Major Read: New method matters in reframing policy and management (14th example new)

In my profession, policy analysis and public management, theory and method aren’t separate when it comes to actual, really-existing practices. They’re unavoidably fused for practitioners with whom I’ve worked.

This would be a banal observation if it weren’t for the fact that many practices mean many methods-cum-theories, and the virtue of the many is having more means to reframe, redescribe, recalibrate, revise, readjust, repurpose, rescript, recalibrate, reorient–in a word, recast–difficult policy and management issues. No guarantees, but you get the point: A little theory, as it has been said, can go a long way in practice, and the many methodological considerations across them can take you even further.

Below are fourteen very different examples of what this means by way of practice:

1. Key method questions in complex policy and management

2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management.

3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers

4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management

5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis

6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”

7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, an infinite regress explains nothing

8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management is the counterfactual

9. What “calling for increased granularity” means

10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management

11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives

12. The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters

13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management

14. As the dimensions of a two-by-two typology are meant to be independent, what then to make of this figure?

1. Key method questions in complex policy and management

A young researcher had just written up a case study of traditional irrigation in one of the districts that fell under the Government of Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) Programme. (We’re in the early 1980s.) I remember reading the report and getting excited. Here was detailed information about really-existing irrigation practices and constraints sufficient to pinpoint opportunities for improvement there.

That was, until I turned the page to the conclusions: What was really needed, the author stated, was a country-wide land reform.

Huh? Where did that come from? Not from the details and findings in the report!

This was my introduction to “solutions” in search of problems they should “solve.” Only later did I realize I should have asked him, “What kind of land reform for whom and under what conditions at your research site?”

Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers you asking:

Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?

Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front us?

2. Methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management

Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.

In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions that are already orthogonal, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.

Everyone triangulates, ranging from cross-checking of sources to formal use of varied methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of divergent stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are common examples.

Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can actually do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.

Return now to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.

Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.

To triangulate asks what, if anything, has persisted or survived in the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that the issue has undergone over time up to the point of analysis. Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple and widely diverse metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.

3. Methodologically, analogies without counter-cases are empty signifiers

The relentless rise of modern inequality is widely appreciated to have taken on crisis dimensions, and in moments of crisis, the public, politicians and academics alike look to historical analogies for guidance.
Trevor Jackson (2023). “The new history of old inequality.” Past & Present, 259(1): 262–289 (https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac009)

I bolded the preceding because its insight is major: The search for analogies from the past for the present is especially acute in turbulent times.

The methodological problem–which is also a matter of historical record–is any misleading analogy. Jackson, by way of illustrating this point, provides ample evidence to question the commonplace that the US is presently in “the Second (New) Gilded Age,” with rising inequality, populism and corruption last seen in the final quarter of our 19th century.

But we are still stuck with the fallacy of composition. Not all of the country was going through the Gilded Age, even when underway. And doubtless parts of the country are now going through a Second Gilded Age, even if not nationally.

The upshot is that we must press the advocates of this or that analogy to go further. The burden of proof is on the advocates to demonstrate their generalizations hold regardless of the more granular exceptions, including those reframed by other analogies.

Why would they concede exceptions? Because we, their interlocutors, know empirically that micro and macro can be loosely-coupled, and most certainly not as tightly coupled as theory and ideology often have it. Broad analogies that do not admit granular counter-cases float unhelpfully above policy and management.

A fairly uncontroversial upshot, I should have thought, but let’s make the matter harder for us.

III

The same day I read Jackson’s article, I can across the following analogy for current events. Asked if there were any parallels to the Roman Empire, Edward Luttwak, a scholar on international, military and grand strategy, offered this:

Well, here is one parallel: after 378 years of success, Rome, which was surrounded by barbarians, slowly started admitting them until it completely changed society and the whole thing collapsed. I am sure you know that the so-called barbarian invasions were, in fact, illegal migrations. These barbarians were pressing against the border. They wanted to come into the Empire because the Romans had facilities like roads and waterworks. They knew that life in the Roman Empire was great. Some of these barbarians were “asylum seekers,” like the Goths who crossed the Danube while fleeing the Huns.
https://im1776.com/2023/10/04/edward-luttwak-interview/?ref=thebrowser.com&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Of course, some read this as inflammatory and go no further. Others, of course, dismiss this outright as racist, adding the ad hominem “Just look at who is writing and publishes this stuff!”

But the method to adopt would be to press Luttwak for definitions and, most importantly, counter-examples.

4. Peer review: another area where error avoidance is the method for reliability management

Below is part of an interchange in the Comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:

Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. The proportion of frauds has probably held steady since the time science became a profession and has grown as the number of scientists has grown. I find it unlikely that the proportion of scientists with this character flaw has increased recently. Possibly much more common than fraud is ripping off your collaborators, or stealing ideas during reviews of manuscripts and grant applications. That is quite hard to prove and so it seems to be popular among certain character types but again, there is no reason to think their proportion has increased.

Reply: It actually doesn’t matter if the proportion is remaining steady – even though it almost certainly is growing, with so much more financial, career and political pressure on academics these days, and a for-profit publishing system that reduces public oversight and is massively biased towards positive outcomes.

