For me, it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about A making B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. More, when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated in or dispersed through interests, full stop.
The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go. Better then to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.
It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” (as in “war”) links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.
The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”
Start with a question asked of a workshop’s invitees:
What are the challenges, practices and strategies of governing infrastructure reliability and safety in organizational networks?
In my mind, the questioning and answering take place in this way and order: What are the system boundaries of the operating infrastructure? What are the standards of reliability and safety being managed to for system-level operations? What are system risks and uncertainties that follow from managing to that standard for that system?
In the process of answering the three, I would specifically probe for the changing interconnectivity between and among latent and manifest boundaries, standards, and risks/uncertainties.
II
So what? Yes, definition and clarification of terms are needed, but not with respect to the initial ones of safety and reliability. In my recasting, it is case-specific system, boundaries, standards, risks/uncertainties and interconnections that are gasping for the same air now sucked away by struggles in better defining “reliability, safety and networks.”
Or to shift the analogy. For centuries, ancient Greek architecture has been praised for its pure forms and perfect proportions. Then came along those who did more site research, suggesting that the bare stone we see today could have been covered by all manner of rough stucco and garish paint. What too then of those forms we—myself included—have abstracted as reliability, safety and networks?
Out of the blue, got a call from Ray R. Haven’t heard from him since he took my class—when? He’s Director of Planning, County Welfare Agency, and wants me to help write the Agency’s five-year action plan. Haven’t dealt with such issues since I fled the social-work track here and five-year district development plans there.
***
Ray briefed me today. Got a briefcase of material. Now for the cast of characters in this melodrama:
David M., Agency Director, on probation by Board of Trustees of politicos and micro-managers.
Agency has four departments:
Welfare to Work (Doris P, head),
Child Youth & Family Services (Rachel F),
Adult & Aging Services (Betty W), and
Workforce & Resource Development (Pedro X)
Amanda T. is Deputy Director, to whom Ray–remember, the Director of Planning–reports. You’ll meet Tomas Y, Family Services’ chief consultant, in a moment.
David forced by Board of Trustees to have a long-term action plan. Who can be against action planning? That means, no one is for it, except Ray and Amanda. Agency is one of largest in the Bay Area: Half a billion dollar annual budget, over 2000 employees.
***
Agency waiting room looks like a bus depot in a bad part of town. Private security guard opens doors around 8:30 am. Mostly Blacks, Hispanics and Asians hang around in front. Building is next to probation and courts, all Stalinist construction.
Walls look like they’ve been eaten off where not pissed on. We queue, eventually get up to functionaries behind bullet-proof windows. Mine decides to buzz the outer door open. I sign in. I’ve interrupted the security guy chatting up one of the females. He buzzes the inside door open, and I’m free.
***
Ray introduces me at today’s Executive Committee meeting. Rachel and Betty are burned out. David says not a word. Amanda waits until the others have had their say, and then wades in. Ray’s the only one who smiles. I don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s mostly acronyms, but this part of a learning curve I like. Ray and I arrange interviews with each department head, plus David and Amanda.
***
Went to my first meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup charged to work with Ray on the Action Plan. (Thinking in CAPS now.) We’re grim. Ray tells me later of another meeting, when they were trying to figure out what to call welfare recipients. Clients? Customers? Consumers? Hell, they’re all suspects, said the head of Welfare Fraud.
***
I just interviewed a guard at a death camp. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is to children, says Rachel about her Child Youth & Family Services department. 20,000 calls to the child abuse hotline a year, only 1200-1500 leading to children being removed from the home. We’re missing lots of kids. We don’t know what bottom is, she says.
Her department’s to reunite children with their families. Reality is that the family’s the problem. She tells me the single best predictor of a foster kid ending up in the juvenile justice system is being reunited with the family.
Some kids have been moved 40 or more times before they graduate from the system at 16 years old. Most families trained as foster care parents drop out early. Every foster kid in the county should get life-long psychiatric therapy, she tells me. Oh, and don’t forget they have more medical and dental problems than do average kids. Most violence done to kids is kid-on-kid violence. An 8-year old kid sexually abuses a younger one. What do you think happened to the 9-year old who committed an armed robbery? He was sent home. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is, she repeats.
