I

A form of societal regulation occurs when critical infrastructures, like energy and water, prioritize systemwide reliability and safety as social values in real time. Importantly, these values are further differentiated within infrastructures.

Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation in infrastructures.” There is no reason to assume that compliance is the same baseline for, inter alios, the infrastructure’s micro-operators on the ground, including the eyes-and-ears field staff; the infrastructure’s headquarters’ compliance staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government mandates; the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for more enterprise risk management; and, last but never least, the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its real-time control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff— in the middle of all this, especially in their role of surmounting any stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols undermining real-time system reliability.

To put it another way, where highly reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must be expected that the social values reflected through these infrastructures differ by staff and their duties/responsibilities (e.g., responsibilities of control room operators necessarily go beyond their official duties).

II

So what? It’s routine but stops short of the truth to say that “government” has allocative, distributive, regulatory and stabilization functions. In truth, critical infrastructures are their own allocative, distributive, regulatory and stabilizing mechanisms for generating and distributing societal safety and security.

Yes, government relies on infrastructures to meet its own functions and, yes, there is an overlap and dependency between both. Few, however, think to ask, let alone study, how critical infrastructures—many of which are privately owned or managed in the US—independently affect society-wide risks, social values and societal regulation.

Dystopias are tropes of contaminated possibilities. Tropes about how more things go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong, about how it’s easier to mismanage than to manage. Collapse is more certain than not; negative externalities are to be expected, positive ones no way.

Probabilities of failure cascades flip to 1.0 in record time. We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one can expect technology to help. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, and thus–“thus”?–everything is at risk.

This—manifold anxiety, existential panic, dog-whistle alarmism—contaminates realism.

But what realism am I talking about? None of this catastrophizing includes the everyday saves of those who avoid large infrastructure failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened. But why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society draws for operational redesign needed because of the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for restoration and recovery. Needed, that is, in order to compensate for other defective possibilities that pass for realism.

Source

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/27/booker-winner-prophet-song/

Much has been made of the distinction between Type I or System 1 thinking—it is nonconscious and all but automatic, rooted in fear and emotion—in comparison to Type II or System 2 thinking that is conscious, deliberative, and not rooted in emotion or instinct.

I’m asking you now to recast conscious deliberation and analysis as positive distractions, that is, diversions from acting otherwise stereotypically or worse, where we are more likely to revert to the latter when responding to unknown unknowns, inexperience and/or great difficulties.

The premise here is that we are positively distracted from ingrained preoccupations when distracted by hesitations, scruples, ambivalences and reflections on: what we know and do not know; what we experience as unavoidable inexperience; and what we come to know as the very different kinds of difficulty.

So? Boris Pasternak, the poet, is reported to have said that life creates events to distract our attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.

I

The considerable strengths of centralized operations rooms in our major critical infrastructures are at the same time blind spots in society’s expectations concerning these infrastructures.

Yes, control rooms represent unique system knowledge, but that real-time knowledge cannot be conveyed or distilled for the public or for experts committed to checklists and protocols.

Yes, their skills and requirements are so knowledge-intensive as to make control operators professionals in their own right, but that means they also cannot be expected to know the requirements of other control rooms with in the same breadth and depth.

Yes, they are virtuosi in managing real time–and it is true that professionals who cannot manage the short-term should not be expected to manage for the long term–but reliability professionals are the first to recognize the need for longer-term planning and analysis.

Yes, control rooms are central to intra- and interinfrastructural reliability, but some critical infrastructures under mandates for high reliability do not have control rooms.

II
All this has at least one major implication:

Yes, the evolutionary advantage of control room operators is the operational redesign of inevitably defective technology and regulation so as to ensure system reliability in real time; no guarantees, of course! This however does not make them experts in repurposing infrastructures when it comes to adding new services or creating new infrastructures to provide the same service.

