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

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

What then might this mean in practice? One place I suggest to start thinking about managed retreat on the West Coast where I live and have done my research is the following:

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

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

Imagine, that is, not a historic retreat and resettlement of peoples from the coastline but rather masses of people who stay behind having nowhere else to go practically and who need indefinite humanitarian aid in order to survive.

–The root cause of unsustainability is often specified in ways that render us oblivious to history: The rationale for irrigated agriculture was to sustain crop production throughout the year; the rationale for burning coal was it generated a manifold increase over energy needed to dig it out.

–There is no little irony in a purely self-interested market approach to deregulated electricity coordination and a purely technology-based approach to decentralized electricity coordination that promises to automate out selfishness.

–Beau Brummell, when questioned by a companion which of the lakes he preferred, reportedly asked his valet, “Which one of the northern lakes do I prefer?” “I believe it is Windermere, sir,” replied the valet. Whereupon Brummell turned to his questioner, “Apparently it is Windermere.” Quite droll—until you realize his “apparently” is indifferent even to drollness. Indifference—this not caring one way or another—is a killer in public policy and management.

–I can’t be the only one struck by the affinity between those 19th century novels whose plots were driven by coincidence after coincidence all the way to a happy ending and today’s crisis narratives where one mistake after another has led to certain disaster.

–The obstinate truth is that the costs to society of confronting limitless disaster scenarios is set by the present danger of ignoring ones easy enough to identify and assess already.

Beliefs are like moods or Stimmungen in the sense that one can begin to believe X, and continue to believe X for some time, but then emerge from believing X into some other state of mind. And (the important point) one finds it as difficult to answer questions about one’s beliefs as to answer questions about one’s moods. Why do I believe X (why am I in mood X)? Why did I stop believing X (why did I emerge from mood X)? All one can say is: Today I am in mood X, but as to what mood I will be in tomorrow I cannot say. Today I believe X, but I cannot guarantee I will still believe X tomorrow. . . .
   Now I turn to your main question, which is: What are my beliefs?. . .My response to this question depends on my mood, as defined above. In my present sanguine mood my answer is yes. I believe that nature is orderly, and that, being part of nature, human beings have intuitions of order, of what a just order (a just natural order, a just social order) will feel like. I believe that non-human animals have intuitions of justice too. Furthermore, I believe that through education our inborn sense of justice can be brought to consciousness, cultivated, and fortified, helping us to distinguish (most of the time, though not always) between right and wrong.
   There you have it: the sketch of a moral philosophy with an antique metaphysical grounding.
   When I am in the opposite kind of mood, on the other hand, I believe that the whole creaky philosophical edifice I have erected for myself is nonsense, and life is nothing but the struggle of all against all.
   The fictions I have written – to conclude my response to your question – are not blocks of thought that can be articulated one with another to constitute a coherent set of beliefs. They are essays, ventures, expressions of the moods that have possessed me at successive stages of my life.

“The Summoning: An Interview with J.M. Coetzee.” Interviewer: Robert Boyers (accessed online at https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/481-the-summoning). The entire interview is a must-read.

Importantly, adaptive capacity [for emergency management] can be facilitated in part by planning and design processes that themselves create prior conditions, such as contacts among diversely skilled people in other infrastructures, robust communications systems and contingent resources in different locations, for restoration actions. In effect, there can be emergency planning process reliability even if the output reliability of subsequent emergency management cannot be predicted or guaranteed.

Paul Schulman, personal communication

I interpret the passage to mean that the mentioned design and planning interventions pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test. That is, robust contact lists, communication systems and distributed inventories, when implemented, are more likely to reduce the task volatility that emergency managers face, increase their options to respond more effectively, and/or enhance their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions. (In case it needs saying, not all design and planning pass the test!)

This notion that there can be reliability in processes to transform inputs into outputs, even if the input variability and output variability of emergency management are not predictable and stable, is incredibly important. Why? Because it shines a bright light on major but under-acknowledged temporal differences key for effective emergency planning and design.

It takes years to seismically retrofit a bridge from start to finish of its planning, funding and implementation. In contrast, a household becoming two-week ready (in terms of having supplies and provisions to last two weeks into the earthquake) is a matter of hours or days. This means the retrofitting of bridges and the implementation of the two-week ready program not only affect the success (or lack) of post-earthquake response. Their prior execution also helps date when planning and design processes started to produce those aforementioned conditions that alter the course (for good or bad) of the unfolding emergency widely visible only after the earthquake happens.

