I

We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications. Think of the latter as part of their backbone or lifeline infrastructures.

What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?

The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists relied upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that begins with the pastoralist system instead.

Framework summary

The three principal elements of the framework are summarized here and based in previous research on large interconnected infrastructures. Each element will be treated separately in the sections that follow.

The first element has two parts. Different types of base-level interconnectivity exist between the infrastructures and the pastoralist system. Think of the base as “normal operations.” Then there are the points at or phases during which the types and configurations of interconnectivity shift. Think of the abrupt event or incident that disrupts normal operations.

The second element is the criticality of real-time operational behavior involving system control variables, which are shared or overlapping at times between different infrastructures.

Think of a system control variable as actionable features of an infrastructure or system—e.g. pumping rates and flows of water, frequency bands for cellphone signals and reception, real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (including off-take). Such control variables are used to adjust the condition or state of the infrastructure/system as operational requirements of the task environment change. Obvious example: Land fallowed now for uses later. Sometimes, however, the control variables of different systems intersect, with important consequences.

Third and last, all of this is managed to systemwide performance standards that can and do shift as changes in interconnectivity configurations and control variables occur. Before, the borehole owner couldn’t preclude grazing by herders nearby or from afar; now the owner can by means of a fenced ranch.

In focusing on shifts in interconnectivities and performance standards, the framework highlights the strategically important role of inter-system improvisations with respect to changes in shared or overlapping system variables. Think of those bush markets emerging ad hoc to connect the livestock of the herders and outside buyers or consumers of that livestock during Covid lockdowns. Now turn to each element in more detail.

Base-level interconnections

What are the baseline interconnectivities against which to gauge subsequent shifts in the links between the pastoralist system and the relied-upon infrastructures?

With pastoralism systems being as diverse as they are, there can be and is no one baseline worldwide.

Not only are base-level interconnectivities context-specific, the notion of a stable baseline is called into question when the operative context is and has been dynamic. This isn’t just because of the disequilibrium ecology of drylands. Fifty years of inter-group conflict, worsening recurrent droughts and their changing path dependencies mean it’s ludicrous for a socio-technical ideal to serve as any kind of baseline to compare against. Added to which are the induced changes from intervening forces like those of markets, crop agriculture and state interventions over the last half century.

Ironically, this means the really-existing baseline for such systems is the shifts in interconnectivity, in our case with respect to water, routes and communications. The framework focus on shifts is even more salient for these cases,

That said, given the numbers of different pastoralist systems across the globe, there must be some whose “normal operations” includes predictable herder mobility, herd movements and grazing itineraries, more or less familiar as before. Even these baseline operations or distinct temporal/spatial patterns are interrupted from time to time by sudden events (indeed that is part of normal herder operations). To the extent that shifts in interconnectivity happen in these cases as well, the framework is also relevant.

Types, configurations, and shifts of inter-infrastructural connections

Just what are the different types and configurations of interconnectivity that shift?

By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities as well.

There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),

Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13570-022-00265-1

What’s so important, you ask, about the shifting mix of different types of interconnectivities–note also the importance of roads and vehicles–and their configurations?

The point is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally. The shifts may be occurring at the same time, not just over time, in the pastoralist systems. One thinks of the prolonged drought instigating multiple coterminous shifts. But it is important to recognize that technology and regulation also are major inducers (e.g., pasteurization requirements for wide-scale milk marketing).

Shared or overlapping control variables of different systems

For our purposes, two or more system control variables can at times overlap or be shared.

Consider first non-pastoralist examples. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for onward navigation and re-opening the adjacent port for onward shipments offloaded there are important to both. Overlap of system variables can also be problematic. Firefighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the firefighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines.

You see exactly the same tension in pastoralist examples. Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries has been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. Real-time grazing or browsing of agricultural stubble along with the dung of livestock can be depicted as sharing the same control variables for herders and farmers.

The problem is that the former is sometimes portrayed as net-negative (at least from a longstanding nation state perspective), while the latter is sometimes thought to be net-positive (yes there are invasions from both sides, but on whole some farmers and some herders concerned are said in the literature to mutually benefit).

But the framework suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going on at the borders of the farm and/or of the country. More this negotiation goes largely unrecorded. This can include even formal activities like periodically renting out different pastures as a kind of shifting boundary work.

