Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]
One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.
Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.
II
I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.
But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.
III
A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”
If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.
IV
But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.
Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]
We show that the rise in the share of immigrants across European regions over the 2010-2019 period had a modest impact on the employment-to-population rate of natives. However, the effects are highly uneven across regions and workers, and over time. First, the short-run estimates show adverse employment effects in response to immigration, while these effects disappear in the longer run. Second, low-educated native workers experience employment losses due to immigration, whereas high-educated ones are more likely to experience employment gains. Third, the presence of institutions that provide employment protection and high coverage of collective wage agreements exert a protective effect on native employment. Finally, economically dynamic regions can better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.
Anthony Edo & Cem Özgüzel (2023). The Impact of Immigration on the Employment Dynamics of European Regions. CEPII Working Paper No. 2023-20. Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII), Paris. (Accessed online at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/publications/wp/abstract.asp?NoDoc=13908)
So, to be clear. The last sentence of the new article’s first paragraph is to the effect that: Economically dynamic regions have been found to better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.
Then follows–and this is what I’d really like to see–are the paragraphs setting out the policy and program details on how degrowth in those dynamic regions would work in Europe, given immigration, particularly from Africa, continues even under (especially under?) successful degrowth.
Please note: I am not asking for anything like guarantees with respect to degrowth’s impact on immigration. I am asking for more granular scenarios and more clarity on their assumptions from degrowth advocates. This way I can better separate out informed opinion from the rest.
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .
Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.
For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.
That policy instead is the music and that implementers are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. Also revealing is the notion that “fits better” means “fits suggestively” for ongoing interpretations: namely, future evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.
Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its implementation is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, repeated evaluation, not implementation on its own, is a de facto policymaking without closure. Or if you will, this is its own kind of democracy.
Sociotechniccal imaginaries have been defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”
Sheila Jasanoff, 2015. Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, ed. S. Jasanoff and S.-H. Kim, pp. 1–33. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
But then: whose visions? Even within a large sociotechnical system like a critical infrastructure, whose imaginaries?
Clearly not just those of the CEO and the rest of the C-suite. Nor its investors and regulators. Nor policymakers and legislators of concern.
After all, any large sociotechnical system has its equivalent street-level bureaucrats, front-line implementers, and middle level reliability professionals, who have their own visions and facts on the ground in constrast to the others. They are, in fact, often credited with de facto policymaking.
I
An example: Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation” in society’s critical infrastructures.
Yet there is no reason to assume that compliance–a sociotechnical imaginary if there ever was one–is the same baseline for, inter alios,
the infrastructure’s operators in the field, including the eyes-and-ears field staff;
the infrastructure’s headquarters’ staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government compliance mandates;
the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for far more than compliance by way of enterprise risk management;
those other infrastructure professionals responsible for thinking through “what-if” scenarios that vary by all manner of contingencies; and, last but not least,
the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff—in the midst of all this, especially in their role of surmounting stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols–the “official” sociotechnical imaginary–undermining real-time system reliability and safety.
II
So what?
These differences in orientation with respect to e.g., “baseline compliance,” mean societal values for systemwide reliability and safety can be just as differentiated and distributed as these staff and their responsibilities are. Where reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must also be expected that the social values reflected in these infrastructures not only differ across infrastructures but also within them.
1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend
3. Disaster averted in central to pastoralist development
4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
5. Assetizing and securitizing pastoralism-as-infrastructure (longer read)
1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend
I
We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications.
What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?
The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists rely upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that starts and ends with the pastoralist system instead.
II
By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals important mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities.
There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),
Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.
What’s so important, you ask, about the interconnectivities of milk marketing, e.g., with respect to roads, and their configurations?
The answer is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally.
III
A different example illuminates the importance of those shifts.
Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries have been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. But the focus on sudden shifts–e.g., the relatively recent policy shift of the Uganda government to ensuring Turkana grazers are unarmed when moving from Kenya to better pastures across the border–suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going at and across the borders.
Indeed, a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements (all be they unrecorded) is to bridge, in real time and unofficially, the unavoidable duality of stationary borders and mobile herders in pastoralist policy and management.
IV
So what?
The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.
Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.
Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables, such as common grazing lands. Think also of rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought or because, e.g., a major rangeland fire has occurred nearby.
V
But what then are some of the policy and management implications?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.
Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.
Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham
Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16
Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies
The great virtue of political ecology, in my view, has been to complexify narratives that “scarcity-of-this-or-this-sort leads to land-use conflict.” I suggest that even the more nuanced, multi-causal explanations can be pushed and pulled further.
In particular, I’m not sure that “conflict,” after a point, helps or aids better pastoralist policy and development. In no way should the following be construed as criticism of those writing on land-use conflicts nor is my contribution a justification for killing people. I suggest only that there may be a different way of interpreting what is going on, and if there is, then there may be other ways even better to productively rethink the policy issues involved.
To that end, I use two lenses from the framework in my 2020 STEPS paper.
II
The first is that logic of requisite variety. Complex environments require complex means of adaptation. If inputs are highly variable, so too must be the processes and options to transform this input variability into outputs and outcomes with low and stable variance, in our case, sustained herder livelihoods (or off-take, or herd size, or composition. . .).
One major implication is that “land-use conflict” has to be differentiated from the get-go. By way of example, references to pastoralist raids, skirmishes and flare-ups that do not identify “with-respect-to” what inputs, processes or outputs are bound to be very misleading.
Consider a livestock raid of one pastoralist group on another. It’s part of the input variability of the latter group but it also part of the process options of the former (i.e., when periodic raids are treated as one means over the longer term to respond to unpredictable input shocks, like abrupt herd die-offs). By way of example, some discussion of jihadist raids by young pastoralist men in the Sahel seems to reflect the changing composition and level of variance around the outputs and outcomes (as if there was something like “young-men pastoralism” whose outputs had been changed by or with jihadism).
So what?
It matters for pastoralist policy just what are the process options of the pastoralist group being raided. Do the response options include that of a counter-raid, or to send more household members away from the conflict area, or to form alliances with other threatened groups, or to seek a political accommodation, or to undertake something altogether different or unexpected? For the purposes of policy and management, a livestock raid (or such) is more than a livestock raid.
III
The second lens to refocus land-use conflicts is the entire cycle of infrastructure operations. A livestock raid undertaken by one pastoralist group on another in order to repair or restore its herd numbers/composition differs from the livestock raid undertaken as an immediate emergency response to having the entire system of operations or herd disappear because of some systemwide calamity.
