“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
A while ago, a joint statement was issued by the Center for AI Safety. It was the one sentence quoted above. Famously, it was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures.
Now, of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence.
But, just as clearly, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.
The conventional balance of terror and ecocide
Article 8. . .Ecocide
1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. . . .
It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.
Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:
[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.
Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.
Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:
To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.
And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.
“So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die, so I can be sustainable
To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]
The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).
Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end really matters:
Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .
It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.
“Underdog metaphysics,” coined by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, has been defined as:
On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”
Let’s not forget, however, just who finds powerlessness to be an elite position:
American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.
Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:
Plato and Dionysius II;
Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
Seneca and Nero;
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
Montaigne and Henri IV;
Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .
I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)
So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”
Sorry to interrupt, but is your point. . .?
. . . .Given the scope and scale of the financing (and divestment) required for mitigation and the support for adaptation, current financing gaps suggest transitions are not happening at the pace or scale they need to cope with catastrophic change. CPI find that global climate finance needs will amount to $6300 billion worldwide in 2030 (Buchner et al., 2023) and should have reached about $4200 bn in 2021. Yet in 2021, total climate finance amounted to $850 bn: a significant sum, but nowhere near what is required. This is hugely challenging, yet needs to be set against the costs of inaction. Without such interventions, warming will exceed 3°C, leading to macroeconomic losses of at least 18% of GDP by 2050 and 20% by 2100 (NFGS, 2022). . . .
I’m reading an article on LatamGPT, the development of a Latin American version of ChatGPT:
When researchers from the LatamGPT project asked ChatGPT for a 500-character description of Latin American culture, the response was polite but revealing: “Latin American culture is a vibrant amalgam of Indigenous roots, African influences, and European heritage. It is characterized by its rich diversity in music, dance, and cuisine, reflected in festivals like Carnival and the Flower Fair.” While the formulation may seem inclusive, what it reveals is a superficial and standardized understanding of a region marked by the imperial overseas conquest and colonization, through which a mestizaje of exceptional density and complexity took place—rarely found elsewhere in the world—whose tensions, memories, and ways of life far exceed any tourist postcard or folkloric representation. In its stylistic correctness, the response betrays the limits of an AI trained from outside the experience it aims to describe.
Sounds right, but what does “mestizaje” mean, you and I ask? The article further along produces the synonym, “hybridization”, but nothing formal.
So I google: “mestizaje meaning.” Oops, the first thing that pops up is the AI-generated:
Mestizaje is a term for the mixing of different racial and cultural groups, historically referring to the blending of Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also including the later addition of African, Asian, and other ancestries. Beyond just race, it encompasses the fusion of languages, customs, and religions that occurred during and after Spanish colonization, and the term is still used today to describe mixed-ancestry identities and cultural exchange. It is a complex concept that is sometimes critiqued for oversimplifying identity, but it remains a significant part of many national identities in the Americas.
Well, this covers some of what the article’s authors describe, but then again, there’s that use of the contentious term, race. . .
So I end up searching further down the google search results and find:
“Mestizaje,” which is associated with the word “mixed,” can be understood as the product of mixing two distinct cultures—that is, Spanish and Indigenous American. While it is etymologically connected to the French métis (a person of mixed ancestry, similar to mestiza/o in Spanish) and métissage (the cultural process that leads to this) and to the Portuguese mestiço (a person of mixed ancestry), it is an unstable signifier that has different meanings depending on its context. Referring to the biological and cultural mixing of European and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, mestizaje can be understood as the effect caused by the impact of colonization. In North America, the closest approximation to “mestizaje” is the word métis, indicating a person of mixed aboriginal and European ancestry. For example, in western Canada the term is used in reference to people of Caucasian and Native Indian ancestry. However, both métissage and métis are used primarily in Francophone culture and literature. English, on the other hand, has no equivalent for “mestizaje,” although in theory, it has been identified as synonymous with cultural hybridization or hybridity, as both represent the space-in-between (Anzaldúa 1987; Bhabha 1994; García Canclini 1995).
Kind of Eurocentric, but, hey, it gets us back to “hybridization”, the synonym in the original article. Still, there’s nothing explicit about cuisine (as in the article’s quoted passage), and what about that bit about mestizaje being “an unstable signifier”?
I have no problem with mestizaje being complex, but I wonder what any GPT prompt-and-response can say about the term’s continuing significance as an unstable signifier?
