Start with a good-enough definition: Real-time team situational awareness is the shared understanding of the current task environment, the actions of those team members then involved, and potential risks and uncertainties, allowing responses now and in the next steps by the team.
How does this happen? One answer is that each team member is already a team:
I suggest that rather than rejecting the possibility that people can lead authentic lives, we reject the individualist self. . .Heersmink (2018) argues for a narrative self view in which the self is partially constituted by a distributed network of other people and external artefacts. Japanese philosopher Deguchi (2022) has recently provided an extended defence of a non-individualist self, arguing that many philosophers in the East Asian tradition—such as Do ̄gen and other Zen philosophers—have conceptualized the self as something essentially social, a ‘we’ rather than an ‘I’. This view does not deny that there is an ‘I’; instead, it makes a distinction between ‘I’ and the self. Deguchi presents the self as a multi-agent system, composed not just of ‘me’ but also of the many others on whom I rely in my actions and decision-making. In this view, the self is strictly and literally composed of multiple agents. While this whole ‘we’ system is involved in decision making, Deguchi (2022: 10) argues,
‘I participate and play an important role in these ‘we’ decisions. Just as the head of an organization, for example, makes the final decision after deliberations and decisions in various departments, I also play a role in pushing the final button after a long and com- plex process, rather than deciding everything alone. In this sense, I am not an autocrat or dictator, but the final decision-maker.’
The agential ‘I’ still has a special place in this system, but not the ontological exclusivity that it has in the individualist self picture. Call this family of views the social self. . . .
Recall Deguchi’s (2022: 10) example of the head of an organization, who ‘makes the final decision after deliberations and decisions in various departments’. The head of an organization does not just draw from the deliberations and decisions of various departments because that provides her with better information about what the most rational decision would be, but also because doing so reflects what kind of organization they are, what kind of relationships the employees have with each other, and what kind of leader she is.
2 The computational irrationality of The Tragedy of the Commons
3. Colin Strang or Garrett Hardin: Which one do you believe?
4. Borana sedentarization
5. Environmental livestock-tarring
6. Rethinking early warnings for drought
7. “Curating publics,” not just “facilitating pastoralist development”
8. A different lens to recast pastoralist mobility: “logistical power from below”
9. Pastoralists as social figures
10. Dust and herders viewed from the paradigm of repair
11. Pastoralists as witnesses-protagonists
12. Imputing property values in pastoralist systems as a way of making more visible the tensions under the climate emergency
13. Expanding the early warning systems for geoengineering interventions: a pastoralist indicator
14. Journal article as manifesto: an example involving Horn of Africa livestock
15. How might digital nomadism recast a research agenda for pastoralism?
16. The moral economy of pastoralists seen through the Levy-Cordelli lens of investment
17. When pastoralists are more like occupiers than residents only (newly added)
1. When it comes to pastoralists, . . .
I have in mind those who regret the passing of pastoralism as if it were a singular institution with its own telos, agency and life-world. It wasn’t and it isn’t. When was the last time these people asked herders their party affiliation? When was the last time they really treated the pastoralist as neoliberal citizen?
These commentators are like the freshwater biologists who consider Lethenteron appendix (the American brook lamprey) and Triops cancriformis (a type of tadpole shrimp) to be evolutionary success stories because the organisms haven’t evolved. By this measure, the best pastoralists are like feisty little tardigrades, those near-microscopic (another “marginal”!) organisms that survive in the most hostile environments on the planet.
I also have in mind those stylized narratives of depastoralizing, deskilling, disorganizing and dewebbing the pastoralist life-world, leaving behind corpse-pastoralism, flogged by conflicts, mummified by inequality, buried at sea in waves of liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of disaster capitalism and speculative finance, always harboring worse to come.
I also have in mind the hangover notion that policy and procedure are at every turn subordinate to state power, that politicians and officials are nothing but the state’s secretariat to capitalists, that capitalisms have entirely colonized every nook and cranny of the life-worlds, and that we have surrendered our minds entirely to politics, such as they are.
I have in mind the disturbing parallel between those who want to save Planet Earth by means of straightforward treatments like stopping fossil fuel or methane-producing cattle and, on the other hand, Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin as treatment for chronic pain that masked the lethal addiction to this kind of “straightforward” medicine.
Last but not least, I have in mind the remittance-sending household member who is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an African rangeland than was Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe, when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans). You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick within and across national policies.
Methodological upshot: It cannot be said often enough that you mustn’t expect reproduction of the same even when reversion to the mean occurs.
2. The computational irrationality of The Tragedy of the Commons
Here is my rearrangement of quotes from a recent piece by philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami:
[I]t is often felt that. . .the commons is not doomed to tragedy since it can be ‘governed’ by regulation, by policing and punishing non-cooperation.
Who can be against such regulation? It is obviously a good thing. What is less obvious is whether regulation itself escapes the kind of thinking that goes into generating the tragedy of the commons in the first place. . . .
To explain why this is so, permit me the indulgence of a personal anecdote. It concerns an experience with my father. He would sometimes ask that I go for walks with him in the early morning on the beach near our home in Bombay. One day, while walking, we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking out of it. My father stopped me and said somewhat dramatically, ‘Akeel, why shouldn’t we take this?’ And I said sheepishly, though honestly, ‘I think we should take it.’
He looked irritated and said, ‘Why do you think we should take it?’ And I replied, what is surely a classic response, ‘because if we don’t take it, somebody else will’. I expected a denunciation, but his irritation passed and he said, ‘If we don’t take it, nobody else will’. I thought then that this remark had no logic to it at all. Only decades later when I was thinking of questions of alienation did I realize that his remark reflected an unalienated framework of thinking. . . .
From a detached perspective, what my father said might seem like naïve optimism about what others will do. But the assumption that others will not take the wallet if we don’t, or that others will cooperate if we do, is not made from that detached point of view. It is an assumption of a quite different sort, more in the spirit of ‘let’s see ourselves this way’, an assumption that is unselfconsciously expressive of our unalienatedness, of our being engaged with others and the world, rather than assessing, in a detached mode, the prospects of how they will behave. . . .
The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute. . .
To repeat: The question that drives the argument for the Tragedy of the Commons simply does not compute in such cases. In the latter, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is computationally irrational.
3. Colin Strang or Garrett Hardin: Which one do you believe?
M: You seem now to be in the paradoxical position of saying that if everyone evaded [e.g., paying taxes], it would be disastrous and yet no one is to blame. . . .But surely there can’t be a disaster of this kind for which no one is to blame.
D: If anyone is to blame it is the person whose job it is to circumvent evasion. If too few people vote, then it should be made illegal not to vote. If too few people volunteer, you must introduce conscription. If too many people evade taxes, you must tighten up your enforcement. My answer to your ‘If everyone did that’ is ‘Then some one had jolly well better see that they don’t’. . .
Colin Strang, philosopher, “What If Everyone Did That?”, 1960
Eight years later, we get Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Common, whose answer to “What if every herder did that?” is: “We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust–but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”
Get real: We’ve always known the better question is: Whose job is it to ensure overgrazing doesn’t happen? Which, to be frank, continues to be the same as asking: Whose job is it to define “overgrazing”?
NB: One of the biting ironies is that Hardin’s explicit piece on morality took no account of Strang’s essay, which was among the most cited and anthologized in collections on ethics and morality at that time.
4. Borana sedentarization
I
Unlike many economists of his generation or later ones, G.L.S. Shackle was preoccupied with how economic agents make real-time decisions in situations so uncertain that no one, including agents, knows the range of options and their probability distributions upon which to decide.
In response, Shackle produced an analysis based on possibilities rather than probabilities and what is desirable or undesirable rather than what is optimal or feasible.
For Shackle, possibility is the inverse of surprise (the greater an agent’s disbelief that something will happen, the less possible it is from their perspective). Understanding what is possible depends on the agents thinking about what they find surprising, namely, identifying what one would take to be counter-expected or unexpected events that could arise from or be associated with the decision in question. Once they think through these alternative or rival scenarios, the agents should be better able to ascribe to each how (more or less) desirable or undesirable a possibility it is.
These dimensions of possibility (possible to not possible) and desiredness (desirable to undesirable) form the four cells of a Shackle analysis, in which the agents (think: decisionmakers) position the perceived rival options. Their challenge is to identify under what conditions, if any, the more undesirable-but-possible options and/or the more desirable-but-not-possible options could become both desirable and possible. In doing so, they seek to better underwrite and stabilize the assumptions for their decisionmaking.
II
Let’s move now from the simplifications to a complexifying example. Consider the following conclusion from an investigation of sedentarization among Borana pastoralists:
Although in the case of this study we can speculate generally about what has prompted the sedentarization adaptation from quantitative analysis and the narratives of local residents, we do not sufficiently understand the specific institutions and information that individuals, households, and communities have utilized in their adaptation decision making. Only in understanding the mechanisms of such inter-scale adaptations can national and state governments work toward increasing community agency and promoting effective and efficient local adaptive capacity.
Such an admission is much needed in the policy and management research with which I am familiar. Thus the point made below should not be considered a criticism of the case study findings. Here I want to use the Shackle analysis to push their conclusion further.
III
Briefly stated, what and where are now undesirable adaptations in Ethiopian pastoralist sedentarization–by government? by communities? by others?–that: were not possible then and there but are now; or were possible then and there but are not now? More pointedly, where else in Ethiopia, if at all, are conditions such that those undesirable adaptations of sedentarization are now considered more desirable by pastoralist communities themselves?
If there is even one case of a community where the undesirable has now become desirable and where the now-desired is (still) possible, then sedentarization is not a matter of, well, settled knowledge.
5. Environmental livestock-tarring
A modest proposal:
Assume livestock are toxic weapons that must be renounced in the name of climate change. Like nuclear weapons, they pose such a global threat that nations sign the Livestock Non-Proliferation Treaty (LNPT). It’s to rollback, relinquish or abolish livestock, analogous to the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty.
How then would the LNPT be implemented, i.e., what are the ways to reduce these toxic stockpiles of dangerous animals?
–If the history of the nuclear proliferation treaty is our guide, the livestock elimination focus quickly becomes the feasibility and desirability of particular elimination scenarios. Scenarios in the plural because context matters, e.g., the way South Africa renounced nuclear weapons could not be the same ways Belarus and Ukraine relinquished them, etc.
