I don’t know about you, but I’ve turned into a survivalist when reading articles on major policy issues. If it doesn’t hook me in the first couple of paragraphs, I scroll down to the last paragraph and read backwards on the look-out for the upshot. If I find something, I read backwards for a bit longer and decide if it’s worth returning back to where I first left off.
This is largely a problem of genre. The journalist article starts with the dead or dying victim, when I the reader want to know upfront, not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce the victimhood. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people!
I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Then tell me how we might modify their doing so in order to make it work here as well.
II There is also that other genre, the academic article on a major policy issue. To be honest, some articles are doing better to get to the upshot(s), at least within the first two or three pages of single-spaced text, i.e., if and when they get to the part, “This article contributes to. . .” Still, too many top-of-the-page Abstracts conclude with, “Finally, implications are drawn for further action.” As if the oasis is somewhere out there in the desert of words ahead.
Tell me what those implications are so I have energy to read the next 20 pages. I’m not asking the authors to simplify. I’m asking them to tell me what they conclude or propose so I, the reader, can decide whether or not their actual analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell me upfront, because I may find I have something better to recommend from their assembly of facts and figures.
III
There is also that Executive Summary you find in some–by no means all–policy-advocacy reports. Many such reports are also doing a better job laying out recommendations upfront so that the readers can decide for themselves whether the rest of the text makes their case.
The problem arises where the rah-rah of advocacy gets in way of the details of how to implement the recommendations. You still find many instances of the already obvious, “We need a more equitable society,” and then full-stop. Not.Good.Enough. These aren’t calls for action but a form of bearing witness, a very different policy genre than the advocacy report.
IV
In fact, many long-form journalism pieces or academic articles come to us posing as two other genres, essays or mysteries. We the readers are meant to see how their thinking unfolds. Or in the case of executive summaries, the values of the advocates are to shine bright above all else. Fair enough for readers knowing they are reading essays or mysteries or a tract. But not good enough for others who want more by way of action.
Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.
Fair enough, but not enough.
So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is, well, predictably unimaginable for them. That is: not totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. It is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.
II
I think something more is going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.
The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot in the midst of answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is: “unimaginably catastrophic” is, well, not untrue.
So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something about a catastrophe very desperate indeed.
Buy, borrow or otherwise acquire Digging Up The Future by Maarten Vanden Eynde (2020, Maastricht University Press). Or go first to his website, https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/.
Below are reproduced (apologies for the poor digital quality) three selections, verbatim, from the book and found at the website:
—Restauration du lac de Montbel
“Every year the Montbel lake in the southwest of France, dries out a bit more. This is partly due to global warming and partly to the use of the lake by local fire department helicopters in fighting nearby forest fires. In a vain attempt to restore something that is broken both physically and metaphorically, Maarten Vanden Eynde tries to repair the bottom of the lake by filling up the cracks with plaster. The gesture, documented in this photograph, is of course futile and to no avail.
“‘Restauration du lac de Montbel‘ hints at the loss of knowledge that is an inherent result and part of the passing of time. Consequently we are all doomed to make ridiculous gestures and draw false or incomplete conclusions in the future, because objective knowledge will always be outnumbered by subjective (mis)interpretation.”
”’Homo stupidus stupidus‘ is a human skeleton that has been taken apart and put back together again in a different and rather puzzling shape that bears little relationship to human anatomy despite our knowledge of it. It is a critical comment on the human arrogance that declares itself doubly wise – Homo sapiens sapiens – and names after itself an entire geological era, the Anthropocene, to represent its own influence on Earth. ‘Homo stupidus stupidus’ questions the extent of human self-awareness, of self-knowledge of where we come from, how we evolved, and where we are going. The work symbolises our inherent failure in understanding ourselves or predicating our future on the basis of our past and present.”
“Lengths of wood from different trees are glued together so as to resemblea tree trunk. The growth rings are matched together like a puzzle, as if an attempt has been made to recreate a tree’s original shape without any surviving point of reference, the growth rings being the only visible guidelines available. ‘Genetologic Research no. 2 & 4‘ are among the earliest examples of an imaginary journey into a fictional future past, where knowledge is lacking and frames of reference are flawed.”
Today I read: “A few years ago I would have said that there was no chance that the US will be the world’s biggest economy by the end of the 21st century. Now I am certain the US will remain the largest economy throughout the whole of this century.”
One reason why is offered by what I read yesterday: “Any socialist effort to navigate the very real state shift in the climate will require a massive reconstruction and deployment of productive forces. For example, all the major cities that are on a coastline on this planet will have to be moved inland. That means the electrical grids and sewer systems need to be rebuilt. We will need to reimagine urban life on a massive scale.”
The latter’s impossible-to-implement undermines anything like the certitude in the former’s starting point.
The entry in Wikipedia explains the typology this way:
Where both preferences and cause/effect relations are clear, decision making is “computational”. These decisions are often short term and information about the decision is fairly unambiguous.
Where outcome preferences are clear, but cause/effect relations are uncertain, Thompson suggest that “judgment” takes over and you make your best educated guess. These decisions are based on prior experience and are often qualitative in nature.
When the situation is reversed, and preferences are uncertain, then you rely on compromise between different groups. Political coalitions may be built which rely on negotiating and bargaining.
When neither preferences nor cause/effect relations are clear, then you rely on “inspirational” leadership. This is where the charismatic leader may step in and this type of decision often takes place in times of crisis. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Thompson)
I want you to keep Thompson’s typology in mind when you read the following article on the case for better emissions reductions by Dr. Hannah Ritchie in the Guardian.
It’s quoted at length, in large part because I agree with every word of it. The virtue of Thompson’s typology is that it unlocks reasons why her points need to be extended, and when doing so, the important policy and management implications that follow for the climate emergency.
2/4. THE ARTICLE
The big idea: why climate tribalism only helps the deniers
Hannah Ritchie
One of the most effective ways to be a climate sceptic is to say nothing at all. Why expend the effort slapping down climate solutions when you can rely on feuding climate activists to tear each other’s ideas apart? We tend to fight with those we are closest to. This is true of family. But it’s also true of our peers, which for me, are those obsessed with trying to fix climate change. Step into the murky waters of Twitter and you’ll often find activists spending more time going after one another than battling climate falsehoods.
These might seem like small squabbles, but they have a real impact. They slow our progress and play into the hands of the deniers, the oil companies, the anti-climate lobbyists. These groups push on while our heads are turned.
What we want to achieve is the same: to reduce carbon emissions. The problem is that we are stubborn about how we get there. We often have strong opinions about what the evils are, and how to fix them. The nuclear zealots want to go all-in on building new power stations. The renewable zealots want no nuclear at all. Some promote electric cars; their opponents want car-less roads. Vegans advocate for cutting out animal products; flexitarians feel judged when they eat their weekly roast chicken. . . .
. . .But the reality is that we can’t afford to be choosy. The answer to almost every climate dilemma is “We need both”. We need renewables and nuclear energy (even if that means just keeping our existing nuclear plants online). We need to tackle fossil fuels and our food system; fossil fuels are the biggest emitter, but emissions from food alone would take us well past a temperature rise of 1.5C and close to 2C. Not everyone can commute without a car, so we need electric vehicles and cycle-friendly cities and public transport networks. We can’t decarbonise without technological change, but we need to rethink our economic, political and social systems to make sure they flourish. . . .