The prime minister of Japan during the Fukushima disaster concluded: “Experiencing the accident convinced me that the best way to make nuclear plants safe is not to rely on them, but rather to get rid of them”. And that is what Germany was to do under its Energiewende, the energy transition (transformation?) from nuclear to renewable resources.

The question then is this: How to make any such transition highly reliable? If the aim is high reliability, answers must pivot around the respective real-time control room operators.

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I

Michelangelo put the carver’s task as liberating form from the surrounding stone. The self is the revealed form that already exists, when the surplusage is chipped away.

Adrian Stokes, art critic, took the distinction and extended it. For Stokes, the modeler fashions the self in contrast to the carver. The clay modeler has the more labile enterprise of molding, where the form is “not uncovered but created.” “The modeler realizes his design with clay. Unlike the carver, he does not envisage that the conception is enclosed in his raw material.” In comparison to stone, “the plastic material has no ‘rights’ of its own. . .Modeling is a much more ‘free’ activity than carving”. (Think of “modeling” not as computer simulation but as Stokes did, molding).

II

Adam Phillips, the essayist and therapist, returns to Stokes’s distinction as two distinct approaches to an individual’s selfhood and experience: “It is as though there are things that are always already there which we may or may not find; and there are things which we make, which we put there and by so doing add something to the world that wasn’t there previously”.

What interests Phillips is that “[e]ach of these two versions involves us in telling a different kind of story about the self”. The modeler “uses his art to expose, to extend, to fashion himself”, while the carver abstains from promoting the self in favor of responding to the otherness of the object. Yet in both, a version of the self is operating—“the carver forgets himself…the modeler endorses himself”.

The difficulty with the carver is that, in seeing herself as deferring to what is already there, she renders herself oddly immune to criticism by a world that responds to her acts nevertheless; it is as if she submerges her own egotism in the name of making what is revealed wholly visible as its own, regardless.

The difficulty with the molder (our modeler) is the reverse. It is her hubris, her own truth that is imposed upon a seemingly moldable reality. She acts as if reality is worse off for not having this truth.

III

What works better, carving or modeling? It is premature to choose between the two versions of self when other selves exist from which to (s)elect. To carving stone and modeling clay, we must at least add improvising the self from what is at hand, which involves something different—good enough but in ways that matter better still than stone, clay and equivalent.

What Phillips calls “the contingent self” is one who makes use of luck, accident, and coincidence that befall him or her. S/he improvises a life within a network of others that improvises him/her. (This, of course, is also a weak-spot of the contingent self who is always, if you will, being prepped for more surgery.)

Now, of course, there are those who promise to mold or carve the Anthropocene into the preferred selves. My bet, though, is on the improvisers,

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Principal sources

Phillips, A. (1994). On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

————– (2004). On not making it up, Or the varieties of creative experience. Salmagundi, no. 143 (Summer): 56-75.

Stokes, A.  (1978). The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Volume I: 1930-1937, Thames and Hudson: GB.

Attempting to enact political and economic transformation without infrastructure support – without a way of pumping water, growing food, or delivering healthcare – is like doing origami with smoke. No matter how ambitious your scheme, how virtuosic your technique, the folds vanish as soon as you make them. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414030/

You needn’t be clairvoyant to realize that the energy transition–whether in its reformist or radical versions–means a host of second chances for critical infrastructures and their provision of reliable services.

With or without Stop-Oil, infrastructures will remain central to energy provision and interconnectivity; with or without Sustainability, reliability will be demanded across that interconnected provision. Yes, of course, technologies and system configurations will change, but even the keywords of the radical versions–transformative, emancipatory–are redolent with the promise of second chances along the way. So too then for the concepts and practices of infrastructure and reliability.

So what? For one thing the Climate Emergency portends all manner of illiquidity, not least of which are today’s critical infrastructures being tomorrow’s stranded assets. But “stranded” underscores the place-based character of the assets. Stranded also implies the possibility of other uses for the infrastructure. Stranded, in other words, means taking the places for second chances very seriously.

