Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and the most empathic of my impressions. . .The first of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.

William James, psychologist and philosopher, on witnessing first-hand the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and immediate aftermath

–A magnitude 9 (M9) earthquake off the shoreline of the Pacific Northwest is not an impossible-to-predict event. To the contrary, it’s being predicted all the time. What’s impossible to predict are the specific consequences on shore, apart from phrases like “unimaginably awful.”

–Having to improvise in these circumsgances will be like breathing: “breathing is not a doing or an action as much as it is a not-being-able-to-not-do-so.”

–In a way, M9 scenarios are so catastrophic that certainty increases with respect to responding to questions like, “What percentage of electricity is likely to be restored in 3 days?” Answer, well, about zero.

–Infrastructures being vulnerable create specific dependencies and responsibilities (e.g., with respect to evacuation), not just a network of cross-cutting interdependencies, summed up as “relatedness.”

–Interviewee comments—”we’ll be under pressure to get the plant up and running asap,” “our people won’t be able to get to the control room because they trying to save their families,” and “we’ll need to evacuate as many people as possible”—serve a key indicator that not only has techno-side of infrastructures been destroyed, but the socio-side of these large sociotechnical systems has also taken a very severe hit.

–Mitigation is a kind of preparedness and prevention that you more readily expect of the responder culture and not of a longer-term repurposing culture for replacing infrastructure.

–Alfred North Whitehead coined “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” i.e., when we confuse or conflate an abstract concept for something concrete and empirical.

Emergency management has its own fallacy of misplaced concreteness: as if bridges and assets are more real than the processes for emergency management and preparedness.

For example, when the aim is to shorten post-disaster restoration and recovery time, mitigation of physical structures beforehand is frequently taken as the priority. Even more a priority, some say, than having in place decision-making processes about avoiding vulnerabilities and errors associated with inter-infrastructural connectivities up to and through the disaster.

–We were told that the most beneficial mitigation, in utilitarian terms (greatest benefit across the greatest number), would be two-week readiness across the population in advance of disaster. We can’t even do that, how then do all the other pre-disaster mitigation?

–What a on-point confirmation of the centrality of high reliability management in infrastructures than the principal immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructure of electricity, water, telecoms and roads. Keeping reliable and safe is a central tendency, a reversion to the mean, an example of the institutional niche with which society holds critical infrastructures.

–Isn’t “We’ve never experienced anything like an M9 and can’t predict. . .” misleading if left at that? Isn’t it better first to ask, What’s your emergency management track record when it comes to “the biggest fire, or flood, or ice storm. . . the state has ever seen so far”?

–A positive track record with respect to emergency management is of course no guarantee of effectiveness when it comes to the unfolding M9 events, but neither is the retrospective record of no major failures a guarantee of high reliability management ahead even in normal operations.

–It is one thing to insist on unimaginable impacts arising from an M9 earthquake, but quite another to leave out infrastructures in imagining the impacts (e.g., treating wastewater as a low priority in inter infrastructural impact assessments).

–The other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” As in: “It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts.” (For example, “we can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” a regulator told us.)

Under what conditions is good enough a reliably good-enough?

I

The best-known gloss must be that of D.W. Winnicott, the psychotherapist, when describing the good-enough mother. The good-enough mother is not perfect, and that is a Very Good Thing. At baby’s birth and for a period thereafter, the good-enough mother is one who manages to be there when child needs mother. So available and in sync with the child’s needs is mother that the child at some point feels it created mother–indeed, created the perfect mother. Over time, the real mother—and this is where her “good enough” comes in—disillusions the child that “mother” is its very own creation.

Winnicott describes what the good-enough mother does as “management,” “provision” and “reliability.” One of his descriptions illustrates the point for a specialist audience of his:

One cannot help becoming a parent-figure whenever one is doing anything professionally reliable. You are nearly all, I expect engaged in some sort of professionally reliable thing, and in that limited area you behave much better than you do at home, and your clients depend on you and get to lean on you.

II

The reliability professionals in large critical infrastructures face the dilemma of good-enough parents: How do they disabuse us, the consumers of water, electricity and other vital services, that our being better off is now more up to us than before and in ways we really haven’t yet appreciated?

