I keep being told infrastructures are complex technologies, even though they’re manifestly socio-technical and not just because the technologies have to be managed (i.e., this is more than “risk is socially constructed”).

We’re to believe regular operations are routine operations, but if routine means invariant, there is nothing invariant about normal infrastructure operations.

System reliability is probabilistic in the view of engineers, even though control room operators act deterministically, i.e., there’s a point at which system reliability cannot be traded off against other factors or else people would die.

I was assured that for reasons of tractability, the modeling of infrastructure operations has two stages, normal and failed. In actual practice, the temporary disruption of systemwide services–hardly ever modeled, let alone sufficiently–identifies highly relevant conditions for returning to normal operations or tipping into failure.

Engineers said the probability of infrastructure failure during post-disaster recovery of assets and operations was higher than the probability of failure during normal operations. Think: re-energizing line by line during a table-top Black Start exercise. Actually, nonmeasurable uncertainties–nothing like probabilities–are faced by operators post-disaster (the Black Start exercises for electric transmission infrastructure assume no asset destruction, as improbable as that is).

Consider the frequent “restore.” What’s it with respect to: interrupted services restored back to normal? Or services to be initially restored after major system failure? Or key equipment or facilities restored after a non-routine outage as part of normal maintenance and repair activities? Restore is one of the most ambiguous terms in infrastructure studies.

You are on one of the upper floors of a huge skyscraper, looking out on the morning. That is Reality I: You are the observing subject looking out at reality. After a point, you realize that dot in the distance is actually a plane headed toward you, this morning in the World Trade Center. That is Reality II: You become the object of reality, in that grip of the real, and no longer just observer.

There is, however, Reality III. This is of the air traffic controllers during 9/11. Neither the observer of the first reality nor the object of second, the professionals achieved the unprecedented without incident that day. They were instructed to land all commercial and general aviation aircraft in the United States—some 4,500 aircraft—and did so.

Without overdrawing the point, so too do we demand that professionals land those water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, and many more critical services every day without major incident.

Introduction

How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything else being uncertain? You know more, of course, after the fact when consequences are clearer in hindsight. But how do you know in real time and in these fogs of struggle and strife that this or that action on your part is a mistake to be avoided, right now and here?

It is highly relevant for the purposes of policy and management to insist that real-time error avoidance is possible even under particular (but not all) conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties.

Research Findings

I

Paul Schulman and I have been undertaking research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but new errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so for some cases.

Based on interviews with infrastructure control room operators and emergency managers, real-time surprises are widespread in flooding, wildfire, road and other transportation disruptions, levee breaches, and transmission failures in electricity and water.

But, as many also told us, there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now interventions. What needs to be done is at times evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals, when not so to those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For these experienced front-line staff and in these circumstances, not doing what needs to be done constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are, in other words, opportunities that cannot be missed.

II

What are those circumstances and conditions of urgency, clarity and logic?

Ones identified by our interviewees focus on an infrastructure’s key interconnectivities with infrastructures they depended upon and which depended upon them. More specifically, this focus and concern centers around shifts in the interconnectivity involving their respective systemwide control variables, like frequency and voltage for electricity transmission, main-pipe pressures for large-scale water supply or natural gas systems, and network bandwidth in telecommunications.

During normal operations, these control variables are already interconnected. What defines system disruption and failure is when the interconnectivities shift in unignorable ways. Fire-fighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the fire- fighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for ongoing marine transport and re-opening a major port along the way is important to both infrastructures.

When these systems as systems are disrupted, or fail outright, restoring or recovering what had already been interconnected system control variables require urgent and often improvisatory behavior by all manner of infrastructure operators from the control rooms on down to field staff. These improvisations may be last-second one-offs saving the day, like seen in battle. From our perspective, these are better understood as part and parcel of the wide range of workarounds that line operators and field staff undertake–beginning in normal operations, routine maintenance and non-routine repair–to ensure safe and reliable operations at the system level.

III

In particular, we found:

While these three errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are of primary concern and are to be avoided because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses.

Three Important Policy and Management Implications

I. Error avoidance is not risk management

Let’s start with a US example. It would be an error not to put into the mandated county/city hazard mitigation plan a proposal to replace a majorly vulnerable culvert with a new bridge, should the former be washed away in new flooding and when federal funds would be available for bridge replacement under those conditions. Put this way, there is a role for forward planning in anticipating and taking advantage of these already existing funding and construction opportunities.