So assume livestock elimination scenarios are just as differentiated. We would expect reductions in different types of intensive livestock production to be among the first priority scenarios under LNPT. After that, extensive livestock systems would be expected to have different rollback scenarios as well. For example, we would expect livestock to remain where they have proven climate-positive impacts: Livestock are shown also to promote biodiversity, and/or serve as better fire management, and/or establish food sovereignty, and/or enable off-rangeland employment of those who would have herded livestock instead, etc.
–In other words, we would expect livestock scenarios that are already found empirically widespread.
Which raises the important question: Wouldn’t the LNPT put us right back to where we are anyway with respect to livestock?
–Finallly, in case there is any doubt about the high disesteem in which I hold the notion of a LNPT, let me be clear:
If corporate greenwashing is, as one definition has it, “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false positive perceptions of a system’s environmental performance,” then environmental livestock-tarring is “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false negative perceptions of a system’s environmental performance with respect to livestock.”
Bells were increasingly used not only to summon people to church, but also to provide another prompt for a belief act to those laity who had not attended: the major bells were to be rung during the Mass at the moment of consecration of the Host, and from the late twelfth century onwards we find texts calling upon lay people to kneel and adore where ever they were at that moment…
John Arnold (2023). Believing in belief: Gibbon, Latour and the social history of religion. Past & Present, 260(1): 236–268. (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac012)
I
I suggest that early warnings promulgated as part of official drought management systems are designed to be bells in just the above sense: People are to demonstrate their belief in the warnings when warned. They are to take action then and there because of them.
But, as Arnold also reminds us, demonstration of obedience always entails the possibility of failure. Obeying might not work. Heeding the warning might not have been effective anyway.
This matters because the stakes are high when it comes to drought for both believers and non-believers. How so?
II
It is important to understand the conditions under which the designers themselves don’t believe in their own bell-ringing systems. In their article, “Drought Management Norms: Is the Middle East and North Africa Region Managing Risks or Crises?,” Jedd et al (2021) examine the efficacy official systems in the MENA region. They conclude:
Drought monitoring data were often treated as proprietary information by the producing agencies; interagency sharing, let alone wider publication, was rare. Government officials described the following reasons for this approach. First, it could create pressure on decision-makers to take action (politicizes the issue). Second, intervention measures are costly, and so, taking measures creates strong and competing demands for financial resources from agencies and/or ministers (increase political transaction costs). Therefore, given existing policies and institutions in the countries, it is unclear to what extent drought decision-making processes would be improved or expedited with increased transparency of monitoring information. . . .
This creates a difficult puzzle: In order to mitigate future drought losses, a clear depiction of current conditions must be made publicly available. However, publishing these data may require that agencies take on the burden of allocating relief if the release of this very information coincides with a future drought crisis.
So then the obvious policy and management question is: When it comes to the efficacy of early warnings for droughts, who do you want to start with: the believers or the non-believers?
7. “Curating publics,” not just facilitating pastoralist development
I
You’ve done all that research on livestock herders. You’ve collected so much information to better government policy and management. You know all the critiques of big-D development. But no one is listening. No one is acting on the findings and insights.
What do you do now and instead, whoever is listening or not? One answer: undertake the practice of curating publics as a part of your work.
I am suggesting that practices–subaltern, “development,” really-existing–can be curated so as to create new publics or, better yet, counterpublics. We want them collected and illustrated in ways that stick in these peoples’ minds, regardless of the dominant development narratives already there.
II
For example, enter the first of several rooms in our thought-experiment exhibition, “Rethinking Pastoralism Today.” On the wall there, you find pictured with a sidebar and attribution:
Source: S. Bose (2023). Photovoice With Pastoralists: A Practical Guidebook. PASTRES, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and the European University Institute in Florence. Reproduced with permission and accessed online at https://pastres.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/photovoice-guide-digital.pdf (Photo by Malicha, used with permission of the ERC PASTRES project)
You read the side-bar again, and then see the caption given by exhibition’s curator: LIKE SO MUCH IN LIFE (YOURS INCLUDED), PASTORALISM IS NOT ONE WAY ONLY. That sticks in your mind, and you suspect those of others.
III
What makes this kind of curatorial practice such a useful entry point is that even the most radical exhibitions guided by progressive politics have to finds ways to work within the conventional “white cube” constraints of rooms, floors and walls upon which to hang rectangles or display against.
By extension, the most radical development recastings have to be in productive tension with current ways of seeing things as well.
–Take another illustration hanging on the walls of this exhibition, that of the policy cycle:
But you, like every other visitor to this exhibition, are your own curator in the sense of having to ask: What’s missing here in this representation? When it comes to actual policies, programs and project, “simplified” just doesn’t hack it. You know from experience, as do like viewers, that each stage is bedeviled by details and contingencies. Indeed, once other viewers also understand these details and contingencies, you’ve established a very effective critique of anything like a “normal cycle.”
The upshot? A viewing public that understands there is no one way to exhibit project performance. The stages hang together differently for viewers who see different details and have different criteria for whether what works or not, what fails or not. Curators who exhibit to illustrate family resemblances that are not seen by viewers as their own curators might be better thought of as exhibiting their own confirmation bias.
IV
So what?
But what comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities, or the emphatic acknowledgement of someone else’s suffering, as an achievement in and of itself?
In answer, what comes after are efforts to curating publics for what we–and they as their own curators–recast by way of pastoral development.
8. A different lens to recast pastoralist mobility: “logistical power from below”
The following are excerpts from Biao Xiang (2023), “Logistical power and logistical violence: lessons from China’s COVID experience,” Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies (accessed online at DOI: 10.1080/24761028.2023.2285022).
Logistical power, be it from above or below, is defined in the article as the “capacity to initiate, coordinate, and stop mobility”:
A state gains infrastructural power by building roads, but does not acquire significant logistical power unless it can collect real-time traffic data, monitor all vehicles, and communicate with individual drivers on the move. More importantly, the concepts of infrastructural power and logistical power point to different analytical questions. Infrastructural power is by definition state power, and the concept is meant to explain how and why modern states, wielding much less despotic power than traditional rulers, can effectively govern societies of tremendous scale and complexity; and why the state and civil society have both become more powerful in the modern times. Infrastructural power enables modern states to govern through society instead of over society. Logistical power, in comparison, has its origin in social life. In most parts of human history, it is the marginal groups – nomads, migrants, hill tribes, petty traders, vagabonds and many others – which are most capable of exercising logistical power. The critical question associated with the concept of logistical power is not how state and society gain more power at the same time, but rather how state concentrate logistical power at the cost of people’s logistical power, in which process society becomes fragmented and loses its capacity of coordinating mobility.
Logistical power is the ability to coordinate mobility, and can be possessed by state and non-state actors. Logistical violence is state coercion through forced (im)mobility. Logistical power from below, namely citizen’s capacity to move and to form networks beyond government control, was a driving force behind economic reforms in the 1980s. By the 2010s, logistical power from above – the coordination of mobility by larger corporations and the state in particular – had become the dominant means of organizing the mobility of people, goods, money, and information.
So what?
While appearing inescapable due to its infrastructural and logistical power, the state has profound difficulty in controlling people’s thoughts, emotions, or communications. When talking to each other, citizens can construct a lifeworld of common sense, interpersonal trust, and mutual assistance. Such a lifeworld may provide a base for the capacity to refuse and resist forces like logistical violence.
State-sponsored sedentarization is logistical violence, the chief resistance to which is and remains the logistical power of pastoralists who move their herds and/or household members outside these settlements.
9. Pastoralists as social figures
We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.
Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)
After such bloodless abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.
The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and then there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists who have been studied.
All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significangtly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”
So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”
And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”
A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historial analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”
10. Dust and herders viewed from the paradigm of repair
“What if the rise of China,” [Jerry] Zee poignantly asks, “were to be approached literally, through the rise of China into the air?” Amidst official and popular accounts of China’s authoritarian ruling, Zee’s Continent in Dust is a striking example of how to write about China and Chinese politics otherwise. The book focuses on how weather events—specifically, those involving dust, aerosols, and particulate matter—are sites for political breakdown and emergence, revealing that the Chinese political system is anything but static.
Zee opens the book with a story of a resettled ex-herder family, whose herds have allegedly overgrazed pastures in inner Mongolia. This, in turn, has resulted in the spread of dust storms, or “wind-sand” (feng sha 风沙).2 Controlling the dust flow has become a state priority, and so these ex-herders have adapted: having left behind their old jobs, they now drive civil servants across fragile dunes, airdrop seeds, and stabilize sand. These state-contracted environmental engineering jobs, however, are only “semipredictable,” leaving the ex-herders caught in “a state of constantly frustrated anticipation.”
Still, how does this offer new insight into China at large? Because, by following the dust, Zee reveals that the plight of these ex-herders is not because of the popularly accepted idea of “a neoliberalization of the socialist state.” Instead, the wind-sand shows how bureaucrats view ex-herders as both a source of “social instability” in rural frontiers and as an on-demand workforce that can furnish state sand-control programs. In other words, ex-herders represent China’s “experiment in governing,” swept in an atmosphere of “windfall opportunities for work and cash,” a departure from the declining pastoral economy. This story is not about the rise of neoliberal China but, instead, the “delicately maintained condition of quietude” deemed harmonious and stable enough for the Chinese state.3
Hands-on work is necessary to cultivate the awareness that architecture cannot be contained within the plot of land.
The way I came to this awareness was cleaning the facades of buildings with my own two hands. This work constitutes the ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, which I began in 2008. These artworks emerged from the intersection of architecture and experimental preservation. I wanted to preserve the dust that would normally be thrown out, because it seemed to me, intuitively at first, that this dust contained important information about architecture’s environmental footprint. This dust, which you can see deposited as dark stains on facades, comes in large measure from the boilers of buildings, as well as electric power plants and traffic. The smoke produced as a byproduct when we heat, cool, and electrify buildings is as much a condition of possibility for architecture as concrete or steel. The airborne particles we call smoke or dust are therefore an architectural material. Yet smoke cannot be contained inside the plot of land. To manipulate this material requires new ways of caring for architecture that encompass this larger territory. It invites us to imagine how to care for the atmosphere as an airborne built environment.
What if the built environments of the many different pastoralists include all manner of dust from herding livestock, cooking in the compound, transport speeding down dirt roads, this year’s droughts. intermittent sand storms, and the sudden dust-devils? What if architectural schools are moving from a pedagogy of new construction (think: development) to repair and renovation of the already built? What do these new generations of researchers offer by way of advice to really-existing pastoralists today?