How to reinforce in us that the declines in services underway aren’t “declines” any more than is the reality-check that we did not create mother on our own? If the control room operators we interviewed are representative, reliability professionals are the last people to persuade us out of our fever dreams. They think we’re adults.

III

What, though, to say to those who argue good enough is no longer possible?

If so, then the answer is crystal-clear: Our infrastructures are not headed for catastrophe. They—and we—are in the middle of that disaster, unfolding right before our eyes.

But is that happening? Are they physically crashing right before your eyes?

Yes, of course, the pressures on critical systems are real and threatening; but, there is a world of difference between having no guarantees for future reliability and insisting that the failed future is here for the rest of now.

Anyway, there is something very odd about supposing entire systems of production are failing right now before our eyes, notwithstanding that their various technologies are constantly replaced before they have had time to physically collapse and permanently fail.

As I see it, the benefit of thinking this question in terms of path dependencies (plural) is not only that their durations differ, but the with-respect-to’s are also highly variable. Path dependencies already are commercial or institutional or legal or technological or behavioral or climatic–and more.

I

To my mind, the value-added of First differentiate path dependencies! is considerable. The three most interanimating of importance are:

1. Further differentiation forces attention in environmental crisis management on comparing and contrasting the “with respect to what?” With respect to this as distinct from that path dependency? These versus those? And if so, attention first here rather than there? . . .

2. Further differentiation forces management attention to the specific failure scenarios of interest and the levels of granularity at which the scenarios are said to be actionable. At least two types of failure scenarios are of interest here: those for how the crisis unfolds and those for how the crisis responses fail.

Specifying action-levels of granularity is also important because the answer to the “What happens next?” question so central to on-the-ground crisis management MUST be more than “What happens is, well, more path dependence. . .”

3. This means “cases of interest” must as well be differentiated from the get-go, e.g., “cases out there in reality” as distinct from, say, “the case emerging from your interaction with issues of concern” (Charles Ragin’s typology of cases, for example)

II

So what, practically?

If the question is:

What are reasonable and feasible ways to anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones?

then my answer derived from the preceding is another question;

If we can’t differentiate path dependencies by better focusing on case-level, variably granular failure scenarios actionable in and for environmental crisis management, how are we ever to better anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones?

–All the smothering paste of macro-principles and generalizations cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.

–So what?

The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties us into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, is to have more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even more into global capitalism or not?

There are, of course, those who insist such is not a binary choice. Surely, though, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.

–Insisting on case-by-case looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by policy narrativea that assume the world is everywhere and equally so colonized by capitalisms and their inequalities.

Count me as one long arguing for more in-country researchers to study China’s high-speed rail (HSR)–a system far more ambitious than other nations combined. The aim: to identify HSR practices with respect to system reliability and safety management in the hope of learning more cross-nationally. HSR accidents occur, and big ones, but China’s system is reported to have been managed with high levels of reliability and safety in the last decade.

I

Now I want to suggest extending that research agenda to the management of the interconnections between HSR systems and other major critical infrastructures in China.

HSR is part of China’s transportation network, which has been estimated to also include5 million kilometres of road and 230 major airports. How does HSR interface with them? HSR requires electricity and it’s also reported that China deploys over 275 gigawatts of wind-power capacity, by way of example. What are its interconnections with HSR? HSR includes a great deal of automation and software. Yet according to one source, by the beginning of 2024 only some 40 of the over 235 large language models (LLM) introduced in China had been approved by the regulators. How does the under-regulation of generative AI affect HSR and its other infrastructure interconnections, if at all?

II

The point of the preceding scatter-shot questions is not to highlight the numbers—there must be much better estimates out there–but rather the need for a frameworks centered on infrastructure interconnectivity that guide what sorts of questions to ask and answer in the first place and by way of priority.

As I neither speak nor read Mandarin and am unable to access the research and modeling of Chinese researchers on this matter, I offer below what is hopefully a suggestive alternative: insights from recent research Paul Schulman and I have been undertaking on the interconnected lifeline infrastructures of roads, telecoms, water and electricity.

Combined with earlier research, our framework covers multiple modes of infrastructure operations, including those during normal, disrupted, and failed periods, followed by immediate emergency response and initial service restoration, longer-term recovery, and the establishment of a new normal (if there is to be one),

Below focuses on the framework’s implications for “immediate emergency response and initial service restoration,” a topic of international concern, and not just in China. Of specific focus are “known errors” and “infrastructure vulnerabilities” with respect to that immediate response and restoration. This following three short sections are pitched at a general level, with specifics to China provided by way a short conclusion.

