I

Consider the following:

The EU cannot finance its budget through debt, but the EU Treaties do not prohibit the issuance of EU-27-backed securities or bonds for off-budget operations, as long as they are approved by the Council. The largest collective borrowing operation in EU history so far was the temporary Covid-19 recovery program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which received 90 per cent of its financing through the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) for which the European Commission borrowed €807 billion on behalf of the EU-27 by issuing green bonds. NGEU presents itself as a green industrial investment program for the benefit of future generations, but it is pervaded by a fundamental contradiction: the repayment involves an intergenerational debt transfer, burdening future generations with €30 billion in annual debt servicing , starting in 2028 and ending in 2058.

Angela Wigger (2025). “Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic: Public Guarantees, Private Gains, and the Illusion of Climate Action,” accessed online at https://www.somo.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/

I’d like you to focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.

First, that notion of off-budget. Here a familiar adage is nowhere truer: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Once upon a time, the basic idea of a system budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits and costs. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints. Statements like

Technocrats’ creative reinterpretation of their own authority and governments’ creative fiscal accounting via off-budget financing vehicles can improve fiscal-monetary coordination and create significant fiscal space (van ’t Klooster, 2022; Guter-Sandu and Murau, 2022). However, the hidden and interim nature of these solutions preempts. . .

(accessed online at https://scispace.com/pdf/green-macrofinancial-regimes-2o45dbuoim.pdf)

. . .and in the process referring to articles with titles like “The Eurozone’s Evolving Fiscal Ecosystem: Mitigating Fiscal Discipline by Governing Through Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies,” give the game away.

Nor does the old-fashioned riposte work: Future generations will have more income than we to cover these debts. We’re in times of decreasing per-capita incomes and near-zero discount rates, where the generations ahead are to be treated just as alive as we are.

If however you really do believe the latter, then the wider declension narratives at work–apocalypse, catastrophe, polycrisis–undermine the very persistence of concepts, like government budgets, intergenerational debt and future generations.

So what? What’s to be done? Well, one question and answer suggests itself: What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis?

II

Are there, more specifically, the equivalent of free ports out there? “Free ports”?! Where did that come from? You can thank complexity for all manner of novel analogies.

Current free ports are to be found in places like Singapore, Luxembourg, and Geneva, and it is reported that the largest of them, Geneva Freeport, houses about 1.2 million artworks, some six times that of New York City’s MOMA. By extension, if “all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive,” then are there equivalent free ports of such diverse testimonies as to offer far more and different metaphors than present-day reductionism provides? As in: realities are metaphors that last longer.

The analogy of free ports would, however, seem to take us right back to the heart of capitalism, with its Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and such. But we would be wrong. The authors of a recent global study of free ports, Koen Stapelbroek and Corey Tazzara (2023), stress their own version of “off-balance sheet”. “Free ports offered essential services that the prevailing system of political economy scarcely allowed.” More specifically:

Rather than treating free ports as intrinsically liberal or illiberal, it is better to see them as controlled breaches in the prevailing political economy, whether that be of a state or of an entire trading system. With respect to national political economy the breach is obvious, since by definition a free port policy entailed a relaxation of ordinary controls over trade and often other parameters such as immigration. The extent of control varied for reasons ranging from technology to the fiscal trade-offs unavoidable in any customs policy. The underlying strategy varied, too – in some cases, free ports served to stabilise a state’s political economy (as in Genoa), in other cases as a forerunner to transform the interior economy (as in the Caribbean). The free port shows that the modern state has never endorsed homogeneous space: there have always been breaches, sometimes of great importance.

Koen Stapelbroek & Corey Tazzara (2023) The Global History of the Free Port, Global Intellectual History, 8:6, 661-699, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2280091

That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for these breaches in political economies, state controls or not; that is, we are looking for heterogeneities–early commercial, mercantilist, capitalist, hybrid–that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere to go on their own.