My point is that such mitigation development and implementation prior to the earthquake is measurable with respect to time: Is it in decades, years, months, days or hours? How do these different time horizons vary and congrue by type of mitigation? While no one can reliably predict when the earthquake will occur, it is not clear from our interviews that process reliability as just described is undertaken with an eye to identifying and better managing the different time horizons associated with different pre-disaster mitigations.

Not taking advantage of designing and planning inter-temporal mitigation processes that, together or singly, do increase options and reduce volatility in emergency management is not only a missed opportunity, it is also a correctible error.

Here’s a case in point. Calls by our interviewees for more administrative support to manage and coordinate local emergency preparedness may look like a routine complaint or a small-deal when compared to other city and county priorities. But from the perspective presented here, it is a very big deal in attempting to move the planning and mitigation agenda to identifying and managing latent inter-infrastructural interconnections and vulnerabilities before the earthquake happens.

I

This is based on a true story. Say you are involved in modeling the lifecycle of a listed species. You and your colleagues rightly start out by aiming to develop and then integrate sub-models for: species reproduction; period-to-period, region-based species survival; movements between regions; and juvenile/adult mortality due to exogenous factors, such as human-made disaster.

It doesn’t take long to confirm what you and your colleagues suspected anyway that not only do the pertinent data not exist, but modeling errors and uncertainties work against integrating the exisiting sub-models into a comprehensive lifecycle model (LCM).

With more time and more funding, you all develop much reduced versions, called LCM1, LCM2 and now LCM3, each bringing to light further refinements and significant methodological and data constraints. The team embarks on developing LCM4 in the hopes that the research–funding permitting–is moving closer to identifying management interventions for the species.

The technical reports (now approaching 50 in number) produced during the decade of research track the refinements, improvements, insights and difficulties in modeling species reproduction, movement and survival. In so doing, the peer-reviewed literature on lifecycle models has been advanced in the view of outside experts by this research.

II

Unfortunately, none of the reports identify modeling and data uncertainties in a way that they can be contrasted to the uncertainties and errors made in the existing comprehensive model for managing said species.

What “comprehensive model,” you ask? Didn’t I just write there was no comprehensive lifecycle model? You see, during all the years the modeling research, real-time deliberations of interagency staff and scientists continued with really-existing decisions, period-by-period, over the management of said species.

From time to time the consequences of the management actions find their way into a technical report of the researchers, but here too modeling uncertainties take center-stage: “Though it is tempting to interpret declines in estimated [mortality] as evidence of management success, models of population dynamics are required to disentangle. . .”

III

One would think that the burden of proof has been on the researchers to demonstrate that reliance on life-cycle models would lead to better results compared to the next best alternative of current interagency deliberations of scientists and support staff. . .

But, not to worry: The judge who mandated the research asserted way back when: “All experts agree that application of a lifecycle model is the accepted method for evaluating the effects of an action upon a populations growth rate.”

This means all we need do is assume management isn’t improving faster than the modeling. And what could make more sense in reality than doing what is so needed in theory?

We forget how longstanding is the notion of addressing each case in its own right. Here is Aristotle:

But let it be granted to begin with that the whole theory of conduct is bound to be an outline only and not an exact system, in accordance with the rule we laid down at the beginning, that philosophical theories must only be required to correspond to their subject matter; and matters of conduct and expediency have nothing fixed or invariable about them, any more than have matters of health. And if this is true of the general theory of ethics, still less is exact precision possible in dealing with particular cases of conduct; for these come under no science or professional tradition, but the agents themselves have to consider what is suited to the circumstances on each occasion, just as is the case with the art of medicine or of navigation.

my underline and without endnotes and annotation; from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0054%3Abekker%20page%3D1104a

The underlined, “suited to the circumstances…” (pros ton kairon), has also been translated “as the occasion merits”.

What really strikes me in this passage is the hint of improvisational or makeshift, as in: working with what’s at hand.

Source: Thanks to Otto Linderborg for directing me to this (also see his https://antigonejournal.com/2023/01/history-socratic-problem/)

I

I graduated with a master’s in public policy studies from the University of Michigan in the early 1970’s and with a PhD in public policy from the UC Berkeley a little more than halfway through the 1980’s. I still identify as a policy analyst when asked my occupation/profession.

One misconception has been that in its early days policy analysis assumed problems were simpler and could be solved by the best and the brightest. That’s not how I remember my graduate training.