One answer from the last citation: “It is important, also, to listen and learn from communities who inhabit the buildings and environments that need repair, because they know best what is broken.” To put it another way, only in a some versions of particulate matter is dust broken.
11. Pastoralists as witnesses-protagonists
I
In my reading, narratives of pastoralism divide into three major groups. There are the studies of pastoralism long past (think: Wilfred Thesiger). I’ve also read anthropological studies from the 1950s and 60s that share a nostalgia for pasts now threatened by modernizing pressures.
The second group is everything that Thesiger and colonial-era anthropologists are not. To cut this long story short, today’s pastoralists are imbricated through and through by overlapping settler-colonial, racial and global capitalisms. There is, though, a deep irony in the fact that the thorough-going critiques of capitalism end up shadow pricing a past thought to be outside the cash-nexus.
The third group is for me more interesting and recent. The literature here seeks to stand in the pastoralists’ marginal(ized) positions and from there speak to the dominant economies and politics at the center. Some of this draws pastoralists to the center by demonstrating how their practices and ways of thinking are shared by, if not have positive implications for, center-based economics, banking, and pandemics (I have in mind the recent work of Ian Scoones and his PASTRES colleagues at IDS Sussex).
I want, however, to focus on a fourth group of narratives, and frankly one I’m not sure exists like the others. Here the narratives are those where contemporary pastoralists are “witnesses-protagonists,” much along the lines of the character, “witness-protagonist,” found in certain period novels.
II
In her 2024 Modern Language Quarterly article, “On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist,” Anastasia Eccles gives examples of novels where such characters are found. For our purposes, these are less important than the features she ascribes to this character type (I quote at length):
This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. . . .
The witness-protagonist took shape during a period of mass revolution abroad and democratic mobilization in Britain in which constituencies lacking formal recognition claimed the power to remake the structures of collective life. These historical developments turned the phenomenon of “unwarranted” participation into a pressing matter of public debate—and a basic condition of modern political subjectivity. The characters considered here tend to strike readers as illegitimate subjects who do not quite fit into or live up to their assigned roles. Instead of anchoring the whole, as we might expect protagonists to do, they call the form of the whole—its boundaries and its internal arrangement—into question. In their curiously unstable narrative position, they illuminate the formal conditions of democratic agency. . . .
Such a figure thus embodies the apparent paradox of a peripheral center or a major minor character. . .
The witness-protagonist, then, is a character whose status in the novel as a whole is somehow in question. We might say that these characters pose problems of or for form, insofar as form is taken to mean some principle of underlying fit or coherence among the novel’s parts. The signs of this problem are evident in the commentary surrounding these characters, which so often takes the form of a struggle to fix or locate or categorize a figure who does not quite behave like a normal protagonist. . . .
If the novel form projects an imagined community or potential body politic, these novels draw attention to that community’s grounds and limits. By focusing on characters whose station in the novel is anything but secure, they underscore the contingency of any particular arrangement of the collective. . .
I don’t know about you, but I suspect I’m not the only one who sees pastoralists we’ve studied or read about in terms of: being at the margins, but still difficult to locate with respect to the dominant narrative; not like the protagonists at the center, though still clearly a center of gravity interacting with that bigger narrative; but so insecurely as to call into question the dominant narrative(s).
III
An example I have in mind is that of a 2023 Annual Review of Anthropology article, “Financialization and the Household,” by Caitlin Zaloom and Deborah James. Although not explicitly in the preceding terms, the quote below captures this sense of speaking substantively and interactively about the center from the perspective of householders, including rural and poor households at the margins:
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.
Imagine if the very first article you ever read about global financialization began with the preceding quote. Imagine that those articles you actually have read up to this point on global financialization now must be re-read as slightly-off-center by comparison. What you thought was the plot all along isn’t the plot with which you could have started.
Source. Ian Scoones (2024). Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World. Polity Press.
12. Imputing property values in pastoralist systems as a way of making more visible the tensions under the climate emergency
Major issues affecting the US housing market are the effect of the climate emergency on property values:
As climate disasters hit with greater intensity and frequency, the economic effects will be felt not only as the underlying assets are damaged or destroyed, . . .but also as those experiences, and expectations of similar ones to come, are “priced in” to the judgments of what homes in floodplains, on the storm-exposed coasts, and in the wildland-urban interface are worth. Those homes could become, in effect, economically worthless even before they are physically uninhabitable. This would then put pressure on areas that are, for the time being, environmentally stable, driving up property values to the benefit of some, while creating economic hardships for others. . . .They are left either stuck in place—with assets that are increasingly difficult to insure. . .and potentially financially underwater— or face a decline in the proceeds available to secure housing elsewhere, let alone to build wealth.
So too you find declinist narratives about pastoralist areas rendered economically worthless under capitalism even before they are rendered physically uninhabitable by the climate emergency.
But of course drylands have noncalcuable use values for pastoralists, whatever is happening to calculated economic values. More, some asset values were evident in commercial transactions long before the advent of any capitalism. And in case it needs saying (also see the above link), property values have always been a social construction within and beyond markets and beyond the quantitative, a fact no less true for herders and their resources, including the drylands relied upon.
So too is the climate emergency bringing into better view not just the changes but also the reciprocal tensions when imputing property values, e.g.:
Overall, we show that reciprocal linkages between environmental change and migration clearly exist in the studied rural communities in Ethiopia, which are mediated by various factors occurring at the micro, meso, and macro level (Table 1). These factors cover biophysical, socioeconomic, and institutional aspects. Remarkably, although not surprisingly, our research revealed that most identified factors can act in opposite directions. Hence, they can trigger or accelerate changes, just as they can hamper or slow them down. For example, in northern Ethiopia, unfavorable environmental conditions for agriculture, including increased drought frequency, unreliable rainfall, and advanced land degradation, can increase migration needs and aspirations by undermining the viability of agricultural livelihoods. However, these conditions also tend to lower migration abilities by decreasing agricultural income and hence, financial resources required for migration. Conversely, favorable environmental conditions, such as relatively stable rainfall during the cropping season in “a good year,” can decrease migration needs and aspirations and enable migration via agricultural income (for more details, see below the description of pathways A and B). The precise impact mechanisms significantly depend on a variety of additional mediating factors at the macro, meso, and micro level. . .
I want to suggest that, in the case of pastoralist systems, focusing on property (noncalculable use and calculated exchange) values and the tensions their social constructions reveal, balance or evade is a better methodological strategy than appeals to “commodification” or “marketization,” as if the latter terms were differentiated enough.
13. Expanding the early warning systems for geoengineering interventions: a pastoralist indicator
It’s a commonplace to argue that scientists and experts need to be talking to and engaging much more with the traditional knowledge folks. What’s less often the case are examples of mutual benefit of doing so. One priority area for reciprocity, I suggest, is that of geoengineering.
Geoengineering is offered up as a last-ditch effort to save the planet in the midst of its very real climate emergency. Even so, one must wonder: What better way to bring the governments of the world to their collective knees than solutions like those that would ballon the skies with mirrors and sulfur dioxide and the seas with chemical changes to capture more carbon, all because the climate emergency has left humanity no choice—no alternative—but to be unreliable on unprecedented scales?
Such indeed is the rationale for having in place robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems of the geoengineering interventions. Now of course, much of the current debate is about the unintended consequences of geoengineering and about the early warning systems for monitoring and evaluating them. But those consequences are almost exclusively dominated by concerns of global North and South experts and scientists.
I suggest that the major priority of governments and the regulators of geoengineering initiatives–and there is no stopping this experimentation!–is to ensure that the early warning systems for droughts and bad weather still in operation among pastoralists and agriculturists of the developing world are also included and canvassed.
The latter are, I believe, a quite specific case where the intersection of measurable and nonmeasuable indicators is of mutual benefit to far more than the presiding scientists and experts in the Global North and South. For my part, I wonder what will be the decrease (or increase for that matter) in the murders of local “rainmakers” (forecasters) because of geoengineering.
On the murder of rainmakers during drought, please see Isao Murahashi (2024), “Climate change or local justice? On frequent drought and regicide in South Sudan.” Presentation given on August 8 2024 as a part of the International Hyflex Sessions, “Living in the Anthropocene, living in uncertainty: Reconfiguring development and humanitarian assistance as ‘care’ with relational approach,” held at IDS Sussex.
14. Journal article as manifesto: an example involving Horn of Africa livestock
To be clear: I like the manifesto below; I agree with it. But that agreement is not because it’s also published as a journal article. Instead, I believe it because, as a manifesto, it demands change now in terms I understand and appreciate historically.
Since my argument depends on the definition of “manifesto” I use, here’s mine:
Always layered and paradoxical, [a manifesto] comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries— something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. . .This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.
In 2023, Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton published, “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” in the peer-reviewed Review of African Political Economy (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679). To its credit, the Review publishes “radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change.” And what a breadth of fresh air this article is.
First, its tone is direct, its language unequivocally materialist in the great manner of yesterday, its focus is on the marginalized, and, equally important, how could we not want change after reading this?
We present in outline an historically and empirically grounded explanation for the post-colonial destruction of the nation states of Somalia and Sudan. This is combined with a forecast that the political de-development of the Horn, and of the Sahel more generally, is spreading south into East and Central Africa as capitalism’s food frontier, in the form of a moving lawless zone of resource extraction. It is destroying livelihoods and exhausting nature. Our starting point is Marx’s argument that the historical growth and the continuing development of capitalism is facilitated through what he called ‘primitive accumulation’. With regard to the current situation in the Horn, there is a sorry historical resonance with the violent proto-capitalist land clearances that took place from the sixteenth century onward in England, Ireland and Scotland and then in North America. While today, as in Darfur, this may be classified as genocide, the principal purpose of land clearances is to convert socially tilled soils and water resources used for autonomous subsistence into pastures for intensive commercial livestock production, which now in Somalia and Sudan amounts to nothing short of ‘ecological strip mining’.
To repeat, how could you (we) not want radical change when reading further:
. . .we argue that the trade is intimately connected with the deepening social, economic and ecological crisis of agro-pastoralism in the region and the way that livestock value is now realised. Underlying the empirical data is the intensification of an environmentally destructive mode of militarised livestock production that, primarily involving sheep, is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained by raw violence and strengthened by United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi investment in Red Sea port infrastructure, the Horn and the Gulf are locked into a deadly destruction–consumption embrace.