Or from the other direction, rural town that did not anticipate accelerated gentrification after a major wildfire in its hazard mitigation plan will have to deal with the consequences of not having prepared for this gentrification (e.g. newly added residential water and wastewater demands and transportation requirements).

In both cases and from this perspective, the mandated hazard mitigation plan is a problem definition, parts of which are latent until activated during immediate emergency response, initial service restoration or longer-term recovery. Collapsing either example under the category of “risk management” is to miss the fact that these errors (or, if prefer, missed opportunities) are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as yes or no. Did you avoid or did you not?

II. An example of how distinguishing between error avoidance and risk management is also important for locality residents affected by the disaster

Friends are telling us wonderful things about their recent move to a rural area in the Pacific Northwest. They were also surprised, given all the rain, about the high fire hazard risk mapped for their area and nearby environs. As in California, such maps created political and insurance company push-back. And there are methodological issues in mapping fuel loads in the absence of not knowing point-of-ignition information in advance.

So what to do? In their case, they talked about how they and neighbors agree in advance to help each other should a wildfire threaten (ignited, say, by vehicle sparks along the roadside). If one neighbor was threatened, all would move to that site to help out.

Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting: What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards but rather avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever the associated risks.

These errors include the aforementioned need for robust communications in this case among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. In addition, it is hoped that here too they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.

To repeat, it is an error to have missed really-existing opportunities for more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms. But why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.

III. The special institutional niche for infrastructures in error-avoiding disaster management

Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own. We have seen this too. What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.

In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, let alone as the disaster unfolds. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.

Self-organizing groups, however, are also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in middle to high-income countries. Error-avoiding behavior in the form of increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff, emergency managers and some local communities.

I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect. A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established.

Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of trying to avoid all manner of errors in restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads?

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Acknowledgement. My thanks to Paul Schulman for working through and crafting a number of these points. All errors–!–remain mine.

Reference. For an initial discussion of topics in this blog entry and its source material, see: 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 (available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106308)

I

Friends are telling us wonderful things about their recent move to a rural area in the Pacific Northwest. They were also surprised, given all the rain, about the high fire hazard risk mapped for their area and nearby environs. As in California, such maps created political and insurance company push-back. And there are methodological issues in mapping fuel loads in the absence of not knowing point-of-ignition information in advance.

So what to do? In their case, they talked about how they and neighbors agree in advance to help each other should a wildfire threaten (ignited, say, by vehicle sparks along the roadside). If one neighbor was threatened, all would move to that site to help out.

Such self-organizing happens all over the world and there is nothing extraordinary in this example, except one thing that deserves highlighting.

What is going on here (and I suspect many other examples) is not managing the risks associated with fire hazards so much as avoiding known errors when faced with fire hazards, whatever their risks. More formally, risks are to be managed more or less effectively in an emergency; errors in contrast are to be avoided—not more or less, but categorically yes or no. 

II

And what errors are these? They include the need for robust communications among the neighbors and the need to have firefighting tools and associated equipment distributed and accessible beforehand. This may or may not be in our friends’ case. In addition, it is hoped that they and other residents use their county’s hazard mitigation plan to seek federal and state support for improving their lifeline infrastructures (water, electricity, roads and telecoms), should fires and other disasters actually undermine them in the future.

Ensuring more robust communications, more dispersed equipment and tools, and greater use of existing planning and funding mechanisms are opportunities that must not be missed, if they already exist. In fact, it is an error not to take advantage of them.

And why is that distinction important? It implies that there should dedicated support and staffing to assist such locality-based error avoidance, in addition to and separate from risk management efforts, not least of which being those fire hazard maps.

I

We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!”, we forget reality is often the other way round: We manage complex critical infrastructures as reliably as we do because their systemwide failure is always the dreaded option to be prevented.

This means it’s more than passing odd that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe the rest of us are not trying hard enough to manage what must be managed better. It’s thus not surprising that those who dissent justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed–even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves.

Consider one such example:

We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency

Such dissent has the merit of at least recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, regardless. Nor is the quoted passage a lone dissent. Others too insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and impoverished minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).

II

So what?

“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.

How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if there were not alternatives?