I had the good fortune to have been a student of Pat Crecine, the founding director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies (now the University of Michigan’s Ford School) and Aaron Wildavsky, a founder of the now Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Two different people you can’t imagine, but one insisting to his first-generation students that policymaking and budgeting were complex, while the other was the last person on earth who would say policy implementation was anything close to simple.

Another misconception: I remember a well-known policy academic upbraiding me that the “policy cycle” from policy formulation through policy evaluation/termination was a signal advance over early notions of incrementalism and the budgeting process. You only need implement something you had earlier planned to realize that the stage of “implementation” is itself a lethal critique of anything like a policy cycle.

II

But implementation is more than critique. We are, for example, used to thinking of a creeping crisis, like slow violence, as one that builds up until outright disaster triggers. Yet would one say that, given the inevitable gap between policies-as-stated and policies-as-implemented, implementation is the creeping crisis of policymaking and planning?

I don’t think so. We are just as apt to say implementation is de facto policymaking, and better for it when rendering more realism. In my view, we don’t ask, “Who’s going to adopt the recommendations and, if so, with what modifications?” before asking: “Who would implement the finalized recommendations and what are implementers’ scenarios for failing to do so?”

III

Realism doesn’t equate with intractability. At no point in my graduate training or later career do I remember being told that a policy problem not amenable to our toolkit was intractable. That toolkit, we were told, always had space for new methods and approaches. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to recapture that sense of policy analysis recasting difficult problems more tractably in the same way that policy analysis originally recast the field of public administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One way I think about what has happened is to distinguish between (1) the discipline as taught in graduate schools and the profession that policy analysts think they are joining upon graduation and (2) the profession as it is actually practiced at any one time or place and the varied careers that policy analysts have across time and place.

IV

For example, when I started out, it was said that 90% of a policy analysis was answering the question, “What’s the problem?” Having defined the problem meant you presumably knew what a solution would look like. It’s my experience today that 90% of a policy analysis—indeed of major policy practice and work—are its initial conditions.

In the 1970s, a key indicator of what is now called “a failed state” was its inability to publish an annual government budget that actually operated over the year. That happens all over the place today, and in parts of the US. But the point isn’t whether the “state” has in this way failed. It’s first about how the initial conditions have changed and become more differentiated.

What arises are cases in their own right. When findings do not converge across multiple orthogonal metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the analytical search becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may in reality be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.

V

A singular purpose of the toolkit remains that policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.

Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”

The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that analysts take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.

The irony has been palpable. Over my policy analysis career, I’ve witnessed the 20-page policy brief reduced to the five-page memo into a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation into the three-minute elevator speech into this or that graphic and now a tweet or two. What next: Telepathy? The knowing look? This arc has been our very own version of long-windedness.

I hope to see in the future a peer-reviewed article whose abstract runs something like the following:

This article traces the evolution of Pastoralist Studies from its nascent stages in the 1950s anthropological literature to its current status as a recognized and integral part of global academic discourse. It highlights the field’s vital role in dissecting the multifaceted structures and functions of settler colonialism (Arab, European, domestic agriculture) and standing firm amidst well-funded and systematic counter-efforts to delegitimize it, principally by global or national techno-managerial and urban elites. The ensuing discussion foregrounds pastoralist scholarly achievements in advancing their narrative and countering marginalization, particularly within the academic institutions of both the Global North and the Global (principally urban) South. By examining the political dynamics shaping research methodologies in Pastoralist Studies, this article elucidates how the field has emerged as a legitimate academic discipline, offering new pathways in graduate education centered around Anthropocene uncertainties and complexities. In asserting that Pastoralist Studies is inherently linked to activism, aiming for transformative change, decolonization, and liberation, this article underlines the contribution of the field to challenging dominant colonial epistemologies and methodologies and reshaping power dynamics. Thus, Pastoralist Studies not only elucidates the realities faced by indigenous herder populations but also vocalizes their struggles and aspirations, positioning itself as a critical lens to understand, and engage with, Pastoralist scholarship and its broader anti-colonial implications.

---

Source: The above replaces “Palestinian” with “Pastoralist” (along with slight edits) in the abstract of Ilan Pappé, Tariq Dana & Nadia Naser–Najjab (12 May 2024). “Palestine Studies, Knowledge Production, and the Struggle for Decolonisation,” Middle East Critique, (accessed online at DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342189)

I

Anyone who studies emergency management in large disasters and catastrophes, at least in the US setting, knows recovery is the second part of emergency management. The first, very formidable phase is immediate response.

Just what, then, is immediate response in the Climate Emergency? That article you are reading starts with: “The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid remaking of economy and society.” Yes, surely that and more; but what do we do immediately?