Foster care graduates should be guaranteed county jobs, she presses, since they’re the creation of the county and have no other employment possibilities. Number of kids exiting foster care who are prepared to take care of themselves is negligible. She’s really worried about what’s going to happen once parents are time-limited off of welfare assistance. The Action Plan goal is: “Promote healthy development of children and families and healthy aging of elders that emphasize home and community-based services.” I’ll be long retired before the end of that Plan period! For one second, she’s young.
***
Had trouble getting past security. Another meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. One thing clear so far: Agency staff know what needs to be done, but they don’t know their clients. Contradictory?
If you have 20,000 calls to a hotline, but respond to 1 out 20, you know what needs to be done—more calls have to be taken seriously—even if you know nothing about who is being abused or doing the abuse. Plus who needs to know the clients, when all trends are getting worse. Next year there’ll be even more calls. The gap between implementation and results is so big, you can’t worry about results (i.e., the impact on the client), until you do something to address implementation (i.e., answer those hotlines).
***
Interviewed Tomas Y today. He’s Rachel’s hired gun to inject new energy into Child Youth & Family Services. He said alot about walking the talk. Interview neatly summarizes the Agency’s problems and proposed solutions:
In brief, the Agency is too
´ fragmented and departmental
´ centralized and headquarters-oriented
´ specialized and narrowly focused
´ focused on needs and immediate crisis response
´ client-centered
´ rooted to desks and offices far from the real problems
´ constrained by categorical funding; and
´ hamstrung by the employee’s union.
Therefore, the Agency should
´ provide integrated services
´ be decentralized and located in the neighborhoods
´ be more generalist and multidisciplinary
´ focused on people’s strengths and longer term prevention and recovery strategies
´ be centered around the whole family
´ have mobile units that go to where the problems are
´ have much more flexible funding; and
´ be working with community-based organizations under performance-based contracts.
Tomas has no—repeat: no—examples of where integrated, decentralized, multidisciplinary, preventative, strengths-oriented, whole-family, mobile, flexibly funded place-based organizations have worked.
In short: All the problems, but none of the solutions, are found in the Agency, while the solutions, all outside the Agency, haven’t been identified by those responsible for finding them. Such is walking the talk.
In the last decade, the Agency has injected into the county economy nearly $2.5 billion in cash assistance alone (excluding staff salaries).
***
The Executive Committee loved my first draft of the roadmap. Convinced them that the Action Plan should have two parts—a roadmap for the future and then the Plan itself. That way, even if the Board of Trustees or the Agency’s critics don’t like specifics of the Plan—what’s this on page 57, line 3?—they still can sign off on the Plan as a whole because they bought into to the short roadmap earlier.
BTW, remember the security guard? He’s been fired. Caught being sucked off. Ray and I speculate about this.
***
We met with Doris, head of the Agency’s largest department, Welfare to Work. Is upset with Rachel re: What happens to kids of parent who are time-limited off welfare?
What are we doing worrying about a problem that hasn’t come up yet and may not even be a problem? We haven’t seen any evidence of this. The whole point of Welfare Reform is that those on the rolls can’t depend indefinitely on the Agency. They have to fall back on their “families” and “communities” at some point. The government safety net is gone. The last resort is the safe haven (no scare quotes!) of community organizations. We no longer provide cash, but match people to jobs. How are the job groups working? I ask. Some 35% of those on the rolls don’t even show up for them. Maybe they’re already employed, she hazards.
Or maybe she hopes I start a rumor to that effect.
***
Executive Committee had meeting to discuss Chapters 1 – 3 (includes “Goals, Strategies and Policies”). I’m again struck by how meetings rehearse one more time who the departments are, what are their problems, and why they can’t do what needs to be done. It’s Agency auto-suggestion enabling it to reconstitute itself daily. Result: There’s always twice as much ground for the meeting to cover.