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Other sources

https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/26/an-aesthetic-autonomy-rebuilding-the-art-world-after-its-neoliberal-degradation/

https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/craf018/8202932

“In the run-up to the 2008 election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney advanced an assault on Barack Obama’s healthcare coverage program, which the former derisively labeled ‘Obamacare’. Eighteen days before the election, Obama advanced a rhetorical counter-offensive that effectively reframed the whole parameters of the discussion. Invoking the presumable medical condition of ‘Romnesia’, Obama cited, in the most simplistic and nonchalant way, all of Romney’s policy flip-flops: ‘Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said the last year […] We’ve gotta name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called Romnesia […] I’m not a medical doctor, but I do wanna go over some of the symptoms with ya, because I wanna make sure nobody else catches it’. He proceeds:

If you say you’re for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you’d sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia […] If you say you’ll protect a woman’s right to choose but you standup in a primary debate and said that you’d be delighted to sign a law outlawing that right to choose in all cases, man, you’ve definitely got Romnesia. . . .

“Extending the rhetorical logic to a series of other examples, Obama reached his rhetorical apex by reclaiming the term ‘Obamacare’ in the most effective way possible, while shattering Romney’s offensive without making any factual references to his healthcare coverage program: ‘And if you come down with a case of Romnesia and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for president, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions!’ (Obama, 2008). Irrespective of whether one is in agreement or not with Obama’s policies, one cannot deny his mastery of political rhetoric, which to a considerable extent facilitated his (out of nowhere) rise to power.”

Michaelangelo Anastasiou, slightly edited and accessed online on September 9 2025 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01914537251374951.

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. As early as 1985, Habermas voiced the concern that utopian energies were exhausted (Habermas 1985), and variations of this sentiment are often echoed in reference to the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. . . .

Against this backdrop, I propose the following starting definition of the role of imagination in critical theory: It is presented as a capacity that, at once, cannot be cut off from the social order (i.e., it is potentially ideological or delusional) while being often referred to as an element within the human psychodynamic that leaves open the possibility for transcending the social order. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

If there truly were a totality of the social order that inscribed itself perfectly into the psyche of every individual, not only would emancipatory change be impossible, but any form of change at all would be precluded— an evidently absurd notion. I rather think that attributing the possibility of change (i.e., contingencies in the social order) to an individual capacity implies that there are no social processes on the horizon for a critical theory to cling to (such as theorems like the diminishing rate of profit, etc.). In a sense, this way of thinking about imagination suggests that a better future is possible against all odds.

Gante, M. (2025). “Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics” Constellations, pp. 1 – 10 (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009)

The substantial point beneath a frivolous comparison of worthless TV in 2025 to worthless 19th century military painting is that the content of every cultural edifice has been ground to dust. Salon painting at least had its pretensions and standards, no matter how conservative and tasteless its judges might be. Manet still wanted the Salon’s approval in spite of everything, and that desire for social achievement is a valuable motivator, which is not to suggest we can or should return to that model. The implications are much broader than academic painting; the library or the museum would never be invented today because those institutions are founded on ideas of cultural edification that are now entirely foreign to society at large. The assumptions of the End of History from the 1990s until roughly 2016 led the cultural sphere to assume it would proceed by its own momentum, reinventing itself boundlessly with no need for maintenance. That may have worked for a time, but the internet, social media, the rising cost of living, and so on, has since stripped culture for parts. Social media kills the social, dispersing in-person groups that used to be called countercultures and subcultures, and monetization optimizes the attention economy into a self-regulating system of everyone selling out to the algorithm. As usual, what at first seems liberatory is a crack in culture that more capitalism seeps into. The humanities and education in general, let alone the art world or popular media, are no longer able to maintain standards of development or basic competence, and it seems impossible to recover them from their current state.

But this is pessimism, not fatalistic cynicism. As Adorno has it: “All specifically modern art can be regarded as an attempt to keep the dynamic of history alive through magic, or to increase the horror at the stasis to shock, or to portray the catastrophe in which the ahistorical suddenly begins to look archaic.” (“Spengler After the Decline,” Prisms, p. 58.) We don’t need cultural institutions to keep the dynamic of history alive or portray our catastrophe, and in all likelihood those edifices have been more of a hindrance than an aid for some time. This can be framed as a freeing from institutional indoctrination, but this is a high price to pay and a challenging imposition on the individual. The internet certainly indoctrinates the general public far more crudely and insidiously than institutions, and this is far from optimistic; rather than an excitement at new tools, the collapse of institutionality forces us to find alternatives on our back foot. The internet may have killed culture, but its barrage of information revived the possibility of history by giving us immediate access to vast amounts of media of the past, and this access can, possibly, act as a trapdoor to outmaneuver the end of the world for the few that care to put in the effort.