This is important because a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements is to make the duality of stationary borders and mobile herders unavoidable in pastoralist policy and management. Unrecorded they may be, but unavoidable they are. Rather than pastoralism offering up the prospect of a borderless world, the policy and management relevance of that duality can only increase.

Why? Because the two-sided tension is also found in many other cases of overlapping or shared system control variables. These cases go well beyond sedentarization examples of conflicting land uses. Other examples range from more benign livestock scarification and dispersal of tree seeds (but whose trees to manage?), through herders’ riverine crop production (but whose water to be managed?) and young herders in school while not herding (but what does the child more harm?) to outright land enclosures that entail “incursions” by the dispossessed.

It then should be no surprise that terms like “resource scarcity,” “elite capture” and “green grabs,” let alone other terms like “conflicts,” fall short in depicting the conditions under which systemwide control variables of two or more systems are made to overlap, rendered shared, or are to be improvised around by one or more of the parties involved. Indeed, the latter concepts enable you to reframe some “conflicts” differently, even more positively, e.g., an ongoing spatial confrontation of herders and farmers can serve as a useful buffer zone against (further) peri-urbanization or worse in some cases.

Shifts in system performance standards

If research on large-scale socio-technical systems is our guide, there is no one performance standard for large-scale critical infrastructures. The precluded event standard for livestock ranching regimes–the ability exclude others from grazing–is not the same as the avoided events standard–herders seek to avoid but can’t preclude shortages or closure in infrastructures they depend upon, e.g., water supplies.

There is, however, another relevant and very major systemwide performance standard identified from more recent infrastructure research: the provision and utilization of requisite variety, particularly but not exclusively during disaster and response.

The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.

Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.

Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables. Think rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought (e.g., a major rangeland fire occurs nearby). The importance of improvisations is again highlighted when it comes to interconnected system-infrastructure operations.

But what does this tell us about interconnected pastoral systems and their relied-upon infrastructures?

For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.

Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety that is actually going on.

So what?

The key policy and management implications are many and deserve a separate venue. Here instead let me focus on two upshots for pastoralist development that may already be familiar to a reader but which reinforce their importance via this framework triangulation: .

(1) In framework terms, what has been called “longer-term recovery” differs in terms of its mix of shifts, configurations, control variables and performance standards, with “recovery” exhibiting:

• a lack of the logic and urgency evident in decisionmaking immediately after the system failure;
• new and emerging latent and manifest interconnections not witnessed pre-disaster or immediately after system failure (largely but not exclusively because of the introduction of new stakeholders in longer-term recovery); and
• systemwide performance standards that differ in kind or degree from those pre-disaster base-level interconnectivities. New systemwide performance standards may even be part of a “new normal” that embraces the new standards as a social benchmark.

In other words, it is easy to see why so many people say about post-disaster recovery, “All of this takes time.” From our framework perspective, it is better to say that shifting or emerging interconnectivities extend time and duration as they include new latent-to-manifest interconnections and tensions that lead invariably to “it took much more time and money than anyone thought.”

(2) In framework terms, vertical and horizontal communication between and among pastoralist systems and their relied upon infrastructures are characterized by shifts, e.g.,

• from predominantly one-directional instructions and commands in sequential dependencies in vertical communications (think governments pushing policies down the throats of pastoralists)
• to ongoing cross-talk and negotiated agreement in mediated, pooled and reciprocal communication patterns (think horizontal micro-coordination in some pastoralist movements and associations over restoration collaborations involve multiple sectors, ministries and infrastructures).

In other words, it is essential to understand when and how communication patterns follow from, rather than determine, the interconnectivity configurations. This means any temptation to impose vertical-dominant communications is to be resisted when shifting interconnectivities demand horizontally-rich communication.

Other sources

Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of
Birmingham

Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of Food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16

Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies

It would be a grotesque exaggeration to leave you with the impression that “method” is the special purview of policy analysis, let alone science and the social sciences. “There is no method but to be very intelligent,” poet and essayist T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I take him to mean “intelligence” being those unique analytic sensibilities we find in the humanities and fine arts. These too have policy relevance.

Read the better essays of George Steiner, John Berger, Adam Phillips—or if you will, Helen Vendler, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jane Hirshfield, Lydia Davis—and you encounter in each an analytic sensibility, sui generis. No need here for a collective or shared point of departure to understanding complexity’s implications for public and private.