The goal should remain zero.

It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
https://www.ft.com/content/c88634cd-ea99-41ec-8422-b47ed2ffc45a

Upshot: If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?

5. Not all the “can’s, might’s, may’s, or could’s” add up to one single “must” in policy analysis

Consider the following example (my bolding):

Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies can potentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war could be pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict could be over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, software, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict could be unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization could be over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potential could involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .

States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X22002255 (my bolds)

Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”

The only way in this particular passage that “could” and “can” link to “must” would mean that the article–and like ones–began with “We must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to those could-events and might-be’s.

6. But in policy advocacy, conditions of “could and might” do lead to proposals that “require and would”

I just read an article [1] that demonstrated how the climate and capitalism crises need to be analyzed together in order to better address how emotions such as anxiety and burnout with respect to each crisis are highly interconnected.

I agree. But I worry how readers might conflate advocacy and analysis.

I agree with the author that so much could help improve the situation: “these insights could be deepened by placing them in the context of the care crisis of neoliberal capitalism”; “such reforms could help create the preconditions for deeper post-capitalist transformation”; and “a ‘polycrisis’ lens might usefully decenter the climate crisis while informing a broader analytic framework and political program”.

But then the author asserts that “this must be a form of polycrisis analysis deeply influenced by Feminist and ecological Marxism”. Also, some could-reforms “must prioritize public transit over private cars, circular economies, and extended producer responsibility to reduce extraction as far as possible”. Indeed and also specifically [my bolding below]:

To a large extent this requires the decommodification of care, involving ‘universal guarantees in place that all people will be entitled to care,’ along with expanding publicly funded childcare, physical and mental healthcare, elderly care, and care for those with disabilities (ibid: 195–196). It also requires revitalizing community infrastructures – like libraries, community centers, parks, and public spaces – that have decayed under decades of neoliberal privatization and austerity (particularly in poor communities) (Rose 2020). More broadly, ending the care crisis requires social programs that dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the emotionally distressing dynamics of debt and unemployment by improving economic security for all.

I have no problem with these requirements! My problem is with the paradox: Conditions are sufficiently uncertain that we cannot say the proposed reforms would actually work, but we are certain enough to say that these proposed reforms entail must-requirements of varying degrees of specificity.

Now there is nothing “illogical” about taking that latter position. It’s what we expect from policy advocacy. This is what policy advocates do; theirs is not to analyze the uncertainties and certainties case-by-case; that’s my job as a practicing policy analyst. Policy analysts of course make recommendations and that is an advocacy of sorts. But they do so in the face of that case-specific determination of what is “sufficiently certain” and “certain enough.” For advocates, the determination is a settled method over the range of cases.

[1] Michael J. Albert (2025). “It’s not just climate: rethinking ‘climate emotions’ in the age of burnout capitalism. Environmental Politics (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2025.2526228).

7. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, methodologically an infinite regress explains nothing

Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop this defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; be small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism, racism and the rest; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and. . .

8. The Achilles heel of conventional risk management methods is the counterfactual

For me, the crux of counterfactual history is a present always not one way only. You want a counterfactual, but for which current interpretation or set of historical interpretations?

What’s at work are the two blades of a scissors. One devotes time and attention to “what is happening,” a state of affairs that can be interpreted in multiple different ways. The other devotes time and attention to “what has happened,” a state of affairs that could have turned out differently and so too the allied interpretations.

Where the blades slice, they open up not only the contingent nature of events past and present, but also the recasting of what is and has been.

For example, consider a city’s building code. Viewed one way, it is sequential interconnectivity (do this-now followed by do-that-then). But if cities also view their building codes as the means to bring structures up to or better than current seismic standards, then the code becomes a focal mechanism for pooled interconnectivity among these developers and builders.

That neither is guaranteed should be obvious. That you in no way need recourse to the language of conventional risk management to conclude so should also be obvious.

9. What “calling for increased granularity” means

When I say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are too abstract, I am not criticizing abstraction. I am saying (1) that these concepts are not differentiated enough for an actionable policy or management and (2) that this actionable granularity requires a particular kind abstraction from the get-go.

What then does “actionable granularity” mean?

I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between, on the one side, the adaptation of policy and management designs and principles to local circumstances and, on the other side, the recognition that systemwide patterns emerging across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.

Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local contingencies and having to accommodate the fact that patterns that emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty differ from not only system definitions but also from localized poverty scenarios based in these definitions.

III

One implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract. Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.

Where so, there is the methodological problem of cases that are assumed to be unique or stand-alone, when in fact no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case might be embedded along with (2) the practices, if any, of adaptation and modification that emerge as a result.

From a policy and management perspective, such cases have been prematurely rendered unique: They have been, if you will, over-complexified so as to permit no abstraction. Unique cases are not themselves something we can even abstract as sui generis or “‘a case’ in its own right.”

I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism deferred to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem is prematurely “wickedly unique.” Or, more ironically, uniquely wicked problems are abstracted insufficiently for the purposes of systemwide pattern recognition and design scenario modification.

