scenario (just this way) in order to stabilize a situation. These alternative but interrelated performance modes are part of an overall requisite variety of responses needed to match the full range of input variance that operators can encounter in their systems, all for the purposes of reliable output management.
But each performance mode has its own dominant risk from the control room perspective. According to our interviewees, the big risk in just-in-case performance is that someone in the control center is not paying attention to and being complacent with respect to sudden or emerging changes in system volatility or network options variety. “What you want to do is avoid complacency,” a senior utilities control room official said about his operators. When it comes to just-in-time performance, the risk is misjudgment by control operators with so many balls in the air at one time. The great risk in just-this-way performance is that not everyone who must comply will comply with the emergency.
Last but decidedly not least, just-for-now performance (“just keep that online right now!”) is the most unstable performance mode of the four and the one control operators and managers want most to avoid or exit from as soon as they can. Here the risk is tunneling into a course of action without escape alternatives. What you do now could increase the risks later (in effect, options and volatility are no longer independent dimensions). Speaking of a major vessel collision and spill, a support person in the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service noted, “The closer it [a large ship] got to the bridge, the more the options dwindled.” In effect, the few options remaining may be such that to use one risks increasing volatility elsewhere in the infrastructure, if not in the other infrastructures dependent upon it.
Note the major policy and management implication of just-for-now performance. If the real time challenge is to increase options and/or reduce task volatility, the most efficient strategy is to adopt and modify better practices already used by like operators in like just-for-now situations. Crudely put, if they are better able to jump a bar of politics, dollars and jerks like yours, then start from their practices.
The take-away point here is that these are systemwidemanagement risks of key importance to the infrastructure’s real-time operators.They are NOT the specific risks of corroding pipes underground, or underwater seepage of flood levees, or the risks of climate change. Of course, the latter can and do affect task volatility and/or options availability, which however are important precisely when they affect and/or shift the more important systemwide management risks identified above. (Note that the above systemwide risks were observed for infrastructures with central control rooms operating under the avoided events standard.)
3. Types of system resilience vary by stage of infrastructure operations.
Our research identified four specific types of resilience for reliability management at the system level, each varying by stage (or state) of system operations discussed above:
real-time system operators adjusting back to within official or unofficial reliability bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by these real-time operators (restoration resilience);
immediate emergency response (as its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
recovery of the system to a “new normal” by real-time infrastructure operators along with others (recovery resilience)
These four specific types of resilience for reliability management constitute overall systemwide resilience, summarized together as “the system’s capability in the face of its reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities—sometimes called “affordances”—that emerge in real time.”
Please note the implications of this classification. Not only are normal operations NOT static or uniform, resilience options differ depending on whether or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations.
Resilience, here, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. It is not one stable portfolio called “process variance” from which to choose this or that already-existing option depending on the stage of operations. (Again, improvisation in the face of unexpected contingencies and assembly of options just in time are instead found, though never guaranteed.)
Note also that it’s not inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal. It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s sociotechnical systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one disaster after another.
The reality for real-time system operators however, may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability different than the outsiders might think. (One thinks immediately of new media platforms, e.g.: Is the capacity to achieve reliable normal operations in digital platforms—not by precluding or avoiding certain events but by adapting to electronic component failure most anywhere and most all of the time—a key skill set of software professionals and their wraparound support in critical infrastructures for emergency management?)
4. The special importance of inter-infrastructural connectivity during infrastructure failure, immediate emergency response & initial service restoration, and longer-term recovery.
What were latent interconnections between and among infrastructures before a disaster often become manifestly evident in that disaster. The earthquake hits, underground water mains break, leakage spreads first out of sight, and then above-ground sections of the road collapse.
The principal management elements of interest in these changes from latent to manifest infrastructural interconnectivity are: the types of interconnectivity configurations among network elements (sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled between and among infrastructures); the shifts in configurations during failure, response and recovery states (e.g., the road now becomes a firebreak); and the joint improvisations involving more than one infrastructures because the respective control variables of these systems are shared or interconnected (e.g., river navigation, town water supplies, and regional hydro-power depend on changes in related dam water releases and pressures). Here too we see that resiliencies triggered in failure, response and recovery must themselves be differentiated when it comes to practice and interventions.
IV
A final point (for an already overly long blog entry). Much of the above is centered around on-the-ground practices (for infrastructure management and operation in particular). This is because I am a practicing policy analyst by profession–although it might seem a small point to you.
Yet it is a very big point, if your profession or discipline gives pride of place to human values, beliefs and attitudes as determinants of really-existing behavior. I come from a literature which repeatedly finds a low statistical correlation between why people say they act and how they actually act. I come from a profession that constantly asks not what is planned or designed but how it is implemented and operated, full of contingent events, situations and context, notwithstanding the power asymmetries attributed to system operations by outsiders.
In more general and summary terms, the logic of capitalist accumulation has had a clear impact on infrastructure operations over time; the logic of requisite variety has now a clear albeit contingent impact on infrastructure operations in the Anthropocene. The difference between the two is due in large part to shifting infrastructural interconnectivities: then, now and ahead.
NB. The above has been spliced and sutured together from a number of previous publications and blogs. The original research for the above was undertaken and co-authored with my colleague Paul R. Schulman. As such, I am responsible for any misleading simplifications or hydraulic interpretations that have crept into the preceding.
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. Prynnefor 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.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 