More, there is a singular cause and it is clear: “This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.” Nor is there anything really complex about this:
The depth and cruel nature of the changes in Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral economies cannot reasonably be attributed only to environmental change, scarcity-based inter-ethnic conflict, or avaricious generals per se. To lend these arguments weight, some hold that they combine to produce a ‘complex’ emergency. The only complexity, however, is the contortions necessary to fashion a parallel universe that usefully conceals the rapacity of capitalism. Particularly cynical is the claim, for example, that Somalia’s long-history of de-development is the result of climate-change-induced drought. It is no accident that the same international powers and agencies fronting this claim have, for decades, been active players in the Horn’s de-development.
You cannot imagine how much I want to believe these words! And I take that to be a good measure of just how effective a manifesto this manifesto is, at least for someone like myself.
Manifestos are their own public genre, whatever the publication venue. This is not a policy memo whose second sentence after the problem statement is the answer to: What’s to be done and how? But then we would never look to manifestos for the devil in the details, would we?
15. How might digital nomadism recast a research agenda for pastoralism?
What if we were to reverse the usual comparison and ask: What value, if any, does the topic of digital nomadism have to add our understanding of pastoralist mobility and movements?
In answer, the lens of digital nomadism that I apply is from Emanuele Sciuva’s 2025 article, “Geographies of Digital Nomadism: A research agenda” published in Geography Compass (online at https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.70016). In the interests of brevity, we stay with the article’s abstract:
The focus has shifted from just the nomads themselves to also considering the destinations they inhabit and the broader spatial implications of their movement. This review sets out a research agenda based on emerging discussions about the geographies of digital nomadism, organized around four main thematic areas. The first cluster of scholarly works examines how digital nomads are understood at the crossroads of work‐life, leisure and lifestyle mobility perspectives. The second part includes studies that explore how states are crafting migration regulations and programs to attract digital nomads, along with the difficulties that nomads face in navigating these evolving regulatory landscapes. The third cluster of scholarship investigates the intricate interplay between digital nomadism and housing, focussing on the rise of a medium‐term rental market and diverse housing solutions tailored to digital nomads, while cautioning against the potential gentrifying effects of these emerging markets. Finally, the fourth segment of research examines the socio‐economic infrastructural changes arising from the growing presence of digital nomadism within urban settlements.
Right off the bat, there is a focus on livestock grazing and herding itineraries and shifts (see Krätli, 2015) that comes with first and foremost “considering the destinations they inhabit and the broader spatial implications of their movement.” Second, there is the decentering of any notion of “traditional” in the contemporary “work-life, leisure and lifestyle mobility perspectives”. Third, it’s housing and shelter, not (re)settlements per se, that also move center-stage in the analysis, which I take to include the structures–be they rental, squatter, public–lived in by household members sending back key remittances to their livestock-herding members.
Fourth, as for the mix of positive and negative regulations on mobility, regulations seek, in Emanuele Sciuva’s words, “not only to regulate who can or cannot move, enter, or remain in a place but also operate. . .[to incentivize] mobile individuals to self‐discipline according to desired traits like self‐sufficiency, consumer citizenship, and depoliticized mobility” That is, when was the last time researchers treated pastoralists as consumers, voters and citizens? Fifth and to stop here, there is also now another primary question: How are pastoralists and their herds changing all manner of local and national infrastructures (e.g., via private investments), not least of which are in urban or peri-urban areas?
Your reading Emanuele Sciuva’s article will show the point-to-point comparison between those nomads and these pastoralists to be imperfect and uneven (e.g., with respect to the internet’s role). But such comparisons are now in my opinion too suggestive by way of policy and management implications to dismiss outright.
Other source
Krätli, S. (2015) Valuing Variability: New Perspectives on Climate Resilient Drylands Development, London: IIED http://pubs.iied.org/10128IIED.html
16. The moral economy of pastoralists seen through the Levy-Cordelli lens of investment
Below I commit an injustice to the insights of three publications: (1) Tahari Shariff Mohamed (2022). The Role of the Moral Economy in Response to Uncertainty among Borana Pastoralists of Northern Kenya, Isiolo County, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex: Falmer, Brighton UK; (2) Jonathan Levy (2025). The Real Economy: History and Theory, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; and (3) Chiara Cordelli (2025). “What Is the Wrong of Capitalism?” American Political Science Review 1–16.
Yet the Levy/Cordelli perspective on the central role of investments–not accumulation, not markets, not prices, but investment–in real economies is an excellent lens with which to add to and extend the already more nuanced work now underway on moral economies.
Let me start with Mohamed’s work. She makes many fine points about really-existing moral economies, but we have space for probing only one–her connection between diversification of pastoralist livelihoods and investments (I bold terms to be parsed through the Levy/Corelli lens):
Pastoralists rely on fundamental practices such as herd mobility, livestock species and livelihood diversification, and investing in social relations in order to navigate livestock production uncertainties. Within these practices, particular moral economy practices, centred on collective redistribution of resources remain significant. The thesis identifies five types of moral economy practice. In the more remote pastoral setting, with intensified insecurity and limited state and institutional presence, practices of redistribution and comradeship are central. In the more urban pastoral setting, with a proliferation of institutions, markets, diversification and investment, institutionalised support and collective crisis management through the use of newly important technologies are seen. Contrary to the assumption that the moral economy is waning due to social stratification and individualisation, the thesis finds that moral economies persist, and new forms are emerging. (p.xvi)
Here, the moral economy emerges through galvanising household members to engage in various income-generating activities to cover costs such as purchasing feeds and paying hired labourers. It is the shared responsibilities and duties to collectively contributes remittances and other income from diverse economies to save the livelihood that embodies moral economy. It embodies what Ellis referred to as ‘non-economic’ aspect of social relations that regulate resource use and access to ensure survival (Ellis, 2000a). It differs from the traditional moral economy of mobilising household members to provide labour support; instead, household members engage in diverse livelihood activities to generate much-needed income that is then invested in sustaining the herd. (p.138)
. . .there is a ‘non-economic’ component of diversification, including social relations, norms and values that regulate income distribution and access. For instance, the case studies presented in chapter seven on women and intra-household diversification illuminated the power dynamic and the transforming gender relations that defined how pastoralists survived in a more urbanising setting. Equally, the opening quote of this section alludes to ‘we’, meaning that it is not one person who diversifies; instead, it is a combined effort by individuals within the family that pull resources and share remittance to manage the livelihood. Thirdly, diversification espouses the moral economy practices defined in this study as a network of relations based on trust that enhances access to resources for survival in the face of uncertainties. I argue that pastoralists establish external connections through economic ties and symbiotic relationships in order to generate a reliable flow of goods, including feeds, labour and market access to survive unpredictable pastoral production. (p.154)
Yet, if I understand Levy and Corelli correctly, what is “non-economic” in the above is economic by virtue of the centrality of investment (e.g., “investing in social relations”). “What is the first act that creates the economy?,” asks Levy in an interview. “It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate with investment.” Livestock as a store of wealth with which to save and from which to invest has been one paradigmatic example.
For Levy, the centrality of investment applies to what he calls the real economy–which, importantly, need not be a capitalist one (e.g., p.21). This is important because capitalist economies have a feature that moral economies must mitigate. In Cordelli’s argument,
. . .under capitalism both the amount and the direction of production are driven by a distinctively future-oriented investment process. Such process is guided by a specific mode of economic valuation—capitalization—which consists in attributing monetary value to assets in the present on the basis of their expected future profitability, rather than their inherent productivity, or the labor expenditure that went into producing them. Since, under capitalism, what will be produced crucially depends on investment, investment is left to private markets, and economic valuation is oriented to future profits, capitalism structurally entails a radical loss of collective control over, and involvement in, the creation and valuation of the future. Capitalism privatizes the power to build the future, and to decide according to which values it should be built. It leaves such power to profit-oriented investment markets. (p.3)
Little of this description will trouble those insisting that capitalism has commodified and marketized every major aspect of contemporary pastoralism. The passage however should trouble those who see the investment in social relations as a way to mitigate or forestall such thorough-going commodification and marketization.
Yes, the latter are increasing, though one must keep in mind Mohamed’s caution about assuming everywhere the “waning moral economy”. Whatever, the bigger question remains, Why hasn’t the waning gone even faster?
Cordelli provides one answer, namely, livestock are not capital unless they can be capitalized: “[S]avings cannot per se count as capital, because they are not capitalized, and the inherent productivity of the means of production is insufficient to make them capital” (p. 6-7). That is, livestock as that walking savings bank isn’t capital just because that store of wealth is based in livestock production; it’s because investment in social relations has kept their flows of benefit from being altogether discounted into economic net present value for pastoralists.
So what? What’s the upshot for pastoralist policy and management? Best to let Levy have the last word in terms of understanding real economies:
Categorically speaking there is nothing wrong with the methodological use of abstractions, mathematical exposition, modeling, building up explanations from individual choice and behavior, extreme scaffolding assumptions, or statistical inference. It may be true that economics at times suffers from being incorrect. The critique I am most invested in making, however, is that even when correct economics also suffers from being intolerably incomplete. (p.16)
17. When pastoralists are more like occupiers than residents only (newly added)
I
I couldn’t help thinking of Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form when reading Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands by Patta Scott-Villiers, Alastair Scott-Villiers and others.
At first reading, though, these are two very different books about very different sites. Here is how Ross’s publisher, Verso, describes her essay:
When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land–from the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre–have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.
Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.”
Here in contrast is the Summary from Scott-Villiers et al:
This working paper examines how communities along the Somalia–Kenya border navigate a landscape of war. Over decades of conflict–including civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency–local people have relied on their own means of governance and mutual support to repair the damage and maintain life and livelihood. The study draws on people’s reflections on their ‘middle way’, a system rooted in tradition by which they both govern themselves and do their best to avoid the dangers of the war. The informal order blends customary institutions, negotiated agreements, and far-reaching social networks to provide basic public goods and maintain the common good.
So indeed, the two publications have very important differences.
II
Yet what connects them for me is Ross’s point about the protracted occupy-movements that interest her:
Occupations that endure for so long require of the occupants a ceaseless ingenuity to come up with new and creative ways of inhabiting the conflict. Fighting about a place is not the same as fighting for an idea. Place-specific struggles create a political situation that really calls for a clear-cut existential choice. . .The Weelaunee Forest outside Atlanta will continue to be a forest, or it will become a militarized training ground for police. . .
This notion that people have now come to occupy a territory indefinitely strikes me as what some of those in the borderlands of Kenya and Somalia are also undergoing.