Indeed, there are times when the very different analytic sensibilities posed by the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham and Robert Lowell achieve actual policy relevance. I say this knowing it’s outrageous to demand policy relevance from poets, let alone others in the humanities. But I suggest you also can read them and others that way.

Ammons and regulation

Policy types fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts, A.R. Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear, he is not talking about “ignorance is bliss.”)

For those working in policy and management, how could it be that “the less we know, the more we gain”? More, in order to make our exercise here more interesting, what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking government regulation?

–By way of an answer, jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:

Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.

You may want to reread the poem once more.

Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming less separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital whole. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I.

So what? How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know?

–When pressed by an interviewer, Ammons’s answer illuminates much about how knowing less is gaining more: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.

Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision of even the categories of “policymaking” and “regulation.” Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsion to “get it right the next time around” there is more importantly a next time to make it better. Again, not just to make a specific regulation better, but to revise what we mean by “regulating.”

To recast (revise, redescribe, rescript, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to make room for—empty your mind for—resituating the cognitive limits of “regulation.”

Jorie Graham and the climate emergency

No one could accuse Jorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, not a homeopathic whiff, of environmental optimism, techno-social-otherwise, in the poetry I’ve read of hers.

Which poses my challenge: Can we readers nevertheless find something to move forward with from her recent poetry? Is there some thing that I can see of possible use in my own response to the climate emergency?

In answer, consider the lines from her book, Sea Change:

                                                                         the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever, 
                                                         so that it's not a 
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
                                                         also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
                                                         ground is bursting with
                                                         sunlight, inquire no further it says. . . 

There’s that tumbling out and after of words and the turns of phrase that deepen the rush. Witness though how the rush of phrases bounces off and back from, in this case, the hard left-side margins and that right-side enjambment.

Some might call her rush of words a compulsion to continue but for someone with my background and training, it’s difficult not to see this as resilience-being-performed in light of the dark messages all around. Like Graham, we make resilience happen.

Robert Lowell and alertness

“Design” too often assumes one macro-design the micro. Anyone who has tried to implement as planned knows how plug-and-play designs don’t work in complex policy and management, as contingency and context invariably get in the way. (For my part, it’s difficult to imagine two words scarier in the English language than business schools’ “designing leadership.”)

To see how this matters for policy and management, consider a late poem of Robert Lowell, “Notice,” and a gloss on it by Helen Vendler, the literary critic. Here’s the poem in its entirety, centering around Lowell’s leaving an asylum after a manic-depressive episode:

Notice

The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm –
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression –
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”

The doctor is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train
and copy on the back of a letter,
as if alone:
“When the trees close branches and redden,
their winter skeletons are hard to find—”
to know after long rest
and twenty miles of outlying city
that the much-heralded spring is here,
and say,
“Is this what you would call a blossom?”
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment.

I take up Vendler’s gloss when she turns to Lowell’s last line:

In becoming conscious of his recovery by becoming aware, literally moment by moment, of his new capacities for the most ordinary actions of life, the poet sees that ‘we are designed for the moment’—that our consciousness chiefly functions moment by moment, action by action, realization by realization. Biologically, ‘we are designed for the moment’ of noticing.

–For my part, what Lowell is doing in the last two lines is also revisiting the second line, “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm” and making this point: The designs put upon us by ideas and enthusiasms differ from the noticing designed into us in at least one major respect: We notice the ideas-that-design because noticing is not an idea. It’s an alertness.

Knee deep in noticing is not being knee deep in ideas or enthusiasms because noticing is a kind of watchfulness—“Is this what you would call a blossom?” If you will, alertness in policymaking and management is, methodologically, first and foremost an analytic sensibility, whether or not the textbooks in policy and management call it that.

–We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!” when it comes to saving the planet, we miss that the reality is somewhat the other way around: We manage complex critical systems as reliably as we do because the systemwide failure up ahead must be prevented. Focusing on what could happen by way of possible management to save the planet is not the same as focusing on what would have happened by way of actual management in saving critical infrastructures.

This means it’s more than of passing interest that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe we all are not trying hard enough. If we did, they want to believe, we all might have a chance to save it.

