I

It’s tempting to see policy analysis in the American setting as the bastard child of American pragmatism and British rationalism: the former with its focus on consequences and less on intentions when deciding; the latter with a focus on the sequence of steps to deciding.

One consequence of this bastardization is that intentions can also end up consequential. If as some philosophers tell us, intentionality is part of action, then intentions are part of decisionmaking. And since decisionmaking is ongoing in policy and management, consequences arising out of a sequence of decisions end up looking like steps in causation. As a result, rationalizing what is pragmatic and pragmatizing the rationalizations can be as difficult to parse–much like the dancer from the dance.

II

So what?

Start with the obvious. It’s because we demand complex organizations be rational (formally. procedural) that they have had also to become pragmatic (informally, less procedural).

Less obvious but as important: Macro-designs formalize as principles what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more informally as localized contingency scenarios, while front-line micro-operations treat informally what policy analysts and managers cannot help but treat more formally when they talk about emerging patterns and practices across cases.

For instance, sometimes it’s too early to decide what is even better than the reliable operations of current infrastructures in the face of turbulent conditions and buttressed by emergency preparedness. Why? Because some cases are still early days when it comes to their mix of formal and informal, e.g.:

It is easy to forget that even in the so-called advanced world, domestic running water – for toilets, cooking, personal hygiene, washing clothes and dishes – is a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, dating back less than a century. In 1940, 45% of households in the US lacked complete plumbing; in 1950, only 44% of homes in Italy had either indoor or outdoor plumbing. In 1954, only 58% of houses in France had running water and only 26% had a toilet. In 1967, 25% of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor toilet, a sink and hot- and cold-water taps. In Romania, 36% of the population lacked a flushing toilet solely for their household in 2012 (down to 22% in 2021). . .

Marco D’Eramo (2022). “Odourless Utopia.” NLF Sidecar (accessed on line at https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/odourless-utopia?pc=1464)

I

How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything seemingly uncertain? You know better after the fact, when consequences are clearer. But how do you know in real time that this or that action is a mistake to be avoided in the fog of war or some all around you?

It is important, I think, to insist that real-time error avoidance is still possible even under conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties (and not via a–much?–later hindsight).

II

Paul Schulman and I recently undertook research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. We ended up focusing on key interconnectivity patterns and shifts in those configurations with respect to systemwide control variables (think electricity frequency or water main pressures). We also focused on shifting performance standards as operating conditions shifted from normal, through disrupted, into failed, then if possible into recovery and a new normal for the interconnected systems.

The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so.

For staff in the interconnected critical infrastructures, there are conditions under which it is a shared error for infrastructure operators not to micro-coordinate by way of improvising and communicating laterally (not just up and down a chain of incident command). This holds even if (especially if) emergency response and initial service restoration are not guaranteed after an interinfrastructural shock.

III

So what?

I know I have been too casual in wielding about broad descriptions of “systemwide uncertainty, complexity, and conflict.” Error avoidance, in contrast, can be a far better site indicator for management-on-the-ground.

Source

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science online.

I

They believe that climate change is actually happening but don’t want those wind-farms off their coastline. Those driving electric cars are opposed by those demanding no cars. Those who demand more renewable energy here are among those opposing construction of new transmission lines from renewables there.

The commonplace is to insist tradeoffs are involved. But tradeoffs aren’t the only, or even priority, starting point.

II

How so? Start with an observation in an online New York Times,

While China is the world’s biggest adopter of clean energy, it also remains the world’s biggest user of fossil fuels, particularly coal. “We have to hold these two things, which can seem contradictory, in our heads at the same time,” [another Times correspondent] said. “China is pulling the world in two directions.”

This may not be a contradiction so much as a transition.

German Lopez in The New York Time’s online Morning, August 14 2023

That is: What if those NIMBYisms are not contradictions so much as part of transitions underway? What if the oppositions aren’t stalemates but are already leading to something different?

III

One such complex transition underway is the transfer of renewable energy between and across different electricity grids in the US.