Culled below from my blog entries on pastoralists and pastoralism are six sets of proposals most relevant, I believe, for the IYRP 2026 policy and management agenda.

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Recasting (inter)national pastoralist policies

Start with the conventional point of departure: Pastoralists are being displaced from their usual herding places by, e.g., land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other factors.

One major question then becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government, among others, to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?

The answer? With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies exist

Where, for example, are the policy interventions for improving and capitalizing on re-entry of remittance-sending members back into pastoralism if and when they return home? Where are the national policies to compensate farmers for not encroaching further on pastoralist lands, e.g., by increasing investments on the agricultural land they already have? Where are the national (and international) policies that recognize keeping the ecological footprint of pastoralist systems is far less expensive than that of urban and peri-urban infrastructures?

Or for that matter and more proactively:

1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO₂ emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.

2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.

3. Stay with those resident migrants sending back remittances. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities heavily resident with migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). Think of this as a form of “reversed green extractivism,” in this case on behalf of dryland households by EU member states for EU-migrant communities.

In the same spirit, let me end with a question: Have you come across anything like Export Credit Agencies (import-export agencies in the OECD, US, or elsewhere) that provide buyer credits to ASAL nations (like in East Africa and the Horn) so that ASAL development banks or parastatals there (e.g., their livestock commissions) can buy catastrophe bonds from those Western country issuers to insure against ASAL drought or livestock failures?

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Pastoralism as a worldwide infrastructure

While vastly different technologically, the critical infrastructures with which I am familiar–water, energy, telecoms, transportation, hazardous liquids–share the same operational logic: The system’s real time operators seek to increase process variance (in terms of diverse options, resources, strategies) in the face of high input variance (including variability in factors of production and climate) to achieve low and stable output variance (electricity, water and telecoms provided safely and continuously).

I submit pastoralist systems are, in respect to this logic, infrastructural; and as pastoralists and their systems are found worldwide, so too is pastoralism a global infrastructure. To be sure, not all pastoralist systems share this logic; nor are all pastoralists real-time reliability professionals; nor do all pastoralist systems reduce to this logic, only.

If we focus on the set of pastoralist systems that share the logic, the implications for rethinking pastoralist development are, I believe, major. To pick four of the differences identified in earlier blogs:

1. The infrastructure perspective suggests that instead of talking about environmental risks associated with pastoralism (e.g., the climate risks of land degradation and methane production), we should be comparing the environmental footprints produced by the respective global infrastructures (e.g., roads globally, electricity globally, dams globally. . .).

Because pastoralisms rely on these other infrastructures, the respective footprints overlap. But the physical damage done to the environment by roads, dams, and power plants are well documented and demonstrably extend well far beyond pastoralist usage.

2. No large critical infrastructures can run 24/7/365 at 100% capacity and be reliable, and pastoralist systems are no different. This means comparing pastoralist livestock systems to a benchmark of “optimized” grassland ranching or intensive dairy production is ludicrous, if only because the latter are more likely headed to disaster anyway.

3. Restocking schemes are routinely criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands. Yet the infrastructure for government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., holding grain, wool or oil in order to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are routinely recommended by other experts, decade after decade, be the countries low-resource or not.

4. When was the last time you heard pastoralist livestock exports from the world’s arid and semi-arid regions being praised for this: Reducing the global budget for virtual water trading from what it could have been. And yet, that is exactly what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does.

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Authoritative websites for real-time decisionmaking with respect to pastoralist and herder development

I propose there be an authoritative websites established for real-time decisionmaking concerning livestock herders and their evolving systems worldwide.

There are many reasons such websites is needed. For me, the most underacknowledged is this: Just as there are ‘VPN activists,’ people who create and distribute VPNs (virtual private networks) to enable circumvention of Internet censorship, so too is there is need for authoritative websites to circumvent and correct for those persistently distorted narratives and approaches to pastoralist development.

More generally, an authoritative website provides sought-after, up-to-date and linked knowledge so quickly and reliably that it is continuously browsed by increasing numbers of users who click on the website early and often in their search for on-point information, in this case about pastoralists:
• These websites do not pretend to provide final or definitive information, but rather seek to assure and ensure the quality of the topical information continually up-dated.
• The website serves as a clearinghouse that encourages cross-checking and tailoring of information on, e.g., pastoral development, while acting also as a springboard for future information search and exchange. It is popular because it shortens the number of steps to search for salient information.
• Well-known U.S. example: Going online to http://www.mayoclinic.org after an initial cancer diagnosis.