Famously, Napoleon and Goethe met at Erfurt for an hour’s interchange in October 1808. They discussed many topics, each of which Napoleon would often end with the above “Qu’en dit Monsieur Goet.?”
Here I want to focus on one of Napoleon’s remarks to Goethe:
You, for instance, ought to write a tragedy about the death of Caesar one really worthy of the subject, a greater one than Voltaire’s [La Mort de César, presumably]. That could be the finest task you ever undertook. You would have to show the world how Caesar would have been its benefactor, how everything would have turned out quite differently if he had been given time to carry out his magnificent plans. You must come to Paris; I absolutely insist on it. We have a larger view of things there!
Ah, the certainty of those “would’s” and “magnificent plans”! And that phrase, “we have a larger view there,” said to the man who had written the first part of Faust by then.
Ah, “the glittering garb of societal relevance belongs to the rented costume of rhetoric,” Hans Blumenberg, the philosopher, said of an essay by historian, Reinhart Koselleck.
Sometimes I’m asked if there’s anything new to add Narrative Policy Analysis (1994). Below are three longer blog entries that expand points in the book which may help its current readers.
Edited from: E.M. Roe (1989). “Folktale development,” The American Journal of Semiotics 6(2): 277-289. An epilogue explains why the article was not republished with others in my Narrative Policy Analysis (1994).
I
There is something exhilarating in finding a book, now almost a century old and from an entirely different field, that is nonetheless still timely. This is the case of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Propp’s argument and supporting textual analysis are that what sets the folktale apart from other literary genres is not its characteristic themes or story plots, but rather the cast of “actors” which appear in the folktale, the types of activities (“functions”) performed by these characters, and, most important, the sequence of these activities. From his analysis, Propp found seven different dramatis personae, some thirty-one different functions, but only one prototypical sequence of action in all folktales. Summarizing that sequence will strike a resonant chord for even those readers who are only superficially familiar with the politics or practice of rural development.
According to Propp, there may be a number of ways in which a folktale is initially introduced and situated, but the action really does not begin until there is either an act of villainy or a lack manifests itself. There may be a villain who does some form of harm, or it may be that something is simply missing, thereby motivating action. The hero decides that this misfortune has to be corrected and he or she departs from home to do so. On the journey, the hero is interrogated and tested by what, presciently for us, is called the donor. With the aid of a magical helper, the hero comes to a place where the object of the search lies. What follows depends upon whether or not the initial misfortune was caused by the villain. If it was, then the hero struggles in direct combat with the villain. The hero wins or gets what she or he is looking for and starts out to return home. If no villain was initially involved, then the struggle to achieve what is desired consists of performing a difficult task or series of tasks and enduring ordeals.
After apparently winning, the hero finds himself pursued while trying to return horne. His victory was only temporary and he has to be rescued from his flight, again by a series of donors or helpers. The hero finally makes it back, metes out justice, marries and ascends the throne. This description is only a partial one, since not all the functions or dramatis personae are listed. Still, it provides the rough schema of a folktale, where not all folktales have the same characters or functions, but what functions they do have should follow the Proppian sequence.
Parallels between what we who work in so called developing countries experience and Propp’s schema can easily be drawn: We have seen the exiled nationalist leader as hero, the colonial master as villain, the struggle to throw off the yoke of oppression, the victory, the “achievement” of independence, and so on. But the “hero” is not really free, pursued by neocolonial exploitation and North-South dependency, beset by the task of building a nation, tested at every turn by financial donors, major lenders, or the stations of the cross in the International Monetary Fund austerity package. Only temporarily rescued by aid and debt rescheduling, the leader of the country tries to reverse the slide toward political instability by crowning himself President for Life. Suddenly, sic semper tyrannis, and the cycle begins again.
Propp appreciated what my fellow practitioners by and large have not: to think in terms of villainy, struggle, pursuit, and tasks means we pair these concepts with their antonyms, implying that these are the possible and preferred alternatives, i.e., victory, rescue, resolution, and the end of misfortune. Such terms embrace both the vocabulary and the grammar of folktale development, which has, in turn, become the mainstream view about how the rural development effort is undertaken in the so-called Third World.
II
Thirty-five years after his Morphology, Propp published an article called “Folklore and Reality”, in which he gives us a clue to what needs to be done by way of responding to the versions of folktale development today. “In folklore the narrative is not based on normal characters or normal actions in a normal situation; just the opposite: folktales choose things strikingly unusual . . . Average types (which constitute the majority in life) do not occur in folklore” (Propp 1984: 19, 20).