It might be useful to think of some pastoralists there less as residents only of drylands in which they and their families have long lived. Rather, think of them more as inhabiting conflicts which render them, like others also now there, as occupants of what are best understood as shifting borderlands. Yes, you still see them as residents, but they also act as occupiers of a territory now claimed by others as well.
For example, according to one interviewee in Scott-Villiers et al:
My name is Burhaan. I’m a pastoralist. It is the zakat season [when “charitable contributions” are made]. There is a lot of push from Al-Shabaab around the villages collecting the tax. You know this zakat has stayed for some time now, and we know what it is. I used to pay to my relatives who are poor, but now I pay to Al-Shabaab. The first time they took the tax, a few years ago, I was herding on the Kenya side and Al-Shabaab came to collect the zakat. They have people who do the counting for them. They know how many are in each herd. They tied two camels of mine. I went to the local police boss, the Officer in Charge of Security (OCS), and told him – my camels are taken by Al-Shabaab. The OCS asked me: ‘How many camels did you have, 30? And then they tied how many, two?’ Then he asked, what will they do next? I said, they will go with them and then they will come back after one year. And then the OCS asked: ‘Between now and then, what will happen to you?’ Nothing will happen to me, I replied. If I have paid my tax, my camels can graze anywhere. I’m not faced by any threat from them. That is when the OCS said: ‘If my unit goes after Al-Shabaab, I may lose soldiers. If two camels can guarantee your safety and the security for a year, it is a good deal!’ I went straight to those who took away my camels and negotiated – these animals are not all mine, I said. This is a herd that is pooled together by many people. Then they told me: ‘If you have issues to raise, you can go to a place called Busar and lodge a complaint. We have mechanisms for addressing grievances.’ I pleaded with them: ‘I don’t know that place, I’ve never been there, I’m from this Kenya side of the border.’ And then they released one camel back to me. It was a waiver. And then after from that day I have complied with paying zakat to Al-Shabaab.
III
So what? So what if pastoralists are occupants of borderlands along with others, notably the Kenya military and Islamic insurgents?
The answer that Ross’s work implies is more than interesting: Alliances by pastoralists with other very different occupiers that shift over time and sites can be ways to defend that occupied territory and appropriate it for uses and practices of each.
And why is that important? Because, as Ross also points out, defence and appropriation are not the same as resistance: “Resistance, quite simply, means letting the state set the agenda. Defence, on the other hand, is grounded in a temporality [namely, protracted conflict] and a set of priorities by the local community in the making.” Note: “in the making.”
Sources
Ross, K. (2024). The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life. London: Verso.
The earlier research treats production reliability as a marginal or fungible property whose costs could be traded off against other organizational values such as efficiency, speed, and product performance. The reliability analysis of the 1980s and 1990s was quite different. It dealt with error and failures that have far-reaching, often unacceptable implications for safety, not just inside but also outside the organization. This is not reliability as a probabilistic property that can be traded off at the margin with other organizational values, but reliability directed toward a set of events whose occurrence must, as nearly as possible, be deterministically precluded. (Roe and Schulman 2008, 52 – 53)
For example, what economists termed “excess capacity” in efficiency terms high reliability researchers at times call “positive redundancy,” that is: sufficient requisite variety in terms of processes and options to ensure stability of outputs in the face of unpredictable or uncontrollable inputs. Economics, for its part, is a theory of substitutability, but high reliability posits nonfungibility after a point. At that point, nothing can substitute for the safe and continuous provision of the critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times. Ironically, this is especially true for economic growth, which is not possible without high reliable contract law and regulations along with high reliably infrastructures, like large-scale water, energy and telecommunications.
These distinctions matter because current debates, centered around “resilience,” can muddle the analysis and follow-on implications.
II
By way of an example, consider what the report, Navigating Trade-offs in the Global Economy (Morris and Campbell 2025), lists as the first major trade-off:
TRADE-OFF A: ‘GROWTH THROUGH EFFICIENCY’ VS ‘RESILIENCE TO ECONOMIC SHOCKS’ There is a trade-off between promoting growth through economic efficiency and reordering supply chains as a means of securing economic resilience.
Building resilience in key sectors may require restructuring supply chains to reduce vulnerabilities to future trade disruption – whether from geopolitical causes such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine or US–China tensions, or from other causes such as the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change. A resilience- focussed approach could involve:
onshoring (transferring production to the UK)
near-shoring (transferring production to nearby countries)
friend-shoring (transferring production to reliable allies or countries with equivalent values).
While it may not be feasible to move entire supply chains to the UK or its allies, the idea behind these approaches is to shift at least part of existing supply chains to reduce the risk of potential disruptions.
Each of the three approaches requires shifting supply chains away from where production can be done most cheaply. This makes supply chains less efficient. For instance, using tariffs on intermediate inputs to try to promote domestic manufacturing increases costs for these goods, which ‘cascade’ down the supply chain and result in cutbacks in production and price increases for consumers (see Kreuter and Riccaboni 2022). Similarly, one study suggests that friend-shoring may lead to a fall in global GDP of up to 4.6 per cent (Javorcik et al 2022).
On the other hand, proponents of resilience-based strategies argue that the reallocation of supply chains can reduce dependencies on unreliable partners and help to insulate countries from economic shocks. There is evidence in particular that the diversification of supply chains can help to reduce the negative impacts of shocks, while partial onshoring can also have benefits but comes with significant implications for economic efficiency (OECD 2023).
The trade-off between efficiency and resilience can be understood as a judgement about the risk of adverse impacts of economic shocks over time. Taking action to bolster resilience could have a short-run detrimental impact on growth by making supply chains less efficient, but it may prove economically optimal in the long run if it shields the UK from future economic shocks. Recent events – from the Covid-19 pandemic to conflicts and trade wars – have heightened policymakers’ alertness to future economic risks and therefore helped to ignite the current efficiency/resilience debate. The trade-off is most acute for goods that are foundational for future economic growth, such as semiconductors. This is because, on the one hand, they are likely to be strategically important – and therefore in need of protection from economic disruption – and yet, on the other hand, restructuring these supply chains will have wide network effects on other industries, with larger impacts for efficiency.
Let’s assume this argument is true as far as it goes. Clearly for the authors, both efficiency and resilience are in terms of risks, benefits and costs, and thus a trade-off between the two seems more than plausible.
But what if resilience-seeking and reliability-seeking are not the same thing? What if that reference to “reliable” in the above passage implies it’s actually “highly reliable supply chains” that are sought after–that is, supply chains that, again, ensure the safe and continuous provision of the critical service, even during times of disruption?
If it’s the latter, then the statement–“While it may not be feasible to move entire supply chains to the UK or its allies, the idea behind these [three] approaches is to shift at least part of existing supply chains to reduce the risk of potential disruptions”–falls short of what is actually sought by way of practice. Which is when on-shoring, near-shoring and friend-shoring diversify the portfolio of practices to ensure high reliability.
If the latter is achieved, then the phrase “‘Growth through efficiency’ versus ‘High reliability in the face of shocks'” is NOT a trade-off, but rather a confusion of different categories.
Understanding policy takes time, and it is easy to get wrong or caricature. First, policies often embody multiple strategic, bureaucratic, and political interests. Second, an administration may provide conflicting or confusing signals as to what its true policy is. Third, the resulting complexity makes coding difficult. Fourth, policies are often bad because alternative policies are worse; criticism should recognize this reality.
D. Byman, 2024. “Writing Policy Recommendations for Aca- demic Journals.” International Security 48 (4): 140–1.
Let me highlight that last statement: “policies are often bad because alternative policies are worse; criticism should recognize this reality.” Indeed, that is the critic’s duty of care.
We are so used to the idea that predicting the future is about accuracy that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let alone the future.
Since the complexity of policy and management means there is more than one way to interpret an issue, the more interpretations we acknowledge the clearer ironically we are about that the nature and limits of that complexity. Why expect anything less for the future, if the present is not one-way interpretable?
Reframe the present, again and again, and then call what sticks “predictability”.
The opposite of peace is not-peace, of which war is one type. There are also contraries and contradictories, like “both peace and not-peace” and “neither peace nor not-peace.” If these semiotics were not enough, ordinary language also has its versions. Other people think in threes or more, e.g., Virginia Woolf talks about Peace, Love and Hate as the big ones.
Once you’ve got more than a duality, the contradistinctions go any which way. If Peace is the freedom from extreme love and hate, Woolf’s threesome become Love, Hate and Freedom from extreme versions of both.
II
For my part, a better question is: What is neither peace nor not-peace? One answer would be a world so complex that the determination of what is “peace” versus “not-peace” is not possible.
How so? It would be as if when reading World War II entries in John Colville’s Downing Street Diaries, you were also experiencing real time today. It would be to read Hardy’s 1912 poem, “Convergence of the Twain,” as if it were still part of the news about the Titanic sinking the month before.
2. A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)
3. Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures
4. Improvisation as interconnectivity
5. “Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“
6. How the only thing between you and death is you
7. “It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre
8. Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China
9. Silos, duties and responsibilities: implications for emergency management
10. Rethinking “trade-offs” in emergency management through an interconnectivity framework: the examples of evacuations and mitigations
11. That “communications gap” in emergency management
12. More on managing ahead for latent vulnerabilities in emergency management (newly added)
1. Profession(s) of emergency management
I
I think we’re all familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to hard issues, without however providing details for that implementation.
Notice a positive but under-acknowledged implication for policy and management: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.
We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.
Note two inter-related assumptions in the preceding. First, they are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operational definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, among other abstractions, matter for and in practice.
II
Yet what do we hear in our interviews of emergency managers and infrastructure operations? Answer: the attempt of some to separate the goats from the sheep, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.
It’s accepted, of course, that in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems. That said, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration.
In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters
There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not Neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us. Emergency management today is in the 21st century; it should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionalism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.
2. A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)
I
I’m about to finish my part of a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur offshore as predicted. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.
More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.
No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead.
II
If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.
III
A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.
Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.
For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response
IV
So what?
We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have real infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have them either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what other literatures call collective denial.
Source
O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK.
The Oregon and Washington State interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.
3. Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures
I
How do you choose which bridges to retrofit, when so many major ones could fail in the next big earthquake?
That question is misformulated and its answers accordingly misleading.
II
Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and related infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.
This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the upshot: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and from which to learn.
Since there are material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.
III
In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”
4. Improvisation as interconnectivity
I
“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the Pacific Northwest told us:
But you realize the gaps in plans when you’re dealing with such catastrophic events that we’ve dealt with in the past 18 months to two years…There’s a lot that needs to be decided on the fly because it hasn’t been planned for or it’s not going to work, the plan didn’t consider all the factors because every emergency is different.