As for those jihadist inspired and supported raids by young pastoralist men, it’s important to determine if those raids are best understood as recovery efforts to a new normal (recovery of a failed system is much more inter-organizationally demanding–think conventional humanitarian aid—than service restoration after a temporary disruption by the system on its own). Much of the current literature on the plight of pastoralists seems as well to be equating recurring pastoralist recoveries after failures as its new normal.
IV
Again: So what?
As with the logic of requisite variety, the whole cycle requires those involved in pastoralist development to first differentiate cases of “land-use conflict” before proposing or adopting policy interventions. It isn’t merely about that old nostrum: Conflict can be productive, not destructive. Rather, “land-use conflicts” are fundamentally different cases of different lands, different uses and different conflicts.
A “conflict” going on for 30 years or more is obviously one that pushes and pulls to center-stage both the full cycle of pastoralist operations across time and the logic of requisite variety at any point in time for transforming input variability into sustained (though over time changing) outputs and outcomes.
3. Disaster-averted is central to pastoralist development
I
My argument is that if crises averted by pastoralists were identified and more differentiated, we’d better understand how far short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.
To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other infrastructure reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Why? Because we are told that ultimately what matters far more are the infrastructure disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.
Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.
II
Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other related processes matter for pastoralists and others. The same for modernization, late capitalism, global environmental destruction, and the climate emergency. But they matter when differentiated and better specified in terms of their “with respect to.”
Just what is marketization with respect to in your case? Smallstock? Mechanized transportation? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or grazing conditions? How do the broader processes collapsed under “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?
Most important, appeals to generalized processes or state conditions diminish the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.
But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios demonstrate how these broad processes preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.
III
Let me give an example. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports a finding in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” from his research in Georgia:
A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.
Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that
my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .
I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core to understanding that disasters-averted remain very real, even if not identified, let alone publicized, by outsiders preoccupied with what hasn’t been averted.
Should it need saying, some with-respect-to scenarios do specify how such phrases result from an ongoing interaction and dialectic between the wider processes and local particularities. I’d hope, though, you’d want to see details behind any such assertion first.
IV
So what? How does the argued importance of disasters-averted compel rethinking pastoralist development? One example will have to suffice: the need to recast “pastoralist elites.”
I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”
My question then: Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to the critics of elites? The answer is important because an over-arching development aim of the 1980s arid and semi-arid lands programs in Kenya was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.
My own answer to the preceding question would now focus on the disasters averted over time by pastoralists, both those who are today’s elites and those who aren’t. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed the ways they did.
Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, the refocusing on disasters-averted over time holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.
Which leads me to the question that should be obvious to any reader: Since when are researchers to decide that time stops sufficiently in a study period to certify who among herders are advantaged going forward, let alone what are the metrics for determining such? When did the development narrative become “poor herders and farmers must advance at the same rate or even faster than advantaged ones?”
Sources
Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.
4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, [and] (iii) steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.
This epigraph focuses specifically on the how to think about policies that better respond to effects of automation on displacing workers.
Please re-read the excerpt and then undertake the following thought experiment.
I
Imagine it is pastoralists who are being displaced from their usual herding workplaces, in this case by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other largely exogenous factors.
The question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government, among others, to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?
The answer? With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies exist.
II
Yes, of course, there are the NGO, donor project, and local department trying to work along these lines. But one has to ask at this conjuncture in development history whether their existence is the excuse government uses for avoiding having to undertake such policies, regionally or nationally.
III
A more productive exercise might be to ask: How would various existing pro-pastoralist interventions be classified: as compensatory, as investment, and/or as steering?
It seems to me that many of the pro-pastoralist interventions fall under the rubric of “steering policies”. The aim is to keep pastoralists who are already there, there–and better off in some regards. Better veterinary measures, paravets and mobile teachers that travel with the herding households, real-time marketing support, mobile health clinics, restocking programs as and when needed, better water point management and participation, and the like are offered up as ways to improve herding livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid lands.
IV
Fair enough, but not far enough, right? For where are the corresponding compensation and investment policies?
Where, for example, are the policy interventions for improving and capitalizing on re-entry of remittance-sending members back into pastoralism if and when they return home? Where are the national policies to compensate farmers for not encroaching further on pastoralist lands, e.g., by increasing investments on the agricultural land they already have? Where are the national (and international) policies that recognize keeping the ecological footprint of pastoralist systems is far less expensive than that of urban and peri-urban infrastructures?
Or for that matter and more proactively:
1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO2 emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.
2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.
3. Stay with those resident migrants sending back remittances. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities heavily resident with migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). Think of this as a form of “reversed green extractivism,” in this case on behalf of dryland households by EU member states for EU-migrant communities.
Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as complex infrastructures in their own right and globally so, a useful contrast emerges:
While many governments seek to modernize their economies and societies by ridding themselves of longstanding pastoralist systems, global infrastructure equity firms and infrastructure debt funds at the same time are assetizing and securitizing more and more local, regional and national infrastructures for financially stabler returns.
My argument here is that pastoralism-as-infrastructure is better able to resist elements of those latter elements of financialization, precisely because they pastoralist systems are not traditional in the sense of the ruling elites of techno-managers and politicians.
Yes, pastoralists have assets, but assets as resources in pastoralism existed long before capitalism (see Sonenscher 2022). Indeed, assetization as ongoing processes of enclosure and property do not necessarily entail financialization (see McArthur 2023). Nor do commodification, marketization and even financialization never provide affordances for poorer households such as herders (see Zaloom and James 2023). Really-existing pastoralisms remain very much mixed systems and highly differentiated, with important policy and management implications.
Let’s examine these points in more detail, starting with describing how pastoralist systems can be viewed as infrastructural and then moving onto the issues and implications of its assetization.
Pastoralism as infrastructure and initial implications
I
While vastly different technologically, the critical infrastructures with which I am familiar–water, energy, telecoms, transportation, hazardous liquids–share the same operational logic: The system’s real time operators seek to increase process variance (in terms of diverse options, resources, strategies) in the face of high input variance (including variability in factors of production and climate) to achieve low and stable output variance (electricity, water and telecoms provided safely and continuously).
Again, we are back to the logic of requisite variety. Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity so as to achieve by and large stable outputs.
I submit pastoralist systems are, in respect to this logic, infrastructural; and as pastoralists and their systems are found worldwide, so too is pastoralism a global infrastructure. To be sure, not all pastoralist systems share this logic; nor are all pastoralists real-time reliability professionals; nor do all pastoralist systems reduce to this logic, only.