Imagine, that is, a rural development without its inflated cliches about heroes and villains, winners and losers; a rural development where difficult tasks and accomplishments achieved do not imply eventual solutions and success; where the war against ignorance and poverty is not going to be “won”; where the rescue from underdevelopment is never guaranteed–imagine that and you confront the end of folktale development. The fact that policies all too often fall short of expectations, plans lead to unintended consequences, projects are stymied by poor implementation rates, and “target” populations become disaffected and alienated is not simply due to bad planning and design. Some of this follows because the grammar and ideology of rural development has us thinking in and acting upon such terms.
Folktale development will have passed away when we have ceased to think of a government department or self-help group as a potential hero whose failures suddenly or continually disappoint us. The next phase of rural development will be the one where we drop the rhetoric of “the road to development” with its inevitable failed redemption. Most of us could start making change now, by realizing the loss of magic that comes with admitting that we don’t need any more folktales about this Third World.
Epilogue (Octobr 2025)
Once I knew I was publishing articles that could be integrated into a single book and approach, called narrative policy analysis, I realized “Folktale Development” would not be one of them.
In narrative analytical terms, the article was at best a critique, and critiques are not counternarratives. Stop doing what we’re currently doing and thinking by way of rural development is not an alternative policy narrative, let alone metanarrative for recasting rural development in positive terms. My book would be about an approach to the latter. Plus I realized that if I did somehow squeeze in this article, I would inevitably be asked: Emery, are you the hero or villain of Narrative Policy Analysis?
References
V. Propp (1984). Theory and Practice of Folklore. Translated by A. Y. Martin and R. P. Martin and several others. Anatoly Liberman, editor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Edited from: E. Roe (2007). Narrative Policy Analysis for Decision Making. In: Goktug Morcel, Ed. (2007). Handbook of Decision Making. CRC Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton: 607 – 626. An epilogue updates points about the metanarrative(s).
THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATION
As originally conceived in Narrative Policy Analysis (Roe, 1994), determination of what was the better policy narrative took place around three connected features. The preferred narrative was one (1) that took seriously the fact that development is genuinely complex, uncertain, unfinished and conflicted, (2) that moved beyond critique of other narratives, and (3) that told a better story, i.e., a more comprehensive yet parsimonious account that did not dismiss or deny the issue’s contraries but which was amenable to policymaking and management.
Narratives for and against globalization provide an example of the strengths and limitations in this initial approach.
GLOBALIZATION
Readers scarcely need be told that the policy narrative in favor of the economic globalization of trade was a dominant scenario in numerous decision making arenas, as witnessed by the many calls for trade liberalization as a way of expanding economic growth. There have always been various counternarratives (counter-scenarios or counter-arguments) to globalization scenarios. For our purposes, focus on the opposing arguments to globalization put forth by environmental proponents of sustainable development. This early opposition can be roughly divided into two camps: a “green” counternarrative and an “ecological” one (Roe & Van Eeten, 2004).
The green counternarrative assumes that we have already witnessed sufficient harm to the environment due to globalization and thus demands taking action now to restrain further globalizing forces. It is confident in its knowledge about the causes of environmental degradation as they relate to globalization and certain in its opposition to globalization. In contrast, the ecological counternarrative starts with the potentially massive but largely unknown effects of globalization on the environment that have been largely identified by ecologists. Here enormous uncertainties over the impacts of globalization, some of which could well be irreversible, are reason enough not to promote or tolerate further globalization.
Where the green counternarrative looks at the planet and sees global certainties and destructive processes definitively at work, those ecologists and others who subscribe to the ecological counternarrative know that ecosystems are extremely complex, and thus the planet must be the most causally complex ecosystem there is. The ecological counternarrative opposes globalization because of what is not known, while the green counternarrative opposes globalization because of what is known. The former calls for more research and study and invokes the precautionary principle—do nothing unless you can demonstrate it will do no harm. The latter says we do not need more research or studies in order to do something—take action now—precisely because we have seen and continue to see the harm.
Neither the green nor the ecological counternarrative meets fully all three features for a better narrative, however.