In our illustrative scenario, the policy professional starts her analysis on pastoralist development by searching–let’s give it a name–http://www.RealTime_Pastoralism.org:
• S/he goes to this website on the well-established better practice that information becomes increasingly policy or management relevant when the people gathering the information are the ones actually using that information.
• That is, the authoritative website is constructed and maintained as a platform to make real-time searching and browsing easier for searchers, not least of whom are project and program managers.
• It is authoritative because: (1) it is online, that is, can be kept up-to-date in ways other media can’t; and (2) it is digital, that is, can be curated for salient multimedia, including but not limited to: video, podcasts, blogs, reports, articles, chatrooms, graphics-rich tutorials, advice line (“ask the professionals”), and its own YouTube channel.

Such websites may already exist on a regional, cooperative, or site/livestock specific basis, though we must wonder to what extent they are linked and curated together (i.e., analogous to meta-analyses of published research findings).

Who funds, provides content, and curates the proposed authoritative websites is, of course, the question, e.g., a consortium of researchers, centers, journals and foundations. Language will of course be an obstacle, insurmountable in some cases (that’s why it is not a single website). But the broader point I’m making here remains the same:

ARGUABLY, THE MOST “PRO-PASTORALIST POLICY” OF A GOVERNMENT OR NGO IS HAVING ITS DECISONMAKERS SEARCH ONLINE FOR BETTER INFORMATION IN THEIR REAL-TIME PROBLEM-SOLVING WITH RESPECT TO PASTORALIST REAL-TIME ISSUES.

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Pastoralist conflicts

Complex environments require complex means of adaptation. If inputs are highly variable, so too must be the processes and options to transform this input variability into outputs and outcomes with low and stable variance, in our case, sustained herder livelihoods (or off-take, or herd size, or composition. . .).

One major implication is that “land-use conflict” has to be differentiated from the get-go. By way of example, references to pastoralist raids, skirmishes and flare-ups that do not identify “with-respect-to” what inputs, processes or outputs are bound to be very misleading.

For example, consider a livestock raid of one pastoralist group on another. It’s part of the input variability of the latter group but it also part of the process options of the former (i.e., when periodic raids are treated as one means over the longer term to respond to unpredictable input shocks, like abrupt herd die-offs).

It matters for pastoralist policy just what are the process options of the pastoralist group being raided. Do the response options include that of a counter-raid, or to send more household members away from the conflict area, or to form alliances with other threatened groups, or to seek a political accommodation, or to undertake something altogether different or unexpected? For the purposes of policy and management, a pastoralist livestock raid is always more than a livestock raid.

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Thinking infrastructurally about rangeland carrying capacity

The key problem with the notion of “rangeland carrying capacity” is the assumption that it’s about livestock. That notion invites you to conjure up livestock shoulder-to-shoulder on a parcel of land and then ask you: How could this not be a physical limit on the number of livestock per unit of land? You can’t pack anymore on it and that has to be a capacity constraint. Right?

Wrong. Livestock numbers on a piece of land are not a system. The number of its pipes, rods and valves are not an operating nuclear power plant. Yes, livestock systems that provide continuous and important services (like meat, milk, wool. . .) have limits. But these limits are set by managing physical constraints, be it LSU/ha or not. More, this management combines with managing other constraints like access to markets, remittances for household members abroad, nearby land encroachment, and much else.

Can herders make management mistakes? Of course. That is why pastoralists-to-pastoralists learning is so important.

From this perspective, it’s not “rangeland carrying capacity” we should be talking about, but “rangeland management capacity”. Or better yet, “rangeland management capacities,” as there is not just one major type of pastoralism, but many different pastoralist systems of production and provision of livestock-related services.

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Against environmental livestock-tarring

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.”

Far too much time has been spent on defending pastoralism against environmental critiques, when those critiques are little more than livestock-tarring. Which raises the bigger policy question: What are the benefits of doing so?

That is, who benefits when the traditional understanding of dryland herds as assets is reconfigured into herds as global environmental liabilities? One consequence of this reconfiguration is to exclude pastoralists from being considered part of the near-global asset boom in rising prices of stock, bonds and real-estate. Livestock tarring is, I suggest, a way to distract the rest of us from recognizing that herd owners/managers were and continue to be entrapped in asset bubbles, and by thee way on a very global scale.