***
I’m directed to reduce the Plan to a sentence that the Broad of Trustees can understand. One sentence. Okey-dokey:
The Action Plan’s eight goals promote, increase or improve the stability, health and well-being, security and learning, capacity building and access, independence and self-sufficiency, and, equally important, the participation and accountability of County families, neighborhoods, and individuals (including children, elders and persons with disabilities) in the planning, delivery and evaluation of services offered by the Agency and its providers.
***
Interviewed Betty, head of Adult & Aging. Department seems to have its act together, i.e., relies on community-based organizations (CBOs), contractors, encourages local capacity building, has new ideas about public/private partnerships. Feels its approach could be extended Agency-wide to the other departments. Two trends strike her: fastest growing segment of the population is the old-old, the over 85’s. Second, dramatic increase in services required for veterans, with younger veterans than in recent past.
***
Met again with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Went through the draft Plan, goal by goal, focusing on the new policies and strategies for implementing the eight goals. They blew me out of the water with comments. From top to bottom and with apologies to Gregory Corso’s “Bomb”:
***
Ray presented the revised proposals to the Executive Committee. Decided not to submit the full text of each, but to introduce ideas for buy-in. The next meeting we’d submit the full text, with their changes incorporated.
The proposals weren’t savaged as much as I thought by the department heads. This worries me.
Key proposal is the cross-departmental Family Intervention Team (FIT). Rachel felt that the FIT members would have to be new hires. We just don’t have enough staff. Doris dittoed the same for welfare-for-work. I’ll have to change the reference to “Job Group Leader.” I tell her I got the info from her people in the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Sometimes I wonder if my staff know anything, she said.
Oh, oh. She’s seen the proposal’s implications, i.e., more scrutiny of her staff and its outputs. DOES NOT LIKE IT. We need random assignment of referrals to the Team, she says abruptly. Tomas says Team should be working on referrals made in light of assessments, as proposed. I’d rather have the support of Doris than Tomas. Doris clams up. This is not good.
Too late, we see that our overheads backfired in one big way. Only after meeting did that become clear. Doris thinks the FIT will be her department’s responsibility, notwithstanding the Agency-wide scope. Clearly not so in the text, but not clear from the overheads. Bulleted by bullets.
***
By the way, the Executive Committee went word-by-word—WORD-BY-WORD—through Chapter 3’s goals, strategies and policies. Doris had a field day. “Authoritative”? Please, let’s stick with simple English! Improved communications? 20 years ago we said we would improve communications, and haven’t done it yet. Rachel beams, she’s retiring.
***
Ray has given up on the benchmarks and indicators of Plan performance. First, he had them in Chapter 3, where the new policies and strategies are discussed. The Executive Committee didn’t like them there, and frankly they broke the flow of the text. Then Ray put them away in an appendix. Then he tried inserting them in the Chapter 4’s Management Plan and that didn’t fit either. So a section on specific indicators has been dropped altogether.
***
Had final meeting with David today. He’s back and jet-lagged. We go through the draft chapters, hitting the new recommendations concerning policies, strategies and the innovation units. He again pushes his idea about the Agency facilitating creation and operation of different networks of providers that vary in terms of subject area, e.g., one network for providers working on substance abuse, another for mental health, and so on.
Doris has been maneuvering behind the scenes. David tells us she saw him in the morning and said, Yes, she supports FIT, but she can’t possibly agree to fund it until her own staffing problems are solved. David sees this as reasonable. Ray doesn’t say much. I say it’s blackmail. I tell David she’s holding ransom a fifteen-person unit by demanding that her 60+ vacancies be filled first. The punishment she’s exacting isn’t proportional to our “crime.” David equivocates, but says he supports the key proposals and “will make them happen.”
I leave, feeling irrationally hopeful that David’s meeting tomorrow with the Executive Committee on the four chapters will end the right way. As for my involvement, it stops here.
***
Called Ray after I got back from my conference. How did the Executive Committee meeting go?