III

To talk about known errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and shocks are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.

Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some of these cases. Despite surprises, sequences of action in these instances are clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake.

IV

Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and after the disaster, can well invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are by definition under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to their demands.

More specifically with respect to known errors:

• Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.
• In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
• It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

There are other known errors, but the above three are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster.

V

Four of the significant implications are:

1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs.

2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. In our experience, this means focusing well beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.

3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as a known error to avoid.

4. Without prior contacts, communication  channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. If inter-infrastructural connectivities are instead a priority, real-time corrections are hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.

VI

So what, with respect to China?

Four obvious questions, for which I don’t pretend to have any kind of answer, are:

–Do existing institutions facilitate lateral communications and horizontal micro-coordination even if (especially if) they occur outside official emergency management infrastructures, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are formal and informal communications systems robust even when baseline telecoms are down, be they in rural or urban areas?

–Are repositories of key infrastructure back-ups readily available, particularly where chokepoints of two or more infrastructures are co-located in urban or rural areas?

–Are existing initiatives focused on vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructures in the face of urban or rural disasters supported not only by funds and staff, but new information and findings?

Note by this point, in case it needs saying, that in none of this am I suggesting the focus start, let alone, end with the HSR system.

---

My thanks to Paul Schulman for working out and providing some of the wording . Any errors still remain mine.

---

1. Thinking infrastructurally about what is not said, but could be, in pastoralist development

(1) “We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity.”

(2) “Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively.”

(3) “Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: ‘We corrected your design problems on the ground. Our job as reliability professionals, after all, is to protect you, too.'”

(4) “We herding professionals refuse to play the game conjured up by you outside analysts that starts with your tables and numbers of livestock. Why? Because your follow-on question is almost immediately: ‘But who owns the livestock?’ And, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: ‘But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?’

As if to ask us: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities?’ And leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more useful ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.”

---

2. Thinking infrastructurally about resilience in pastoralist settings

I

The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back. But is that true? Both occur at the individual level, but from an infrastructure perspective, the opposite of the individual is something like “team situational awareness” in its control centers, not another individual herder who is “non-resilient.”

We observed the professionals in control rooms of critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of system operations:

Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience

• Professionals adjusting back to within de jure or de facto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
• Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by the professionals (restoration resilience);
• Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving other professionals from different from systems; and
• Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others, including new stakeholders (recovery resilience)

Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies undertaken by the system’s real-time managers and tied to the state of system operations in which they find themselves. Resilience differs depending on whether the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here as critical infrastructure.)

Resilience, as such, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. Nor is it, as a system feature, reducible to anything like individual “resilient” herders, though such herders exist.

II

So what?

What you take to be the loss of the herd, a failure in pastoralist operations that you say comes inevitably with drought, may actually be perceived and treated by pastoralists themselves as a temporary disruption after which operations are to be restored. While you, the outsider, can say their “temporary” really isn’t temporary these days, it is the herders’ definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.

Herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. Normal doesn’t mean what happens when there are no shocks to the system. Shocks happen all the time, and normal operations are all about responding to them in such a way as to ensure they don’t lead to temporary system disruption or outright system failure. Shifting from one watering point, when a problem arises there, to another within a range of good-enough fallbacks, is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.

Pastoralist systems can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, off-take of livestock products is interrupted, lightning triggers a veldt fire—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to usual is better termed restoration resilience. Access to alternative feed stocks or sources of livelihood may be required in the absence of grazing and watering fallbacks normally available.

So too resilience as a response to shocks looks very different by way of management strategies when the shocks lead to system failure and recovery from that failure. In these circumstances, an array of outside, inter-organizational resources and personnel—public, private, NGO, humanitarian—are required in addition to the resources of the pastoralist herders. These recovery arrangements and resources are unlike anything marshaled by way of precursor or restoration resiliencies within the herder communities themselves.

III

There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal (indeed the probability of system failure in recovery can be higher than in normal operations). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from any new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s pastoralist systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one drought or disaster after another. The reality may be that some systems—not all!—are already at a new normal, operating with a very different combination of options, strategies and resources than before.