So how can we make these debates work better? First, we need to become less fixated on the ideal pathway. None of us will get precisely what we want; we need to compromise and take a route that reduces emissions effectively and quickly, using a combination of solutions.
Second, we need to be more generous when dealing with our rivals. Intellectual disagreements can quickly descend into name-calling. Real conversation stops and we talk past one another instead. We become more focused on winning the argument than understanding the other side. This makes the climate solution space hostile, which is counterproductive considering we want the world’s best minds to be there.
Third, we need to be honest about what is and isn’t true about the solutions we don’t like. “EVs emit just as much CO2 as petrol cars” is simply wrong. They emit significantly less, even if they emit more than the subway or a bike (and yes, this is still true when we account for the emissions needed to produce the battery). “Nuclear energy is unsafe” is wrong – it’s thousands of times safer than the coal we’re trying to replace, and just as safe as renewables. It’s fine to advocate for your preferred solutions, but it’s not OK to lie about the alternatives to make your point. . .
For me, Dr. Ritchie speaks the truth; better yet, truth to power. But if you’ve kept in mind the Thompson typology, you’ll see what she’s doing a bit differently.
In Thompson’s terms, the article posits a low uncertainty over preferences—we do want to reduce carbon emissions—even if there are among us people more uncertain as to what best achieves our preferred outcome. As such, the decisionmaking process is primarily a matter of judgement, and involving the drive to consensus not just among experts but also among more and more people who have come to the same judgment about the priority of reducing emissions.
Fair enough, but now return to that part of her text about “the need to compromise,” a term that for Thompson means something quite different. For him, yes of course there are occasions when negotiating and bargaining are the primary decision processes, but these are more the cases of greater uncertainty or disagreement over preferred outcomes than over the available means to achieve them.
What Dr. Ritchie is talking about, on re-reading, are interventions where the specific means utilized require the occasional compromise, without however jeopardizing the common end to be achieved. The ends remain clear(er). That is also why her article reads at points almost computational in Thompson terminology: “’Nuclear energy is unsafe’ is wrong – it’s thousands of times safer than the coal we’re trying to replace, and just as safe as renewables”.
4/4. SO WHAT?
Positively put, the policy and management challenge is to document those really-existing cases, if any, where computation, judgement, compromise and inspiration are achieving lower emissions. This includes cases of compromises, whose ends while not being (only) emission reductions nevertheless lead to reductions even greater than those explicitly promoted as doing so in terms of computation and judgement.
I’ve just finished a study of state and federal emergency management efforts in two US states, Oregon and Washington, were a magnitude 9.0 earthquake to happen offshore in their nearby Cascadia Subduction Zone. Suffice it to say, there is great worry that not enough is being done by way of preparing for, responding to, and recovery from such an event.
More formally, the counterfactual thrown-up to get more resources is: Were infrastructures and governments there spending more on automatic shut-off valves, retrofitting bridges, mobile generators and telecommunication towers, 2-week readiness kits for individual households, etc etc, they would be in a better position for immediate emergency response and recovery.
No guarantees of course, but still fair enough. Yet the preceding is not the only counterfactual about what would or could happen instead there.
II
If your world is the world, you will very quickly come across the literature on Shock-Responsive Social Protection that also addresses massive shocks. But here you’d find almost an entirely different set of terms, namely, how social protection programs work with humanitarian response and disaster risk management for what is called here in the US emergency preparedness, immediate emergency response and initial service restoration.
III
A social protection program might focus on how to transfer and get cash into the hands of the victims asap; the emergency management efforts we looked at worried about how ATMs and cellphone transactions would work once the infrastructures failed.
Humanitarian programs readily admit the need for international assistance; we interviewed no one in Oregon and Washington State who described “humanitarian aid” as a key emergency response, let alone from anywhere outside the US.
For its part, disaster risk management, while close to what we mean by emergency management in the States, might also include insurance mechanisms (e.g., assisting in paying premiums before the disaster) and contingency credit programs not just for recovery but also during immediate response
IV
So what?
We are a rich country that knows emergency management inside out. SRSP, if we were to get that literature, is for poor countries, from which we wouldn’t learn anyway. We have infrastructures, they don’t. That western Oregon and Washington State won’t have infrastructures either after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake is what another literature calls denial.
Source
O’Brien, C., Scott, Z., Smith, G., Barca V., Kardan, A., Holmes, R., Watson, C. and Congrave, J. (2018), Shock-Responsive Social Protection Systems Research: Synthesis Report, Oxford Policy Management, Oxford, UK
Critical infrastructures are defined as those large-scale systems and physical assets so vital to society that their failures undermine society and economy, in whole or major part.
Critical infrastructures are also a very useful lens through which to rethink topics of major importance like risk/uncertainty and low probability/high consequence events, or infrastructure fragility and market failure, or healthcare and NIMBYism, or that ever-present worry, Big System Collapse. Below are eight (8) reconsiderations prompted by thinking infrastructurally.
1. Thinking infrastructurally about whole-cycle risk and uncertainty.
Think of an infrastructure as having an entire cycle of operations, ranging from normal operations, through disrupted and restored back, or if not, tripping over into failure, followed by emergency response including efforts at initial service recovery, then into full asset and service recovery, and onto a new normal (if there is to be one).
There are, of course, other ways to characterize the cycle or lifespan—for example, shouldn’t maintenance and repair be separated out of normal (routine) and disrupted (non-routine) operations?—but this segmentation from normal through to a new normal works for our purposes here.
I’m suggesting that “risk and uncertainty” vary both in type and degree with respect to these different stages in infrastructure operations. In normal, disrupted and restoration operations, we observed infrastructure control room operators worrying about management risks due to complacency, misjudgment, or exhausting options. When infrastructures fail, the management risks and uncertainties are very different, however.
The cause-and-effect relationships of normal, disrupted and restored operations are moot when “operating blind” in failure. What was cause-and-effect is now replaced in failure by nonmeasurable uncertainties accompanied by disproportionate impacts, with no presumption that causation (let alone correlation) is any clearer in that conjuncture. Further, the urgency, clarity and logic in immediate emergency response entail the need for impromptu improvisations and unpredicted, let alone hitherto unimagined, shifts in human and technical interconnectivities as system failure unfolds.
As for system recovery, in earlier research the control room operators we interviewed (during their normal operations) spoke of the probability of failure being even higher in recovery than during usual times. Had we interviewed them during actual system failure, their having to energize or re-pressurize line by line may have been described in far more specially demanding terms of operating in the blind, working on the fly and riding uncertainty, full of improvisations and improvisational behavior.
In short, risk and uncertainty are to be distinguished comparatively in terms of an infrastructure’s different stages of its lifespan operations.
Once we recognize that the conventional notion of infrastructures having only two states–normal and failed–is grotesquely underspecified for empirical work, the whole-cycle comparisons of different understandings of infrastructure risk and uncertainty become more rewarding.
For example, what separates the risks and uncertainties of longer-term recovery from risks and uncertainties found in a new-normal is whether or not the infrastructures have adopted new standards for their high reliability management. Endless recovery is trying to catch-up to some kind of reliability and safety standards; new-normal is managing to standards and the risks that follow from managing to the standards.
This may or may not be in the form of earlier, old-normal standards seeking to prevent specific types of failures from ever happening. We know that major distributed internet systems, increasingly viewed as critical infrastructures, are reliable precisely because they expect components to fail and are better prepared for that eventuality, along with other contingencies. Each component should be able to fail in order for the system to be reliable unlike systems where management is geared to ensure some components never fail.