By the internet I don’t mean its very contemporary experience, of course, that flood of frivolous content optimized to command and envelop our attention. I mean the Internet Archive, Newspapers.com, JSTOR, Libgen, torrents, online catalogue raisonnés, untapped research archives in raw HTML, even Wikipedia rabbit holes, means of accessing vast stores of information far larger than any physical archive that are sitting and waiting to be utilized. Most of these are relics from the ‘90s when people could still see the internet as an unprecedented practical resource, an idea that’s so hard to remember now.

Sean Tatol (2025) “After the End of the World” (accessed online at https://tripleampersand.org/after-the-end-of-the-world/; my bolding)

I. So what?

In a world where gender, race and class are the de rigueur differentiators, it’s too easy to conclude: Structural problems require structural solutions. That proposition is grotesquely premature and lethal to any first-round respect for heterogeneity and complexity.

What the sample below illustrates is that the only place structural solutions thrive is in theory. Which means: The only place really-existing heterogeneities are found is in the many–and many more–empirical analyses like those below.

II. Ten illustrative examples

1. Structural racism

This is the case, for instance, with broad-brush rhetorical attacks on ‘structural racism in criminal justice’ that confuse the different scales of the American penal state (federal, state, county and city), overlook the hyperlocalism and administrative fragmentation of a criminal justice system that is not a system, and amalgamate the different practices of legislating, policing, pretrial detention, prosecution, public defence, plea negotiation and litigation, sentencing, supervising, court-mandated programming, incarceration, and sentence administration, each of which has layers of internal complexity, and may or may not produce looping ethnoracial disparities. . . .[“Structural racism”] replaces meticulous study with facile sloganeering, and pinpoint remedial action with vague calls for systemic changes that are unlikely to come about or to produce their expected results. In so doing, this vogue word betrays its ostensive purpose: to excavate the social conditions of possibility of ethnoracial justice.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/loic-wacquant-resolving-the-trouble-with-race

2. Class structure

The structural primacy of class is not due to it alone governing people’s material wellbeing, since other social structures do as well, but is based instead on it being endogenously dynamic such that it generates differentiation of interests within and between class and non-class groups. . . .

[T]he structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy, in the sense of making the abstract category of “worker” the immediate and exclusive subjective basis for class formation specifically and socialist politics more broadly. On the contrary, under certain conditions ratcheting up class struggle on the vertical dimension, i.e., scaling up class struggle beyond a segment of the working class in a single workplace to the level of politics, may require the mobilization of people on the basis of non- class subjectivities if those subjectivities are most salient conjuncturally. Building cultures of solidarity is indeed essential to class formation. But given a working class that is already highly differentiated, it is forms of solidarity that cut across differentiations within the working class on both the vertical and horizontal levels that are the building blocks for class formation that can move from the economic to the political.

—https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fy5xu

3. Capitalism

a. State capitalism

The heterogeneous literature on the ‘new state capitalism’ has provoked considerable academic and popular interest in recent years, but also critique regarding how to analytically bolster the concept and enhance empirical understanding.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0308518X221083986

b. Platform capitalism

With dominant perspectives towards globalized platform power and control, we argue that there has been limited analysis of platform variation. Studies of platform capitalism tend to underplay differences – in the form of governance, practice and agency across space. This leads to risks of undeveloped perspectives of unfolding platform capitalism, especially when studies seek to analyse uneven global relations. . . .

Over-globalized accounts risk underplaying the variations that occur that are essential to how platforms operate and expand across space (Wood et al., 2019). Specifically, as platforms expand across spaces and sectors, it is important to examine how they cohere with existing institutions and regulatory environments within diverse capitalist systems (Thelen, 2018). This is particularly important when analysing platforms, practices and labour outside the economies of the global north (Foster & Bentley, 2022; Panimbang, 2021), with the risk that notions of platform may ” … universalize Western platform capitalism and the ideological and cultural forces that underpin its development” (Davis & Xiao, 2021, p. 104). Global accounts of platform expansion may also overplay the power and control platform leaders actually have across all spaces and sectors. It is important to allow consideration of potential tensions, alternatives, cleavages and agency by which more diverse and inclusive forms of digital capitalism or alternative forms of economy might emerge (Arvidsson, 2019).