II
If we focus on the set of pastoralist systems that share the logic, the implications for rethinking pastoralist development are, I believe, major. To pick four of the differences identified in earlier blogs:
1. The infrastructure perspective suggests that instead of talking about environmental risks associated with pastoralism (e.g., the climate risks of land degradation and methane production), we should be comparing the environmental footprints produced by the respective global infrastructures (e.g., roads globally, electricity globally, dams globally. . .).
Because pastoralisms rely on these other infrastructures, the respective footprints overlap. But the physical damage done to the environment by roads, dams, and power plants are well documented and demonstrably extend well far beyond pastoralist usage.
2. No large critical infrastructures can run 24/7/365 at 100% capacity and be reliable, and pastoralist systems are no different. This means comparing pastoralist livestock systems to a benchmark of “optimized” grassland ranching or intensive dairy production is ludicrous, if only because the latter are more likely headed to disaster anyway.
3. Restocking schemes are routinely criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands. Yet the infrastructure for government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., holding grain, wool or oil in order to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are routinely recommended by other experts, decade after decade, be the countries low-resource or not.
4. When was the last time you heard pastoralist livestock exports from the world’s arid and semi-arid regions being praised for this: Reducing the global budget for virtual water trading from what it could have been. And yet, that is exactly what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does.
Assetizing pastoralisms as infrastructure
I
Think of assets and assetization as follows:
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset’s income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. . . .
Commodities are produced for sale, and as such their value is defined by the labour imbued in them as they are substitutable and subject to laws of competition. In resting on rent and enclosure without a particular orientation towards sale, assetization instead involves “the transformation of things into resources which generate income without a sale”. . . .
The market value of an asset depends on the estimated future rents it will afford, so for there to be a market for rent-bearing property the purchaser must borrow against future rent and capital gains. It is only after this capitalization that there is a viable market for tradable rent-bearing property and, therein, an asset.
That rent-bearing aspect of assetization is often identified separately as securitization or financialization. As the above quote and its authors underscore, such assetization is a more nuanced, meso-or-lower-level concept than are macro notions like that of global capitalism.
The treatment of livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks or rangeland as assets has been an undeniable feature of pastoralism. We may debate the history of doing so. My view is that the path dependency with respect to assets-thinking originated in the division of labor in earlier pastoralist societies as pre-capitalist commercial economies (think: trade routes and the early-on division between herd owners–anachronistically, “rent-seeking,” and their herd holders). Whatever, the variety of capitalist economies has subsequently ramped up the diversity of assetization and securitization within and across pastoralist systems.
II
But the point here is that diversity. Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures described in the literature? More formally, has the logic of requisite variety with respect to input/process/output variability become a set of assets from which to realize profits and rents? “Not entirely–and significantly so” is my answer to both.
For example, the treatment of “human capital” seeks to assetize a rich process variance in pastoralism as infrastructure. You would have to be sycophants of economics not to see that reification of real-time management of process variance into “investments” does a great disservice to meso- and micro-level differentiation of practices with respect to options, resources and strategies, especially their real time versions.
It’s also easy to continue with such examples and questions by returning to points #1 – #4 and showing how “assetization” in those areas are underway yet in very complex ways.
Livestock and water become “ecological footprints,” a very different asset. Grassland systems as assets are not one-to-one with those in ranching schemes or the dairy sector. As for restocking schemes, it requires a different perspective to see them as part and parcel of commodity stock buffers. And yes, virtual water trading is assetized, but here too the assets in question differ considerably from those conventionally talked about in pastoralist systems.
Conclusion: So what?
I am suggesting that pastoralism as a global infrastructure resists assetization and securitization in ways that are, ironically, criticized by pastoralist advocates.
Start with the fact that the current literature on infrastructure financialization focuses on how schools, health facilities, police and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing specific rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.
If so, why then are the critics casting in overwhelming negative terms those persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing and securitizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, permanent health facilities, pacified zones free of armed conflict, and large livestock development projects?
Where some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization and securitization, how is that a failure of pastoralism as its own functioning infrastructure? A threat to pastoralist resistance, perhaps, but when these fixed-point interventions do fail, they fail only in the sense their government and NGO advocates should have known better anyway.
Or to put the point from a different, more positive direction: By viewing pastoralism as infrastructure, do we invoke a longer-term at work than would be the case, were its assets rendered wholly or considerably turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in exchange rates and interest rates?
Sources
Birch, K., and Ward, C. (2022). Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies.’ Dialogues in Human Geography (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20438206221130807). In addition to the quote, this article provided two examples.
De Conti, B., Bosari, P., and Martínez, M. (2022). “Credit rating agencies as policymakers: the different stances in regard to core and peripheral countries during the pandemic.” Texto para Discussão. ISSN 0103-9466. Unicamp. IE, Campinas, n. 438.
McArthur, J. (2023). “Infrastructure debt funds and the assetization of public infrastructures. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231216319)
This paper provides many details and examples of input, process and output variance. It also provides the basis for the above five entries to build upon and extend the reliability professionals framework.
Sonenscher, M. (2022) Capitalism: The story behind the word. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. This book goes into great detail about the differences between earlier commercial societies and later capitalist economies.
Zaloom, C. and D. James (2023). “Financialization and the Household.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 52: 399–415 (https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947). Note a repeated finding of theirs: “Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue” (p. 399; also pp. 400, 403, 406, and 410).
We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications.
What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?
The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists rely upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that starts and ends with the pastoralist system instead.
II
By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals important mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities.
There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),
Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.
What’s so important, you ask, about the interconnectivities of milk marketing, e.g., with respect to roads, and their configurations?
The answer is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally.
III
A different example illuminates the importance of those shifts.
Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries have been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. But the focus on sudden shifts–e.g., the relatively recent policy shift of the Uganda government to ensuring Turkana grazers are unarmed when moving from Kenya to better pastures across the border–suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going at and across the borders.
Indeed, a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements (all be they unrecorded) is to bridge, in real time and unofficially, the unavoidable duality of stationary borders and mobile herders in pastoralist policy and management.
IV
So what?
The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.
Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.
Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables, such as common grazing lands. Think also of rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought or because, e.g., a major rangeland fire has occurred nearby.
V
But what then are some of the policy and management implications?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.
Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.
Other sources
Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham
Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16
Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies
1. From a high reliability management perspective, regulation for safety in large socio-technical systems is dispersed. The regulation of critical infrastructures for system safety is not just what the regulators do; it is also what the infrastructures do in ways that their regulator of record can’t do on its own. Those who have the real-time information must fulfill regulatory functions with respect to system safety that the official regulator is not able to fulfill.