More can be said, but let me leave you with a worry: namely, those commentators who assume “the new normal” is at best endless attempts at repair, where coping is the order of the day and managing for full recovery no longer possible.
So what? Well for one thing, how can you have “proper pricing of risk,” if you don’t know the socio-technical system to be managed across its states of operation, the reliability standard to which it is to be managed then and there, and the risks and uncertainties entailed by subscribing to that standard for those systems?
2. Thinking infrastructurally about low-probability, high-consequence events.
Return to having to operate blind and on the fly in widespread infrastructure failure, where cause-and-effect scenarios most often found in normal operations have given way to being confronted by all manner of nonmeasurable uncertainties and disproportionate (i.e., predictably unimaginable) impacts, none of which seem obviously cause-and-effect.
The point is that both nonmeasurability and disproportionality still convey important information for their infrastructure operations during and after the disaster. This information is especially significant when causal understanding is most obscure(d). Not least is the fact that nonmeasurability and disproportionality tell them to prepare for and be ready to improvise, irrespective of what formal playbooks and plans have set out beforehand.
“Coping with risk” is highly misleading when an important part of that “coping” is proactive improvisations and in response to infrastructure failures that unfold in ways well beyond predicting or imagining a “low probability and high consequence event.”
3. Thinking infrastructurally about fragility of large socio-technical systems.
The last thing most people think is that infrastructures are fragile. If anything, they are massive structures, where “heavy” and “sturdy” come to mind. But the fact that they not only fail in systemwide disasters, but that they also require routine (and nonroutine) maintenance and repair as they depreciate, requires us to take the fragility features seriously.
Fortunately, there are those who write on infrastructure fragility from a broadly socio-cultural perspective rather than the socio-technical one with which I am familiar:
For all of their impressive heaviness, infrastructures are, at the end of the day, often remarkably light and fragile creatures—one or two missed inspections, suspect data points, or broken connectors from disaster. That spectacular failure is not continually engulfing the systems around us is a function of repair: the ongoing work by which “order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” . . . .
It reminds us of the extent to which infrastructures are earned and re-earned on an ongoing, often daily, basis. It also reminds us (modernist obsessions notwithstanding) that staying power, and not just change, demands explanation. Even if we ignore this fact and the work that it indexes when we talk about infrastructure, the work nonetheless goes on. Where it does not, the ineluctable pull of decay and decline sets in and infrastructures enter the long or short spiral into entropy that—if untended—is their natural fate.
Jackson, S. (2015) Repair. Theorizing the contemporary: The infrastructure toolbox. CulturalAnthropology website. Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/repair
The nod to “sociotechnical systems” is welcome as is the recognition that these systems have to be managed–a part of which is repair and maintenance–in order to operate. Added to routine and non-routine maintenance and repair are the just-in-time or just-for-now workarounds (software and hardware) that are necessitated by those inevitable technology, design and regulatory glitches–inevitable because comprehensiveness is impossible to achieve in complex large-scale sociotechnical systems.
Not only is the observed better-than-expected operation (beyond design and technology) because of repair and maintenance. It is also because real-time system operators have to actively manage in order to preclude must-never-happen events like loss of nuclear containment, cryptosporidium contamination of urban water supplies, or jumbo jets dropping like flies from the sky. That these events do from time-to-time happen only increases the widespread social dread that they must not happen again.
What to my knowledge has not been pursued in the sociotechnical literature is that specific focus on repair:
Attending to repair can also change how we approach questions of value and valuation as it pertains to the infrastructures around us. Repair reminds us that the loop between infrastructure, value, and meaning is never fully closed at points of design, but represents an ongoing and sometimes fragile accomplishment. While artifacts surely have politics (or can), those politics are rarely frozen at the moment of design, instead unfolding across the lifespan of the infrastructure in question: completed, tweaked, and sometimes transformed through repair. Thus, if there are values in design there are also values in repair—and good ethical and political reasons to attend not only to the birth of infrastructures, but also to their care and feeding over time.
That the values expressed through repair (we would say, expressed as the practices of actual repair) need to be understood as thoroughly as the practices of actual design reflects, I believe, a major research gap in the sociotechnical literature with which I am familiar.
Finally, I cannot over-stress the importance of this notion of infrastructure fragility, contrary to any sturdy-monolith imaginary one might have. One can only hope, by way of example, that wind energy infrastructure being imposed by the Morocco-Siemens occupiers of Western Sahara is so fragile as to necessitate of them endlessly massive and costly repairs and maintenance.
4. Thinking infrastructurally about the market failure economists don’t talk about.
Economists tell us there are four principal types of market failure: public goods, externalities, asymmetric information, and market power. They do not talk about the fifth type, the one where efficient markets actually cause market failure by destroying the infrastructure underlying and stabilizing markets and their allocative activities.
Consider here the 2010 flash crash of the U.S. stock market. Subsequent investigations found that market transactions happened so quickly and were so numerous under conditions of high-frequency trading and collocated servers that a point came when no liquidity was left to meet proffered transactions. Liquidity dried up and with it, price discovery. ‘‘Liquidity in a high-speed world is not a given: market design and market structure must ensure that liquidity provision arises continuously in a highly fragmented, highly interconnected trading environment,’’ as a report by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) put it for the crash. Here, efficiencies realized through high transaction speeds worked against a market infrastructure that would have operated reliably otherwise.
The school economist will counter by insisting, ‘‘Obviously the market was not efficient because the full costs of reliability were not internalized.’’ But my point remains: Market failure under standard normal conditions of efficiency say nothing about anything so fundamental as infrastructure reliability as foundational to economic efficiency.
The research challenge is to identify under what conditions does the fifth market failure arises empirically. Until that is done, the better part of wisdom—the better part of government regulation—would be to assume fully efficient markets are low-performance markets when the stabilizing market infrastructure underlying them is prone to this type of market failure.
But what, then, is “prone”? Low-performing market infrastructure results from the vigorous pursuit of self-interest and cost-cutting when hobbling real-time market infrastructure operators in choosing strategies for high reliability of the market infrastructure.
There is another way to put the point: High reliability management of critical infrastructures does not mean those infrastructures are to run at 100% full capacity. Quite the reverse. High reliability requires the respective infrastructures not work full throttle: Positive redundancy or fallback assets and options—what the economists’ mis-identified “excess capacity”—are needed in case of sudden loss of running assets and facilities, the loss of which would threaten infrastructure-wide reliability and, with it, price discovery. To accept that “every system is stretched to operate at its capacity” may well be the worst threat to an infrastructure and its economic contributions.
In this view, critical infrastructures are economically most reliably productive when full capacity is not the long-term operating goal. Where so, efficiency no longer serves as a benchmark for economic performance. Rather, we must expect the gap between actual capacity and full capacity in the economy to be greater under a high reliability standard, where the follow-on impacts for the allocation and distribution of services serve and act as investments in having a long term.
5.Thinking infrastructurally about healthcare.
The US Department of Homeland Security states healthcare is one of the nation’s critical infrastructures sectors, along with others like large-scale water and energy supplies.
Infrastructures, however, vary considerably in their mandates to provide vital services safely and continuously–that is, highly reliable. The energy infrastructure differs depending on whether it is for electricity or natural gas, while the latter two differ from large-scale water supplies (I’ve studied all three). Yet the infrastructures for water and energy, with their central control rooms, are more similar when compared to, say, education or healthcare without such centralized operations center.