II

We could quibble, “Just how immediate is immediately?” But in the US setting, a disaster, like wildfires or flooding, entails the activation of a city or county emergency operations center (EOC) and/or incident management teams (IMTs) to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also have their own EOCs or equivalent.

This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.

III

Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which acknowledge and accept we are the Climate Emergency. And who, you ask, are the distressed peoples and sites? Well, that’s not something you, the reader, can answer a priori. It’s up to those really-existing EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the Climate Emergency is making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .

IV

The stakes thereby become clearer for both recovery and for immediate response when it comes to the Climate Emergency.

First, much of what outsiders recommend for now-now clearly belongs more under “long-term recovery” than immediate response, e.g., those net-zero emissions promises or those more resilient or sustainable infrastructures. Yet it is in no way news that this longer-term is invariably political with many stakeholders and does not have the same logic, clarity and urgency that immediate response has, e.g., disaster declarations that trigger immediate release of funds.

That said and second, those current appeals to “Stop oil!” and such immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, transport goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are also common because they are necessary..

V

As such, rather than focusing concern around the greater reliance in an emergency on petrol or like, we might instead want to think more productively about two empirically prior issues.

First, who are those EOCs and IMTs activated for the Climate Emergency? Their activation for wildfires, flooding and abrupt seasonal events have been increasing and increasingly responded to by all manner of city, county, state and agency EOCs and IMTs. These are climate emergencies—lower-case speech matters in a polarized US—even for those would never say the phrase, “climate change,” out loud.

Second, where EOCs and IMTs have been or will be activated, are they responding in ways that are climate-friendly? Or to put response challenge correctly: Where are the logic, clarity and urgency of the Climate Emergency requiring immediate eco-friendly response even before longer-term environmental recovery?

I ask the latter question, because I don’t think some of us who treat the Climate Emergency seriously have thought the answers through. It seems to me much more thought has been given by far many more people to the use of eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and like alternatives. Years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options.

Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response as well, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means using petrol and cutting down trees in the way? Do the activated EOCs and IMT’S really need new benefit-cost analyses to take that decision—right now?

I

It’s striking how similar responses-from-below regarding climate change are to immediate emergency response witnessed in recent large-scale disasters. (The similarity would have been more obvious if climate change is called for what it is, the Climate Emergency.) For example, a Mozambican scholar-activist has

outlined three major differences between these climate actions ‘from below’ and top-down solutions: (i) participation of local actors from planning design and implementation of projects; (ii) horizontal relations and equal access to information; and (iii) non-extractivist initiatives that retain benefits within communities for local consumption, without extractions and expropriations.

A summary of the plenary points made by Natacha Bruna, director of Observatório do Meio Rural, Mozambique, on September 27 2022 at the Climate Change and Agrarian Justice Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa

Immediate emergency response to major disasters–like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and wildfires–also feature collective action among the remaining people involved (and not just in search and rescue). So too are featured the importance and centrality of horizontal and lateral communications (the work of Louise Comfort on emergency response in major earthquakes is exemplary in this regard). More, the collective action and joint improvisations are geared to restoring rather than depleting key services in these emergencies.

II

The similarities–actually, equivalencies–go further. The local site, including placed-based communities, is the pivot-point in emergency response as in climate action-from-below. Food sovereignty is mentioned as a priority in responses-from-below, and indeed localized food and water around the site becomes a priority in emergency response well into longer-term recovery.

Speaking of which, local forms of resistance to climate change responses directed from above look more like the conflict over longer-term recovery witnessed in really-existing disasters than it does conflict over a status quo ante. Why? Because recovery to a new-normal involves many different or changing stakeholders (think here: NGOs).

III

So what? What’s the added value to policy and management that comes with seeing the immediate emergency response features of climate action-from-below?

Foremost, claims that the Climate Emergency has already cancelled out response capacities need to be considered case by case. The point is: Emergency response doesn’t disappear. Collective action and improvisations will occur even in the worst emergencies.

Some may dismiss “immediate emergency response” and its suite of jargon as imported from the outside and “thus” incommensurable with traditional practices. It’s difficult, however, to argue that, e.g., a 1000 years of imperial Chinese flood prevention strategies and practices are incommensurable with “emergency response” as above.

Related sources

Louise K. Comfort (2019). The Dynamics of Risk: Changing technologies and collective action in seismic events. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

Pierre-Étienne Will (2020). “Introduction,” in: Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A descriptive and critical bibliography. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.