Clearly, the ecological counternarrative is preferable over the green version in terms of the first feature. The ecological counternarrative takes uncertainty and complexity seriously throughout, while its green counterpart goes out of its way to deny that any major dispositive uncertainties and complexities are at work. Does this then mean the ecological version is the better environmental counternarrative? The answer depends on the other two criteria, and here problems arise. Plainly, the ecological counternarrative is open to all manner of critique, if simply because of its reliance on the precautionary principle, e.g., I can no more prove a negative than I can show beforehand that application of the precautionary principle itself will do no harm in the future (see Duvick, 1999). That said, from the narrative policy analysis framework, critiques against the precautionary principle or for that matter against the ecological counternarrative are of little decision making use if they are not accompanied by alternative formulations that better explain how and why it makes sense to be environmentally opposed to globalization.
What about the third criterion? Is there at least one metanarrative that explains how it is possible to hold, at the same time and without being incoherent or inconsistent, the dominant policy narrative about globalization, its counternarratives, and other accounts, including critiques of the former? Readers may have different metanarratives in mind, but the one I am most familiar with is the metanarrative about who claims to have the best right to steward the planet. The proponents of globalization and the proponents of the counternarrativez disagree over what is best for the environment, but both groups are part and parcel of the same techno-managerial elite who claim they know what is best for us.
According to this metanarrative, we need free trade or the precautionary principle or whatever because we—the unwashed majority—cannot better steward our resources on our own. While we may bristle against the elite condescension—who elected them?—it is patent that the metanarrative does not take us very far in deciding what to do next and instead. We are still left with the question: What is the better policy (meta)narrative?
Fortunately, it is now possible to provide a fuller evaluative framework of policy narratives. We know more than we did in the early 1990s about what it takes to ensure reliable development services taken to be critical by the human populations concerned, and in that knowledge can be found the better policy narratives. As one might expect, the evaluation is contingent on who is doing the evaluating (and their own definitions even if not operationalized in social science terms).
FRAMEWORKFOR EVALUATING POLICY NARRATIVES
Assume any system—technical, agricultural, social, ecological or the one you have in mind now—has as a priority the aim of providing reliable critical services. It may not be the only aim, but it is a priority. The critical services may be crops, water, transportation, or electricity, among others. “Reliable” means the critical services are provided safely and continuously even during peak demand periods. The lights stay on, even when generators could do with maintenance; crop production varies seasonally, but food supplies remain stable; and we have clean water because we have managed our livestock so as not to harm the aquifer. The challenge to maintain reliable services is daunting, as these critical service systems—technical, agricultural, social, and ecological—can be tightly coupled and complexly interactive. The generator goes off, and the knock-on, cascading effects might be dramatic.
The wider literature my colleagues and I have been contributing to (Schulman, Roe, van Eeten, and de Bruijne, 2004; Roe, van Eeten, Schulman, & de Bruijne, 2002; Roe, Schulman, van Eeten & de Bruijne, 2005; see also Roe, 2004) tells us that the drive to high reliability management in such systems can be described along two dimensions:[1] (1) the type of knowledge brought to bear on efforts to make the system reliable, and (2) the focus of attention or scope of those reliability efforts. The knowledge bases from which reliable performance is pursued can range from formal or representational knowledge, in which key efforts are understood through abstract principles and deductive models based upon the principles, to experience, based on informal, tacit understanding. Knowledge bases, in brief, vary in their mix of induction and deduction, and thus their assembly of differing arguments and scenarios into policy narratives.
At the same time, the scope of attention can range from a purview which embraces reliability as an entire system output, encompassing many variables and elements, to a case-by-case focus in which each case is viewed as a particular event with distinct properties or features. Typically, scope is articulated in policy narratives as the different scales, ranging from specific to general, that must be taken into account. The two continua of knowledge and scope define a conceptual and perceptual space (Figure 1), where high reliability can be pursued (defined again as the continuous and safe provision of the critical service even during periods of stress). Four nodes of activities and the domain of the reliability professional are identified:
At the extreme of both scope and formal principles is the macro-design approach to reliable critical services (the “macro-design node”). Here formal deductive principles are applied at the systemwide level to understand a wide variety of critical processes. It is considered inappropriate to operate beyond the design analysis, and analysis is meant to cover an entire system, including every last case to which that system can be subjected. At the other extreme is the activity of the continually reactive behavior in the face of real-time challenges at the micro-level (the “micro-operations” node). Here reliability resides in the reaction time of the system operators working at the event level rather than the anticipation of system designers for whatever eventuality. The experiences of crisis managers and emergency responders are exemplary.