[Riley and Brenner] link these new electoral dynamics to the new political-capitalist regime, itself a kind of morbid adaptation to the ‘long downturn’: the system-wide, global slow- down that set in in the early 1970s, catalysed by declining profitability in manufacturing as intensifying international competition mired successive national industries in chronic crises of overcapacity and weak aggregate demand from which they are yet to escape. Eroding wages to subsidize profits only exacerbated shortfalls in consumer spending, while state interventions—from Keynesian stimulus to accommodating monetary policy and the massive expansion of public and private debt—stabilized the system but at the cost of entrenching its structural weaknesses, preventing a replenishing shake-out of unproductive capital. . . .

In response, Benanav argued that Brenner’s theory of overcapacity is in fact dynamic rather than static. The ‘zero-sum game’ doesn’t imply a ‘fixed amount of demand’, but a fiercely competitive world system in which the ongoing slowdown in average rates of economic growth pits capitalist firms and states against each other, such that the rise or recovery of manufacturing in one country, often achieved through currency revaluation, can only be achieved ‘at the expense’ of other countries’ industries.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii142/articles/lola-seaton-reflections-on-political-capitalism

Let’s agree for the sake of argument that in aggregate, global overcapacity in terms of manufacturing and industry has dampened economic growth. A common enough follow-on would then be to differentiate by scale, pointing out regions and sites where overcapacity is less or more of an economic growth depressor.

But overcapacity with respect to what? is the intervening questioning before any knee-jerk scaling.

For example, take seriously the growing literature on regionally-based foundational economies:

In recent years, a number of alternative approaches, such as everyday economy (Reeves, 2018) and foundational economy (FE) (FEC, 2018), advocated for regional policy that directly aims at well-being of all citizens, rather than emphasising a narrow set of R&D-intensive industries. This means moving the focus to the ‘part of the economy that creates and distributes goods and services consumed by all (regardless of income and status) because they support everyday life’ (Bentham et al., 2013, 7). This includes material infrastructures (utilities and transportation) and providential services (health and education). It is proposed that such activities should be put forward in regional development efforts, as the interruption in their provision causes an immediate crisis for all households. . . .

Following Braudel’s (1981, 23) recognition that ‘there [are] not one but multiple economies’, the term foundational economy (FE) was introduced by Bentham et al. (2013) to denote the part of the economy that supplies goods and services meeting essential citizen needs and providing the infrastructure of everyday life. The FE is, thus, fundamentally defined by the necessity of consumption (Hall and Schafran, 2017).

https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/23/3/577/6759701

Now presumably overcapacity in manufacturing and industry has a major critical infrastructure dimension (water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications). But who would even start with the proposition that overcapacity in critical infrastructures necessary for regional foundational economies has and is dampening regional economic growth?

I

An earlier blog entry suggested that perennial disappointment with revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion, today’s campus riots–to the effect that they have not culminated into “far-reaching institutional change” is probably very misleading.

The entire point of revolt may be revolts, in the plural. Revolts on their own give freer rein to imagine what could follow by way of a climax, be it utopia, dystopia, reform. Or to draw the same point from the negative direction: Our unrelieved stream of peak-crisis scenarios is itself proof that a prophesied climax can’t do all the talking.

II

I want to suggest that revolts do that talking in ways that many utopian narratives do not. Really-existing revolts, such as just those listed, have all manner of noise you don’t find utopians focusing on.

Revolts are very much in the present tense, one that in Amy Kornbluh’s words, “compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now. Moreover, present tense often forecloses conclusiveness, judgment, or resolution, lacking hindsight and favoring openness or even nonsensical, unplotted, impressionistic indeterminacy”. Revolts are their own version of illegible diary entries, allowing multiple interpretation. They are like those recordings of musicians whose grunts and movements are also part and parcel of the performance. Revolts are never comfortable, let alone satisfied, with one reading, performance or future.

Little if any of this surfaces by way of the utopian narrative. Which proves to be as frustrating and punishing as the inmate reading a prison library book only to find its pages have been torn out.

Sources

https://www.negationmag.com/articles/waxing-affect-anna-kornbluh

https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/24/the-entire-point-of-revolt-may-be-revolts-updated/

Thinking infrastructurally about migration

Managed retreat?