10. The methodological relevance of like-to-like comparisons for policy and management

Assume the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:

Even with all that detail, it’s fairly easy to critique the above. Do we really believe, for example, that well-established evidence and high certainty are as tightly coupled and correlated? In fact, each dimension can be problematize in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.

But the methodological issue at stake here is to compare like to like.

That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:

This latter typology has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies eventually lapsing, it is hypothesized, into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between decisionmaking by majority-rule and by compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.

In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more typologies the better by way of finding something more tractable to policy or management.

11. The methodological importance of “and-yet” counternarratives

The paragraph I’ve just read before typing this is bookended by two quotes:

Just before: “Therefore, rather than being schools of democracy, ACs [associative councils] may be spaces where associative and political elites interact and, therefore, just reproduce existing political inequities (Navarro, 2000). Furthermore, these institutions may have limited impact in growing and diversifying the body of citizens making contributions to public debate (Fraser, 1990).”

Just after: “The professionalised model results from a complex combination of inequalities in associationism and a specific type of participation labour. Analysing the qualitative interviews, regulations and documents was fundamental to understanding the underlying logic of selecting professionals as the main components.”

Now try to guess the gist of the paragraph in between. More of the same? Well, no. Six paragraphs from the article’s end emerges an “and-yet” that had been there from the beginning of the article:

Nevertheless, an alternative interpretation of professionalisation should be considered. The fact that ACs perform so poorly in inclusiveness does not mean that they are not valuable for other purposes, such as voicing a plurality of interests in policymaking (Cohen, 2009). In this respect, participants can act as representatives of associations that, in many cases, promote the needs of oppressed and exploited groups (De Graaf et al., 2015; Wampler, 2007). Suffice it to say, for example, that labour unions or migrants’ associations frequently send lawyers or social workers to ACs to defend their needs and positions. Problems with inclusion should not take away from other purposes, that is, struggles to introduce critical issues and redistribution demands to the state agenda. Other studies have already shown that groups make strategic decisions to achieve better negotiation outcomes in the context of technical debates (Grillos, 2022). Thus, the choice of selecting professionals can be a strategy to improve the capacity of pressure in institutional spaces dominated by experts. (my bold; accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251319065)

Methodological upshot: What the counterfactual is to economic analysis, the and-yet counternarratives are to policy analysis.

12. The cross-cutting methodological fault-line in Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters

The large-scale infrastructure is never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and so many more, each claiming a special purchase that demands our attention. A less banal observation is the cross-cutting methodological default line once each discipline’s poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up further analysis to the global, while others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.

For example, we’re told that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that “policy:” ratcheting up or digging down. So often today the road taken is the former:

In our attempt to understand contemporary archival politics, it would seem much more beneficial to pay attention to the concrete political issues in which community digital archives are involved, such as, for example, armed conflict and civil unrest (e.g. The Mosireen Collective 2024; Syrian Archive 2024; Ukraine War Archive 2024), gender queerness (e.g. Australian Queer Archives 2024; Digitial Transgender Archive 2024; Queer Digital History Project 2024), forced migration (e.g. The Amplification Project 2024; Archivio Memorie Migranti 2024; Living Refugee Archive 2024), post-colonialism (e.g. Talking Objects Lab 2024), rights of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Archivo Digital Indigena 2024; Digital Sami Archives 2024; Mukurtu 2024), racial discrimination (e.g. The Black Archives 2024; Black Digital Archiving 2024), or feminism (e.g. Féminicides (2024); Feminist Archive North 2024, Rise Up 2024).

You many wonder at the methodological finesse taking place in this passage, namely: equating the concrete with the abstract. This transmutation is made easier because it is not really-existing archival practices that the author describes, but rather “the politics of digital archival practice.” Rather than being case-specific, these politics face outward and upward. They’re “political agendas,” not micro-practices. Such is why the author can write he is “attending to the politics of digital archives at the level of concrete archival practices,” while in no way differentiating concrete practices, processes and interactions of each of the bolded categories and how they work themselves out relationally, case by case and over time.

Lesson? Just say you’re talking about politics and you’re taken to be more practical than practical?

I however come from profession, policy analysis, whose propensity is to dig down rather than ratchets up analysis, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. The “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important in terms of policy relevance for them alone to determine how to move the analysis forward. To equate policy with politics is to miss practices, processes and interactions that matter.

In the infrastructure case of digital archives, I suspend judgment over the author’s conclusion precisely because no concrete practices of digital archiving are detailed over a range of different cases. Please note: He may well have them at hand and to be clear, I am happy to search out practices that float something in and through passages such as:

Similarly, the temporality of community-based digital archival enterprises seems neither ephemeral nor unfathomable. Rather, it plays a crucial role in rearticulating the historical subjectivities of various Queer, Indigenous, post-colonial, and other marginalized communities. And indeed, such enterprises and the rise of participatory and collaborative archiving can surely also be seen as examples of ‘collectivization’ and ‘socialization’ or even of ‘the dialectics between the individual and the society’–the very conditions of politics and historicity that Étienne Balibar (2024) sees ‘the digital’ as precluding.

Source.

Goran Gaber (2025): “Mind the Gap. On archival politics and historical theory in the digital age,” Rethinking History, (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2025.2545029)

13. Seven differences in method that matter for reliable policy and management

When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized so that we can analyze and manage, if only case-by-granular case.