Terrible, he says. Worse meeting he’s ever had. In fact, told Amanda he was back on the job market. What happened?! Seems Doris had made a side deal with the other department heads that would effectively nudge Ray out of monitoring implementation of the Action Plan, leaving it to the separate departments.
“Causal power means the power to bring about some sort of change at the level of empirical events. The Critical Realist (CR) philosophy of science argues that “there are enduring structures and generative mechanisms underlying and producing observable phenomena and events” (Bhaskar 2011: 2). According to CR, causal mechanisms are the “relatively enduring structures of nature and their characteristic ways of acting” that scientific activity tries to identify and characterize. These mechanisms may or may not be empirically observable. Mechanisms possess causal powers, “which, when triggered or released, act as generative mechanisms, with natural necessity and universality (within their range) so as to codetermine the manifest phenomena of the world, which occur for the most part in open systems: that is, where constant conjunctions do not pertain” (Bhaskar 2009a: 17).
“This ‘codetermination’ may take the form of generating or preventing, enabling or constraining, events, or effects (Hartwig 2007). A law in CR is not a constant conjunction of events but the characteristic pattern of activity, or tendency, of a mechanism (Steinmetz 1998). CR also argues that that mechanisms and their powers shape the course of empirical events within open systems. . .Single causal mechanisms do not act in isolation or in universal conjunctions in producing empirical effects. Causal laws should not be “regarded as empirical regularities” but instead as the expressions of the “tendencies of things” (Bhaskar 2009b: 199; 1997: 10).
“In open systems, mechanisms combine to produce actual events conjuncturally, that is to say, in concert with other mechanisms (Steinmetz 1998). The events, processes, cultural phenomena, etc., that are studied by sociologists are always “multiply determined” and always within causal “conjunctures” (Bhaskar 2009b: 196). While there are, of course, other definitions of causal mechanisms, and while some readers find the metaphor of “mechanism” rebarbative, its use in CR is distinctly non-mechanical (Gorski 2009).”
I take this to mean that the enduring contribution of the social sciences to really-existing policy analysis and public management is the two-notion of the sample and the intervening variables.
The article demonstrates how climate and capitalism crises need to be analyzed together, if the interconnected emotions of anxiety and burnout are to be addressed effectively..
I agree. My problem is I worry how readers often conflate advocacy and analysis.
First, I feel the author is right in saying: “these insights could be deepened by placing them in the context of the care crisis of neoliberal capitalism”; “such reforms could help create the preconditions for deeper post-capitalist transformation”; and “a ‘polycrisis’ lens might usefully decenter the climate crisis while informing a broader analytic framework and political program”.
But then the author asserts that “this must be a form of polycrisis analysis deeply influenced by Feminist and ecological Marxism”. Also, some of those could-reforms “must prioritize public transit over private cars, circular economies, and extended producer responsibility to reduce extraction as far as possible”. Indeed and also specifically [my bolding below]:
To a large extent this requires the decommodification of care, involving ‘universal guarantees in place that all people will be entitled to care,’ along with expanding publicly funded childcare, physical and mental healthcare, elderly care, and care for those with disabilities (ibid: 195–196). It also requires revitalizing community infrastructures – like libraries, community centers, parks, and public spaces – that have decayed under decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity (particularly in poor communities) (Rose 2020). More broadly, ending the care crisis requires social programs that dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the emotionally distressing dynamics of debt and unemployment by improving economic security for all.
I have no problem with these requirements! My problem is the paradox: Conditions are sufficiently uncertain that we cannot say the proposed reforms would actually work, but we are certain enough to say that these proposed reforms entail must-requirements with varying degrees of specificity.
Now there is nothing inherently “illogical” about taking that latter position. In fact, it’s what we expect from policy advocacy. This is what policy advocates do; theirs is not to analyze the uncertainties and certainties case-by-case, which I would do as a practicing policy analyst.