—https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2306694

4. Heterogeneous income inequalities

Our results suggest that while a positive and statistically significant relationship exists between economic complexity and inequality globally, heterogeneity emerges when analysing countries by income level. Specifically, the relationship is reversed for high-income countries: the more complex the production structure, the lower the income inequality level (as found by Hartmann et al. 2017). In addition, when exploring non-linearity, results suggests a diminishing positive effect of economic complexity on inequality, resembling an inverted U-pattern. As complexity increases, the positive impact on inequality diminishes, but turning negative only at very high levels of complexity. . . .One key conclusion from our analysis is the existence of a heterogeneous relationship between economic complexity and income inequality, which underscores the importance of considering country-specific contexts.

—https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592624002364?via%3Dihub

5. Authoritarian regimes

An important simplification of the discussion presented above is that it treats the authoritarian regime as a homogenous entity, keen on achieving one goal – its self- preservation, maximization of power and rent-seeking. Although this picture of authoritarianism is very widespread in modern scholarship (ironically, very much in the writing of academic economists), in reality, regimes are highly heterogeneous and include groups with different interests and ideas. Some of them may be stronger supporters of particularism and rejection of the West; some may embrace integration of their country into the Western world; and some may see their country as an opponent of the West but at the same time be willing to learn from the West to become more competitive. These positions can be associated with economic and political interests or with firm beliefs.

—https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13507486.2025.2526055

6. Automating immigration and asylum controls

Overall, the wide range of applications for new technologies [in migration and asylum governance in Europe] implies that each one should be investigated independently, taking into consideration its development context and the unique requirements of the stakeholders who develop and use them. This report, therefore, debunks a totalising, black-and-white perception of the uses of new technologies. New technologies can be used for various purposes ranging from including migrants’ and refugees’ preferences in their settlement processes (as in the case of some preference matching tools) to profiling them through risk assessments or monitoring them through invasive tools such as electronic monitoring. While the former can benefit migrants by having a say in their migration and settlement trajectory, the latter can have extremely harmful impacts on them. It is, therefore, crucial to examine each use of new technology in its own right, considering its design and implementation processes and their legal and social impacts.

https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/automating-immigration-and-asylum-the-uses-of-new-technologies-in-migration-and-asylum-governance-in-europe

7. Household macroeconomic narratives

The large extent of heterogeneity and fragmentation in households’ narratives has important consequences for the formation of economic expectations. Households are not only imperfectly informed about the current state of the economy (Coibion and Gorodnichenko, 2012; Mankiw and Reis, 2002; Reis, 2006) but they also systematically disagree about why the current state has been reached. Heterogeneity in narratives thus contributes to the widely-documented disagreement in macroeconomic expectations (Coibion and Gorodnichenko, 2015a; Dovern et al., 2012; Giglio et al., 2021; Link et al., 2023b; Mankiw et al., 2003). One important question for future research is to better understand the origins of the substantial heterogeneity in household narratives. While differential media exposure is likely to drive some of the heterogeneity, our experiment with exogenous variation in media exposure suggests (as discussed in Appendix 1) that traditional news media is only part of the story. A related open question revolves around the social processes that make some narratives go viral (Graeber et al., 2024c; Shiller, 2017). For instance, narratives involving corporate greed and price gouging are common among households but are neither endorsed by experts nor prominently featured in the news media, suggesting that social interactions are important.

—https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3974993

8. Gig economy

More specifically, I argue that the combination of the technological structure of gig work (nearly automatic, open-access employment, algorithm-driven work process) plus workers’ ability to choose schedules and hours yields an unusually heterogeneous labor force on a range of dimensions, especially patterns of work in other jobs and portfolios of household incomes. As a result, worker experiences are also more heterogeneous than in conventional workplaces.

https://digitalage.berlin/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Brief-3_Schor_final.pdf

9. COVID-19

a. Preparedness and response

However, these general trends mask significant heterogeneity in responses as countries neither entered nor went through the crisis alike. . . .Overall, the pre-pandemic global outlook was heterogeneous across different geographies. . .