2. The dispersed functions of regulations for system safety put a premium on understanding real-time practices of control room operators and field staff in these large systems. Safety, if it is anything, is found in practices-as-undertaken, i.e., “it’s operating safely.” This means safety is best understood more as an adverb, and less as a noun. If the behavior reflects a “safety culture,” that culture is performative at least in its real-time practices.
3. It makes little sense then for critics to conclude that regulators are failing because formal regulations are not being complied with, if the infrastructures are managing in a highly reliable fashion and would not be doing so if they followed those regulations to the letter. In practical terms, this means there is not just the risk of regulatory non-compliance by the infrastructure, there is also the infrastructure’s risk of compliance with incomplete regulations.
4. Note that the regulatory functions of the infrastructure’s control room (if present) and field staff differ from the health and safety regulations and approaches elsewhere in the critical infrastructure. This means we should not expect there to be a single set of procedural or supervisory approaches that can apply throughout the entire infrastructure, however committed it is to system safett and service reliability.
5. If points 1 – 4 hold, the challenge then is to better understand the institutional niche of critical infrastructures, that is, how infrastructures themselves function in allocating, distributing, regulating and stabilizing system safety (and reliability) apart from the respective government regulators of record.
6. With that in mind, turn now to the relationship between system risk and system safety, specifically: regulating risk in order to ensure system safety. For some, the relationship is explicit, e.g., increasing safety barriers reduces risk of component or system failure.
In contrast, I come from a field, policy analysis and management, that assumes safety and risk are to be treated differently, unless otherwise shown in the case at hand. Indeed, one of the founders of my profession (Aaron Wildavsky) made a special point to distinguish the two. The reasons are many for not assuming that “reduce risks and you increase safety” or “increase safety and you reduce risks.” In particular:
However it is estimated, risk is generally about a specified harm and its likelihood of occurrence. But safety is increasingly recognized, as it was by an international group of aviation regulators, to be about “more than the absence of risk; it requires specific systemic enablers of safety to be maintained at all times to cope with the known risks, [and] to be well prepared to cope with those risks that are not yet known.”. . .In this sense, risk analysis and risk mitigation do not actually define safety, and even the best and most modern efforts at risk assessment and risk management cannot deliver safety on their own. Psychologically and politically, risk and safety are also different concepts, and this distinction is important to regulatory agencies and the publics they serve. . . .Risk is about loss while safety is about assurance. These are two different states of mind.“
Danner and Schulman, 2019
7. So what?
That informed people continue to stay in earthquake zones and sail in stormy seas even if they can move away from both tells you something about their preferences for system safety, let alone personal safety. For it is often safety with respect to the known unknowns of where they live and work versus safety with respect to unknown-unknowns of “getting away.”
Note: unknowns, not risks.
Source
Danner, C., Schulman, P. (2019). Rethinking risk assessment for public utility safety regulation. Risk Analysis 39(5), 1044-1059.
A recent review of refugee accounts stresses there are no words to describe how awful these camps are. The authors ask what I take to be the profoundly important question: “why it is that some of us write from inside the camps, and others from outside”?
Why, indeed, are they in camps and not us?
I
My modest proposal: Randomized control trials (RCTs) would be undertaken to assign people to camps (“us as them”) and control groups (“us as still us”). The random assignment would mimic, more or less, the contingency of current camp assignments.
Replacements for those who die during the RCTs should be expected as some camps have been in existence for even longer. (You could randomized the selection of camps and add a small budget to monitor and assess the few who graduate out.) Funding would, of course, require deep pockets, but RCTs are all the rage now in keystone foundations.
II
If significant differences are found in the attitudes and beliefs about camps between those arbitrarily assigned to camps and those in control groups, then a major policy change should be considered for the continuance or termination of refugee camps, to wit:
Imposing a penal draft–to randomly select citizens to serve their country as camp inmates, if only on the grounds that those outside are as guilty as those inside. Such is another benefit with the sortition of random lottery.
Principal sources
Ewing, B. (2018) “Socializing Punishment.” The Point Magazine Issue 17.
Swift, J. (1729). A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. Accessed online on March 1 2022 at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
It’s a truism that narratives dominate public policy and decision-making.
For those of us with a formalist or literary bent, the major conceptual implication is that the narratives are necessarily affected by the different conventions governing the respective genres (the policy memo, scholarly article, manifesto, others) through which the narratives are presented.
Below are ten brief illustrations of how different genre conventions affect, noticeably and importantly, the policy narrative when considered as story with beginning, middle and end or as an argument with premises and conclusion(s).
1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format
2. The genre of wicked policy problems
3. Not marginal or marginalized, but rather: which precarious?
4. Recasting poverty: a Zimbabwean example
5. Catastrophized cascades
6. The genre of policy palimpsest
7. Not-good-enough as an artifact of different genres
8. Analogies without counter-examples are floating signifiers
9. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
10. The policy relevance of Hamlet‘s Shakespeare (newly added)
11. When poems take us further in the climate emergency: Jorie Graham
12. How being right is a matter of genre
13. Different genres bring different granularities of policy relevance: a case in pastoralist development
Postscript. Never forget the importance of narrative structure in genre: the memo as a case
Post-Postscript. The beginning of style, or the limits of argument by adverb and adjective in public policy and management
1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format
I
Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest as nothing like it had occurred there before. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.
Fair enough, but not enough.
So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is predictably unimaginable to them. The M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. Rather it is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.
II
I however think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.
The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is, “unimaginably catastrophic” is not untrue.
So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something about a catastrophe very desperate indeed.
2. The genre of wicked policy problems
Recast wicked (that is, intractable) problems of policy and managementt as part of a longstanding genre in literature, which enables very different statements and competing positions to be held without them being inconsistent at the same time. Literary and cultural critic, Michael McKeon, helps us here:
Genre provides a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. The ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-“solving” capacities.
In McKeon’s formal terms, “the genre of the novel is a technique to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no particular commitment than that.”
Intractability appeared not only as the novel’s subject matter but also by virtue of the conventions for how these matters to be raised. The content is not only about the intractable, but also its governing context is as historically tangled and conventionalized as that of the English novel.
So what? I am not saying wicked problems are fictitious (even so, there is the well-known truth in fiction). Rather, I am arguing that pinning wicked problems exclusively to their content (e.g., wicked problems are defined by the lack of agreed-upon rules to solve them) misses the fact that the analytic category of wicked problems as such is highly rule-bound (i.e.., by the historical conventions to articulate and discuss such matters, in this case through novelistic means).