Policy analysts of course make recommendations and that is an advocacy of sorts. But they do so in the face of that case-specific determination of what is “sufficiently certain” and “certain enough.” For advocates, the determination is a settled matter with respect to their cases.
Another growing concern about the US Supreme Court is its expanding “shadow docket.” “Emergency applications,” writes the New York Times‘s Adam Kushner,
require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.
What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:
None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.
The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:
The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.
Some law professors have built a new database tracking the rise of the emergency docket. The first half of 2025 represented a record high, with 15 emergency applications accepted as of June 18. The next highest peak was 11, from the final year of the previous Trump administration.
Let’s extend that analogy, “You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way”.
II
Imagine if you will the shadow docket consists of the real-time decisions of the justices (if only aspirationally) as reliability professionals. They see themselves managing the federal justice infrastructure not only during its routine operations but also during turbulent periods of just-in-time or just-for-now.
One research finding takes on considerable prominence in this thought experiment, namely: Control rooms managing just-for-now–“just keep that generator on line for now!”–do so outside standard operating procedures and routines.
Here, the emergency is such that real-time reliability of the electric grid requires keeping that generator on line, even though it was scheduled for mandatory maintenance and repair at that time. Duch exceptions, while allowed, in no way are meant to undermine the official practice and procedure of routine repair and maintenance.
So too for an aspirational Supreme Court-as-control room. Our early Federalists also worried about systemwide emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times (think of Lincoln during the Civil War). But these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter (Fatovic 2009). Or in the case of the quoted shadow docket, the legal determination comes later after lower court deliberations.
III
The real problem, of course, lies in Alito’s analogy. Yes, there are doctors in the emergency room, but there’s little else that is empirical. The justices are not emergency management teams in emergencies, and thereafter a team of physicians the rest of the time. By and large, career physicians and career emergency staff are different professions requiring different skills and orientations, at least if you take the management literatures seriously. To think the longer-care physician translates easily into the emergency ward is like thinking you can make fish from fish soup.
Source: C. Fatovic, (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Let me state my conclusion right here: In the policy and management world with which I am familiar and from which I generalize, human agency is the only global counternarrative I have come across.
Because human agency is constrained differently at different times in different places under different conditions, it has a much more important function than one of being universalized like the human rights narrative.
The differences in context and function are obvious the second anyone defines human agency. Here is my definition (not an uncommon one): “an individual’s capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action“. Mine accents the reflexivity; your definition on the other hand might stress self-determination, imposition of the one’s will on the environment, or some such. That said, I suspect similar or parallel points, to which we now turn, would be observed in applications of your definition(s) as well.
II
So that we are on the same page, here are two examples of human agency that illustrate how I am defining human agency, one from a case study of migration and the other from case studies of child labor:
Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.
Schapendonk, J. (2021). “Counter moves. Destabilizing the grand narrative of onward migration and secondary movements in Europe.” International Migration: 1 – 14 DOI:10.1111/imig.12923
First, as the data [from three countries] have demonstrated, labor, and the need for children to work, is the predominant lens through which young people and the adults that surround them conceptualize children’s engagement with gangs and organized crime. This was in contrast to the other standpoints that permeate discourse. Labeling the children as gang members is a poor reflection of their drivers of involvement in crime and is likely to stigmatize children engaged in a plight to ensure their own survival. Alternatively, the young people were not child soldiers nor were they victims or perpetrators of trafficking or slavery. A victim lens is also problematic in this context. The relationship between young people and organized crime is complex and multifaceted. Young people are victims of acute marginalization, poverty and violence but they do have some agency over their decision making. The data from all studies illustrated how gangs offer young people ways to earn an income but they also provide social mobility, ‘social protection’ (Atkinson- Sheppard, 2017) and ‘street capital.’ In some instances, criminal groups offer young people ways to earn ‘quick and easy money.’ Thus, the young people are not devoid of agency, but their decision making should be considered within the context of restricted and bounded lives.
Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2022). “A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re‐Conceptualizing young people’s involvement in organized crime.” Critical Criminologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09674-5
III
With those specific examples in mind, let’s first turn to four positions often taken with respect to “human agency.”