How about the next article on the merits of degrowth begins with this paragraph. . .

Reframing migration crises

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                         Thinking infrastructurally about migration

I

Thinking infrastructurally about migrants typically short-cuts to the stresses and strains they bode for a site’s infrastructures, i.e., the added demands they impose on water supplies, transportation, energy, healthcare and the social protection systems, be that site a city, region or nation.

Attempts at itemizing the benefit side of having migrants–by virtue of added economic growth and increased tax revenues–look more and more feeble these days in the face of calls for degrowth and populist pressures against more government.

Shift this frame of reference, however, and matters start to look very different.

II

Historically, diasporic immigration worldwide has had its irreversible impacts. (Think: the transoceanic slave trades.) One such irreversibility has been that immigrants and infrastructures have developed together, with worldwide as the level and unit of analysis.

Rather than a priori stressors on existing infrastructures, a better point of departure is the evolution of: water supplies with respect to immigrants, energy supplies with respect to immigrants, telecommunications with respect to immigrants, and so on. Indeed, infrastructures and immigrants render each other visible and tangible–unavoidably really-existing for themselves and the rest of us–in ways that the noticeably immaterial labor of speechifying anti-immigrant politicians and pro-immigrant advocates does not.

III

So what? In reality, pro- and anti-immigration policies have rarely been articulated in practical terms when it comes to shifts in the many different configurations of interconnected critical infrastructures, again worldwide.

The idealized concatenation of sequential and reciprocal interconnectivity–migrants leave home and arrive at their destination, and once there, interact with others–has been (if it weren’t always) much more complicated. Mediated interconnectivities of traffickers and remittances along with pooled interconnectivities (think: EU directives on border management) have complicated matters even more.

For example, the focus on shifting interconnectivities takes on increasing importance in the digitalization of border management, not least of which in the operation of Frontex, the EU’s primary agency in this area. It is argued that, via digital technologies (including AI), national borders are being securitized and militarized. Surveillance is broadened and changing dramatically. “Europe has long been implementing border and migratory policies that focus on externalising European borders as far south as Senegal or as far east as Azerbaijan” records the same report (https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2023/08/Risking-Lives-report.pdf). Another report finds:

The removal of rescue boats and the increase of the utilization of drones is used by Frontex to detect and prevent migratory flows at an early stage, as migrant vessels are recognized in pre-frontier areas. In fact, the Frontex Situation Centre is a unit in charge of monitoring the external borders and the pre-frontier areas of the EU (European Parliament, 2018). The investment in drones has increased considerably in parallel with the deterrence of external rescue operations and the withdrawal of some naval missions in the Mediterranean, as it happened in the case of the Operation Sophia. Therefore, vessels that are capable of helping migrants and asylum seekers are replaced by drones that can only observe. In consequence, the agency has not the obligation to intervene neither rescue them.

https://centredelas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WP_DronesFrontex_ENG.pdf

And yet, the complexity remains when the focus is on digital interconnectivities. A third report concludes:

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

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/automating-immigration-and-asylum-uses-new-technologies-migration-and-asylum-governance-europe

Indeed, digital surveillance and recognition systems are very much a mixed bag of shifting pros and cons at the case level (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517211006744).

Yes, these cases of shifts in interconnectivity can themselves be inter-related, but by definition they cannot be reduced to one and the same case (there are, after all, separate nodes in even the most tightly coupled network.)

IV

So too when it comes to thinking infrastructurally about the diasporic communities of immigrants worldwide. Undertake a thought experiment. Assume today was able to send a macro-message to world’s diasporic communities of half a century ago. What would we say to them? At best, it would be about what not to do by way of their infrastructures, right? No more building this and that; but instead not losing more of those and these.

And when those of 50 years ago understandably shoot back and ask, “Just how is that to be implemented when it comes, say, to the digitalization you are talking about?,” is there any doubt whatsoever our replies would center around what’s taken to be ideal today with respect to the interconnectivity shifts, albeit in no way detailed enough for their cases?

If worldwide is your unit and level of analysis, then complex, thankfully, is as simple as it gets.

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                                  “Managed retreat”?

Managed retreat is increasingly recommended as a response to rising sea levels confronting coastal communities, cities and major ports. We already have climate migrants in coastal Louisiana and like places, and the idea is to manage this out-migration more systematically.