But designers cannot foresee everything, and the more “complete” a logic of design principles attempts to be, the more likely it is that the full set will contain two or more principles contradicting each other (again, prove beforehand that application of the precautionary principle will itself do no harm). On the other hand, operator reactions by their very nature are likely to give the operator too specific and hasty a picture, losing sight of the forest for the trees in front of the manager or operator. Micro-experience can become a “trained incapacity” that leads to actions undermining reliability, as the persons concerned may well not be aware of the wider ramifications of their behavior.
What to do then, if the aim is system reliability? Clearly, “moving horizontally” across the reliability space directly from one corner across to the opposite corner is unlikely to be successful. A great deal of our research has found that attempts to impose large-scale formal designs directly onto an individual case—to attempt to anticipate and fully deduce and determine the behavior of each instance from systemwide principles alone—are very risky when not outright fallacious (variously called the fallacy of composition in logic or the ecological fallacy in sociology). That said, reactive operations by the individual hardly constitute a template for scaling up to the system, as management fads demonstrate continually.
Instead of horizontal, corner-to-corner movements, Figure 1 indicates that reliability is enhanced when shifts in scope are accompanied by shifts in the knowledge bases. To be highly reliable requires more and different knowledge than found at the extremes of a priori principles and phenomenological experience. We know from our research that reliability is enhanced when designers apply their designs less globally and relax their commitment to a set of principles that fully determine system operations. This happens when designers embrace a wider set of contingencies in their analyses and entertain alternate, more localized (including regional) scenarios for system behavior and performance (the “localized contingent scenarios node” in Figure 1). From the other direction, reactive operations can shift away from real-time firefighting toward recognizing and anticipating patterns across a run of real-time cases (the “pattern recognition and anticipation node”). Operator and managerial adaptation—recognizing common patterns and anticipating strategies to cover similar categories of micro events or cases—arises. These emerging norms, strategies and routines are likely to be less formal than the protocols developed through contingency analysis or scenario-building.
It is in this middle ground where worldviews are tempered by individual experience, where discretion and improvisation probe design, where anticipated patterns mesh with localized scenarios, and where shared views are reconciled with individualized perspectives. Our research tells us that sustaining critical services in a reliable fashion is not really possible until the knowledge bases have shifted from what is known at the macro, micro, localized scenario and pattern recognition levels. The four nodes are important only to the extent that designs, scenarios, personal experience and empirical generalization can be translated into reliable critical services across the scales of interest. The translation is interpretative rather than literal—that is why new or different knowledge is generated.
The middle ground is, in our phrase, the domain of the reliability professional. These are the people who excel at cross-scale, context-dependent case-by-case analysis. They are the middle level managers and operators in the control rooms of our technical systems; they are the medical staff in our hospital emergency rooms; they are the firefighters who know when to drop their shovels and run for it; they are the farmers who decide to plow now before the first rains, the pastoralists who move their herds only now after the first rains, the experienced extension agent and researcher who does not turn away from the villager they have worked with the minute she asks, “But what do we do now….” They excel at formulating and evaluating what-if scenarios in order to answer: What do we do next? (The inability to answer “what happens next, according to the narrative of interest?” remains a shortcoming attributed to other approaches to discourse and narrative analyses.)
AN EXAMPLE IN APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATING POLICY NARRATIVES
As we shall see, the policy narratives deployed by reliability professionals are different than those found populating the four nodes of macro-design, localized contingency scenarios, pattern recognition and anticipation, and micro-operations in much of the published literature. This is to be expected since the knowledge bases used in the narratives are different. Reliability professionals and the arguments they make have of course always been there, decade after decade. To be thoroughly arbitrary, we read about them in Albert Hirschman’s Development Projects Observed (1967), Robert Chambers’ Managing Rural Development (1974), and Jon Moris’s implementation-oriented Managing Induced Rural Development (1981)—and that only touches the tip of a literature on reliability professionals in development. Hindsight, a facility for other languages, and greater respect for the fugitive literature would easily chronicle other archaeologies.
What has changed since the 1990s is that the reliability space and the differences in policy narratives around the nodes and in the middle are more obvious than before in a number of cases. One example will have to suffice.