Will the energy transition(s) be granular enough to do so?

I

In one year alone (2016), multinational corporations (MNCs) were estimated to have shifted USD 1 trillion of profits to tax havens, with an estimated USD 200-300 billion in lost tax revenue worldwide. (The Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Hong Kong and the Netherlands are among the most important tax havens.) Another study estimates multinational enterprises shift close to 40% of their profits to tax havens globally. As for regions, the main European banks are reckoned to have booked EUR 20 billion (close to 15% of their total profits) in tax havens. In Germany, by way of one country, MNCs there are said to have shifted corporate profits of some EUR 19 billion to tax havens, with an estimated tax revenue loss of roughly EUR 5.7 billion.

Assume now the Climate Emergency intervenes as apocalypse. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Hong Kong and the Netherlands? Under water. MNCs? They should be so lucky! Tax havens and forgone tax revenues? After the apocalypse, what taxes?

II

These points bode forth an interesting set of policy issues. In particular, why ever, it seems, are we spending time and resources on reducing the use of tax havens when all our energies—all our political will—should be directed to averting the climate-induced apocalypse? Indeed, today’s tax havens are visibly part of the opportunity costs of deadly climate inaction. Reducing tax havens is worse than meaningless unless the generated revenues are directed to mitigating the impacts of climate change–and even then it could be too little too late.

Or is it too little too late in quite another sense? For surely part of being in the apocalypse means we have to manage the Climate Emergency far better everywhere than we (can) manage tax havens here or there, and now. . .

Unless, of course, you are among the many who imagine that getting rid of these tax sinkholes for the rich and already-undeserving is already among the few things that are truly urgent.

Principal sources

Aliprandi, G., M. Baraké, and P-E Chouc (2021). Have European Banks Left Tax Havens? Evidence from country-by-country data (Report 2). The EU Tax Observatory. Paris School of Economics.

Ciuriak, D. and A.J. Eurallyah (2021). Taxing Capital In The Age Of Intangibles. Discussion Paper, Ciuriak Consulting. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3920763)

Fuest, C., F. Hugger, and F. Neumeier (2021). Corporate Profit Shifting and the Role of Tax Havens: Evidence from German Country-By-Country Reporting Data. CESifo Working Paper No. 8838. Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research, Munich.

Garcia-Bernardo, J., and P. Janský (2021). Profit Shifting of Multinational Corporations Worldwide. ICTD Working Paper 119, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton UK.

I

Why would we think a book on policy written nearly three decades ago remains relevant? It seems to me by way of answer that the major policy and management issues, though much changed, are still characterized by high uncertainty, complexity, incompletion, and polarized conflict, the focus of the 1994 Narrative Policy Analysis.

So that we start on the same page, issues are uncertain when causal knowledge about them is found wanting by decisionmakers. Complex when their elements are more numerous, varied and interconnected. Incomplete, when efforts to address them are interrupted or left unfinished. And conflicted, when individuals take opposite positions on them often precisely because of their uncertainty, complexity and incompleteness.

Such issues are often now called wicked problems, said to be intractable to conventional policy and management intervention. In the older language, the “truth” of the matter is difficult if not impossible to establish—right now when a decision has to be taken.

How then to make the decision that claims urgency and priority?

II

In answer, though narrative analyses of policy issues have evolved over the three decades, two foci of the original approach remain salient. First its terminology and second, its drive to identify narratives that underwrite policymaking, given current intractability.

First, the terminology. It’s next to impossible to avoid terms like policy narratives. They are those stories with beginnings, middles and ends, or if cast as arguments with premises and conclusions that policy types and managers tell themselves and others in order to take decisions and justify them.

The narrative analytical approach continues to ask you to start by identifying the different types of narratives in the issue of concern—some of which are very visible—the dominant policy narratives—others of which have to be found or identified, including marginalized counternarratives.