If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities that emerge in real time,” then they are able to do so because of being capable to undertake the different types of resiliencies listed here, contingent on the stage of operations herders as a collectivity find themselves.

Or to put the key point from the other direction, a system demonstrating precursor resilience, restoration resilience, emergency response coordination and recovery resilience is the kind of system better able to withstand the downsides of shocks and uncertainty and exploit their upsides. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.

Finally, a mistake to avoid. When response and recovery are difficult to separate or these “stages” occur together, then response and recovery resiliences are also hard to tease apart and separate out. The danger is that “resilience” may be relegated only to the planning for the mitigation of longer-term recovery efforts.

---

3. Rethinking the role of in-kind transfers in rural and herding settings

I

Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]

One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.

Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.

II

I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.

But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.

III

A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”

If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.

IV

But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.

Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]

—-

[1] See “Financing agriculture: what are the challenges and opportunities in Zimbabwe?,” “Managing money: savings and investment in Zimbabwean agriculture,” and “The changing remittance economy in Zimbabwe” (accessed online at, among other links, https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/managing-money-savings-and-investment-in-zimbabwean-agriculture/)

[2] Linda Pappagallo (2024). Recasting tenure and labour in non-equilibrium environments: Making the case for “high-reliability” pastoral institutions. Land Use Policy 138: 5 (accessed online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723005008)

[3] I touch upon how the practices of local justice systems remain highly salient in globalized settings in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene

---

4. Thinking infrastructurally about rangeland carrying capacity

I

The key problem in my view 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.

---

I

Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]

One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.

Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.

II

I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.

But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.

III

A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”

If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.

IV

But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.

Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]

---

[1] See “Financing agriculture: what are the challenges and opportunities in Zimbabwe?,” “Managing money: savings and investment in Zimbabwean agriculture,” and “The changing remittance economy in Zimbabwe” (accessed online at, among other links, https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/managing-money-savings-and-investment-in-zimbabwean-agriculture/)

[2] Linda Pappagallo (2024). Recasting tenure and labour in non-equilibrium environments: Making the case for “high-reliability” pastoral institutions. Land Use Policy 138: 5 (accessed online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723005008)

[3] I touch upon how the practices of local justice systems remain highly salient in globalized settings in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene

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 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.

Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .

Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.

John Y. Lawrence (2023). Lyricist as Analyst: Rhyme Scheme as Music-Setting in the Great American Songbook. Music Theory Spectrum XX: 1 – 15 (accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/mts/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mts/mtad015/7492927?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.

That policy instead is the music and that implementers are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. Also revealing is the notion that “fits better” means “fits suggestively” for ongoing interpretations: namely, future evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.

Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its implementation is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, repeated evaluation, not implementation on its own, is a de facto policymaking without closure. Or if you will, this is its own kind of democracy.

Sociotechniccal imaginaries have been defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”

Sheila Jasanoff, 2015. Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In
Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, ed. S. Jasanoff and S.-H. Kim, pp. 1–33. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

But then: whose visions? Even within a large sociotechnical system like a critical infrastructure, whose imaginaries?

Clearly not just those of the CEO and the rest of the C-suite. Nor its investors and regulators. Nor policymakers and legislators of concern.

After all, any large sociotechnical system has its equivalent street-level bureaucrats, front-line implementers, and middle level reliability professionals, who have their own visions and facts on the ground in constrast to the others. They are, in fact, often credited with de facto policymaking.

I

An example: Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation” in society’s critical infrastructures.

Yet there is no reason to assume that compliance–a sociotechnical imaginary if there ever was one–is the same baseline for, inter alios,

• the infrastructure’s operators in the field, including the eyes-and-ears field staff;
• the infrastructure’s headquarters’ staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government compliance mandates;
• the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for far more than compliance by way of enterprise risk management;
• those other infrastructure professionals responsible for thinking through “what-if” scenarios that vary by all manner of contingencies; and, last but not least,
• the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff—in the midst of all this, especially in their role of surmounting stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols–the “official” sociotechnical imaginary–undermining real-time system reliability and safety.

II

So what?

These differences in orientation with respect to e.g., “baseline compliance,” mean societal values for systemwide reliability and safety can be just as differentiated and distributed as these staff and their responsibilities are. Where reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must also be expected that the social values reflected in these infrastructures not only differ across infrastructures but also within them.