The Science of Sustainable Development, by Jeff Sayer and Bruce Campbell (2004), has plainly been written by and for the reliability professionals working in the middle of the development and the environment arena. The book, authored by two development practitioners with strong research and administrative bona fides, sought to demonstrate how integrated natural resource management happens in practice at the time of writing. Through case studies from Borneo, Zimbabwe, and the Ecuadorian Andes and a very broad synthesis of the literature, the book “aims to demystify the sometimes obscure science of natural resources management, interpreting it for the benefit of those who need to deal with the day-to-day problems of managing complex natural resources” (p. i). That word, “interpreting,” is more path-breaking than one first notice, because it is directly tied to the translation function that reliability professionals provide. In this way, the book reflected a major shift that was taking place over the years away from conventional development and environment narratives based solely or primarily on designs.
It is important to underscore how different the Sayer and Campbell discussion of “sustainable development” is from that which still takes place at the four nodes. It would be easy enough to critique their book from the nodes looking into the domain the authors occupy. One can already hear the critics. From the macro-design node: “But the book doesn’t have a chapter on the foundations and principles of sustainable development. . .” From the local scenario node: “But the book doesn’t have any discussion on the model that hunter-gatherers offer for contemporary sustainable development…” From the micro-experience node: “But the book doesn’t tell us what the lived daily experience is really like for a peasant under ‘sustainable development’…” From the pattern recognition node: “But the book has no discussion of global trends in per capita consumption and population growth rates that affect sustainable development…”
The point is not that these narratives from the outside are irrelevant. On the contrary, they could be very important—if and when they can be translated and interpreted into the different knowledge bases required for sustainable (a.k.a., reliable) development across multiple scales from the global to the specific. For example, the book is mercifully free of the de rigueur macro-narrative about sustainable development as managing resources today so that the future has a chance to manage them tomorrow. It is not that the Bruntland Commission definition is “wrong,” but that it never has been specific enough for management purposes. For Sayer and Campbell (2004, p. 57) as well as many others (this author included), the better narrative—that is, one which interprets Bruntland in reliability terms—is: Sustainable development is about creating human opportunities to respond to unpredictable change across the scales humans find themselves interacting without killing life in the process. That narrative is difficult enough to realize, but at least unpredictability and uncontrollability move center stage where they must be if sustainability is to be taken seriously.
Sayer and Campbell write decidedly from within the reliability space looking out to the nodes beyond. The two authors make it patent that sustainable livelihoods will not be possible until new and different knowledge bases are brought to bear across the scales from case to system. (In fact, one cannot talk about multiple scales for sustainability without shifting from knowledge bases.) The authors’ call for more participatory action research (PAR), scaling out (rather than up or down), and use of “throwaway” models is especially apposite because those approaches at best help information gatherers become information users. At worst, PAR and formal models can be made as formulaic as the project log frame at the macro-design node, as the authors are quick to point out.
Sayer and Campbell’s call for more science-based integrated resource management can also be understood in the same light. When “Science” comes to us in a capital-S—a set of must-do’s (e.g., random assignment groups and controls)—it is too rigid for ready translation by reliability professionals working in the middle. Yet Sayer and Campbell are correct to insist that small-s science has a major contribution to make. Science when understood as one way to tack from the four nodes to the middle—that is, to make sense of principles, scenarios, the ideographic, and livelihood patterns—is crucial.
The implication for evaluating policy narratives is as dramatic as it is straightforward. In terms of the above framework, the more useful way to evaluate the narratives in Sayer and Campbell’s The Science of Sustainable Development is not from the outside looking in, but from the inside looking out along with other reliability professionals.
What precisely are the policy narratives deployed by reliability professionals such as Sayer and Campbell? They are not alone among development practitioners in making much of the importance of complexity and uncertainty, flexibility, experimentation, replication, integration, risk, learning, adaptive management and collaboration to the work of development. The terms and the narratives they reflect are very much the common currency of many writing from the middle. When narrativized, however, the terms can render the insights from the middle banal to even the 17-year old undergraduate—“Take uncertainty into account” Awesome! “You must be flexible in your approach” Too right!
In actuality, once the terms are probed further, they retain their unique insights. Again, we are in the presence of few studies but a great deal of practice. When reliability professionals say we need more learning, what they are often talking about is a very special kind of learning from samples of one case or fewer, as from simulations (see March, Sproul & Tamuz, 1991). When they say we must recognize and accommodate complexity and uncertainty, what mean this amalgam of the uncertain, complex, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized if we are to analyze and manage natural resources case by case (Roe, 1998). When they say we need more findings and better science that can be replicated across a wide variety of cases, what they really are calling for is identifying greater equifinality in results, that is, finding multiple but different pathways to achieve the similar objectives, given the variety of cases (cf. Belovsky, Botkin, Crowl, Cummins, Franklin, Hunter, Joern, Lindenmayer, MacMahon, Margules, & Scott, 2004).