https://www.esm.europa.eu/publications/regional-responses-covid-19-crisis-comparative-study-economic-policy-and-institutiona

b. Worker protests

Finally, the dataset reveals significant variation between countries and regions. Political, economic, and institutional contexts clearly matter in shaping patterns of protest. Nevertheless, over-generalisation about the role of national institutional factors should be resisted, given the huge differences we found within countries. For example, a comparatively large volume of protest were identified in healthcare in India but very little in retail, and the same can be said of Nigeria; we therefore examine reports from these country cases in more detail below. Moreover, among the handful of countries reporting no protests, there is no consistent economic or institutional profile. Hence, we suggest that spikes in protest in particular sectors and countries are likely to reflect not only the national institutional context, but also contingent factors and strategic decisions made by the actors involved. To illustrate this point, we examine in more detail reports from the five countries with the highest levels of protest in the two sectors: France, India and Nigeria for healthcare, and the United States and Argentina for retail.

https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—inst/documents/publication/wcms_860587.pdf

10. Chinese development finance [CDF] to Africa

We contend that the impact of CDF on policy space cannot be generalised as either wholly expansive or restrictive. Instead, policy space is shaped more significantly by the internal political economies of recipient states, historical legacies, their global economic positioning and the interplay of these elements with the external financing environment. We find that, for example, countries with strong state capacity may strategically leverage CDF to implement incremental policy innovations, while more aid-dependent states often face greater constraints. Notwithstanding these general reflections, our framework and findings challenge uniform assumptions about CDF’s influence on policy space: neither divergence nor convergence between Northern and Chinese approaches results in wholesale shifts in policy autonomy. Rather, the development financing landscape, characterised by heterogeneity and ambiguity, creates opportunities for modest but meaningful policy experimentation. However, these manifest in an indeterminate way.

—https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jid.3996

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NB. In some cases, footnote/endnote numbers have been deleted for ease of reading.

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.

(accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton

Since complex is often as simple as it gets in emergency planning and coordination, the place to start by way of adding much more value are those initiatives already underway to manage the complex interconnectivities and vulnerabilities of lifeline infrastructures.

This means capitalizing on existing opportunities beyond the official emergency management structures and plans at the local, regional, state and federal levels there. The aim is to leverage existing initiatives that have already “seen the light.” The priority in focusing on those who actively acknowledge the centrality of interconnectivities is made all the more visible because these are still early days in thinking through emergency management in terms of infrastructural connectivities.

When it comes to our recent US Pacific Northwest research, ongoing professional efforts focusing around inter-infrastructural connectivities were the Cascadia Rising exercises in Oregon and Washington State, the Cascadia Lifelines Dependencies Collaborative (“CSZ Lifelines Group”) in Oregon, the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization (RDPO) in Washington State, various city and county groups in both states, as well as state personnel with emergency support functions, whose duties and responsibilities explicitly entail lifeline interconnections.

A priority is assembling and undertaking major table-top exercises and improvisation drills with these groups around unfolding Magnitude 9 earthquake scenarios centered around shifting interconnectivities of water, electricity, telecoms and roads in western Oregon and Washington State. The core competency called for in these table-tops is in the area of interconnectivities. These people are targeted because they already work outside their infrastructural or sectoral siloes.

The advantage of starting with ongoing or already-existing major initiatives is that they involve professionals who know much more by way of what needs to be done in preparing for large-scale emergencies. This means that when asked, “Have you read this report on seismic vulnerability here?,” and they answer “No, we haven’t,” no one should assume these professionals aren’t as knowledgeable as they must be. (I.e., the professionals may explain their “no” by referring to work already done in actual emergency operations to address shifting and shifted interconnectivities and vulnerabilities, with the staff and resources they have.)

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Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.

An interviewee in our recent Pacific Northwest research gave the example of a major opportunity that was not missed when altering the local hazard mitigation plan to replace an existing culvert by a new bridge:

So in the case of the county, they’re well positioned because they already had this plan, like we see this culvert is undersized, we continually see water over the road and we want to replace it with a bridge and that was the plan. If they had to wait and put that bridge in their general capital improvement process, it could have taken them another decade to replace it, right? But because they had a plan and that’s the direction they were already headed, now that the culvert washed away, it’s going to accelerate in the direction of the change that they were already headed, which is towards the bridge, which is great. . .They thought ahead of it and now they’re taking advantage of it in terms of trying to get additional funding”

As another interviewee put it, the hazard mitigation plan becomes a way to think more strategically about the federal funding component in critical infrastructure development at the local level.