There are those who think human agency is among core precepts around which to design large-scale systems involving humans, individually or collectively. Others are more apt to focus on the individual or micro-level, where here the agent acts. Whether at the macro- or micro-levels, contestation abounds over the term, human agency, if only because of different optics on the micro from psychology, phenomenology, law, microeconomics, and more.
There are, however, two other levels and units of analysis, which are the ones I want to focus on with respect to human agency as the global counternarrative.
Far less mentioned than the micro and the macro are really-existing better practices for realizing human agency–in your or my definitions–that have evolved over widely different cases. Then there are the cases where macro-precepts are modified over widely different contingency scenarios that also vary locally. In both of cases, human agency is better understood as an insistent counternarrative for moving away from the current dominant micro and macro-level narratives of human action
IV
In this view, overarching claims that human agency, in theory or as a right, govern all cases is a non-starter for actually-existing patterns and contingency scenarios in policy and management.
One thinks of rush to judgment in macro-labeling election results and protest numbers as “populist” as long as the behavior fits into schema like alt-right, left, authoritarian, or nationalist populism. From the perspective presented here, this is a rush to judgment when the criteria for this first-cut differentiation in populism pre-exist the analysis offered. How so?
In the cases of pattern recognition or local contingency scenarios, however, the features and evaluative criteria instead emerge from the political complexities of elections, protests and agency dominating the cases at hand. Human agency as a counternarrative emerges from the cases; it is not an a priori position from which to assert macro principles or micro experience.
V
More, human agency in this way becomes sufficiently granular to be actionable when applied and modified to the next case at hand. Though there are no guarantees, this is an incredibly important point of policy and management relevance.
The limitation of staying at the macro and/or micro positions, e.g., “human rights apply uniformly to every single individual on this planet,” is that these positions on their own degranularize the conditions for taking action between whole system and single person. Think here of those who want to believe that the rest of us are stirred to action by their claims that the climate emergency creates atrocities or extractive capitalism is genocide, as if perpetrator intentionality and the very real distinctions between perpetrators and victims no longer matter for taking action case by case.
When it comes to policy and management, what is human agency if it is only decontextualized?
Montesinos Coleman, L; H. M. Martínez; & L. Wise (2025): “Reparation for Extractivist Genocide: harm, responsibility and implications for a just transition.” The International Journal of Human Rights (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2025.2519583)
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis
6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual
9. What “calling for increased granularity” means
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
12.The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters
13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
1. Key method questions in complex policy and management
I
A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement there.
That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed, the author stated, was a country-wide land reform.
Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!
This was my introduction to “solutions” in search of problems they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”
II
Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers you asking:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?
2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management
I
Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.
In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions that are already orthogonal, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.
Everyone triangulates, ranging from cross-checking of sources to formal use of varied methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of divergent stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are common examples.
Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can actually do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.
II
Return now to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.
Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.
To triangulate asks what, if anything, has persisted or survived in the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that the issue has undergone over time up to the point of analysis. Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple and widely diverse metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.
3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers
The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
I bolded the preceding because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.
The methodological problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is any misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.
II
Even here, we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition: Just because a tree is shady does not mean each leaf provides shade. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.
The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.
Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often would have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.
III
A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.
The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:
Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishes this stuff!”
But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and, most importantly, counter-examples.
4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management
Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:
Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.
Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.
The goal should remain zero.
It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
Upshot: If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?
5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis
Consider the following example (my bolding):
Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies canpotentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war couldbe pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict couldbe over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict couldbe unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization couldbe over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potentialcould involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .
States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”
The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to “must” would mean that the article (and like ones) actually began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those could-events and might-be’s.
6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”
I just read an article [1] that demonstrated how the climate and capitalism crises need to be analyzed together in order to better address how emotions such as anxiety and burnout with respect to each crisis are highly interconnected.
I agree. My problem is I worry how readers might conflate advocacy and analysis.