As has been reported, there is a pressing need for new transmission lines. But that new construction would add to a base that already involves inter-regional electricity transmission, including for clean energy. True, how much of that transitioning is going on is hard to document. True, the regional grids are fragmented and true, more renewable energy interconnections are needed.

IV

So what?

Take a case where city residents objecting to wind-farms off the coastline are served by a grid not inter-regionally connected to clean energy sources. One interconnectivity solution to this Nimbyism would be to hike up the electricity rates of city residents: not just because they are forgoing clean energy but also because their rates for the interconnected water, cellphone and transportation subsidize their choice.

Transitioning to clean energy in my back-yard is already in the front-yard of inter-regional energy infrastructures.

I

From our 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 is an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now interventions in some cases. Better put, 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.

More important, where these and like sequences are clear, urgent and known to front-line staff, then errors to be avoided in operations and response are also evident to experienced front-line staff.

II

We found:

–Under conditions of 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, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. It would be a management error in anticipation and planning 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 also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies

–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

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

III

“Error avoidance,” though, hits a sore-spot when it comes to managing for infrastructure safety and reliability: namely, around the pros and cons of admitting error by front-line staff. One interviewee said “error avoidance” was like saying we were doing something wrong. Another told us bureaucratic hierarchies are wary to admit mistakes. A third interviewee provided a way to recast this, however: Emergency managers don’t like to call it error but rather missed opportunity.

Following on this shift in terms, what is most important about error avoidance is missing those real opportunities that shouldn’t or can’t be missed where the logic, clarity and urgency of in emergency response and initial service restoration are evident. Such include, as we just saw, taking advantage of any opportunities to improvise and maintaining lateral communications, as well as having distributed equipment and supplies along with robust communications. To equate this specificity with respect to known errors as “managing risks” is misleading.

IV

Put this way, there is a role for forward planning in anticipating and taking advantage of these opportunities as they emerge. Within our wider high reliability management framework, the latter resonates with “bandwidth management under prior anticipatory analysis.” That type of management by infrastructure control rooms and wraparound support staff is, we found, ‘highly error-intolerant.”.

Indeed, to miss out on prior anticipatory analysis and its intersection with a now-existing opportunity is an error–a controllable error as another interviewee put it. For 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 this replacement under those conditions.

V

Keeping to the bandwidth management terminology, the preceding also means that in the absence of prior anticipatory analysis and from the perspective of infrastructure control rooms and their wraparound support units, we should expect to see more “bandwidth management under active analysis.”

For example, a rural town that did not anticipate accelerated gentrification after a major wildfire in its hazard mitigation plan will “respond in ways that buffer or tolerate input variance, including that arising from mistakes or errors” that emerge with that gentrification (e.g. newly added residential water and wastewater demands).

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. The plan, while incorporating streams of activities already budgeted for, becomes further operational when an emergency triggers release of funds contingent on that emergency.

Where that happens, we then have a positive instance of what has been pejoratively termed in garbage-can theory as, “solutions in search of problems.” It is a latent problem definition in search of an emergency to activate it. It, however, remains an open question whether other city/county/state plans, e.g., for “building in resilience,” are also functional in this way.

VI

So what?

In our 2008 High Reliability Management, we talked about no-go areas for policy and management, i.e., topic areas where there were no reliability professionals or equivalent. Indeed: “Reliability professionals. . .need to be engaged to help identify no-go areas for policymakers.”

In contrast, the notion of pre-existing or mandated hazard mitigation plans as latent problem definitions activated by emergencies–in particular, replacing legacy structures with new, more advanced ones–implies there are also go-now areas for policy and management. That is, infrastructure operators must now manage newer infrastructure components that replace older systems and practices.

Source: Paul Schulman is not to blame for my construal of his wording and ideas!

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

Well, 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

I

The following are excerpts from Biao Xiang (2023), “Logistical power and logistical violence: lessons from China’s COVID experience,” Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies (accessed online at DOI: 10.1080/24761028.2023.2285022).