What’s missing are assessments of the track records in the various managed retreat strategies already out there. The management of moving capitols, for example, has not been without its major problems. Relocation of large numbers of people is even more notoriously difficult in humanitarian work.

What then might this mean in practice? One place I suggest to start thinking about managed retreat on the West Coast where I live and have done my research is the following:

Every time I visit South Sudan, the angels’ response to my criticisms never varies. “What would you have us do?” asked one exasperated aid worker as we sat drinking cold beers one night by the bank of the Nile. “If we leave, people will die.” He was right. A decade of government withdrawal from the provision of services, enabled by the humanitarian presence, and campaigns of government violence, partly paid for from humanitarian resources, had created a situation in which some people in the camps in Maban would probably starve if it were not for the aid agencies. The only solution the humanitarians can envision is to continue with this dystopic system.

Joshua Craze (2023). “The Angel’s Dilemma” (accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-angels-dilemma-craze)

Imagine, that is, not a massive withdrawal and resettlement of peoples from the coastline but rather masses of people who stay behind having nowhere else to go practically and who need indefinite humanitarian aid in order to survive.

So what? Stay or not stay–either way means disaster preparedness.

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   How about the next article on the merits of degrowth begins with this paragraph. . .

We show that the rise in the share of immigrants across European regions over the 2010-2019 period had a modest impact on the employment-to-population rate of natives. However, the effects are highly uneven across regions and workers, and over time. First, the short-run estimates show adverse employment effects in response to immigration, while these effects disappear in the longer run. Second, low-educated native workers experience employment losses due to immigration, whereas high-educated ones are more likely to experience employment gains. Third, the presence of institutions that provide employment protection and high coverage of collective wage agreements exert a protective effect on native employment. Finally, economically dynamic regions can better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.

Anthony Edo & Cem Özgüzel (2023). The Impact of Immigration on the Employment Dynamics of European Regions. CEPII Working Paper No. 2023-20. Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII), Paris. (Accessed online at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/publications/wp/abstract.asp?NoDoc=13908)

So to be clear. The last sentence of the new article’s first paragraph is to the effect that: Economically dynamic regions have been found to better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.

Then follows–and this is what I’d really like to see–are the paragraphs setting out the policy and program details on how degrowth in those dynamic regions would work in Europe, given immigration, particularly from Africa continues even under (especially under?) successful degrowth.

Please note: I am not asking for anything remotely like guarantees with respect to degrowth’s impact on immigration. I am asking for more granular scenarios and more clarity on their assumptions from degrowth advocates. This way I can better separate out informed opinion from the rest.

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                              Reframing migration crises

“Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”), Angele Merkel, 2015, then-Chancellor of Germany, referring to the migrant crisis in Germany and Europe.

Maybe in the beginning the influx was managed, but not now.

Germany initially met the increase in input variance with an expansion of process options (e.g., a major distribution and increase of migrants into towns and villages). But it’s the input variance that has increased massively since, with the pandemic lockdown, Ukraine impacts (e.g., more refugees and energy shortages), and all other disruptions up to and through the present.

So not surprisingly more of this is heard now: “We want to regain control of migration,” said Mario Voigt, CDU head in Thuringia. And yet that would mean controlling input variance, and since when have exogenous factors like war, pandemic and mass migrations been controllable in the sense this guy is talking about?

I may be wrong, but I believe these migration crises must be substantively recast and reframed, if we are to make them more tractable to policy and management (without, however, simplifying them or obscuring the complexities involved). There are a variety of policy optics to recast complex policy issues, including a focus on counternarratives, different methods, other-than-usual analogies, and key concepts around a more granular, differentiated analysis. (See my Guide https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008)

Below are examples for each with respect to the currently understood “migration crises”. No pretense is made that these quoted excerpts from publications are everywhere relevant for policy and management. They are offered, with little edit, in the spirit of softening up what look to be obdurate crises that can be defined in no other way than currently.

I. Counternarratives

The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264

2. Different methods

Irregular migrants need to be able to safely report labour exploitation and exercise their labour rights without fear of deportation. We therefore propose creating a special temporary work permit – call it a ‘redress work permit’ – specifically for irregular migrant workers who have come forward to claim their rights and whose employment conditions, while working illegally, were found to constitute a significant breach of their fundamental rights. Such a redress work permit could be included in European laws either by amending the current Employer Sanctions Directive, or as part of a new EU Directive on Labour Standards for Irregular Migrant Workers in the EU. . .