What would healthcare look like if it were managed more like other infrastructures that have centralized control rooms and systems, such as those for water and energy? Might the high reliability of infrastructural elements within the healthcare sector be a major way to better ensure patient safety?
Four points are offered by way of answer:
(1) High reliability theory and practice suggest that the manufacture of vaccines and compounds can be made reliable and safe, at least up to the point of patient injection, the so-called sharp-end of healthcare. Failure in those back-end processes is exceptionally notable—as in the fungal meningitis contamination at the New England Compounding Center—because failure here is preventable.
So what? When dominated by considerations of the sharp-end, we overlook—at our peril—the strong-end of healthcare with its backward linkages for producing medicines and treatments reliably and safely.
(2) If healthcare were an infrastructure more like those with centralized control centers, the criticality and centrality of societal dread in driving reliable service provision would be dramatically underscored.
Yet, aside from that special and important case of public health emergencies (think the COVID-19 pandemic), civic attitudes toward health and medical safety lack the public dread we find to be the key foundation of support for the level of reliability pursued in other infrastructures. Commission of medical errors hasn’t generated the level of public dread associated with nuclear meltdowns or jumbo-jetliners dropping from the air. Medical errors, along with fires in medical facilities, are often “should-never-happen events,” not “must-never-happen events.”
What would generate the widespread societal dread needed to produce “must-never-happen” behavior? Answer: Public recognition that getting medical treatment kills or maims you unless professionally managed reliably and safely.
(3) How a reliable and safe healthcare system encourages a more reliable healthcare consumer would be akin to asking how does a reliable grid or water supply encourage the electricity or water consumer to be energy or water conscious. Presumably, the movement to bring real-time monitoring healthcare technology into the patient’s habitation is increasingly part of that calculus.
(4) In all the focus on the patient sharp-end, it mustn’t be forgotten that there are healthcare control rooms beyond those of manufacturers of medicines mentioned above: Think most immediately of the pharmacy systems inside and outside hospitals and their pharmacists/prescriptionists as reliability professionals.
One final point follows from an infrastructure perspective on healthcare risks and uncertainties. Can we find systematically interconnected healthcare providers so critical in the US that they could bring the healthcare sector down (say, as was threatened when the 12 systematically interconnected banking institutions were under threat during the 2008 financial crisis)? If so, we would have a healthcare sector in need of “stress tests” for systemic risks just as post-2008 financial services institutions had to undergo.
6. Thinking infrastructurally about cognitive reversals.
What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when business is entirely on the line? We have to risk failure in order to succeed!
But what if the business is one of the many critical infrastructures privately owned or managed Here, if upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, do so in order to reduce the chances of systemwide failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.
When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results have been deadly:
• Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.
• Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.
• Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.
In brief, decision-rule reversals have led to system failures and more: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; and the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.
“But, that’s a strawman,” someone counters. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.” Really?
The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks first like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if requiring emergency and related organizations to cooperate in ways they currently cannot, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties, let alone really-existing impracticalities.
7. Thinking infrastructurally about NIMBYism (newly added)
They believe that climate change is actually happening but don’t want those wind-farms off their coastlines. Those driving electric cars are opposed by those demanding no more automobiles on the roads. Those who want more renewable energy here are among groups opposing new construction of transmission lines from there.
The commonplace is to insist there are trade-offs involved. But the fact of the matter is tradeoffs aren’t the only starting point. How so?
Start with an observation in yesterday’s 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 instances of NIMBYism in the first section are not contradictions only but also part and parcel of transitions underway? What if the oppositions involved aren’t stalemates but instead are already leading to something else or different?
And to be clear, I do not imply the transitions are all positive or all lead to a clean energy economy or better yet, degrowth. Nor am I implying that the transitions are fueled only or primarily by contradictions that are untenable over time. I am asking you, in this thought experiment, to focus on complex states of affairs that are called transitions.
One such complex transition underway is the transfer of renewable energy between and across different electricity grids in the US.
As is frequently 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 the ongoing transitioning to clean energy. True, how much of that is going on is hard to document. True, the regional grids are fragmented and true more renewable energy interconnections are needed.
But, again, that would be part of a transition that is underway, at least when it comes to transfers of renewable energy between and across existing grids.
So what?
Go back to the Nimbyism: There, the point of departure is the individual or a city (say, voter or, a collectivity of voters). Electricity grids in contrast are complex organizations, even institutions, with their own reliability standards and interinfrastructural connectivities (to water, roads and telecommunications, for example).
Again, 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 Nimby 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.
To summarize: Transitioning to clean energy in my backyard is in the yard of inter-regional energy infrastructures.
8. Thinking infrastructurally about Big System Collapse.
Here are early warning signals—typically not recognized—that those major critical infrastructures upon which we survive are in fact operating at, or beyond, their performance edges:
–The infrastructure’s control room is in prolonged just-for-now performance. This means operators find it more difficult to maneuver out of a corner in which they find themselves. (“Yes, yes, I know this is risky, but just keep it online for now!”)
–The real-time control operators are working outside their official or unofficial bandwidths for performance—in effect having to work outside their unique domain of competence.
–The decision rules operators reliably followed before are turned inside out: “Prove we can do that” becomes “Prove we can’t.”
–Real-time operational redesigns (workarounds) by control room operators of inevitably defective equipment, premature software, and incomplete procedures are not effective as before.
–Their control room skills as professionals in identifying systemwide patterns and undertaking what-if scenario become attenuated or no longer hold.
–Instead of being driven by dread of the next major failure, control room professionals are told that their track record up to now is to be benchmark for system reliability ahead.
I have yet to come across these as key indicators of infrastructure and big system collapse in the literature I’ve read.
Principal sources: Excerpted and revised from previous blog entries.
—Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
—Drylands, remittances and the twelve rules for radicals
—“Adaptable” and “flexible” are not nuanced enough to catch the place-specific nature of pastoralist improvisations
—Colin Strang or Garrett Hardin: Which one do you believe?
—Which “rangeland restoration”?
—Pastoralisms on the offense, not just defended (newly revised and expanded)
—Environmental livestock-tarring
—Frustrated herders
–Not the marginal or marginalized herder, but rather: Which of the precarious ones? (just added)
—It makes a difference for policy and management when describing pastoralism in terms of capitalism and not first and foremost as a global infrastructure (newly added)
Subsistence agriculture and livestock: how reliability-seeking and risk-averse differ
—A risk-averse farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites so that, if one fails, s/he has others to fall back on. The more different crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he won’t lose everything. Where possible, the risk-averse farmer avoids hazards whose probabilities and uncertainties cannot be managed so as to maintain a survival mix of crops, livestock and productive sites. The risk-averse farmer faces a land carrying capacity that sets exogenous limits on the total crops and livestock produced.
—A reliability-seeking farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites because any single resource—e.g., the land that sustains the crop, site and livestock—is managed better if it provides multiple services. The more crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he can meet peak demands made on his/her production system. The reliability-seeking farmer seeks to manage the probabilities and uncertainties of hazards that cannot be avoided so as to maintain a peak mix of crops, livestock and sites. The reliability-seeking farmer faces a carrying capacity whose endogenous limits are set by farmer skills for and experience with different operating scales and production phases.
Upshot
Farming behavior, no matter if labelled “subsistence,” that
is developed around high technical competence and highly complex activities,
requires high levels of sustained performance, oversight and flexibility,
is continually in search of improvement,
maintains great pressures, incentives and expectations for continuous production, and
is predicated on maintaining peak (not minimum) livestock numbers in a highly reliable fashion without threatening the limits of system survival
is scarcely what one would call “risk-averse.”