What reliability professionals mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more team work or working with more stakeholders, but rather that the team members and stakeholders “bring the whole system into the room” for the purposes of rendering the services in question reliable (see Weisbord & Janoff, 1995). When they talk about the need for more integration, what they really mean is the need to recouple what have been all too decoupled and fragmented development activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reflect the coupled nature of the environment around them (Van Eeten & Roe, 2002). When they call for more flexibility, what they mean is the need for greater maneuverability of the reliability professionals in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes (Roe et al, 2002).
If reliability professionals say we need more experimentation, they decidedly do not mean more trial and error learning, when survival demands that the first error never be the last trial (see Rochlin, 1993). So when they call for more adaptive management, what they often are asking for is greater case-by-case discriminations in management alternatives, depending on the particulars (Roe & Van Eeten, 2001a). In this and the other ways, activities in the middle domain have not become “more certain and less complex,” but rather that the operating uncertainties and complexities have changed with the knowledge bases. Policy narratives remain needed, but they are decidedly different than those claiming priority at and around the four outer nodes.
If we fully appreciated the differences, longstanding development controversies, such as that of “planning versus implementation,” would have to be substantially recast. If you look closely at Figure 1, you see we are talking about professionals who are expert not because they “bridge” macro-planning and micro-implementation, but because they are able to translate that planning and implementation into the reliable critical services.
CONCLUSION
Just because they are all narratives does not mean that all policy narratives are equal. Just because policy narratives can be found doing battle with each other and across the nodes does not mean that the stakes are higher there. Nor does it mean these nodal narratives are the better ones because the shouting and waving is more frantic there, at least when it comes to underwriting and stabilizing decision making over critical services whose reliability matters to society and the public.
Readers must not be too sanguine that those at the nodes will take account of those in the middle domain. No matter what professionals such as Sayer and Campbell (2004) or all the other reliability practitioners have to say, there will be the economist who all but pats us on the head, saying, “Well, obviously the prices aren’t right.” Or the regional specialist who sighs, “Obviously, it’s because. . .well, it’s Africa. . .” Or the ethnographer who counters, “You don’t know what these villagers are telling me!” Or the numbers expert who says, “Nor do you know the latest trends.” To adapt the useful phrase of Robert Chambers (1988), “normal professionalism” has all but been equated with those who claim to speak for and hold expertise at the four nodes.
The fact of the matter is that we have very little research on reliability professionals and more than ample study of the nodes. Almost all the airtime in “doing development” has been given to the short-cut metaphysics of dominant policy narratives. If only we had full cost pricing, or sufficient political will, or had publics that could solve Arrow’s voting paradox on their own, then everything would be okay. We can, they promise, jump from macro to micro and back again when it comes to ensuring reliability. In contrast, the middle is very much terra incognita if only because it has no real value to those who already know, after a fashion, the Answer. Reliability professionals—be they villagers or control room operators—are very much the marginalized voices to whom Narrative Policy Analysis recommended we give more attention.
To get to the middle is daunting, but far too many of our long-lived debates have been at the extremes of the reliability space, haven’t they? Planning versus Markets. Markets versus Hierarchy. Science versus Technology versus Politics. Which way Africa: Kenyatta or Nyerere? Which way Latin America: Structural Adjustment or Basic Human Needs? Which way the world: Globalization or Anti-Globalization? We might as well be talking about who is more likely to be in Heaven, Plato or Aristotle.
EPILOGUE (OCTOBER 2025)
Since the publication of the Handbook chapter from which the above has been excerpted, more research has been undertaken on high reliability management by reliability professionals in the context of interconnected critical infrastructures (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016, 2018, 2023).
It is clearer now that the centralized control room in a critical infrastructure (and not all infrastructures have such such operations centers) is a unique organizational formation that has evolved in ways to manage systemwide reliability under the pressures of real time. Balances between centralized and decentralized decisonmaking and between error tolerance and error intolerance have to be struck in the form of scenario-based decisions, often just-in-time or just-for now. Otherwise, the lights don’t go on, the water come out of the tap, the 911 call doesn’t connect, and people die.
In narrative analytical terms, the control room as a unique organizational formation for having to take decisions is a powerful engine for reliability professionals producing real-time metanarratives that seek to reconcile, accommodate or otherwise balance all manner of conflicting scenarios so as to underwrite and stabilize taking a decision nevertheless and right now.