First, I agree with the author that so much could help improve the situation: “these insights could be deepened by placing them in the context of the care crisis of neoliberal capitalism”; “such reforms could help create the preconditions for deeper post-capitalist transformation”; and “a ‘polycrisis’ lens might usefully decenter the climate crisis while informing a broader analytic framework and political program”.
But then the author asserts that “this must be a form of polycrisis analysis deeply influenced by Feminist and ecological Marxism”. Also, some of those could-reforms “must prioritize public transit over private cars, circular economies, and extended producer responsibility to reduce extraction as far as possible”. Indeed and also specifically [my bolding below]:
To a large extent this requires the decommodification of care, involving ‘universal guarantees in place that all people will be entitled to care,’ along with expanding publicly funded childcare, physical and mental healthcare, elderly care, and care for those with disabilities (ibid: 195–196). It also requires revitalizing community infrastructures – like libraries, community centers, parks, and public spaces – that have decayed under decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity (particularly in poor communities) (Rose 2020). More broadly, ending the care crisis requires social programs that dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the emotionally distressing dynamics of debt and unemployment by improving economic security for all.
I have no problem with these requirements! My problem is the paradox: Conditions are sufficiently uncertain that we cannot say the proposed reforms would actually work, but we are certain enough to say that these proposed reforms entail must-requirements of varying degrees of specificity.
Now there is nothing “illogical” about taking that latter position. Indeed, it’s what we expect from policy advocacy. This is what policy advocates do; theirs is not to analyze the uncertainties and certainties case-by-case, which I would do as a practicing policy analyst. Policy analysts of course make recommendations and that is an advocacy of sorts. But they do so in the face of that case-specific determination of what is “sufficiently certain” and “certain enough.” For advocates, the determination is a settled method over the range of cases.
7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothing
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and. . .
8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual
I
For me, the crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?
What are at work are the two blades of a scissors.
One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations. Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.
II
For example, consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by then-that). But if cities also view their respective building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among developers and builders.
That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be obvious.
9. What “calling for increased granularity” means
I
When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction altogether. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for an actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind abstraction from the get-go.
What then does “actionable granularity” mean?
II
I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.
Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.
III
One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.
Where so, then there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.
From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or even “‘a case’ in its own right.”
I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.
10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management
Assume you come across the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:
It’s fairly easy to question the above. Do we really believe, for example, that well-established evidence and high certainty are as tightly coupled and correlated? In fact, each dimension can be problematize in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.
But the methodological issue at stake here is to compare like to like.
That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the famous Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:
This latter world has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies eventually lapsing, it is hypothesized, into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between decisionmaking by majority-rule and compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.
In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more the better by way of finding something more tractable to policy or management.
11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives
The paragraph I’ve just read is immediately bookended by two quotes:
Just before: “Therefore, rather than being schools of democracy, ACs [associative councils] may be spaces where associative and political elites interact and, therefore, just reproduce existing political inequities (Navarro, 2000). Furthermore, these institutions may have limited impact in growing and diversifying the body of citizens making contributions to public debate (Fraser, 1990).”
Just after: “The professionalised model results from a complex combination of inequalities in associationism and a specific type of participation labour. Analysing the qualitative interviews, regulations and documents was fundamental to understanding the underlying logic of selecting professionals as the main components.”
Now try to guess the gist of the paragraph in between. More of the same? Well, no. Six paragraphs from the article’s end emerges an “and-yet” that had been there from the beginning:
Nevertheless, an alternative interpretation of professionalisation should be considered. The fact that ACs perform so poorly in inclusiveness does not mean that they are not valuable for other purposes, such as voicing a plurality of interests in policymaking (Cohen, 2009). In this respect, participants can act as representatives of associations that, in many cases, promote the needs of oppressed and exploited groups (De Graaf et al., 2015; Wampler, 2007). Suffice it to say, for example, that labour unions or migrants’ associations frequently send lawyers or social workers to ACs to defend their needs and positions. Problems with inclusion should not take away from other purposes, that is, struggles to introduce critical issues and redistribution demands to the state agenda. Other studies have already shown that groups make strategic decisions to achieve better negotiation outcomes in the context of technical debates (Grillos, 2022). Thus, the choice of selecting professionals can be a strategy to improve the capacity of pressure in institutional spaces dominated by experts. (my bold; accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251319065)
Methodological upshot: What the counterfactual is to economic analysis, the and-yet counternarratives are to policy analysis.