Here too, how so?
The answer gets us to the really important part. Return to the scholarly attempt to differentiate “wicked” and “tame” problems into more nuanced categories. Doing so is akin to disaggregating the English novel into romance, historical, gothic and other types. But such a differentiation need not problematize the genre’s conventions. In fact, the governing conventions may become more complex for distinguishing the more complex content, thus reinforcing the genre as a bottled intractability.
If wicked problems are to be better addressed, altogether different conventions and rules—what Wittgenstein called “language games”—will have to be found under which to recast these. . . . well, whatever they are to be called they wouldn’t be termed “intractable,” would they? There’s little understanding, it seems to me, that labeling a policy issue wicked can over-complexify a problem.
In fact, the litmus test that an issue is overly complexified or overly simplified is whether or not it can be recast in ways that open up fresh options for intervention without gainsaying its complexity. Declaring something a wicked problem can create The Ultimate One-Sided Problem—it’s, well, intractable—for humans who are everything but one-sided. In effect, one-siders of intractability, Anthropocene or not, have taken the generous notion of intractably human and scalped it.
Source
McKeon, M. ([1987] 2002). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
3. Not marginal or marginalized, but rather: which precarious?
I
Pastoralist knowledge, such as that of sub-Saharan herders, is an endangered species, we are told. More than marginalized, the practices are precarious—threatened where not extinct. Not only are the transmitters disappearing (the old-time pastoralists and transhumant nomads), but the forms of transmission—traditional knowledge, oral cultures, parent-to-child herding practices—are also slipping away.
II
If the preceding sounds like a familiar narrative, it has been written to be that way. For this is the view many have of pastoralism. It, after all, accords with many facts, e.g., the declines in young herders and their training/apprenticing.
The narrative needs to be pushed further, though. For governments have added a third type of precarity to the mix of disappearing practices and practitioners, namely: the latter were much less useful, anyway, than official policies and programs.
Why does this matter?
Because marginal and precarious are not the synonyms. Precarious differentiates behavior in ways that all those repetitions of marginal and marginalized do not. For it turns out precarity has more dimensions.
III
How so?
When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the more common refrain is these herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.
Since the study of pastoralism appears to be stuck with the term’s use and abuse, may I suggest a different, more positive dimension of their precarity:
The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .
Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York
Pastoralists, in this sense, continue to illuminate to our advantage what others persist texting as “the margins.”
4. Recasting poverty: a Zimbabwean example
–“What am I missing when I look at poverty the way I do?,” is for me much like reading a mystery novel twice: The first time I read to find out what happened by way of what is described and evoked. The second time I read to figure out and evaluate what I missed by way of how the mystery was constructed. As Leona Toker put it, the first reading is the reading of a mystery as it unfolds; the second is about the convention(s) at work in making the mystery I read.
This implies poverty should be read at least twice, first as a policy issue and second as any such policy issue involving these rather than those conventions of issue construction: What does policy say? And what did we miss by way of saying it this, rather than that, way?
–Here’s an example. Consider reports by Zimbabwe villagers:
March, 1992 “We are not yet getting food for drought relief” “there is no body who bring us food”
April “He has got a problem of starvation he is not working and he has got seven children.”
May “The problem of water here is sirious so that they need borehole and their cattle are very thin because there is no grass” “Trees die when they plant them” “This man is a criple that he needs help, but he is very intelligent that he tries to help himself” “She is old and she is blind and she is a widow and she does not have anyone to help her with food. No clothes no blankets. They do no have cattle to plough with this year”
June “At present two girls have left school they are just sitted at home. They can’t get money to pay schoolfees” “They have no food. She has a family of six children” “They are starving” “The cattle are dying”
What was to be done?
That depends on my—your?—two readings. The first reading is the unfolding immediacy of dire times in the village; the second is identifying the responses to what is described, starting from food-for-work schemes on to other projects. (Think of the project as others have done: It is its own genre, with pre-existing modules for planning, operation, management, auditing and such.)
Still back to the question: What am I missing by way of two readings? But my second reading of the above quotes came years after the comments were written.
–That is to say, answers are to be found for: What am I missing now? The response, please note, cannot be solely a fact-finding response by way of the obvious other question: What happened to these villagers in 1992 and after?
What is very important for today is: Where are people saying the same or similar things, right now, and what are the new genres for addressing these now recasted forms of poverty?
Source
Toker, L. (1993). Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.
5. Catastrophized cascades
The upshot of what follows: Infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing about infrastructural failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.
I
An infrastructure cascade happens when the failure of one part of the critical infrastructure triggers failure in its other parts as well as in other infrastructures connected with it. The fast propagation of failure can and has led to multiple systems failing over quickly, where “a small mistake can lead to a big failure.” The causal pathways in the chain reaction of interconnected failure are often difficult to identify or monitor, let alone analyze, during the cascade and even afterwards.
For its part, catastrophizing in the sense of “imagining the worst outcome of even the most ordinary event” seems to overlap with this notion of cascade. Here though the imagining in catastrophizing might be written off as exaggerated, worse irrational—the event in question is, well, not as bad as imagined—while infrastructure cascades are real, not imagined.
II
We may want, however, to rethink any weak overlap when it comes to infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing failure across interconnected infrastructures. Consider the insights of Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (2019, The University of Chicago Press).
In analyzing cases of catastrophizing (in Leonardo’s Notebooks, an early work of Kant and Shakespeare’s King Lear, among others), Passannante avoids labeling such thinking as irrational and favors a more nuanced understanding. He identifies from his material four inter-related features to the catastrophizing.
First (no order of priority is implied), catastrophizing probes and reasons from the sensible to the insensible, the perceptible to the imperceptible, the witnessed to the unwitnessed, and the visible to invisible. In this fashion, the probing and reasoning involve ways of seeing and feeling as well.
Second and third, when catastrophizing, an abrupt, precipitous shift or collapse in scale occurs (small scale suddenly shifts to large scale), while there is a distinct temporal elision or compression of the catastrophe’s beginning and end (as if there were no middle duration to the catastrophe being imagined).
Last, the actual catastrophizing while underway feels to the catastrophizer as if the thinking itself were involuntary and had its own automatic logic or necessity that over-rides—“evacuates” is Passannante’s term—the agency and control of the catastrophizer.
III
In this way, the four features of catastrophizing take us much closer to the notion of infrastructure cascades as currently understood.
In catastrophizing as in cascades, there is both that rapid propagation from small to large and that temporal “failing all of a sudden.” In catastrophizing as in cascades, causal connections—in the sense of identifying events with their beginnings, middles and ends—are next to impossible to parse out, given the rapid, often inexplicable, processes at work.