When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identifying not only emerging better practices across cases, but also greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.

What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not just more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that team members and stakeholders “bring the system into the room” for the purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.

When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never fully reproduce the coupled nature of the wider system environment.

When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes. (“Only the middle road does not lead to Rome,” said composer, Arnold Schoenberg.)

Where we need more experimentation, we do not mean more trial-and-error learning, when the systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial by destroying the limits of survival.

While others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from different standards.

14. As the dimensions of a two-by-two typology are meant to be independent, what then to make of this figure?

In the above figure, the cost of a disturbance and the cost of its response mirror the typology’s vertical and horizontal dimensions. As the disturbance severity grows larger, for example, so too is its parallel cost shown to increase.

Yet methodologically those main dimensions of the degree of response change and the severity of disturbance are to be independent of each other. Consequently, as the two costs are manifestly correlated and interdependent, the immediate implication is that the two dimensions are not in fact independent.

So what? Well, one thing this means is that the cost ranking from low to high of cope, adapt and transform resilience strategies is not presumptively as shown. That is, you can imagine (if not identify) cases where incremental adapting was less costly than indefinite coping or where transformation was not radically (more) costly.

Source

Roig Boixeda, P., E. Corbera, and J. Loos (2025). “Navigating a global crisis: impacts, responses, resilience, and the missed opportunity of African protected areas during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Ecology and Society 30(4):28. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16352-300428

And now he invades Venezuela: our boyg at year’s end

The Trump cuts and interventions are already having specific catastrophic effects. Worse, “catastrophe averted” is no longer the standard for evaluating government performance. Routine just doesn’t work for this administration. For them, the catastrophe is the status quo, which because it didn’t change on or about January 6 2021, demands all manner of emergency and extraordinary powers. What’s going on rhymes more with Robespierre than Louis XIV, I think.

Peer review: another area where error avoidance is a form of high reliability management

Below is part of an interchange in the comments section of a recent Financial Times article on scientific fraud:

Comment: I am a scientist. I spend all my time trying not to be wrong in print. Even then, occasionally I am. It is the same for all of us. Furthermore, some scientists are very poor at dealing with statistics and are thus wrong more than others. Our common incompetence is different from actual fraud. . .

Reply: It’s unacceptable for scientists to publish errors due to being ‘poor at statistics’. Huge amounts of money is being wasted, lives are being lost – the least people can do is get training, or work with someone else who IS good at them.
https://www.ft.com/content/c88634cd-ea99-41ec-8422-b47ed2ffc45a

If peer review isn’t solely about error avoidance, how can it aspire to be reliable?

Four other examples in using High Reliability Management to rethink major public policy and management: government regulation, catastrophe periodization, economics as investment, and societal reforms

Rethinking government regulation: When it comes to society’s critical infrastructures, regulatory functions are dispersed beyond the government regulator of record

Here’s my starting point on government regulation (from our 2016 Reliability and Risk):

. . .as long as infrastructure regulation is equated with what regulators do, society will have a very myopic understanding of how regulation functions for critical infrastructures. The regulation of infrastructures is not just what the regulators do; it is also what the infrastructures do in ways that their regulator of record could never do on its own.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not a criticism of regulators to say they never have the same timely information as do those operating the critical infrastructures being regulated. It’s a statement of the obvious cast as a negative. Restate the obvious, but now as a positive: those who have the real-time information must fulfill regulatory functions that the official regulator cannot fulfill. How well they are fulfilling the regulatory functions depends on (1) the skills in real-time risk management of their reliability professionals and (2) where those professionals are located, which for our purposes means the infrastructure control rooms and their respective support units.

From our perspective, it makes little sense for critics to conclude that regulators are failing because formal regulations are not being complied with, if the infrastructures are managing in a highly reliable fashion and would not be doing so if they followed those regulations to the letter.

In practical terms, this means there is not just the risk of regulatory non-compliance by the infrastructure, there is also the infrastructure’s risk of compliance with defective regulations. Either way, the importance of time from discovery to correction of error reinforces the dispersed nature of regulatory functions: A shorter time to error discovery has the advantage of discovering errors that would have propagated into much larger ones if left uncorrected.

The upshot for the government regulator of record?

If policymakers insist that the regulator’s task is one of regulating the whole cycle of the infrastructure throughout its operational stages of normal, disrupted, failed, and recovered onwards, then it is better to say that at best the regulator of record is in permanent setback management. At worst, its own activities require the coping behavior we associate with emergency management during crises.

III

And yet the demands on government regulation are increasing at the same time. No one should doubt, for example, that the more interconnected the systems to be regulated and the more complex each system and its own regulations are, the more regulatory and inter-regulatory oversight will have to be given to latent interconnections, risks and the transition thresholds where they shift from latent to manifest.

Regulating ahead for latent interconnectivities is a very difficult task for even one regulator, let alone for something like “inter-regulatory oversight.” This too reinforces the need for a dispersed regulatory regime well beyond the regulator of record.