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[1] I thank Paul Schulman for the original framework, though he bears no responsibility for my adaptation and application.
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?”
Maybe you’ve heard of this innovation in economic development, but I hadn’t until I read:
China’s “Taobao Villages” offer compelling counterevidence that digital financial services, when combined with comprehensive support ecosystems, can fundamentally transform rural economies. From a modest beginning in 2009 with just three pilot villages, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially. By 2022, it had encompassed 7,780 rural communities across 28 Chinese provinces (Chu et al. 2023; Komatsu and Suzuki 2025). These villages, officially defined as localities where at least 10% of households engage in e-commerce and generate combined annual revenues exceeding RMB 10 million, produced over RMB 1.3 trillion (approximately USD 180 billion) in sales by 2021 (Qi, Zheng, and Guo 2019; Lin and Tao 2024; Wang 2022). Their evolution from isolated agricultural communities into dynamic participants in global supply chains represents a profound transformation in their economic landscape. https://www.cigionline.org/publications/from-rural-villages-to-global-markets-policy-lessons-from-chinas-taobao-villages-for-digital-finance/
“Wow,” I thought. The numbers are impressive. A “profound transformation” is what we’re looking for. But then there’s the “global supply chains” reference. Critics of international capital aren’t going to like that.
My suspicions were reinforced as I read further. At the heart of the policy brief is this description of the key innovation:
Central to the Taobao ecosystem’s ability to drive inclusive growth is its alternative approach to finance, which transforms behavioural data into a new form of collateral. This innovation has unlocked access to credit for millions of entrepreneurs who were previously considered “unbankable” by the traditional financial system.
The engine of this transformation is MYbank, a digital bank launched by Ant Group in 2015. MYbank operates on a fully automated “3-1-0” lending model: loan applications are completed online in 3 minutes, an approval decision is rendered in 1 second, and the entire process involves 0 human intervention (Chataing and Kushnir 2018; Huang et al. 2020). The core innovation lies in how MYbank assesses creditworthiness. Instead of relying on physical collateral or formal credit histories, its proprietary algorithms analyze a multidimensional array of real-time behavioural data generated within the Alibaba ecosystem. This includes transaction volumes, customer satisfaction ratings, payment patterns, and supply chain relationships. This data-rich environment enables the system to create a highly accurate and dynamic picture of a small business’s health and repayment capacity. Therefore, a merchant’s digital reputation and transaction history become a form of “digital collateral.”
The impact of this model has been profound. By the end of 2023, MYbank had served over 53 million small and micro-enterprises (Business Wire 2024). The average loan size, approximately RMB 72,000 (USD 10,000), is tailored specifically to the working capital needs of these micro-enterprises (Luo 2019).
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the model’s effectiveness is its ability to de-risk a population that conventional banks deemed too risky to serve. MYbank has consistently maintained a non-performing loan (NPL) ratio of around 1 – 2%. This performance is significantly better than the NPL ratios often associated with traditional SME lending, which have historically been much higher in China (Business Wire 2020). This success reveals a fundamental truth: rural SMEs were not inherently “unbankable”; they were simply “undatafiable” by the old financial system. The problem was not the borrowers’ creditworthiness but the lenders’ inability to see it. The Taobao model effectively created a new asset class (reputational capital) and, in doing so, solved one of the most intractable problems in development finance.
Oops, don’t the brief’s authors know about the universal criticism of platform capitalism, of financialization, assetization and datification, all of which is worse than the old-time Fordist commodification. . . Talk about embedding poor people into international capital!
But then I take a deep breath and look to the invariably missing piece in these critiques–the granularity of agency, the particularity of being.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone researching these transactions years from now. You know like the researchers who find that money loaned is not all debt, that this provides resources for building and keeping social networks, that some people who get credit are very creative about what they do with these multi-valent resources, that financialization, assetization and datafication are not one-way only, that more than 7,500 communities over 25 provinces are not a homogenous population, and that big numbers like these have wide distributions and variation that has to be explained precisely because they matter for really-existing policy and management.
Suggested reading: C. Velasco and J. Willis (2024). “Saving, inheritance and future-making in 1940s Kenya.” Past & Present 267(1): 211–241. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae013
In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, political writer and social theorist William Davies bemoans the fact that:
To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century
Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve worked on issues and jobs in development where the driving ethos included “circumvent the world of academia altogether”.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 