Resilience is a plural noun
The topic here is herders of livestock primarily in the African rangelands. Below are two different redescriptions of herders and their systems: it’s resiliencies, not just resilience; and disasters-averted need to be far more recognized and capitalized on.
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, and the opposite of the individual is the collective (think: “team situational awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.
We observed reliability professionals in 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
Reliability 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 reliability professionals (restoration resilience);
Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (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 when it comes to pastoralists?
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 their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
To return to Table 1, 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. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, and reliably so. Shifting from one watering point, when an interfering problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough 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 normal 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 high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity 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.
Source
Krätli, S. (2015) Valuing Variability: New Perspectives on Climate Resilient Drylands Development, London:IIED http://pubs.iied.org/10128IIED.html
Disaster-averted is central to pastoralist development
I
My argument is that if crises averted by pastoralists were identified and more differentiated, we’d better understand how far short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.
To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other infrastructure reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Why? Because we are told that ultimately what matters far more are the infrastructure disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.
Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.
II
Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other related processes matter for pastoralists and others. The same for modernization, late capitalism, global environmental destruction, and the climate emergency. But they matter when differentiated and better specified in terms of their “with respect to.”
Just what is marketization with respect to in your case? Smallstock? Mechanized transportation? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or grazing conditions? How do the broader processes collapsed under “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?
Most important, appeals to generalized processes or state conditions diminish the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.
But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios demonstrate how these broad processes preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.
III
Let me give an example. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports a finding in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” from his research in Georgia:
A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.
Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that
my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .
I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core to understanding that disasters-averted remain very real, even if not identified, let alone publicized, by outsiders preoccupied with what hasn’t been averted.
Should it need saying, some with-respect-to scenarios do specify how such phrases result from an ongoing interaction and dialectic between the wider processes and local particularities. I’d hope, though, you’d want to see details behind any such assertion first.
IV
So what? How does the argued importance of disasters-averted compel rethinking pastoralist development? One example will have to suffice: the need to recast “pastoralist elites.”
I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”
My question then: Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to the critics of elites? The answer is important because an over-arching development aim of the 1980s arid and semi-arid lands programs in Kenya was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.
My own answer to the preceding question would now focus on the disasters averted over time by pastoralists, both those who are today’s elites and those who aren’t. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed the ways they did.
Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, the refocusing on disasters-averted over time holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.
Which leads me to the question that should be obvious to any reader: Since when are researchers to decide that time stops sufficiently in a study period to certify who among herders are advantaged going forward, let alone what are the metrics for determining such? When did the development narrative become “poor herders and farmers must advance at the same rate or even faster than advantaged ones?”
Sources
Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.
The great virtue of political ecology, in my view, has been to complexify narratives of scarcity-of-this-or-that-sort leads to land-use conflict. I want to suggest, though, that even the more nuanced, multi-causal explanations can be pushed and pulled further.
In particular, I’m not sure that “conflict,” after a point, helps or aids better pastoralist policy and development. In no way should the following be construed as criticism of those writing on land-use conflicts nor is my contribution a justification for killing people. I suggest only that there may be a different way of interpreting what is going on, and if there is, then there may be other ways even better to productively rethink the policy issues involved.
To that end, I use two lenses from the framework in my 2020 STEPS paper.
II
The first is the logic of requisite variety. 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.
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 sudden herd die-offs). Indeed, some discussion of jihadist raids by young pastoralist men in the Sahel seems to reflect the changing composition and level of variance around the outputs and outcomes (as if there was something like “young-men pastoralism” whose outputs had been changed by or with jihadism).
So what?
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 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 livestock raid (or such) is more than a livestock raid.
III
The second lens to refocus land-use conflicts is the entire cycle of infrastructure operations. A livestock raid undertaken by one pastoralist group on another in order to repair or restore its herd numbers/composition differs from the livestock raid undertaken as an immediate emergency response to having the entire system of operations or herd disappear because of some systemwide calamity.
As for those jihadist inspired and supported raids by young pastoralist men, it’s important to determine if those raids are best understood as recovery efforts to a new normal (recovery of a failed system is much more inter-organizationally demanding–think conventional humanitarian aid—than service restoration after a temporary disruption by the system on its own). Much of the current literature on the plight of pastoralists seems as well to be equating recurring pastoralist recoveries after failures as its new normal.
IV
Again: So what?
As with the logic of requisite variety, the whole cycle requires those involved in pastoralist policy and management to first differentiate cases of “land-use conflict” before proposing or adopting policy interventions. It isn’t merely about that old nostrum: Conflict can be productive, not destructive. Rather, land-use conflicts are fundamentally different cases of different lands, different uses and different conflicts.
This is especially true if one takes a long-term perspective on pastoralist systems and their evolution. A “conflict” going on for 30 years or more is obviously one that pushes and pulls to center-stage both the full cycle of pastoralist operations across time and the logic of requisite variety at any point in time for transforming input variability into sustained (though over time changing) outputs and outcomes.
Reframing the latest drought in East Africa
Nothing in what follows argues against the latest East Africa drought being of catastrophic proportions in terms of human and livestock deaths and migrations. What I want to do here is contextualize this catastrophe differently in order to show what remains a catastrophe has some different but very important policy and management implications.
I
Start with the current debates over periodizing World Wars I and II. It’s one thing to adopt the conventional periodization of the latter as 1939 – 1945. It is another thing to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding to and from a central paroxysm in Europe.
In the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with the Shoah and the carnage, was short and embedded in a much longer series of large regional wars. These in turn were less preludes to each other than an unfolding process that was indeed worldwide. (Think: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the late 1940s Dutch war in Indonesia, the French war in Indochina from the late 1940s through early 1950s, and the Korean War, among regional conflicts across the globe.)
II
Now think of the latest East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. What follows from such a construction?
Well, one thing that follows is so obvious that it might be missed. This East Africa drought is not a paroxysm for pastoralism systems worldwide, let alone in the world’s arid and semi-arid lands.
Even the current climate emergency would fall short of that role, given so much regional and local variation in climate response to date. Of course, we can imagine a global polycrisis involving drought, climate change and the like, but that scenario would inevitably be but one of other potential polycrisis scenarios out there.
III So, let’s return to East Africa as the unit and level of analysis, with the current drought being an indisputable paroxysm.
What follows for policy and management there?
Current emergency management lingo about this or that “longer-term recovery” would be considerably problematized when the longer term is one drought unfolding into another drought and so on. Immediate emergency response would look considerably less immediate when embedded in a process of recurring response always before the next disaster.
To be clear here, it’s an advance in pastoralist development to embed mechanisms for explicit emergency preparedness, immediate response and longer term recovery. But no one should delude themselves into believing that making explicit these stages and identifying interventions won’t highlight the ongoing and unfolding difficulties in recasting these processes in terms that policy or management narratives with beginnings, middles and ends.
IV What does this mean practically?
What does it mean to frame the current East Africa drought as a paroxysm that extends both the spatial and temporal terms of “recurring drought response and recovery across East Africa”?
Clearly then one major issue is government budgets (in the plural) for their recurrent operations in pastoralist areas. Or more negatively, you’re looking at the recurrent cost crises of East Africa governments–which, to my mind, far too few critics analyze as they seem more fixated on the obvious failures of capital development projects and programs for pastoralists.
My own view (and I stand to be corrected) is that you have to have recurrent operating budget already in place in order to get recurring drought response and recovery more effective on the ground over time.