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/702670/IPOL_STU(2022)702670_EN.pdf

3. Not-your-usual analogies

I argue that detained migrants become valued not only for their exploited labour, but as bedspace occupants who trigger rent payments from ICE to corrections firms.” “As detention occupants, migrants’ cash value for others is more than metaphorical. Formally and institutionally, they are made fungible, exchangeable, transformed from people with lives and stories into chargeable bed days.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anti.129923

Beds have been the center of urgent political struggles — be they in prisons, detention centers, hospitals, or nursing homes. Our virtual conversation series centers “bed activism,” complex forms of resistance and visionary care that emerge from the intimate spaces of sick, disabled, detained, and imprisoned peoples. It connects a long-term vision of connecting communities and movements at the nexus of abolition feminism, migrant justice, and disability justice.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/the-reciprocal-politics-of-bed-space-activism–creative-resistan#:~:text=Beds%20have%20been%20the%20center,%2C%20detained%2C%20and%20imprisoned%20people.

4. More granular, differentiated analyses

Between 2010 and 2019, over 2 million people have crossed the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Europe, escaping conflicts, persecution and poverty and looking for a better chance in life (D’Angelo, 2018a; UNHCR, 2020). Since the mid-2010s, this phenomenon, widely labelled as a ‘Refugee Crisis’ (Crawley, 2016), has been at the centre of media and academic debates, with considerable attention being devoted to the humanitarian concerns over search and rescue at sea and the implementation of the European Asylum System (Crawley et al., 2017; Spijkerboer, 2016; Vassallo Paleologo, 2016). . .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.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glob.12312

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review/article/platform-work-exploitation-and-migrant-worker-resistance-evidence-from-berlin-and-london/30DF1A5FD18F4B86983332ABE401E88E

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Even otherwise fine articles have text like this:

In summary, if we assume that individuals have 100% control and agency over their direct emissions and over all emissions embedded in their consumption, then the consumption approach is indeed a powerful framework for assessing responsibility inequalities. However, if we assume that the rate of control over the indirect emissions embedded in individual consumption (let us call this parameter α) is less than 100%, the mixed approach arguably provides a more appropriate framework. In this framework, α ≈ 80%. If α is assumed to be 0, then the ownership approach appears as a more appropriate framework for assessing emissions responsibilities. Note here that the ownership framework assumes that individuals have 100% agency and control over their direct emissions (we call this parameter β). However, in practice, the use of personal gasoline vehicles or home heating devices is often constrained. This is especially true at the bottom of the distribution due to location, housing type and/or income constraints. If α = 0 and β < 1, the ownership approach should be seen as a lower bound on emissions inequality. Of course, in practice, the α and β parameters might vary at the individual level.

An interlinear translation:

If we assume that individuals have 100% control and agency over their direct emissions and over all emissions embedded in their consumption [WHICH, OF COURSE, IS IMPOSSIBLE], then the consumption approach is indeed [INSTEAD READ, “TAUTOLOGICALLY“] a powerful framework for assessing responsibility inequalities. However, if we assume that the rate of control [WE COPE PRECISELY BECAUSE WE CAN’T CONTROL] over the indirect emissions embedded in individual consumption (let us call this parameter α) is less than 100%, the mixed approach arguably [HOW ARGUABLE IS THE CIRCULARITY?] provides a more appropriate framework. In this framework, α ≈ 80% [NICE TOUCH, THE VERISIMILITUDE OF THOSE “~”]. If α is assumed to be 0, then the ownership approach appears as [“IS BY DEFINITION ONLY”] a more appropriate framework for assessing emissions responsibilities. Note here that the ownership framework assumes that individuals have 100% agency and control over their direct emissions [. . .THIS WAY MADNESS] (we call this parameter β). However, in practice, the use of personal gasoline vehicles or home heating devices is often [“IS ALWAYS”] constrained. This is especially true at the bottom of the distribution due to location, housing type and/or income constraints. If α = 0 and β < 1, the ownership approach should be seen as a lower bound on emissions inequality. Of course, in practice, the α and β parameters might [“MIGHT”? MIGHT?? RATHER: “BY NECESSITY”] vary at the individual level.