The preceding will seem obvious to many, but the implications aren’t as readily recognized.
For one thing, it implies that there is not a “life cycle” of a critical infrastructure, if by that is meant one stage follows another until it–the single now-mature infrastructure–is superseded by something better. In open-systems theory, infrastructures are like other complex organizations in that they shift in response to changes in their wider task environments. That they shift in and out of stability again implies the centrality of improvisation, not steady evolution.
II
“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, and answered from his experience: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.”
Success, in other words, is when pre-existing interconnectivity does not altogether disappear, however reconfigured. Indeed, interconnectivity can be improvised in trying to match just-now demands with just-now capabilities. Stability takes many shapes, and so too the pathways followed by infrastructures.
5. “Why aren’t you all running away like mad!“
I
For reasons that become clear, no names are given in what follows. The numbers, though, remain roughly as identified.
Researchers estimated the annual probability of a major stretch of an island’s levees failing ranged between 4% to 24% due to a slope failure. (Slope instability in this scenario would be caused by flooding behind the levee as well as high water levels on its water side.)
Our estimates were considerably higher than the official one, in large part because the research project relied on methodologies validated against benchmark studies.
We presented the findings to the island’s management board. Their first and really only question was whether our estimates would be revealed to the island’s insurers.
II
We undertook a hotwash afterwards to figure out their–how to put it?–lukewarm response:
Didn’t they understand the upper range, 24% per annum, implied a levee breach nigh inevitable with respect to our failure scenario? Or to put the question to our side, in what ways did the 24% per annum estimate fall short of being a failure probability of 1.0?
But if as high as 24% per annum, why hadn’t there been a levee breach over the many decades since the last major one on the island?
And what about the islands nearby? Assuming even a few of these had a similar upper range, why weren’t levee failures happening more often?
The 4% – 24% range was with respect to annual levee failure due to slope instability only. If you add in all the levee failure modes possible (e.g., due to seepage rather than overtopping and flooding), the combined probability of levee failure would have to be higher. (But then again, what are the conditions under which the more ways there are to fail, the more likely failure is?)
You could say one reason why levee failure there hadn’t happened–yet–was because it had been long enough. That is: a long enough period to observe levee breaches so as to form the distribution from which the 24% could be established empirically. But these levees had been in place for decades and decades. The burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why this wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.
The levee stretch in question could be “failing to fail.” It might be that this stretch had not undergone events that loaded it to capacity and worse. (But then again: How much worse would the conditions have to be in our expert view? Just what is “a probability of failing to fail”?)
To put all this differently, was this levee stretch on that island more diverse and more resilient (say, in the way biodiverse ecosystems are said to be more resilient) than current methods capture but which islanders better understood and perhaps even managed?
III
But our most significant point from the hotwash was the one none of us saw need to voice: How could we accuse the management board and islanders of being short-sighted or worse, with so much else going on challenging us, the team, to make sense of our own estimates for the purposes of island emergency preparedness and management?
6. How the only thing between you and death is you
I
Say you are residents of Oregon, a US state facing a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just off its shoreline, in the Pacific Northwest. Aftershocks will likely be around magnitude 8.0 with a 60’ft tsunami hitting the shore first thing.
Nothing has every happened like that to Oregon. People there began thinking seriously about this earthquake and its aftermath only about a decade or so ago. Thinking about the infrastructure interconnectivities within a regional focus has been even more recent. People talk about the recent spate of ice storms, fires, flooding and heat dome effects more as “eye-openers and wake-up calls” than as sources of lessons to be learned for the M9 events. According to interviewees, emergency management is itself a relatively new profession and organizational priority in the state.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that key resources, like electricity generation and regional transmission is on the eastern side of the state. But that too is at jeopardy if instead of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake off the coast, we are talking about, say, a repeat of the massive geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859. That too can happen and take out a much wider swathe of electric and telecom assets.
II
What to do in response to the prospect of the earthquake or worse? One thing is: “get out of Dodge.” But then do you know what’s in store when you arrive somewhere you’ve never resided? That the state’s infrastructure operators aren’t fleeing like mad indicates people’s preferences for known unknowns over unknown unknowns.
Known unknowns after all can be cast in the form of scenarios, and scenarios can be more or less detailed. Restoring water, electricity, telecoms and roads will be an immediate priority once saving lives is underway and plans are (being) made for this. That is, people imagine the known unknown called the unimaginable all the time.
In other words, the second we try to anticipate the unimaginable–that is, prepare for it–the preparedness scenarios become more or less granularized as well. These scenarios are what separate you from unstudied/unstudiable conditions. “Humans can only really know that which they create,” as the older philosophical insight has it.
7. “It’ll be unimaginably catastrophic” as a limitation of the interview genre
I
Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. But the M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns, as we just saw. Scenarios of varying details are to be expected. Still, I think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre with its own limitations and their implications.
II
The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees probably felt put on the spot sometimes while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers.
So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something that is not untrue about a catastrophe desperate indeed.
8. Error avoidance is NOT risk management: an example from China
I
To talk about known errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and shocks are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.
Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some cases. Despite surprises, sequences of action can be clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake.
II
Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and afterwards, invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are by definition under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to the now-dynamic demands.
More specifically with respect to known errors:
Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so in the time required.
In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.
III
While there are other known errors, the above three bullets are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster:
1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs.
2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. In our experience, this means focusing beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.
3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as a known error to avoid.
4. Without prior contacts, communication channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will by necessity focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. Where inter-infrastructural connectivities turn out to be a priority, real-time corrections are then hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.
(My thanks to Paul Schulman in thinking through and formulating these points. The original research interviews were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.)
IV
So what? Take China and its disaster management with respect to, say, its massive High Speed Rail (HSR) system. Against the above background, four follow-on questions, for which I don’t pretend to have any kind of answer, are:
–Do existing institutions facilitate lateral communications and horizontal micro-coordination even if (especially if) they occur outside official emergency management systems, be they in rural or urban areas?
–Are formal and informal communications systems robust even when baseline telecoms are down, be they in rural or urban areas?
–Are repositories of key infrastructure back-ups readily available, particularly where chokepoints of two or more infrastructures are co-located in urban or rural areas?
–Are existing initiatives focused on vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructures in the face of urban or rural disasters supported not only by funds and staff, but also by new information and findings?
Note, in case it needs saying, that in none of this am I suggesting the answers start, let alone end, with the HSR system.
9. Silos, duties and responsibilities: implications for emergency management (newly added)
I
The admonition, “We need to get out of our organizational silos!,” is a familiar one. It is also said of immediate response and service restoration by the feds and state emergency management agencies. The causes and the consequences of human-made disasters are inter-sectoral and so too, the argument runs, should be emergency management.
That may be demonstrably true as far as it goes, but differences in contexts require going further by imposing all manner of caveats and qualifications. I focus here on one because of its surprising implications for policy and management.
II
Oregon and Washington State have separate and separately staffed Emergency Support Functions, e.g., in Oregon ESF-1 is responsible for transportation, ESF-2 responsible for communications, ESF-3 for public works and so on. The separate functions seem to be a welcomed way for inter-function coordination apart from but complementary to the formal federal and state Incident Command System.
One reason for this seems to be each ESF unit is small, a single staff-person with or without some support, who recognizes that the formal duties with respect to his or her function need to be supplemented by informal responsibilities to coordinate with other units and field staff. This is especially so when it comes to infrastructural interconnectivities emerging before, during and just after a major disaster.
In formal terms, you can think of each ESF undertaking their respective duties and responsibilities as a focal unit mediating between those on the ground and those in the Incident Command Structure (ICS) chain of command. Where so helps make sense of one conundrum we encountered in our research in both states on the huge and awful impacts of a Magnitude 9 earthquake there.
III
“If the earthquake’s going to be that bad, why plan for it at all?” Answer: Because it someone’s job–in terms of their duties and responsibilities–to do that.
We were told that it’s better to build a resilient cell-tower now, as long as you have done a detailed study showing on that cell-tower is instrumental to your post-disaster response/recovery. Why? A resilient tower is built to last, long after people and disasters come and go, we were told. But we were also told the M9 events would test any “built to last” assumption.
Yet even if the latter remains true, building more resilient cell-towers is still the job of someone or organization. This is true in the same sense that the question–“Whose ESF is responsible for ensuring mobile generate are provided?”–has an answer, including “Well, no one is doing this right now., so it’s our job. . .”
IV
This focus on whose job we are talking about means that the position holder (if there) carries an authority and expertise others don’t have. When he or she says, “That ain’t gonna happen,” that message conveys a level of certainty in the midst of uncertainties. “What percentage of electricity can we expect to be restored within 2 days after M9?” “Well, about zero,” has the ring of truth if it’s the responsible ESF or ICS person saying it. So too if these professionals say, “We won’t know where to start until we see what actually left to work with.”
Note another implication of whose job is it. It is also common to hear, and not just in emergency management: “Everything is connected to everything else.” If so, then the other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” As in: “It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts.” (For example, “we can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” a regulator told us.)
A last implication. It is one thing is to insist on unimaginable M9 impacts, but quite another to leave out those whose job it is think about those impacts with respect to other infrastructures. We were told that wastewater wasn’t at the planning and emergency preparedness table as often as other infrastructures like electricity, roads and potable water. “If there’s an earthquake and water is restored, here we’ll be calling for no flushing of toilets,” said a wastewater manager responsible for making this call. He didn’t need to add: Now, how would that look?
Source: Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616. See also E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science.
10. Rethinking “trade-offs” in emergency management through an interconnectivity framework: the examples of evacuations and mitigations (newly added)
From our framework’s perspective (Roe and Schulman 2023), the key feature of a “trade-off” is that it is an inter-relationship between parties, more precisely: an interconnectivity between them.
Now economists tell us more guns mean less butter, other things equal. Say this produces X amount of guns and Y amount of butter. But “change one causes the other to change” is only one type of interconnectivity, in this case sequential. Assuming both guns and butter require infrastructures to produce and distribute means that other types of interconnectivity could as well explain the values, X and Y. For example, the parties reciprocated and so ended up with those amounts; or someone from the outside mediated the interchange between the parties, leading to that joint consensus, well, at least for the time being.