V Anything else?
One of the major reasons why “recurring drought response and recovery” is better part of government’s recurrent rather than capital budget is because pastoralists give ongoing priority to the real-time prevention of other disasters from happening along the way and the need for their improvisational behavior to do that.
Yes, the government budget for staff operations falls woefully short in helping pastoralists do so, but it is government operations we are talking about, not the log-frame of a project.
Source
Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.
A Shackle analysis of Borana sedentarization
I
Unlike many economists of his generation or later ones, G.L.S. Shackle was preoccupied with how economic agents make real-time decisions in situations so uncertain that no one, including agents, knows the range of options and their probability distributions upon which to decide.
In answer, Shackle produced an analysis based on possibilities rather than probabilities and what is desirable or undesirable rather than what is optimal or feasible.
For Shackle, possibility is the inverse of surprise (the greater an agent’s disbelief that something will happen, the less possible it is from their perspective). Understanding what is possible depends on the agents thinking about what they find surprising, namely, identifying what one would take to be counter-expected or unexpected events that could arise from or be associated with the decision in question. Once they think through these alternative or rival scenarios, the agents should be better able to ascribe to each how (more or less) desirable or undesirable a possibility it is.
These dimensions of possibility (possible to not possible) and desiredness (desirable to undesirable) form the four cells of a Shackle analysis, in which the decisionmakers position the perceived rival options. Their challenge is to identify under what conditions, if any, the more undesirable-but-possible options and/or the more desirable-but-not-possible options could become both desirable and possible. In doing so, they seek to better underwrite and stabilize the assumptions for their decisionmaking.
II
Let’s move now from the simplifications to a complexifying example. Consider the following conclusion from an investigation of sedentarization among Borana pastoralists:
Although in the case of this study we can speculate generally about what has prompted the sedentarization adaptation from quantitative analysis and the narratives of local residents, we do not sufficiently understand the specific institutions and information that individuals, households, and communities have utilized in their adaptation decision making. Only in understanding the mechanisms of such inter-scale adaptations can national and state governments work toward increasing community agency and promoting effective and efficient local adaptive capacity.
Such an admission is as rare as it is much needed in the policy and management research with which I am familiar. Thus the point made below should not be considered a criticism of the case study findings. Here I want to use the Shackle analysis to push their conclusion further.
III
At least in this example we know where to start the Shackle analysis: sedentarization’s dismal track record.
Briefly stated, what and where are now undesirable adaptations in Ethiopian pastoralist sedentarization–by government? by communities? by others?–that: were not possible then and there but are now; or were possible then and there but are not now? More specifically, where else in Ethiopia, if at all, are conditions such that those undesirable adaptations of sedentarization are now considered more desirable by pastoralist communities themselves?
If there is even one case of a community where the undesirable has now become desirable and where the now-desired is (still) possible, then sedentarization is not a matter of, well, settled knowledge.
Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, [and] (iii) steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.
This epigraph focuses specifically on the how to think about policies that better respond to effects of automation on displacing workers.
Please re-read the epigraph and then undertake the following thought experiment.
I
Imagine it is pastoralists who are being displaced from their usual herding workplaces, in this case by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other largely exogenous factors.
The 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.
II
Yes, yes, of course there are the NGO, donor project, and local department trying to work along these lines. But one has to ask at this point in development history whether their existence is the excuse government uses for avoiding having to undertake such policies, regionally or nationally.
III
A more productive exercise might be to ask: How would various pro-pastoralist interventions be classified: as compensatory, as investment, and/or as steering?
It seems to me that many of the pro-pastoralist interventions fall under the rubric of “steering policies”. The aim is to keep pastoralists who are already there, there–and better off in some regards. Better veterinary measures, paravets and mobile teachers that travel with the herding households, real-time marketing support, mobile health clinics, restocking programs as and when needed, better water point management and participation, and the like are offered up as ways to improve herding livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid lands.
IV
Fair enough, but clearly not far enough, right?
For where are the corresponding compensation and investment policies?
Where, for example, are the policy interventions for improving and capitalizing on re-entry of remittance-sending members back into pastoralism once 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?
V
So what?
This missing government policies would function much along the lines government support of various “new green initiatives” are meant to: They seek to derisk dryland development by enlisting the private capital of pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and farmers via adjusting the risk/returns on their private investments in local infrastructure, such as markets and transportation. Obviously this is easier said than done and would have distributional impacts if done.
Drylands, remittances and the twelve rules for radicals
–Any number of radical proposals have been made for addressing problems of the globe’s rangelands, including: the end of capitalism and extractivism, redistribution of wealth, and reparations.
In an important sense, though, these are not be radical enough. I have in mind the “twelve rules for radicals” of the late organizer, Saul Alinsky, two in particular being:
RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
–By extension, use the logic of capitalism, extractivism and financial accumulation to benefit rangelands and pastoralists, e.g.:
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.
Now extend this kind of thinking to the likes of G7 and many OECD countries. The aim, again, is not to dismiss current radical proposals, but to find opportunities to exploit all twelve of Alinsky’s rules for radicals.
“Adaptable” and “flexible” are not nuanced enough to catch the place-specific nature of pastoralist improvisations
–Return to an old resource management typology. Its two dimensions are: (1) fixed resources/mobile resources and (2) fixed management/mobile management.
The repeated example of the mobile resources/mobile management cell has been pastoralist (nomadic/transhumant) herders. Fortunately, the truth of the matter has always been more usefully complicated.
From the standpoint of sustaining biodiversity across wide rangelands, some pastoralist systems are examples of mobile management (e.g., of grazers or browsers) with respect to fixed resources (different patches at different points and times along routes or itineraries). Indeed, this may be occurring because fixed on-site biodiversity management is too costly to undertake, if not altogether unimaginable otherwise.
–Now ratchet up the complexity. What had been mobile management must now be fixed; and what had been a fixed resource or asset now must be mobile.
Example: During the COVID lockdown, some pastoralists created informal bush markets at or near their kraals as alternatives to the now-restricted formal marketplaces. So too do formal associations of pastoralists participating in distant conference negotiations or near-by problem-solving meetings exemplify a now differently fixed resource exercising now differently-mobile management.
It’s good to remember that not only government can (and should) make their fixed-point resources–formal markets or social protection infrastructure–mobile.
–So what?
Terms, like “adaptable” and “flexible,” are not nuanced enough to catch the place-specific improvisational property of that adaptability and flexibility in undertaking shifts from fixed to mobile or mobile to fixed.
More formally, being skilled at real-time improvisation is what we also must expect of pastoralists whose chief system control variable is their real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (which can of course include adjusting livestock numbers through off-take).
Colin Strang or Garrett Hardin: Which one do you believe?
M: You seem now to be in the paradoxical position of saying that if everyone evaded [e.g., paying taxes], it would be disastrous and yet no one is to blame. . . .But surely there can’t be a disaster of this kind for which no one is to blame.
D: If anyone is to blame it is the person whose job it is to circumvent evasion. If too few people vote, then it should be made illegal not to vote. If too few people volunteer, you must introduce conscription. If too many people evade taxes, you must tighten up your enforcement. My answer to your ‘If everyone did that’ is ‘Then some one had jolly well better see that they don’t’. . .
Colin Strang, philosopher, “What If Everyone Did That?”, 1960
Eight years later, we get Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Common, whose answer to “What if every herder did that?” is: “We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust–but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”
Get real: We’ve always known the better question is: Whose job is it to ensure overgrazing doesn’t happen? Which, to be frank, continues to be the same as asking: Whose job is it to define “overgrazing”?