The challenge then is to better understand the institutional niche of critical infrastructures, that is, how infrastructures themselves function in allocating, distributing, regulating and stabilizing that reliability and safety apart from, if not independently of, the respective government regulators of record. That this knowledge will always be for regulators partial and punctured by gaps and ignorance should go without saying.

When reliability professionals express discomfort over a design orientation, regulators and others insist that this has to be expressed in terms of formal analysis, where the burden of proof is on the reliability professional to show what in this design orientation is not reliable. That burden of proof, on the contrary, is the responsibility of the regulator; it is not a regulatory function of the infrastructure, when real-time service reliability matters.

Rethinking the periodization of catastrophe management: Reframing the 2020-2023 drought in East Africa and its response

What I want to do here is contextualize a recent major East African drought differently in order to show what remains a catastrophe has some different but very important policy and management implications when reframed.

Start with 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 matter to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding into and from a central paroxysm in Europe.

In the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with the Shoah and the frontline carnage, was embedded in a longer series of large regional wars. These in turn were less preludes than unfolding processes 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.)

Now, reframe the recent, extended East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. What follows from such a re-construction?

Current emergency management terminology about this or that “longer-term recovery” would be considerably problematized when the longer term is one drought unfolding into another and then over again. Immediate emergency response would look considerably less proactive when embedded in a process of recurring response always before the next disaster

What does this mean practically?

III

Clearly one major follow-on is government budgets (in the plural) for their recurrent operations in pastoralist areas. Or more pointedly, you’re looking at the recurrent cost crises of East Africa governments–which, to my mind, far too few critics analyze when fixated on failures of capital development projects and programs for pastoralists.

My own view 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.

IV
So what?

One major reason why “recurring drought response and recovery” is better treated as part of government’s recurrent budget than capital budget is because pastoralists, when acting like other reliability professionals, 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 capital development project.

Source

Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.

Rethinking economics: Moving investment and its implications to center stage

“Therefore, infrastructure and connectivity, rather than trade and investment, should be the focus in order to understand the specific character of any Chinese sphere of influence among the Mekong states.” (Greg Raymond 2021. Jagged Sphere: China’s Quest for Instructure and Influence in Mainland Southeast Asia. Lowy Institute: Sidney Australia accessed online at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/RAYMOND%20China%20Infrastructure%20Sphere%20of%20Influence%20COMPLETE%20PDF.pdf)

“What is the first act that creates the economy? It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate with investment.” (Daniel Judt 2025. “Storage, Investment, and Desire: An interview with Jonathan Levy,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog accessed online at https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/02/24/storage-investment-and-desire-an-interview-with-jonathan-levy/)

Greg Raymond makes a convincing case for his point above and I too am among many who emphasize the centrality of infrastructures and their interconnectivities in underwriting economies and the maintenance of market transactions.

The point of this blog entry, however, starts with the argument of economist, Jonathan Levy, in his recent The Real Economy: Contrary to conventional economics with its fulcrum of allocation and exchange, it is investment which creates economies. And it is that association to infrastructure suggested in the above phrase, “storing of wealth,” that prompts the comments below.

Thinking infrastructurally about investment highlights three under-recognized insights that are highly policy relevant.

First, investments import the long run into infrastructure analysis in ways that a focus on allocation and exchange do not. These ways range from the banal–it takes time for the infrastructure to be planned, funded, implemented and then operated as constructed and managed–to more invisible considerations.

The pressures to innovate technologies, in particular, means that some infrastructure technologies (software and hardware) are rendered obsolete before the infrastructures have been fully depreciated. This brings uncertainty into investing in technology and engineering of infrastructures that can last ahead, say, two generations or more. Here, the long run means another short-run, and those short-runs at times can look like boom and busts, well short of anything like “infrastructure full capacity.”

And yet, second, there are examples of infrastructures being operated beyond their depreciation cycles. Patches, workarounds and fixes keep the infrastructure in operation, even if that this reliability is achieved at less than always-full capacity. It takes professionals inside the infrastructure to operationally redesign technologies (and defective regulations) so as to maintain critical service provision reliably during the turbulent periods of exogenous and endogenous change.

Third, this professional ability to operationally redesign systems and technologies on the fly and in real time in effect extends what would otherwise be a shortened longer run (e.g., due to always-on innovation and defective design)–and extended under the mandate of having to maintain systemwide infrastructure reliability. Introduction of what are premature innovations is countervailed by those professional patches, workaround and fixes that sustain system reliability, at least for the present. These practices are often rendered invisible under the bland catch-all, “infrastructure maintenance and repair,” where even operations become part and parcel of corrective maintenance..

The latter means, however–and this is the key point here–that maintenance and repair are far from being bland and worthy only of mention. Really-existing maintenance and repair and their personnel are in fact the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of infrastructures faced with uncertainties induced from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and from the inside (e.g., those premature engineering innovations).

III

So what?

Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of globalized challenges, ranging from defective international banking to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by central banks and massive new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.

What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures necessary for functioning economies and supply chains, let alone for “economic stability.” Nor have you seen in the subsequent investments in science, technology and engineering anything like the comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability management of those backbone critical infrastructures. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would not be primarily directed to innovation as if it were basic science, but rather to applied research and practices for enhanced maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof of scaling up.