Assume you—the policy analyst, manager, researcher or decisionmaker—find a much-current policy narrative to be too simplistic for the complexities at hand. You can rejigger that narrative in three ways: Denarrativize it; provide a counternarrative or counternarratives; and/or offer a metanarrative (or metanarratives) accommodating a range of story-lines (arguments), not least of which are versions of the simplistic narrative and preferred counternarrative(s).

• First, denarrativize! To denarrativize is to critique a dominant policy narrative, point by key point. The best way to do that is to bring counter evidence to each point the offending narrative holds. To denarrativize is to take the story out of the story, i.e., to disassemble it by contravening its parts. Abundant case evidence exists to call into question the Tragedy of the Commons, for example.

• First, counternarrativize! The chief limitation of denarrativization is the inability of critique on its own to generate an alternative narrative to replace the discreditable one. In contrast, a counter-story challenges the original by virtue of being a candidate to replace it. Common property resource management is said to be one such counternarrative to older Tragedy of the Commons storyline.

• First, metanarrativize! A metanarrative is that policy narrative—there is no guarantee there is one, or if so, only one—which the narrator holds in order to understand how multiple and opposing policy narratives are not only possible but consistent with each other. Claims to resource stewardship is a metanarrative shared by policies based in the Tragedy of the Commons as well as in other explanations, including but not limited to common property resource management. In this metanarrative, a group—the techno-managerial elite, “the community”—asserts stewardship over resources, because they alone, so the metanarrative goes, are capable of determining and adjudicating where and in what form better management holds.

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III

The second advantage of the original approach continues to be its recognition that decisions have to be made. Yes, of course, taking time to deliberate, being reflective and having second thoughts remain important, but even here acting these ways can end up being a decision of real import.

So, at some point you face a choice over which is the better policy narrative. For narrative policy analysis, a better policy narrative meets three criteria:

• The narrative—its story with beginning, middle and end, or argument with premises and conclusions—is one that takes seriously that the policy or management issue is complex, uncertain, interrupted and/or polarized.

• The narrative is one that also moves beyond critique of limitations and defects of the dominant policy narrative (criticisms on their own increase uncertainties when they offer no better storyline to follow).

• The narrative gives an account that, while not dismissing or denying the issue’s difficulty, is more amenable and tractable to analysis, policymaking and/or management. Indeed, the issue’s very complexity—its numerous components, each varying in terms of its functions and connections—offers up opportunities to recast a problem differently and with it, potential options. Problems are wicked to the degree they have yet to be recast more tractably.

This means that the preferred policy narrative can be in the form of a counternarrative; or it can be in the form of metanarrative; but it won’t be in the form of a critique or other non-narratives like circular arguments or tautologies.

Nor should you think that in a planet of now more than 8 billion people you have to invent a preferred policy narrative from scratch: Preferred policy narratives—note the plural—should be assumed from the get-go to already exist and to being modified right now.

IV

To summarize, the policy narratives of interest for narrative policy analysis are not those used by policy types who insist they already know the truth. This approach is NOT about how various Big Lies have evolved from Goebbels through Trump, as in: The Jews were to blame before; the Blacks were later to blame; Islamists are to blame now.

Rather and to reiterate, narrative policy analysis over the last three decades remains relevant for those issues that policy types, analysts and researchers already admit a high degree of uncertainty, complexity, incompleteness and polarization—or again in today’s parlance the issues are wicked and intractable in their current casting.

V

To see if we’re still on the same page by this point, assume in this thought experiment you are faced with two dominant environmental crisis narratives about globalization:

• The green narrative assumes that we have already witnessed sufficient harm to the environment due to globalization and thus this narrative demands taking action now to restrain further global destruction. More research isn’t needed in order to decide that new action is required, now.

• The ecological narrative starts with the massive but largely uncertain (including unknown) effects of globalization on the most complex ecosystem there is, Planet Earth. Here enormous uncertainties over the impacts of globalization, some of which could well be irreversible, are reason enough not to promote or tolerate further globalization, in the  view of many ecologists.