Put this way, forward planning–in our terms, managing ahead–has a major role in anticipating and taking advantage of already-existing funding and construction opportunities. When the focus is on mitigating major emergencies, missed opportunities to correct for known vulnerabilities are mitigable errors to be avoided. As such, the hazard mitigation plan also becomes a mechanism to think through how the bridge would alter road transportation in ways another culvert would not.

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Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.

A federal emergency manager whose national and international experience included working in one of the Pacific Northwest states whose emergency management we recently researched described his experience in a disaster:

But as, you know, as they start bringing systems up and we run into this, everybody gets pretty excited, right? They’re like, “Oh, water plant’s up and running. It’s great. You know, we’re out of the bottled-water business.” Or, you know, people have water to their taps now. And then,. . it’s off again. And so we plan those things, we really never plan a kind of a hard cut off of any of it. We continue until we’re sure everything is stable. And that kind of the world I live in is the world of stabilization. . .It might not be a long term solution, but they work. And that’ll then allow all of those other systems that are tied to it—so water, wastewater or interconnected power with all of that. It allows you time when you once get it stable, time [for] people that really know what they’re doing to go and figure out if there are any other problems with the systems, figure out where the gaps are going to be. . .

[For] example, anytime they’re putting the grid back together, power will come up in an area. And at some point, they’re gonna have to take that back offline in order to do something somewhere else. And so, it’s not necessarily stable at that point. So if we are providing food and water, we may still have to provide food and water because there’s going to be a time where it might be a couple of days that the power’s gonna go back down.
So, you know, there’s that interconnectivity. It seems like that is the world we live in. It all, everything we do, every piece of it impacts something else. . .

Here stabilization is explicitly tied to shifts in the interconnectivities between and among critical infrastructures as the disaster unfolds. But how can this challenge of stabilization during immediate response and initial service restoration be better addressed in advance before the emergency?

Part of the answer centers on a much more nuanced understanding of vulnerabilities in infrastructures.

Discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities that we are familiar with frequently focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. Sometimes, physical properties considered vulnerabilities are focused on precisely because they follow from the system’s strengths: “So we do have a fairly robust [internal communications] system. The vulnerability is that we are responsible for that system. No one else is going to go fix it, so we have to rely on our internal resources to then have access to the sites to fix any problems that arise,” a electricity transmission interviewee told us.

The vulnerabilities of special interest in our research, though, start off as significant weaknesses before disasters. These begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for special capacities—in lateral telecommunications and communications, for instance—with respect to the demands arising from their shifting or shifted interconnectivities. Once the emergency is underway, sequential dependencies up and down chains of command are of course important (e.g., declarations of emergency to release funds under the Incident Command System). But they do not and cannot offer sufficient options in micro-coordination for requisite variety to match the shifting demands and capabilities imposed by the shocks, surprises and contingencies of a major catastrophe. Here other forms of interconnectivity–reciprocal, mediated and pooled–are required. In important cases, the resources for them are also known beforehand.

It is a mitigable error not to anticipate (predict and prepare for) the vulnerabilities that come with shifts to these other interconnectivity configurations. Coping with and responding jointly to interconnectivity shifts by infrastructure operators and emergency managers for initial service restoration without (1) prior contacts, (2) repositories and pools of back-up material, equipment and facilities, and (3) the availability of robust communication channels is an known error to avoid. It is also known that all of this subsequent micro-coordination takes place against the constraining limits that the infrastructures involved necessarily focus also on their own priorities, sequences of tasks, and duties. Yes, “First get the plant up and running!,” but they may be unable to do so without helping to restore initial service provision of other infrastructures they depend upon and/or depended upon them.

Which brings us back to stabilization. This prior, jointly-undertaken preparation extends beyond the priorities or commercial interests of a single infrastructure. Managing ahead for shifting infrastructure interconnectivity is a public good in interconnected service restoration of critical infrastructures during a disaster and its unfolding. This status must be recognized as such by policymakers, emergency management officials, and senior executives in lifeline infrastructures.

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Source: The above consolidates slightly edited extracts from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.