In sum, if I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of backbone infrastructures as the resilience of an economy that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure maintenance and repair–and their innovations–move center stage in ways not yet appreciated by politicians, policymakers and the private sector.

Rethinking societal reform: How does your version of reform shift the odds in favor of a prospectively more reliable foundational economy?

An AI-generated definition is good-enough to start: “The ‘foundational economy’ (FE) is the infrastructure of everyday life, including essential services like water, electricity, healthcare, and housing, that are required for society to function.” (The key website is The Foundational Economy.) Even at that level of abstraction, it’s clear there is no one and only FE with one and only one set of critical infrastructures in each.

More important than their numbers and diversity, it’s that “infrastructure” I take up here and expand below: Since critical infrastructures and their operating networks of personnel are required so as to make it possible for a collective to exist and thrive economically let alone societally, so too societal reform and the foundational economy are instrumentally linked in ways that commend further elaboration.

How so?

Here are ten propositions by way of answer:

1. By definition, a foundational economy would not exist if it were not for the reliable provision of electricity, water, telecoms, and transportation. Here reliability means the safe and continuous provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) turbulent times. This means, for example, that the physical systems as actually managed and interconnected on the ground help establish the spatial limits of the FE in question.

2. By extension, no markets for goods and services in the FE would exist without critical infrastructure reliability supporting their operations. This applies to rural landscapes as well as urban ones.

3. Other infrastructures, including reliable contract and property law, are required for the creation and support of these markets, though this too varies by context. One can, for example, argue healthcare and education are among the other infrastructural prerequisites for many FEs (as above).

4. Preventing disasters in the face existing and prospective uncertainties is what highly reliable infrastructures do. Why? Because when the electricity grid islands, the water supplies cease, and transportation grinds to a halt, then people die and the foundational economy seizes up (Martynovich et al. 2022).

5. Another way to say this is that within a foundational economy you see clearest the tensions between economic transactions and reliability management. Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services.

6. Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the market transactions would be such that you can never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying. Much discussion around moral economies and agrarian reform can be described in such terms.

7. This in turn means there are two very different standards of “economic reliability.” The retrospective standard holds the foundational economy–or any economy for that matter–is performing reliably when there have been no major shocks or disruptions from the last time to now. The prospective standard holds the economy is reliable only until the next major shock, where collective dread of that shock is why those networks of reliability professionals try to manage to prevent or otherwise attenuate it. The fact that past droughts have harmed the foundational economy in no way implies people are not managing prospectively to prevent future consequences of drought on their respective FEs–and actually accomplishing that feat.

8. Why does the difference between the two standards matter? In practical terms, the foundational economy is prospectively only as reliable as its critical infrastructures are reliable, right now when it matters for, say, economic productivity or societal sustainability. Indeed, if the latter were equated only with recognizing and capitalizing on retrospective patterns and trends, economic policymakers and managers in the FE could never be reliable prospectively in the Anthropocene.

9. For example, the statement by two well-known economists, “Our contention, therefore, following many others, is that, despite its flaws, the best guide to what the rate of return will be in the future is what it has been in the past” (Riley and Brenner 2025) may be true as far as it goes, but it in no way offers a prospective standard of high reliability in the foundational economy (let alone other economies).

10. So what? A retrospective orientation to where the economy is today is to examine economic and financial patterns and trends since, say, the 2008 financial crisis; a prospective standard would be to ensure that–at a minimum–the 2008 financial recovery could be replicated, if not bettered, for the next global financial crisis. Could the latter be said of the FE in your city, metropolitan area or across the rural landscape of interest?

III

In short, how does your version of societal reform shift the odds in favor of the prospective standard for a reliable foundational economy ahead?

Note by way of concluding that the policy-relevant priority isn’t scaling up your reforms beyond the FEs as much as your determining the openness of those FEs to being modified in light of evolving affordances under reforms during the Anthropocene.

Sources.

Martynovich, M., T. Hansen, and K-J Lundquist (2022). “Can foundational economy save regions in crisis?” Journal of Economic Geography, 1–23 (https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbac027)

Riley, D. and R. Brenner (2025). “The long downturn and its political results: a reply to critics.” New Left Review 155, 25–70 (https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711)

Development tourism, revisited

Robert Chambers (1983: 10-12) dubbed as development tourism the scurrying of rural development practitioners in, about, and out of the countryside in “fact-finding” trips, much in the fashion of a very interested sight-seer. Trips are undertaken, questions asked, observations made, all defining that touristic gradient between the traveler’s “first impressions” and the consultant’s preliminary conclusions.

André Gide unwittingly provides us an excellent instance of consequences. To read the journal he kept when he served as a special envoy in 1925-26 to the French Colonial Ministry in the Congo is to see the travel diarist anachronistically as consultant, dispensing advice to field administrators and others on how affairs should be run across tracts of Africa. Gide’s companion on the tour had occasion to use a local interpreter to find out why a group of children were being mistreated. A local (“first class”) guard, who had overheard the translation, promptly threw the interpreter into prison. When they learned of this, Gide and his companion made strong inquiries and protestations, locally and to the acting French administrator, M. Martin.