We and the economist still see X guns and Y butter, but from our interconnectivity framework perspective, it matters greatly what type of interconnection that trade-off is (i.e., sequential, reciprocal, mediated). Two examples of key concepts in emergency management help illustrate why these differences matter:
1. Post-Disaster Evacuations. From our framework’s view, evacuations of people from a disaster area are efforts to shift the demands for major infrastructural interconnectivities out and away from that area to sites where those demands can be met through interconnections involving electricity, water supplies, telecoms and other lifeline infrastructures.
In other words, not only are the trade-offs–even with respect to guns and butter–different between the origin and the destination areas, the trade-offs also vary within each area to the extent their interconnectivity types differ.
This means that there is difference relevant for policy and management between a disaster area now without water, electricity or telecoms and a disaster area still with levels of electricity, water and telecoms but insufficient for the population demands. Even with evacuation eventuating in the latter case, the trade-offs in its origin area differ from the former case where the infrastructures and their critical services have been eliminated. That is to say, evacuation also means those remaining behind.
So what? Recourse to “trade-off” terminology can be too coarse for management purposes if it is without the granularity differences in interconnectivity impose on the analysis.
2. Pre-Disaster Mitigations. From our framework’s perspective, pre-disaster mitigations are efforts to manage latent interconnections before they become manifest by virtue of a triggering disaster. This challenge is compounded by the fact that not only are some latent interconnections extremely difficult to see or predict beforehand, they and others may also only become visible during the disaster or afterwards.
So what? Any vacuum produced by difficulties in prediction matters because the professional(s) whose job it is to make these predictions and calls for pre-disaster mitigation will always be confronted by politicians, whose politics also ground and justify making such calls anyway. How is this relevant for policy and management?
One answer is to shift the issue to a different question: Who is better at improvising solutions once the latent become manifest in the disaster: Those politicians, those professionals, both depending on the circumstances, others? In other words, whose improvisation learning carries more weight when it comes thereafter to offering pre-disaster mitigations? Now that’s the trade-off–interconnection–of interest!
Source:
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science. Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.
11. That “communications gap” in emergency management (newly added)
I
Interviewees frequently mention “classic examples” of communication gaps that emerge or recur in emergency response and recovery. Issues of interoperability across communication technologies is one. As for others, I don’t need to spell out all the acronyms for you to still get that déjà vu when reading the following passage from a recent draft after-action report for a Cascadia earthquake exercise:
Numerous resource requests in OpsCenter were marked as “Unable to Fulfill” without any follow-up communication from the ECC Operations Section. This lack of communication resulted in stalled requests, even though federal resources were available to address them. The FEMA Liaison Officer identified, submitted to the RRCC, and resolved this issue, but only after delays had occurred. ESF staff reported being overwhelmed with incoming requests, leaving little capacity for follow-up or escalation, while ECC Operations did not proactively monitor or coordinate these unresolved requests. Highlighting a siloed approach to resource management, where the absence of centralized oversight contributed to gaps in communication and missed opportunities for resolution.
Well yes, but there is a more subtle persisting problem here.
II
In terms of our framework, a communication gap is the absence of interconnections established when task demands and response capabilities match (in this case, with respect to the broad tent called communications). The problem is the backdrop against which the communication gaps emerge, namely: All manner of other gaps and matches come and go in the emergency. What is the relationship between persisting gaps and the more fleeting ones?
Here part of the answer lies in other interconnectivities. Part of the definition of a major disaster is that task demands and resource capabilities are highly unlikely to be isolated to the purview and authority of one agency. The disaster is too big for that.
The state and federal infrastructures for emergency management could never undertake the tasks of preparedness, response, restoration and recovery on their own without the major and active participation of the key lifeline infrastructures under threat. Task environment demands are so varied, numerous and unpredictable when it comes to immediate response and initial service restoration that requisite variety in options requires multiple sites (organizational, locational) of response capabilities—and even then there are no guarantees.
III
In fact, we were told, “Emergency management coordinates with anyone who can help.” For example, bringing community members into emergency preparedness, response and recovery isn’t just because members could well make infrastructure response and restoration more effective. It can also bring in different interconnectivity, i.e. restoring social and cultural relationships before or in parallel to immediate response. Either way, the emergency management priority, while saving lives and property, is to restore power and water for those remaining.
So now we have an answer to the Big Question: Why isn’t an Magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State a critique of economic system that leads to the earthquake being such a catastrophic failure with such catastrophic consequences there and beyond?
Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, rebuild, or renew–is such a high priority, now and not just ahead, for the communities, lifeline infrastructures and emergency managers combined. Plus, they want to get back to where they were before, if only to plan the next steps ahead. Let others critique the end of the world through capitalism or the climate emergency or the polycrisis. Now that’s what I call a persisting gap in communications.
12. More on managing ahead for latent vulnerabilities in emergency management (newly added)
I
The admonition to manage ahead latent interconnectivities before they are triggered into manifest ones by a disaster is easier said than done. What are the practices to do so? Mitigations like retrofitting a bridge, installing automatic shut-off valves, 2 week readiness supplies in advance of an earthquake are common examples. So too are table-top exercises, increasing one’s contact list for emergencies, and contingency planning.
Each of these comes with no guarantee that they will actually mitigate once the disaster hits. It might be useful, then, to start with what is guaranteed to happen and see if that offers insights in what to do beforehand and afterwards.
II
One guarantee when major disaster hits: Latent interconnections unmanaged beforehand, particularly those that are invisible or dormant, necessitate improvisations in immediate emergency response afterwards. That is, disaster is the only way these vulnerabilities become visible for management, if any.
Obviously, not all latent interconnectivities are invisible beforehand. To bring to light what can be made visible and manage ahead for them is the function of contingency planning, table-tops, joint drills and other mitigations, like retrofitting. The only thing I have to offer here based in our Oregon and Washington State research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake is that a number of interviewees did not have specific response scenarios for their own departments or units.
This lack of granularity is understandable (i.e., the more specific the scenario the more likely it is wrong about actual events unfold), but it makes some M9 discussions, in the words of one state infrastructure coordinator, “theoretical”. To avoid that, increased granularity in what-if scenarios seems necessary in managing for vulnerabilities that are not hidden out of view. Think again of table-tops, but this time around multiple what-if scenarios and interconnections.
III
But what to do beforehand for those cases where latent vulnerabilities are altogether unknown until disaster makes them manifest?
One answer follows from the guarantee that, when it comes to major disaster, prior latencies are joined at the hip with subsequent improvisations. Managing ahead means the latter are to be more doable and effective. I think immediately of cross-desk or cross-position training, e.g., control room dispatchers have also trained on the scheduler’s desk or water department staff can clear a major road even if the roads department staff have priorities elsewhere.
But it must also be recognized that some improvisations would not happen, cross-training or not, without the disaster. One state coordinator involved in communications management during emergencies told us about convening an online group of competing companies and infrastructure providers:
During a winter storm we had a utility or provider say we’ve got fiber cuts in this area, we don’t have the fiber to replace it in that area, our resources are in this other area—that allowed us to look at the group and say now is the time for some teamwork: Can anyone else solve that problem and be a good team member? And we’ve seen a lot of that sort of problem-solving manifest among the agencies with very little input from us. Another example might be a cellular carrier who is a competitor of another carrier going “Hey, we’re going to fill our generator, can we top off your fuel tank while we’re up there?. . .But I don’t think [those kinds of cooperation] would occur if we didn’t coordinate it and get everybody on the same call and provide a platform for them to kind of air those sorts of things.
Disaster shifts the interconnectivity configurations of staff and infrastructures not only in ways that open up opportunities to improvise but also in ways that make any such missed opportunities mitigable errors to be avoided.
IV
So what, practically?
Many interviewees reiterated they have no idea who or how many of their staff will be able to resume work immediately after the M9 earthquake. “The first 72 hours and you’re still trying to figure out who’s alive out there and those who can communicate,” said a state emergency manager. In other words, referring to “the M9 event” is misleading if it’s taken to imply one event and not thousands or more of them unfolding unpredictably.
One major implication is that it’s better to assume infrastructure cascades are part of the unfolding nature of the M9 earthquake, where just-in-time joint improvisations play an important role in addressing those cascades. Far too often “inter-infrastructure cascades” are assumed–and not just by modelers–to be instantaneous and unmanageable when in fact they are delayed and open to human intervention.
I couldn’t help thinking of Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form when reading Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands by Patta Scott-Villiers, Alastair Scott-Villiers and others.
At first reading, though, these are two very different books about very different sites. Here is how Ross’s publisher, Verso, describes her essay:
When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land–from the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre–have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.
Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.”
Here in contrast is the Summary from Scott-Villiers et al:
This working paper examines how communities along the Somalia–Kenya border navigate a landscape of war. Over decades of conflict–including civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency–local people have relied on their own means of governance and mutual support to repair the damage and maintain life and livelihood. The study draws on people’s reflections on their ‘middle way’, a system rooted in tradition by which they both govern themselves and do their best to avoid the dangers of the war. The informal order blends customary institutions, negotiated agreements, and far-reaching social networks to provide basic public goods and maintain the common good.
So indeed, the two publications have very important differences.
II
Yet what connects them for me is Ross’s point about the protracted occupy-movements that interest her:
Occupations that endure for so long require of the occupants a ceaseless ingenuity to come up with new and creative ways of inhabiting the conflict. Fighting about a place is not the same as fighting for an idea. Place-specific struggles create a political situation that really calls for a clear-cut existential choice. . .The Weelaunee Forest outside Atlanta will continue to be a forest, or it will become a militarized training ground for police. . .
This notion that people have now come to occupy a territory indefinitely strikes me as what some of those in the borderlands of Kenya and Somalia are also undergoing.
It might be useful to think of some pastoralists there less as residents only of drylands in which they and their families have long lived. Rather, think of them more as inhabiting conflicts which render them, like others also now there, as occupants of what are best understood as shifting borderlands. Yes, you still see them as residents, but they also act as occupiers of a territory now claimed by others as well.