And yes, of course, cascades are real, while catastrophizing is more speculative; but: The catastrophizing feels very, very real to–and out of the direct control of–the catastrophizer as an agent in his or her own right.
In fact, one of the most famous typologies in organization and technology studies sanctions a theory that catastrophizes infrastructure cascades. The typology’s cell of tight coupling and complex interactivity is a Pandora Box of instantaneous changes, invisible processes, and incomprehensible breakdowns involving time, scale and perspective.
This is not a criticism: It may well be that we cannot avoid catastrophizing, if only because of the empirical evidence that sudden cascades have happened in the past.
IV
The four features, however, suggest that one way to mitigate any wholesale catastrophizing of infrastructure cascades is to bring back time and scale into the analysis and modeling of infrastructure cascades.
To do so would be to insist that really-existing infrastructure cascades are not presumptively instantaneous or nearly so. It would be to insist that infrastructure cascades are differentiated in terms of time and scale, unless proven otherwise. That, in fact, is what our research suggests. At the risk of tooting our horn:
One clear objective of recent network of networks modeling has been finding out which nodes and connections, when deleted, bring the network or sets of networks to collapse. Were only one more node to fail, the network would suddenly collapse completely, it is often argued…
But ‘suddenly’ is not all that frequent at the [interconnected infrastructure] level. In fact, not failing suddenly is what we expect to find in managed interconnected systems, in which an infrastructure element can fail without the infrastructure as a whole failing or disrupting the normal operations of other infrastructures depending on that system. Infrastructures instantaneously failing one after another is not what actually happens in many so-called cascades, and we would not expect such near simultaneity from our framework of analysis.
Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen….Yet individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operation to failure across systems can also take time. Discrete stages of disruption frequently occur when system performance can still be retrievable before the trajectory of failure becomes inevitable.”
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman, Risk and Reliability, 2016, Stanford University Press,
V
Let me leave you with another extension inspired by Passannante’s analysis. If infrastructure cascades, when catastrophized, have endings entailed in their beginnings (leaving only attenuated middles or no middles at all to speak of by way of analysis), the catastrophized cascade turns out to be the entailment of “just before” and “immediately after.”
That is, we are to believe we are in a state where disaster avoidance in-between is not possible and disaster response has yet to start but remains unavoidably ahead. We are expected to experience cascade-as-disaster as a presentism too close at hand for us to think about anything else.
But the point remains: Every one experiences time as anfractuous, full of twists and turns on occasion–why else all the interruptions?
6. The genre of policy palimpsest
I
Consider what was a commonplace for years: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism has come to mean total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.”
In reality, that statement was full of effacements from having been overwritten again and again through seriatim debates, vide:
“……totalitarianism has come to mean…….total control of politics ,citizenry and economics………”
It’s that accented “total control” that drove the initial selection of the phrases around it. Today, after further blurring, it’s much more fashionable to rewrite the composite argument as: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism sought total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.” The “sought” recognizes that, when it comes these forms of totalitarianism, seeking total control did not always mean total control achieved. “Sought” unaccents “total control.”
II
Fair enough, but note that “sought” itself reflects its own effacements in totalitarianism’s palimpsest, with consequences for how time and space are re-rendered.
Consider two quotes from the many in that policy palimpsest, which are missed when it comes to the use of a reduced-form “sought”:
I always thought there must be some more interesting way of interpreting the Soviet Union than simply reversing the value signs in its propaganda. And the thing that first struck me – that should have struck anybody working in the archives of the Soviet bureaucracy – was that the Soviet leaders didn’t know what was happening half the time, were good at throwing hammers at problems but not at solving them, and spent an enormous amount of time fighting about things that often had little to do with ideology and much to do with institutional interests.
The camp, then, was always in motion. This was true for people and goods, and also for the spaces they traversed. Because Auschwitz was one big construction site. It never looked the same, from one day to the next, as buildings were demolished, extended and newly built. As late as September 1944, just months before liberation in January 1945, the Camp SS held a grand ceremony to unveil its big new staff hospital. . .
Inadvertently, [construction] also created spaces for prisoner agency. The more civilian contractors worked on site, the more opportunities for barter and bribes. All the clutter and commotion also made it harder to exercise full control, as blocked sightlines opened the way for illicit activities, from rest to escape. . .
Some scholars see camps like Auschwitz as sites of total SS domination. This was certainly what the perpetrators wanted them to be. But their monumental designs often bore little resemblance to built reality. Priorities changed, again and again, and SS planners were thwarted by supply shortages, bad weather and (most critically) by mass deaths among their slave labour force. In the end, grand visions regularly gave way to quick fixes, resulting in what the historian Paul Jaskot, writing about the architecture of the Holocaust, called the “lack of a rationally planned and controlled space”. Clearly, the popular image of Auschwitz as a straight-line, single-track totalitarian machine is inaccurate.
I am not arguing that the quoted reservations are correct or generalizable or fully understandable (the quotes come to us as already overwritten). I am saying that they fit uncomfortably with popular notions “local resistance,” when the latter is about “taking back control”
III
So what? So what if time and space are in a policy and management world are (re-)rendered sinuous and interstitial, in a word, anfractuous rather than linear like a sentence? It’s a big deal, actually. It means that no single composite argument can galvanize the entire space-and-time of a palimpsest. It means matters of time and space are worth another look with each argument we read off of a major policy.
Why? Because reconsiderations of how time and space play out offers up the prospect of different objectivities and realisms, the very stuff of space and time.
For instance, the preceding entry noted how “catastrophic cascades” are described as having virtually instantaneous transitions from the beginning of a cascade in one infrastructure to its awful conclusion across other infrastructures connected with it. But in the terminology presented here, a catastrophizing cascade isn’t so much a composite argument with a reduced-form middle as it is a highly etiolated palimpsest where infrastructure interactions taking more granular time and space have been blotted out altogether.
7. Not-good-enough as an artifact of different genres
I
I don’t know about you, but I’ve turned into a minimalist when reading articles on major policy issues. If it doesn’t hook me in the first couple of paragraphs, I scroll down to the last paragraph and read backwards on the look-out for the upshot. If I find something, I read backwards for a bit longer and decide if it’s worth returning back to where I first left off.
This is largely a problem of genre. The journalist article starts with the dead or dying victim, when I the reader want to know upfront, not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce the victimhood. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people!
I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Then tell me how we might modify their doing so in order to make it work here as well.