Both seek to stop harmful effects on the environment from globalization. But which is the better narrative when it comes to the next steps ahead in environmental policy and management?

From a narrative analytical viewpoint, if future unpredictabilities—uncertainty, complexity, conflict and unfinished business—are taken seriously, the ecological narrative is the better one. Or if you are sure that in your case the green scenario is the one to start now and here, your challenge is to detail how conditions could lead to hitherto unspecified unpredictabilities in the local scenario(s).

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See also: E. Roe and M. van Eeten (2004). “Three—Not Two—Major Environmental Counternarratives to Globalization,” Global Environmental Politics 4(4).

I

To keep highlighting that “there are hundreds and hundreds of organizations having oversight responsibility for [fill in name the region]” misses the fact that interconnectivity becomes a focus only with respect to specific failure/accident scenarios there. Changing the scenario focus over what are the important manifest interconnections means having also to chang the focus over what are the latent ones of concern.

What are latent interconnections? To answer that, we have first to describe latent and manifest risk. If manifest risk is where the probability of failure (Pf) and the consequences of failure (Cf) are known or estimated, “latent risk” is when uncertainty over Pf or over Cf exists. Once the missing estimate is provided, what was latent becomes manifest risk.

High reliability management recognizes that management of latent risk—the management of nonmeasurable uncertainty—should be ahead of the risk becoming manifest. (Think of measurable risk as associated with professionals’ skills in pattern recognition across a run of cases and nonmeasurable uncertainty as associated with their skills when it comes to a one-off, what-if scenario formulation.)

Minimally, this management-ahead is to forestall the realization of those risk-with-respect-to scenarios that would decrease options and/or increase volatility of reliability professionals. In other cases, the management-ahead is to help realize risk-with-respect-to scenarios that would manifestly increase options and/or decrease task environment volatility.

II

Now to implications for and about latent and manifest interconnectivity. In complex, interconnected systems with which I’m familiar (where high reliability, including safety matter as an existential priorities), four inter-related factors move center-stage for the managing-ahead of latency:

• Analytic modeling uncertainties become a major consideration. Not only do analytic models differ in terms of their uncertainties—e.g., electricity modeling appears to be better than levee modeling. Even more important, the more interconnected the infrastructures, the more latent risks to be managed in light of input and output variables as well as their joint their control variables, which modelers often miss or avoid (e.g., waterflows central to real-time services of key interconnected infrastructures).

• The evolutionary advantage of each control room’s ability to operationally (re)design workarounds to compensate for (latent but now emerging) defects in hardware and software under interconnectivity take on added prominence in real time.

• A key latency–but one often ignored or not recognized outside the infrastructure control room by regulators and legislators–centers around small change/large impact scenarios. For example, the November 2006 disconnection of a single power cable in northern Germany triggered regional blackouts as far away as Portugal. True, but: How many times were such small changes managed before so as not to lead to huge impacts (the disasters averted) and would subsequent “remedies” undermine this prior ability to manage reliably, had the remedies been instituted earlier?

• A focus on the classic common-mode failure around spatially collocated elements of different infrastructures, such as a shared utility corridor, is misleading when the chokepoints of the respective systems are physically located elsewhere. A chokepoint of one infrastructure tripping over into disrupted or failed operations is profoundly more important if collocated next or adjacent to the chokepoint of another infrastructure with which it is also latently interconnected.

In infrastructure studies, “safety” is its most problematic when used more as a noun than adverb. Safety, if it is anything, is found in practices-as-undertaken, i.e., “it’s operating safely.” If the behavior in question reflects a “safety culture,” that noun, culture, is performative and not something in addition to or prior to “culturally.”

Safety is no different from democracy or intelligence. They too happen adverbially—“behaving democratically in that s/he, e.g., votes in elections, pays taxes and more”—and “thinks intelligently” (whatever that means in practice). To believe safety, democracy and intelligence are otherwise is like thinking you make fish from fish soup.