Logistical power, be it from above or below, is defined in the article as the “capacity to initiate, coordinate, and stop mobility”:

A state gains infrastructural power by building roads, but does not acquire significant logistical power unless it can collect real-time traffic data, monitor all vehicles, and communicate with individual drivers on the move. More importantly, the concepts of infrastructural power and logistical power point to different analytical questions. Infrastructural power is by definition state power, and the concept is meant to explain how and why modern states, wielding much less despotic power than traditional rulers, can effectively govern societies of tremendous scale and complexity; and why the state and civil society have both become more powerful in the modern times. Infrastructural power enables modern states to govern through society instead of over society. Logistical power, in comparison, has its origin in social life. In most parts of human history, it is the marginal groups – nomads, migrants, hill tribes, petty traders, vagabonds and many others – which are most capable of exercising logistical power. The critical question associated with the concept of logistical power is not how state and society gain more power at the same time, but rather how state concentrate logistical power at the cost of people’s logistical power, in which process society becomes fragmented and loses its capacity of coordinating mobility.

Logistical power is the ability to coordinate mobility, and can be possessed by state and non-state actors. Logistical violence is state coercion through forced (im)mobility. Logistical power from below, namely citizen’s capacity to move and to form networks beyond government control, was a driving force behind economic reforms in the 1980s. By the 2010s, logistical power from above – the coordination of mobility by larger corporations and the state in particular – had become the dominant means of organizing the mobility of people, goods, money, and information.

II

So what?

While appearing inescapable due to its infrastructural and logistical power, the state has profound difficulty in controlling people’s thoughts, emotions, or communications. When talking to each other, citizens can construct a lifeworld of common sense, interpersonal trust, and mutual assistance. Such a lifeworld may provide a base for the capacity to refuse and resist forces like logistical violence.

State-sponsored sedentarization is logistical violence, the chief resistance to which is and remains the logistical power of pastoralists who move their herds and/or household members outside these settlements.

As regards analysis, I have been much influenced by Bob Goodin’s dictum: ‘Distinctions = arguments’. That formula cannot be quite right: distinction is often the basis for argument rather than the argument itself. For example, philosophers may distinguish different aspects of equality before using this for a normative argument. But Goodin’s essential insight is correct: we often benefit when we see that what we thought of as one thing is actually two or more things, and that our answers depend on which of these things we examine.

Adrian Blau, political scientist, in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2023.2276603 [my underlines; endote numbers deleted for readability]

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For more on and examples of the methods’ imperative, First differentiate!, please see my guide http://ids.ac.uk/publications/when-complex-is-as-simple-as-it-gets-guide-for-recasting-policy-and-management-in-the-anthropocene/

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 interconnectivites. 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.

Begin with the strategic orientations many have with respect to resilience and anticipation as distinct from each other. Resilience is said to be optimizing the ability to absorb or rebound from shocks, while minimizing the need to anticipate these shocks ahead of time. Anticipation, in contrast, is to optimize the ability to plan ahead and deal with shocks before they happen, while minimizing having to cope with shocks when they do occur. Consider the resulting Table 1:

System designers would like managers to be both optimally anticipatory and resilient at the same time—indeed that managers maximize their “readiness” for whatever arises, whenever. These all-embracing demands can, however, reduce the managers’ much-needed capacity to balance anticipation and resilience case by case.

More, the ideal of stabilizing the task environment so as to minimize the need for both anticipation and resilience—a common enough premise (promise) of macro-designers—is as impossible to realize as it is irresponsible to promote, when the aim is high reliability in real-time operations.

Who wouldn’t be right in avoiding or resisting burn-out, if told repeatedly they haven’t “taken control” of climate change, species extinction and biodiversity loss?

It would be good to know if we are nine missed meals away from civil unrest, or only four such meals as others say.

Isn’t everything-connected-to-everything-else an odd form of stasis?

To say endemic crises have many causes and are overdetermined is like saying there’s too much wind-up for the pitch thrown.

Since when has inequality been best described as a crisis? Inequality is much more the norm before it is a crisis. Norms are accepted or not; crises are to be managed or coped with. Shaming, humiliating and ostracizing those profiting from the scandal of the status quo is a more policy-relevant response to norms of inequality.