II There is also that other genre, the academic article on a major policy issue. To be honest, some articles are doing better to get to the upshot(s), at least within the first two or three pages of single-spaced text, i.e., if and when they get to the part, “This article contributes to. . .” Still, too many top-of-the-page Abstracts conclude with, “Finally, implications are drawn for further action.” As if the oasis is somewhere out there in the desert of words ahead.
Tell me what those implications are so I have energy to read the next 20 pages. I’m not asking the authors to simplify. I’m asking them to tell me what they conclude or propose so I, the reader, can decide whether or not their actual analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell me upfront, because I may find I have something better to recommend from their assembly of facts and figures.
III
There is also that Executive Summary you find in some–by no means all–policy-advocacy reports. Many such reports are also doing a better job laying out recommendations upfront so that the readers can decide for themselves whether the rest of the text makes their case.
The problem arises where the rah-rah of advocacy gets in way of the details of how to implement the recommendations. You still find many instances of the already obvious, “We need a more equitable society,” and then full-stop. Not.Good.Enough. These aren’t calls for action but a form of bearing witness, a very different policy genre than the advocacy report.
IV
In fact, many long-form journalism pieces or academic articles come to us posing as two other genres, essays or mysteries. We the readers are meant to see how their thinking unfolds. Or in the case of executive summaries, the values of the advocates are to shine bright above all else. Fair enough for readers knowing they are reading essays or mysteries or a tract. But not good enough for others who want more by way of action.
8. Analogies without counter-examples are floating 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 have bolded the preceding phrase because its insight is major: We have to search for analogies in the times.
The problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is when the analogy misleads. Jackson, by way of illustrating the 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
The upshot, however, is that, when confronted with an analogy drawn from history, like the Gilded Age, and marshaled to encapsulate and distill present trends, we must press its advocates to go further. They need to identify disaggregated trends (regional, sectoral, rural/urban, other), including cases where these parts are not described by the whole. The burden of proof is on the analogy advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions.
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 would have it. Broad analogies untethered from granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.
III
A fairly uncontroversial conclusion, I should think, but let’s now make the matter harder for us.
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can 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, said 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.
Now, of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others of course dismiss this outright as racist, adding “Just look where he publishes this stuff!”
But, following on the earlier upshot, the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and examples, including most importantly counter-cases.
9. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
I
Remember when those orbiting twins of “freedom and necessity” shone brightest on the intellectual horizons? Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the second you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity. Or if you prefer more negative: back to when your blindspots are also strengths.
None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential were nowhere different from each other. None of this would matter if really-existing policy and management were not the way-stations lived in between.
But the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential are, I want to argue, conflated and treated as one and the same in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.
II
Recently, Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, makes the point directly:
Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.
Memoir in this shift ends up, in Tisdale wonderful term, as a “grand reveal.” Of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds to also be positive affordances and enablements as they move to the way-stations in-between.
To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one meaning at the expense of the other meanings allied to. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”
So what? To rewrite a once-popular expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eyewitnessing what is right in front of us.
Other sources
David Caute (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London).
10. The policy relevance of Hamlet‘s Shakespeare (newly added)
There is no more fundamental way of freeing Hamlet from the constraints of text than by removing words altogether, as ballet of necessity does.
Michelle Assay (2022). “The late- and post-Soviet trials of Hamlet in song, ballet, and opera.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 108(1) 35–52 (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01847678221092791)
The artist as the created; Mona Lisa’s Leonardo, Beatrice’s Dante. Curious concept.
Guy Davenport in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 1963 (Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Edited by Edward M. Burns, 2 volumes (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA; 2018).
If anything, the notion of “Hamlet‘s Shakespeare” looks to be a way of textualizing Shakespeare. Not just his becoming the playwright through writing Hamlet, but also writing his own narrative self by thinking through Hamlet. As if in referring to Satan’s Milton, I am positing how John Milton might have worked out his own personal theology by having to dictate (verbalize) that Satan into Paradise Lost.
If so, then freeing both Hamletand Shakespeare from the textual is to imagine something altogether different, like those ballets called Hamlet.
Here the upshot is that there are multiple versions, not just necessarily unique performances, of the single play, e.g., Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles, Stephen Mills’ 2000 Hamlet, and the 2015 Hamlet of Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s for the Bolshoi Ballet (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797).
For policy and management to have multiple versions, rather than many unique implementations, is also to imagine policy and management through different genres than those of the textual.
One great example is that of the refusal. There have been those whose rejection to involvement in policy and management, let alone in politics, has been uncompromising: “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight.” This silence and isolation includes refusing to “to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution”(quotes from https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal)
The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say refusal is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the function of silence depends on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is by way of being voiceless. Or better yet: In what ways do you render voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?
The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say refusal is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the function of silence depends on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is by way of being voiceless. Or better yet: In what ways do you render voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?
11. When poems take us further in the climate emergency: Jorie Graham
I
No one can accuse poetJorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, a homeopathic whiff, of optimism–enviro-techno-social-otherwise–in the poetry I’ve read of hers.
Which poses my challenge: Is there some thing, other than loss and dread in her four recent books of poetry, compiled as [To] The Last [Be] Human, that I can rely on or use in my own responding to the climate emergency?
To expect answers from poets is to make an outrageous demand, but that is what I’m doing here.
II
There are two easy ways to finesse my challenge. First, Graham provides instances where she could be wrong (“. . .how you/cannot/comprehend the thing you are meant/to be looking/for”). There is also no reason to believe her readers read her as she seems to imagine, irrespective of thinking there will be no readers if things continue as they are.
But that kind of line of by-pass fall shorts of what Graham is doing here. It’s her sharp scalpel in getting to the point and making it wholly matter that is my focus. To lay my cards out: Graham’s analytic sensibility shines through the poems’ dark prospect, and I want to stay with that sensibility and not her horizon.
III
One from many excerpts reflects this constellated sensibility for me (from the first 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. . . (p. 12)
There’s that tumble of words and turns-of-phrase that deepen the rush. Then they bounce off and back from the two hard left-side margins and the right-side enjambment. For someone with my background and training, this is resilience-being-performed.
I see hard walls being repelled from and pushed up to, and sometimes through (as in the hyphen-less “dancefloor”). Not as though it were a hope, but rather as a coiling that toggles between everywhere necessary and never out of sight/site: a resilience for the climate emergency.