Finally, after two days of effort:

The whole thing is now perfectly clear. In the absence of the sergeant, who left ten days ago to accompany the administrator, the “first class” guard had abused his powers, practised forcible recruiting . . . . We gave a full account of everything to Martin and put in such a way that it will be hardly possible for him not to intervene. It is inadmissible that he should protect and encourage such abuses, if only by shutting his eyes to them. If nothing reprehensible had been going on, the guard would not have taken such precautions to conceal it. (1962: 152)

So the tale ends, minus however the most important piece of information: What happened to the interpreter once Gide and his party left? So too similar questions are asked of rural development consultants and advisors who, at the end of their contracts, have walked away from their interventions.

Officially produced plans and project proposals also read like travel brochures, advertising this or that rural haven to be had, somewhere or sometime. The only place where crop yields double, where the rate of return is 50% plus, and where a project operates as planned is on paper, in the original proposal. As Reg Green (1983) long ago put it about a once-famous Lagos Plan, it “is rather like a travel guide which sketches the destinations in fairly understandable (and attractive) terms, indicates a few of the intermediate resting places and road signs but, far from providing a highway map, does not even tell us how to get out of town”.

Like the diarist, the development tourist is caught up in the hunt and peck of the datum that best sums up what’s going on. They search for the journalist’s opening vignette and for the statistic that “says it all”. Allegory displaces analysis, as the eroded hillock symbolizes government indifference to desertification. For our travelers, this is less a place for making a personal future than an entrepot to be inventoried, a moment to be recorded, where a visit is always enough to see the writing on the wall.

III

So what?

The lesson I’ve taken away from development tourism–and from the other work of Robert Chambers–is that we must look at these “problems” differently and indeed we are able to do that. The legend on the development tourist’s map has been about as useful in describing what is on the ground as were the 1960s potboilers of Ruark and Monsarrat in describing the far more complex Kenya and Botswana, even then and now ahead.

Sources.

Robert Chambers (1983). Rural Development: Putting the First Last. London. Longman.

André Gide (1962). Travels in the Congo. Berkeley, CA: California University Press.

Reg Greene (1983). Paper presented at the Conference on Development Options for Africa in the 1980’s and Beyond, organized by the Society for International Development, Kenya Chapter, Nairobi. (March 1983).

Nicholas Monsarrat (1968). Richer Than All His Tribe. London: Cassell.

Robert Ruark (1962). Uhuru, A Novel of Africa Today [sic]. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Reframing the 2020-2023 drought in East Africa

Start with 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 mattter to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding into and from a central paroxysm in Europe.

Now, reframe the recent, extended East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. What follows from such a re-construction?

What does this mean practically? What does it mean to frame this East Africa drought as a paroxysm that extends both the spatial and temporal terms of “recurring drought response and recovery across East Africa”?

III

My own view 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.

IV
So what?

One major reason why “recurring drought response and recovery” is better treated as part of government’s recurrent budget 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.

Source

Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.

Hope doesn’t fail. It’s disappointed but it does not fail.

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
          A.R. Ammons, "Corsons Inlet"

–“Who said: I study not to learn but hoping/What I’ve learned might not be true?,” poet C.K. Williams asks.

–If we are to believe philosopher Kant, the three most important questions remain entirely future-oriented: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?

–Hope, another philosopher, Ernst Bloch put, is something not bargained down. Hope is not traded off. It is disappointed, but it does not fail.

–John Berger, essayist, novelist, and painter:

The other day I saw a lorry carting blocks of stone, white in the sunlight, from the quarries on the other side of the village. On top of the blocks was a wooden box with tools in it. On top of them, carefully placed so that it should not blow away, lay a sprig of cherry blossom. In the rockface is buried the promise of dynamite: in the dynamite the promise of space: in the space grows the promise of a tree: in the core of the tree the promise of blossom. That was the relationship between the spray and the blocks of stone on the lorry.

Some call this intersection of practice and possibility, hope.

When it comes to society’s critical infrastructures, regulatory functions are dispersed beyond the regulator of record

Here’s my starting point on government regulation (from our 2016 Reliability and Risk):

. . .as long as infrastructure regulation is equated with what regulators do, society will have a very myopic understanding of how regulation functions for critical infrastructures. The regulation of infrastructures is not just what the regulators do; it is also what the infrastructures do in ways that their regulator of record could never do on its own.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not a criticism of regulators to say they never have the same timely information as do those operating the critical infrastructures being regulated. It’s a statement of the obvious cast as a negative. Restate the obvious, but now as a positive: those who have the real-time information must fulfill regulatory functions that the official regulator cannot fulfill. How well they are fulfilling the regulatory functions depends on (1) the skills in real-time risk management of their reliability professionals and (2) where those professionals are located, which for our purposes means the infrastructure control rooms and their respective support units.

From our perspective, it makes little sense for critics to conclude that regulators are failing because formal regulations are not being complied with, if the infrastructures are managing in a highly reliable fashion and would not be doing so if they followed those regulations to the letter.

The upshot for the regulator of record?