For example, according to one interviewee in Scott-Villiers et al:
My name is Burhaan. I’m a pastoralist. It is the zakat season [when “charitable contributions” are made]. There is a lot of push from Al-Shabaab around the villages collecting the tax. You know this zakat has stayed for some time now, and we know what it is. I used to pay to my relatives who are poor, but now I pay to Al-Shabaab. The first time they took the tax, a few years ago, I was herding on the Kenya side and Al-Shabaab came to collect the zakat. They have people who do the counting for them. They know how many are in each herd. They tied two camels of mine. I went to the local police boss, the Officer in Charge of Security (OCS), and told him – my camels are taken by Al-Shabaab. The OCS asked me: ‘How many camels did you have, 30? And then they tied how many, two?’ Then he asked, what will they do next? I said, they will go with them and then they will come back after one year. And then the OCS asked: ‘Between now and then, what will happen to you?’ Nothing will happen to me, I replied. If I have paid my tax, my camels can graze anywhere. I’m not faced by any threat from them. That is when the OCS said: ‘If my unit goes after Al-Shabaab, I may lose soldiers. If two camels can guarantee your safety and the security for a year, it is a good deal!’ I went straight to those who took away my camels and negotiated – these animals are not all mine, I said. This is a herd that is pooled together by many people. Then they told me: ‘If you have issues to raise, you can go to a place called Busar and lodge a complaint. We have mechanisms for addressing grievances.’ I pleaded with them: ‘I don’t know that place, I’ve never been there, I’m from this Kenya side of the border.’ And then they released one camel back to me. It was a waiver. And then after from that day I have complied with paying zakat to Al-Shabaab.
III
So what? So what if pastoralists are occupants of borderlands along with others, notably the Kenya military and Islamic insurgents?
The answer that Ross’s work implies is more than interesting: Alliances by pastoralists with other very different occupiers that shift over time and sites can be ways to defend that occupied territory and appropriate it for uses and practices of each.
And why is that important? Because, as Ross also points out, defence and appropriation are not the same as resistance: “Resistance, quite simply, means letting the state set the agenda. Defence, on the other hand, is grounded in a temporality [namely, protracted conflict] and a set of priorities by the local community in the making.” Note: “in the making.”
Sources
Ross, K. (2024). The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life. London: Verso.
1. What people don’t appreciate about the Trump budget and staff cuts: Catastrophe averted is no longer the gold standard for government performance
It is recognized that the Trump budget and staff cuts will have catastrophic effects. But most people don’t understand that their chief effect will be jettisoning catastrophe itself as an evaluative standard for government performance. Catastrophe is the risk we have to take, or so we are now told.
Yet millions of real-time professionals have been trained and acculturated to avoid or prevent outright failure in providing critical services. People die when catastrophes happen. In contrast, our national leaders believe “If we don’t risk system failure by cutting costs and staff we’ll never get our global market share”–now both in dollars and in global politics.
What they–and the rest of us–don’t see is the billions of dollars saved each day by professionals who are now being fired from real-time operations in our critical infrastructures, like water, energy and telecommunications. For our national CEO’s, the jettisoned standard was all about playing it safe, and playing it safe is not good enough.
The expression, “playing it safe,” is often used pejoratively in the U.S. Safety-first, Teddy Roosevelt said, will kill America. The problem is that our CEO leaders haven’t told us: Under what conditions is not playing it safe the equivalent to running headlong into fire?
2. A different optic for recasting US emergency management: the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP)
I
I’m about to finish my part of a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to occur offshore as predicted. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.
More formally, the counterfactual to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.
No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead.
II
If your world is the world, you will come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive multiple shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.
III
A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.
Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.
For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response
IV
So what?
We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have real infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have them either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what other literatures call collective denial.
Source: O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK.
3. Rethinking “trade-offs” in emergency management through an interconnectivity framework: the examples of evacuations and mitigations
The key feature of a “trade-off” is that it is an inter-relationship between parties, more precisely: an interconnectivity between them.
Economists tell us more guns mean less butter, other caveats aside. Say this produces X guns and Y butter. But “change one causes the other to change” is only one type of interconnectivity, in this case sequential. Assuming both guns and butter require infrastructures to produce and distribute means that other types of interconnectivity could as well explain arriving at X and Y. For example, the parties reciprocated and so ended up there; or someone from the outside mediated the interchange between the parties, leading to those joint values for the time being.
We and the economist still see X guns and Y butter, but from our interconnectivity framework, it matters greatly what type of interconnection that trade-off is (i.e., sequential, reciprocal, mediated). Two examples of key concepts in emergency management help illustrate why the differences matter:
1. Post-Disaster Evacuations. From our framework’s view, evacuations of people from a disaster area are efforts to shift the demands for major infrastructural interconnectivities from that area to sites where those demands can be met through interconnections involving electricity, water supplies, telecoms and other lifeline infrastructures.
This means that there is a difference relevant for policy and management between a disaster area now without water, electricity or telecoms and a disaster area still with levels of electricity, water and telecoms but insufficient for population demands. Even with evacuation eventuating in the latter case, the trade-offs in its origin area differ from the former case where the infrastructures and their critical services have been eliminated. If, as they say, a thing is also defined by what it is not, then evacuation also means those remaining behind.
So what? Recourse to “trade-off” terminology can be too coarse for management purposes if it is without the granularity differences in interconnectivity impose on the analysis.
2. Pre-Disaster Mitigations. From our framework’s perspective, pre-disaster mitigations are efforts to manage latent interconnections before they become manifest by virtue of a triggering disaster. This challenge is compounded by the fact that not only are some latent interconnections extremely difficult to see or predict beforehand, they and others may also only become visible during the disaster or afterwards.
So what? Any vacuum produced by difficulties in prediction matters because the professional(s) whose job it is to make these predictions and calls for pre-disaster mitigation will always be confronted by politicians, whose politics ground and justify making such calls anyway. How is this relevant for policy and management?
One answer is to shift the issue to a different question: Who is better at improvising solutions once the latent become manifest in the disaster: Those politicians, those professionals, both depending on the circumstances, others? In other words, whose improvisation learning carries more weight when it comes thereafter to offering pre-disaster mitigations? Now that’s the trade-off–interconnection–of interest!
4. Managing ahead for latent vulnerabilities in emergencies
I
The admonition to manage ahead latent interconnectivities before they are triggered into manifest ones by a disaster is easier said than done. What are the practices to do so? Mitigations like retrofitting a bridge, installing automatic shut-off valves, 2 week readiness supplies in advance of an earthquake are common examples. So too are table-top exercises, increasing one’s contact list for emergencies, and contingency planning.
Each of these comes with no guarantee that they will actually mitigate once the disaster hits. It might be useful, then, to start with what is guaranteed to happen and see if that offers insights in what to do beforehand and afterwards.
II
One guarantee when major disaster hits: Latent interconnections unmanaged beforehand, particularly those that are invisible or dormant, necessitate improvisations in immediate emergency response afterwards. That is, disaster is the only way these vulnerabilities become visible for management, if any.
Obviously, not all latent interconnectivities are invisible beforehand. To bring to light what can be made visible and manage ahead for them is the function of contingency planning, table-tops, joint drills and other mitigations, like retrofitting. The only thing I have to offer here based in our Oregon and Washington State research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake is that a number of interviewees did not have specific response scenarios for their own departments or units.
This lack of granularity is understandable (i.e., the more specific the scenario the more likely it is wrong about actual events unfold), but it makes some M9 discussions, in the words of one state infrastructure coordinator, “theoretical”. To avoid that, increased granularity in what-if scenarios seems necessary in managing for vulnerabilities that are not hidden out of view. Think again of table-tops, but this time around multiple what-if scenarios and interconnections.
III
But what to do beforehand for those cases where latent vulnerabilities are altogether unknown until disaster makes them manifest?
One answer follows from the guarantee that, when it comes to major disaster, prior latencies are joined at the hip with subsequent improvisations. Managing ahead means the latter are to be more doable and effective. I think immediately of cross-desk or cross-position training, e.g., control room dispatchers have also trained on the scheduler’s desk or water department staff can clear a major road even if the roads department staff have priorities elsewhere.
But it must also be recognized that some improvisations would not happen, cross-training or not, without the disaster. One state coordinator involved in communications management during emergencies told us about convening an online group of competing companies and infrastructure providers:
During a winter storm we had a utility or provider say we’ve got fiber cuts in this area, we don’t have the fiber to replace it in that area, our resources are in this other area—that allowed us to look at the group and say now is the time for some teamwork: Can anyone else solve that problem and be a good team member? And we’ve seen a lot of that sort of problem-solving manifest among the agencies with very little input from us. Another example might be a cellular carrier who is a competitor of another carrier going “Hey, we’re going to fill our generator, can we top off your fuel tank while we’re up there?. . .But I don’t think [those kinds of cooperation] would occur if we didn’t coordinate it and get everybody on the same call and provide a platform for them to kind of air those sorts of things.
Disaster shifts the interconnectivity configurations of staff and infrastructures not only in ways that open up opportunities to improvise but also in ways that make any such missed opportunities mitigable errors to be avoided.
IV
So what, practically?
Many interviewees reiterated they have no idea who or how many of their staff will be able to resume work immediately after the M9 earthquake. “The first 72 hours and you’re still trying to figure out who’s alive out there and those who can communicate,” said a state emergency manager. In other words, referring to “the M9 event” is misleading if it’s taken to imply one event and not thousands or more of them unfolding unpredictably.
One major implication is that it’s better to assume infrastructure cascades are part of the unfolding nature of the M9 earthquake, where just-in-time joint improvisations play an important role in addressing those cascades. Far too often “inter-infrastructure cascades” are assumed–and not just by modelers–to be instantaneous and unmanageable when in fact they are delayed and open to human intervention.
5. Breaking into a snatch of dialogue from the play of our time
. . . .SPIEGEL: Surely you would include here the communist movement?
Heidegger: Yes, unquestionably — insofar as that, too is a form of planetary technicity.
SPIEGEL: Americanism also?
Heidegger: Yes, I would say so. Meantime, the last 30 years have made it clearer that the planet-wide movement of modern technicity is a power whose magnitude in determining [our] history can hardly be overestimated. For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system — and which one — can be adapted to an epoch of technicity. I know of no answer to this question.
SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?
Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.
SPIEGEL: . . .Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it?
Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us.
SPIEGEL: . . .The question, then, is this: isn’t it possible, after all, that suggestions come from the thinkers (if only as a by-product) either as to how this system may be replaced by a new one and what a new one would look like, or that reform must be possible — together with some indication as to how this reform could be possible.
Heidegger: As far as I can see, an individual [thinker] is not in a position by reason of his thought to see through the world as a whole in such fashion as to be able to offer practical advice, and this, indeed, in view of the fact that his first task is to find a basis for thinking itself. For as long as thought takes itself seriously in terms of the great tradition, it is asking too much of thought for it to be committed to offering advice in this way. By what authority could this come about? In the domain of thinking there are no authoritative statements. . .
BUT WHAT THEN IS THE STATEMENT, “ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US”?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 