12. The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters
The large-scale infrastructure is never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and so many more, each claiming a special purchase that demands our attention. A less banal observation is the cross-cutting methodological default line once each discipline’s poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up further analysis to the global, while others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.
For example, we’re told that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that “policy:” ratcheting up or digging down. So often today the road taken is the former:
In our attempt to understand contemporary archival politics, it would seem much more beneficial to pay attention to the concrete political issues in which community digital archives are involved, such as, for example, armed conflict and civil unrest (e.g. The Mosireen Collective 2024; Syrian Archive 2024; Ukraine War Archive 2024), gender queerness (e.g. Australian Queer Archives 2024; Digitial Transgender Archive 2024; Queer Digital History Project 2024), forced migration (e.g. The Amplification Project 2024; Archivio Memorie Migranti 2024; Living Refugee Archive 2024), post-colonialism (e.g. Talking Objects Lab 2024), rights of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Archivo Digital Indigena 2024; Digital Sami Archives 2024; Mukurtu 2024), racial discrimination (e.g. The Black Archives 2024; Black Digital Archiving 2024), or feminism (e.g. Féminicides (2024); Feminist Archive North 2024, Rise Up 2024).
You many wonder at the methodological finesse taking place in this passage, namely: equating the concrete with the abstract. This transmutation is made easier because it is not really-existing archival practices that the author describes, but rather “the politics of digital archival practice.” Rather than being case-specific, these politics face outward and upward. They’re “political agendas”. Such is why the author can write he is “attending to the politics of digital archives at the level of concrete archival practices,” while in no way differentiating the concrete practices, processes and interactions of each of the bolded categories and how they work themselves out relationally, case by case and over time.
Lesson: Such say you’re talking about politics and you’re taken to be more practical than practical!
I however come from profession, policy analysis, that digs down rather than ratchets up analysis, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. The “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important in terms of policy relevance for them alone to determine how to move the analysis forward. To equate policy with politics is to miss practices, processes and interactions that matter.
In the infrastructure case of digital archives, I suspend judgment over the author’s conclusion precisely because no concrete practices of digital archiving are detailed over a range of different cases. He may well have them at hand and to be clear, I am happy to search out practices that float something in and through passages such as:
Similarly, the temporality of community-based digital archival enterprises seems neither ephemeral nor unfathomable. Rather, it plays a crucial role in rearticulating the historical subjectivities of various Queer, Indigenous, post-colonial, and other marginalized communities. And indeed, such enterprises and the rise of participatory and collaborative archiving can surely also be seen as examples of ‘collectivization’ and ‘socialization’ or even of ‘the dialectics between the individual and the society’–the very conditions of politics and historicity that Étienne Balibar (2024) sees ‘the digital’ as precluding.
13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.
What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer, Arnold Schoenberg.)
Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.
While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.
In one sense, being rational lies in questioning and answering to the extent one is calling for an account from the other and able to explain why s/he is doing so by way of responding to the other. As such, answerability is core to this rationality, if only in the sense that to answer a question requires knowing first what would qualify as an answer.
In case it needs saying, such interchanges are conventionalized and need not be vocal or written:
Seldom a simple gesture because of the depth of information it carries and the amount of work it does, the handshake needs to be read as a scripted, sequentially-structured ritual that transforms the proffering of a hand into a request for access and the hand’s reception into the granting of the request. (accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/past/article/267/1/48/7716082)
Convention also includes: “Whose asking?” shot back philosopher, Sidney Morgenbesser, when pressed to prove the existence of his questioner.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 