NB: One of the biting ironies is that Hardin’s explicit piece on morality took no account of Strang’s essay, which was among the most cited and anthologized in collections on ethics and morality at that time.
Which “rangeland restoration”?
I
“Restore” is a very big word in infrastructure studies. It’s been applied to: (1) interrupted service provision restored back to normal infrastructure operations; (2) services initially restored after the massive failure of infrastructure assets; and (3) key equipment or facilities restored after a non-routine “outage” as part of regular maintenance and repair.
To be clear, what follows are overlapping examples, but good-enough for our purposes:
–An ice storm passes through, leading to a temporary closure of a section of the road system. Detours may or may not be possible until the affected roadways are restored. This is an example of #1.
–An earthquake hits, systemwide telecommunications fail outright big time, and mobile cell towers are brought in by way of immediate response to restore telecom services, at least initially. This is an example #2.
–A generator in a power plant trips offline. Repairs are undertaken, often involving manual, hands-on work so as to restore back on line. This kind of sudden outage happens all the time and is considered part of the electric utility’s standard-normal M&R (maintenance and repair). This is an example of #3.
II
Now think of “rangeland restoration” in these terms of 1 – 3, e.g.:
#1: Stall feeding, which is here part of normal operations, is restored after an unexpected interruption in its version of a supply chain. Trucking of water and livestock, which are also part of normal livestock operations there, are temporarily interrupted.
#2: Grasslands have been appropriated for other uses (the infamous agriculture), requiring indefinite use of alternative livestock feed and grazing until a more permanent solution is found.
#3: A grassland fire—lightning strikes are a common enough occurrence though unevenly distributed—takes part of the grasslands out of use, at least until (after) the next rains. Herders respond by reverting to more intensive alternative intensive grazing practices for what’s left to work with.
III
Now, the implications are major. Here’s one: the issue of overgrazing is often a sideshow distracting from what is actually going on infrastructurally. Because normal operations—remember, it’s the benchmark used here for comparisons—always has had overgrazing in its operations.
What, for example, do you think the sacrifice grazing around a livestock borehole is about? There is nothing to “restore” the immediate perimeter of this borehole back to. In fact, that “overgrazed perimeter” is an asset in normal operations of the livestock production and livelihood systems I have in mind.
III
So what?
As I read them, calls for “rangeland restoration” are a contradiction in infrastructure parlance, namely: “rangeland recovery back to an old normal.” Recovery in infrastructure terms is a massively complex, longer term, multi-stakeholder activity without any guarantees following on immediate emergency response to outright full system collapse.
Pastoralisms on the offense, not just defended
I
Pastoralists and their herds need to be defended against state depredations, private capture and encroachment, and livestock tarring by climate activists. I can also see the need for those defenders who believe “structural problems require structural solutions,” even when leaving “the low mean cunning” (their term, not mine) to others.
What I don’t understand are the negative narratives of corpse-pastoralism, sliced by conflicts, petrified into inequalities, buried at sea in liquid modernity, and dissolved in the quicklime of disaster capitalism, all the while harboring worse to come. As if dryland herding were nothing more than a side-hustle, an income- or asset-generating activity pursued in the informal economy and always alongside the primary employment of other household members elsewhere. The university student sells items digitally from her bedroom and so the pastoralists sell milk from their household’s fifth room, the adjacent range.
II
If pastoralism were on the offense and not always defensive, it would be far clearer about the double standards operating in these negative narratives. Allow me a few examples:
Indigenous populations and their land rights are now taken by the Left as an essential part of democratic struggles (and not just in the Americas). But where are pastoralists holding livestock and claiming their land rights in the literature on this indigeneity?
We hear about the need to move infrastructure change away from powerful fossil-fuel actors towards more inclusive low-carbon futures. But where is the focus in that literature on pastoralists already practicing such futures? We hear about the methane contributions of livestock to global warming, but what about the reverse climate risks associated with curtailing pastoralism and in doing so its pro-biodiversity advantages?
We know dryland pastoralists have members sending back vital remittances from their urban areas of residence. But when was the last time you heard of researchers studying the migrant struggles of these many household members for better housing and care in the many urban areas where they live and work? I’d wager conflicts involving fewer jihadists and fewer farmers get more attention in the pastoralist research.
The literature on varieties of capitalism demonstrates that capitalism is better understood as “an assemblage of actors (both state and market), policies and people” (in contrast to a directed project of global capital reproduction and accumulation). How then could pastoralisms not be intertwined with capitalisms? Trade routes and transactions involving livestock were a single feature of arid and semi-arid commercial societies well before the advent of capitalism.
And, just to make sure we are on the same page, that “capitalist” is very misleading when it obscures understanding the overlap between pastoralisms and what is now known as “the foundational economy” (FE):
“The FE comprises two parts,” according to researchers writing on cases in Sweden. “Material FE connects households to daily essentials and encompasses utilities (electricity, gas and water), transport and telecommunication infrastructure, food production and distribution, as well as private banking services. Providential FE includes a subset of activities providing welfare services (education, health and care) as well as systems of income maintenance.”
So too do pastoralist societies serve the same infrastructural function as other foundational economies do across time and space.
Assume livestock are toxic weapons that must be renounced in the name of climate change. Like nuclear weapons, they pose such a global threat that nations sign the Livestock Non-Proliferation Treaty (LNPT). It’s to rollback, relinquish or abolish livestock, analogous to the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty.
How then would the LNPT be implemented, i.e., what are the ways to reduce these toxic stockpiles of dangerous animals?
If the history of the nuclear proliferation treaty is our guide, the livestock elimination focus quickly becomes the feasibility and desirability of particular elimination scenarios. Scenarios in the plural because context matters, e.g., the way South Africa renounced nuclear weapons could not be the same ways Belarus and Ukraine relinquished them, etc.
–So assume livestock elimination scenarios are just as differentiated. We would expect reductions in different types of intensive livestock production to be among the first priority scenarios under LNPT. After that, extensive livestock systems would be expected to have different rollback scenarios as well. For example, we would expect livestock to remain where they have proven climate-positive impacts: Livestock are shown also to promote biodiversity, and/or serve as better fire management, and/or establish food sovereignty, and/or enable off-rangeland employment of those who would have herded livestock instead, etc.
In other words, we would expect–well, how to put this obvious fact?–livestock scenarios that are already found empirically widespread.
–Which raises the important question: Wouldn’t the LNPT put us right back to where we are anyway with respect to livestock?
–In case there is any doubt about the high disesteem in which I hold the notion of a LNPT, let me be clear:
If corporate greenwashing is, as one definition has it, “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false positive perceptions of a system’s environmental performance,” then environmental livestock-tarring is “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false negative perceptions of a system’s environmental performance.”
Inability to tolerate empty spaces limits the space available.
W.R. Bion, psychoanalyst
I
How is it that we outsiders can be certain about pastoralist wants and needs? One answer is that pastoralists tell us what’s what.
Another answer, the one I explore here, is when pastoralists do no such thing. Even if they say, “This is what we want and need,” there are important occasions where they are no are more omniscient about their needs and wants than are the question askers–or for that matter the rest of us.
On the upside, a continuing asking and answering can clarify the respective needs and wants–even if in unpredictable or uncontrollable ways by those involved.