IV
A tic in her sensibility is illuminating: her intermix of macro and micro, general and specific, universal and particular, without a gradient in-between. Two examples toward the end of Sea Change illustrate this (here too breaking into her flow):
. . . .It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing and
cleaning-up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000 years of
the inter-
glacial period, & the orders & the getting done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you pass, did
you lose the address again. . . (p55)
. . .The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
question—how, this sensation called tomorrow and
tomorrow? Did you look down at
your hands just now? The dead gods
are still being
killed. They don’t appear in
“appearance.” They turn the page for
us. The score does not acknowledge
the turner of
pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging, in the
void. . . (p45)
Again—that rush of words, use of margins, turns-of-phrase that cut to a point—but what’s notable to me is there is no middle between future and mind, gods and hands, the emergency and losing an address.
I come from a profession and career where, in contrast, when conditions are complex, we look for the meso-level(s). Patterns and formations emerge for the policy analyst and manager that are not seen at the level of individual cases nor at the level of universalized generalizations. For Graham, the complexity is in that wide-open combinatorics of micro’s and macro’s.
Ironically, this sensibility makes us want to explore the middle further.
Principal source
Jorie Graham (2022). [To] The Last [Be] Human. Introduction by Robert MacFarlane. Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA
12. How being right is a matter of genre (newly added)
In public policy, the wish–so often unfilled, is for the right person at the right time in the right job doing the right thing.
In poetry by contrast, we have Louise Glück’s poem, “Crossroads,”
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives but never in its choices, its intensities. Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent: forgive its brutality. As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss, it is you I will miss.
Given the poem’s theme, the shortening of lines from three to two is so RIGHT!
13. Different genres bring different granularities for policy relevance: a case from pastoralist development (new added)
I
To think of policy and management narratively is to think about narrative structure(s) from the get-go.
It’s not that a policy brief is shorter than the policy report upon which it is based. Things are left out in the former for reasons other than its shorter length. A policy brief and a policy report are different genres, like a novel compared to a play. Their respective styles, voice, conventions, audiences, and even what they take to be details (formally, their granularities) differ significantly. This means that what’s narrated in one but not repeated in another have implications for policy and management.
II
A wonderful example of why and how narrative structure matters for real-time policy and management lies in comparing two fine publications recently released by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University:
The differences in narrators’ voice is made explicit and obvious via the two documents. The policy report has been written by a local research team in a first-person voice, while the policy brief has been edited from the report in the third-person voice. For that matter, the personal and conversational “we” of the report doesn’t appear at all in the brief, and this is not surprising as its editors include those who were listed in the local research team.
IT MUST BE UNDERSTOOD THESE DIFFERENCES ARE NOT A FAILING. It could be that both brief and report had the same point of view, albeit other genre differences remain. What is crucial to note here is that the genre differences pose a huge opportunity for those of us readers who are policy analysts and managers.
That a brief and a report have been written for different audiences, fulfilling different requirements and expectations, would be a banal observation, where it not for one fact: What each genre takes as “the specifics”–to repeat, the respective granularities–are nevertheless both relevant for real-world pastoralist policy and management.
IV
Here’s one illuminating example. At one point in the report, a side comment appears: “An old man asked us where we are coming from, and we told him we had come from the office of herders. That is good, he said.”
This notion of an office of and for herders is picked up later in the report’s section, “What can pastoralists do?”. Note the voice and specifics in following passage:
The stories we have heard from women, men, and young people, have affected all of us. We will call for policies that everyone knows and follows. We’re thinking of an office run by pastoralists, with people from each community — Bokora, Jie, Turkana, Matheniko, Dodoth etc. When there are issues, the people from that place know how the issues are arising. . . .
The office should deal with any issues related to pastoralists, not only raids. The representatives would be like teachers, organising meetings, bringing awareness to people what they should be doing. Giving information to the government and NGOs.
The kraal leaders should form a network. The first to know about drought and animal disease is the herder. The herder reports to kraal leaders. Kraal leaders negotiate resource sharing with other kraal leaders. If they agree, they act. If they need further permissions, they go to the broader pastoralist association. If they need further help, they then can reach to government. Success will come if we all believe that any problem that comes has a solution within us.
“Office” is not mentioned in the policy brief, nor is “kraal,” nor is that “network” of leaders. NOR WOULD I EXPECT TO SEE THIS TYPE AND LEVEL OF GRANULARITY IN A POLICY BRIEF. For my part, I think the proposal of such an office is great idea. I wish I had thought of pastoralists-as-reliability professionals in this way.
But that is not point of this blog entry. Rather, it’s a methodological lesson to be drawn by those who treat narratives seriously in pastoralist development: Actionable granularity is not and cannot be the province of only one genre in policy or management. (Had I recourse to the transcripts of the local research team, I might have picked a more or a differently detailed example.)**
The authors of both the report and the brief are to be commended for making this lesson so evident.
**Another way to put the lesson is that pastoralists are intermedial, that is, composites of multiple media at any point in time and over time. Again, pastoralists, like the rest of us, are never one way only.
Postscript. Never forget the importance of narrative structure in genre: the case of a memo
Graduate students in public policy analysis and management will know the idealized sequence for undertaking a professional policy analysis, e.g., first define the problem, then assemble the evidence, then analyze it so and so on until we make our recommendation. This sequence, or something like it, is cast in the present tense.
My experience is that the idealized steps are markedly not in the present tense, but rather:
Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.
The past gerund, “having completed the analysis,” indicates something finished, a hope that stands in sharp contrast to real-world policies in their persisting incompletion—a very different kind of “present tense.” The gerund also serves to situate analysis within an ongoing context without which there wouldn’t be analysis.
In turn, the prepositional object, “recommendations,” introduces its own promise that our memo, already written as it is, will be dealt with, albeit outside our control but within a context of which we analysts are part. Indeed, the overall thrust of the sequence–past gerund combined with past tense verb but with present and future object–is to make clear that analysts in the present are not (yet) to blame for anything like the real-world incompletion all around us.
Post-Postscript. The beginning of style, or the limits of argument by adverb and adjective in public policy and management
–Paul Claudel, French poet and playwright, wrote in his Journal, “fear of the adjective is the beginning of style”.
–Georges Simenon: “It is said, probably apocryphally, that on completion of yet another novel he would summon his children and shake the typescript vigorously before them, asking, ‘What am I doing, little ones?” to which they would reply ritually, in chorus, ‘You’re getting rid of the adjectives, papa.’”
–“In adapting Mark Twain’s writing for the stage, Mr. Holbrook said he had the best possible guide: Twain himself. ‘He had a real understanding of the difference between the word on the page and delivering it on a platform,’ he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2011. ‘You have to leave out a lot of adjectives. The performer is an adjective.’”
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 