III

It should go without saying that the regulatory functions of the infrastructure’s control room (if present) will differ from the health and safety regulations and approaches needed elsewhere in the critical infrastructure. This means we should not expect there to be a single set of procedural or supervisory approaches that can apply throughout the entire infrastructure, however committed it is to service reliability.

The challenge instead is to better understand the institutional niche of critical infrastructures, that is, how infrastructures themselves function in allocating, distributing, regulating and stabilizing that reliability and safety apart from, if not independently of, the respective government regulators of record. That this knowledge will always be for regulators partial and punctured by gaps and ignorance should go without saying.

There is, however, a serious asymmetry in the current design orientation for regulating infrastructure reliability (including safety) and the practice orientation of reliability professionals in and around control centers for the infrastructure. When reliability professionals express discomfort over a design orientation, regulators and others insist that this has to be expressed in terms of formal analysis, where the burden of proof is on the reliability professional to show what in this design orientation is not reliable. That burden of proof, on the contrary, is the responsibility of the regulator; it is not a regulatory function of the infrastructure, when real-time service reliability matters.

Progress is only understood retrospectively. This means progress ahead is predicted before it is understood.

If the subject heading is true, as I believe it is, then policy and management implications are wildly different from what is more often taken for granted or otherwise assumed today.

Let start with a lesser known example:

Once an artificial island, the ancient site of Soline was discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica of the University of Zadar in Croatia while he was analyzing satellite images of the water area around Korčula [Island].

After spotting something he thought might be human-made on the ocean floor, Parica and a colleague dove to investigate.

At a depth of 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) in the Mediterranean’s Adriatic Sea, they found stone walls that may have once been part of an ancient settlement. The landmass it was built upon was separated from the main island by a narrow strip of land. . . .

Through radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood, the entire settlement was estimated to date back to approximately 4,900 BCE.

“People walked on this [road] almost 7,000 years ago,” the University of Zadar said in a Facebook statement on its most recent discovery. . .”Neolithic artifacts such as cream blades, stone [axes] and fragments of sacrifice were found at the site,” the University of Zadar adds.

accessed online at https://www.sciencealert.com/road-built-7000-years-ago-found-at-the-bottom-of-the-mediterranean-sea)

This discovery is also part of an on-going installation work by German filmmaker and moving image artist, Hito Steyerl, and described in a recent article as:

In The Artificial Island, the work traces a submerged Neolithic site off the coast of Korčula, discovered in 2021 by archaeologist Mate Parica. The site, originally connected to the mainland by an ancient road, now lies four to five metres beneath the Adriatic Sea, submerged by rising waters that speak both to geological deep time and contemporary climate upheaval.

accessed online at https://aestheticamagazine.com/flooded-worlds-parallel-realities/

After being primed by the two texts, take another look at the photo. You can see the submerged island, see its causeway to surface land, and imagine how the still-rising waters will submerge even more settlements ahead in the climate emergency.

The problem here arises when the preceding “imagine” becomes a prediction about what is to happen.

I wager that no reader primed as above asks first thing: “What about the presettlement template displaced by the Neolithic roadway and settlement?” Or from the other direction, “What about what’s been preserved from having been submerged for so long? What does this tell us about how the retreat from rising sea level was managed?”

Nor is it satisfactory to counter that Neolithic times had no concepts for presettlement template and rising sea levels. If so, why then do you think future generations, looking back, wouldn’t have their own (different) concepts to understand the submergence underway?

More, what if further research suggests the current understanding of these sites needs to be modified, say: “It turns out evidence is found that the roadway was actually an important runway for animals”–how would that change, if at all, what we are to do, now and in the next steps ahead?

III

So what? What now?

“What do we do now?” is precisely the question that should be first asked. No one, I also wager, reads the above text and looks at the photo and immediately asks: “What happens next?”

I mean that literally: “What happens next at and around these submerged sites? Are they to be protected (that is, why these sites and not other worthy candidates for protection in the face of the climate emergency)?”

More formally, you may think this example points to what to do with respect to the climate emergency elsewhere and over the longer haul. I am suggesting that accomplishments that happen next and here reframe that issue for real time. People already understand what are accomplishments in ways that progress and success are understood by others later on.

Conditions under which good enough is even better

Calling something “good enough” borders on the pejorative, as in “good enough for government work.” Less so, but still found wanting, is the sense in which a second-best result is good enough only because the optimal is not–promise, promise–yet realized (think: efficiency benchmarks in microeconomics).

Here are two (hopefully familiar) conditions under which good enough is better than said optima:

1. When it comes to complex policy issues, efforts at full or direct control to achieve results may produce effects well short of what would have been the case had one managed by adapting to the inevitable contingencies in trying to get there.

We of mid-twentieth century US were told that an annual economic growth rate of about 3% and an unemployment rate of about 4%, while no way perfect, were good enough compared to the grief entailed in authoritarian measures to achieve substantially different rates at the same time.

2. Managing for good enough in processes that adapt to contingencies can produce results even better than the initial “best-case scenario.”

Examples include Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela (or on a smaller, lesser known stage, Botswana’s Seretse Khama and Ketumile Masire). Each was a very imperfect person, comrade and leader, but each prevented some fresh hell on earth. They were good enough to take us further than we could have expected, albeit we would want to go further still.