II
The problem is when needs and wants fit too easily in with the language game of deprivation and gratification. In this view, pastoralist needs and wants are deprivations that continue and change only for the better when gratified. Gratifying needs and wants, as such, turn into as a species of prediction, for which planning and its cognates are suitable responses.
The reality of contingency is that the future, let alone the present, is not that predictable. In this reality, peoples’ needs are more an experiment than something to be met, or not.
III
Let me sketch three of the policy and management implications:
1. First and foremost, the frequency of wants and needs being frustrated–be they pastoralist, NGO, researcher, or government–is more to the point than deprivation and gratification.
Frustration not only because needs and wants aren’t fulfilled, but also frustration over having to figure what the needs and wants really are. Researchers are frustrated, pastoralists are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too some government officials.
The good news is when learning to handle frustrations, induced with government and NGO interventions, means having to think more about what works and that more thinking means better handling of inevitable frustrations ahead. To my mind, a center of gravity around frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling frustrations better is about what you–you, me, pastoralist, NGO staff person, researcher, government official–do between bouncing back and bouncing forward.
2. Still, saying we have to handle frustrations without being paralyzed or stalemated sounds like a bit too pat an answer.
I’m arguing, though, that these frustrations are better appreciated when recast as the core driver of relationships between and among pastoralists, researchers, NGOs and government staff. Bluntly stated, this is how the principal sides know they are in a relationship: They pose problems for the other and when those problems are frustrating, the salience of the relationship(s) increases for more parties.
3. This is why I make it such a big issue about just who are pastoralists talking to. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Who in government, if anybody, are pastoralist kith and kin talking to or want to talk to?
Are they in a relationship, however, asymmetrical, or is it that others are just a nuisance for them, if that? Is the researcher actually frustrated with the pastoralists s/he is studying and, if so, in what ways is that frustration keeping their relationship going? Here too it is important, I think, to distinguish between those skilled in riding uncertainties and allied frustrations and those whose skills in relationships or otherwise are elsewhere.
Not the marginal or marginalized herder, but rather: Which of the precarious ones?
I
Pastoralist knowledge is an endangered species. More than marginalized, the practices are precarious—threatened where not extinct. Not only are the transmitters disappearing (the old-time pastoralists and transhumant nomads), but the forms of transmission—traditional knowledge, oral cultures, parent-to-child herding practices—are also slipping away.
II
If the preceding sounds like a familiar narrative, it has been written to be that way. For this is the view many have of pastoralism. It, after all, accords with many facts, e.g., the declines in young herders and their training/apprenticing.
The narrative needs to be pushed further, though. For governments have added a third type of precarity to the mix of disappearing practices and practitioners, namely: the latter were much less useful, anyway, than official policies and programs.
Why does this matter?
Because marginal and precarious are not the synonyms. Precarious differentiates behavior in ways that all those repetitions of marginal and marginalized do not. For it turns out precarity has more dimensions.
III
How so?
When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the more common refrain is these herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.
Since the study of pastoralism appears to be stuck with the term’s use and abuse, may I suggest a different, more positive dimension of their precarity:
The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .
Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York
Pastoralists, in this sense, continue to illuminate to our advantage what others persist texting as “the margins.”
It makes a difference for policy and management when describing pastoralism in terms of capitalism and not first and foremost as a global infrastructure
I
Please take the time to read the following excerpts from a fine study by Marty et al (2022) on Maasai pastoralists in contemporary southern Kenya:
As an adaptation process, diversification brings new opportunities for some people, but can also displace risks and bring new exposures for others, acting as ‘a socially stratifying capitalist fix providing new avenues for accumulation and market penetration’, benefiting a small elite (Mikulewicz 2021, 424)’. . . .
Our results also align with recent research evidencing the increased importance of capital relations for grazing access in the context of changing land use across Kajiado (Jeppesen and Hassan 2022), which is likely to further accentuate processes of social differentiation and associated class formation dynamics. . . .
Our findings suggest that diversification tends to promote more individualized and market-based adaptation strategies, but that the drivers and ramifications of increased integration into capitalist production systems and renegotiation of production relations are complex and dynamic. Differentiated engagements with diversification in pastoral areas are not only related to changing material conditions, but also linked to ‘intangible’ dimensions, such as changing norms and values. New social differentiations emerge through the increased emphasis placed on formal education and how knowledge influences one’s position within the community and beyond (e.g. the relation to state or non-governmental actors). At the same time, other entrenched markers of differentiation persist and are crystalized through exclusionary decision-making processes and established roles, perhaps most notably gendered discriminations. The research findings thus underscore the need for climate change adaptation planning in agrarian environments to extend beyond the dominant technical focus (Eriksen, Nightingale, and Eakin 2015), by showing how adaptation processes in pastoral environments are closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations.
Edwige Marty, Renee Bullock, Matthew Cashmore, Todd Crane & Siri Eriksen (2022): Adapting to climate change among transitioning Maasai pastoralists in southern Kenya:an intersectional analysis of differentiated abilities to benefit from diversification processes., The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2121918
I’ve left the original references in to indicate that the authors are not alone in their views–which to be clear I believe to be true as far as they go.
I want to go further and take up the authors’ own suggestion that the adaptation processes be studied in terms of how they are now “closely intertwined within rapidly evolving socio-political and economic transformations”.
II
Let’s look at the history behind those “socio-political and economic transformations.”
Since there are many historians to choose from, allow me to take the most recent one I’ve read: Capitalism: The story behind the word, by historian of ideas, Michael Sonenscher (2022, Princeton University Press).
I believe he is well-regarded, but that doesn’t matter for what follows: There are plenty of histories of capitalist relations, any number of which usefully complicate the above quote and indeed compel us to go further.
–Sonenscher starts by underscoring that the development of commercial societies preceded the development of capitalism. Most notably, commercial societies had markets induced by divisions of labor that preceded capitalist class formation. Indeed, capitalist terminology introduce has served to misdirect analysts away from the high degree of economic differentiation on and specialization in commercial societies–again prior to introduction of capitalist relations for initially for financing war and debt.
–Some readers will have already recognized that this emphasis on trade and markets, along with a division of labor that was differentiated and specialized in terms of trade routes and trade transactions, also characterized major pastoralist societies well before the commonly narrated version of 18th – 19th century introduction of (Western) capitalism.
III
–So what if these earlier commercial societies had markets and transactions for goods and services?
After all, the point underscored in the above extended quote and many like it is that those earlier formations have long been superseded by capitalist relations and their accentuation/extension into what are no longer and must now be considered “former pastoralist societies.”
Really? Are we sure about that?
I can well believe processes the authors describe are going on in Kajiado, elsewhere in East Africa, and further elsewhere in Africa and beyond.
What I can’t believe is that pastoralists are colonized everywhere by capitalism. You mean all (or even most) of these people Wikipedia record are integrated in capitalist relations? “As of 2019, between 200 million and 500 million people globally practised pastoralism, and 75% of all countries had pastoral communities.”
–There are too many different types of livestock production systems, too many regional differences in the impacts of the climate emergency, too many different path dependencies historically and now into the Anthrocpocene to deny the following:
Just as researchers now talk about the varieties of capitalism, there all along were varieties of commercial societies, and among that latter were and still are pastoralist systems with their evolving–that is, with less ruptured than many think–divisions of labor, differentiations and specializations.
–But, again: So what? I have argued that pastoralisms are a global critical infrastructure. I now argue they have been one for a very, very long time in terms of their differentiation and specialization of services and opportunities to advance and change.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 