Yet it’s just as likely to conclude that, when it comes to managing like we do for critical infrastructure whose failure triggers widespread social dread, the planet is not that kind of system or system of systems. It’s not be managed or even manageable that way, even if there were widespread social dread triggered by the prospects of catastrophic climate breakdown and failure. Which there isn’t.

–It’s thus not surprising that those who refuse to “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or have better chances, even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves. Consider one such example:

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

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

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

–So what?

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

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

–Let’s start with a quote:

Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief. BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to the country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full. Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.

https://debtjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Debt-and-the-Climate-Crisis-Briefing-October-2022-UPDATED.pdf

It’s also been reported that only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock, whose recent assets have been around $10 trillion. It’s also said that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.

Now, it’s always good to check the numbers, be they for Zambia, the globe or points in between. But let’s assume the orders of magnitude are correct.

–Yes, of course, we could say that the current sovereign debt crisis could be better managed. Fair enough.

It would be more accurate to say that BlackRock could be managed for the better, because, well, BlackRock is actually being managed in ways the sovereign debt crisis can’t. (Think BlackRock’s C-suite, starting with Larry Fink.) Why then not start with BlackRock being managed differently? After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008. Nothing is set in stone here.

–In other words, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis currently underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as its smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise.

We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the Global Behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.

“The only way to speak of a cliché is with a cliché.” Christopher Ricks

I

How do I convince you that watching South Korean TV dramas of 12 or os episodes is good for you? Whenever I explain why a story about a 400-old space alien falling in love today or why it’s worth watching two actors obviously in their twenties play 17- or 18-year students—my friends stare at me.

But, I’m telling you, this stuff is really, really good. The acting (Kim Soo Hyun, Jun Ji Hyun, Lee Min Ho, Park Shin Hye in the above); and the music (the entire OST from Cinderella and the Four Knights; “Love is the moment” from Heirs; “Eternal love” from Healer—with the amazing Ji Chang Wook btw)

…even if, granted, there are problems with things like endings, lips syncing into a kiss, and subtitles.

So under pressure to justify all this, I’ve come up with a more complex rationale justifying my—and your—watching kdrama.

II

Kdramas, like US soap operas and Spanish TV novellas, have tropes: boy/girl loves girl/boy, second-male lead falls in love with first female lead, poor girl makes good, and a closet-full of stock characters, ranging from revenge-seekers to fate itself.

For me, it’s not the tropes that make kdrama but their clichés and how they’re assembled together. Almost every kdrama I’ve watched combines a good number of the following clichés:

The real kiss between Episodes 8 and 12 followed by the interlude of sheer happiness that just can’t last, then the break-up and the last-episode time jump, say, five years ahead; the whole concept of confessing and dating; hiccups, nose-bleeds, pinky promises & thumb seals; back hugs, comfort pats, and amnesia; night-time fireflies and anytime car chases; carrying someone piggy-back, rushing the gurney down the hospital corridor, slicing vegetables, checking the cellphone, texting and more texting; banquet rooms, hunger groans, finger cuts and pinpricks; fake rain and drinking from empty paper cups; slow-motion turns and long-motion gazes; cars U-turning on major roads, the white truck of doom hitting the car mid-intersection; foot-to-the-peddle and the vehicle accelerating into the outer lane and off screen; one-sided love, funeral wakes and karaoke singing; the guy’s shower scene (what abs!); she accidentally falling into his arms, he grabbing her wrist, she drunk, he clenching his fist and knuckles whitening, she kicking her legs up and down on the bed, he searching his trays for watches and accessories, she kicking him in the shins, he bending across her and pulling her seatbelt tight, he/she following at a distance behind her/him, and both of them slurping down hot rahmen; side-to-side, ear-to-ear whispers or her arms rigid the first time they hug; “hey!” pronounced “yah!”; did you ever know so many people who sleep with the bedroom lights on?; “fighting!,” and omigod, always the flashbacks!………..

When it finally struck me that I’d just gotten started with the above list, I realized: There are so many clichés you could think of a kdrama as one cliché after another from beginning to end. 

III

And that proposition—itself an example of Ricks’ point?—has changed how I watch TV police procedurals from the US, Europe and Scandinavia. I suspect, most like everyone, I watch the procedurals as stories with plots to be followed and solutions to guess along the way.

Now I can’t watch them without first seeing their clothesline of clichés: the segmented sequencing of slamming the office telephone down, rushing out of the station, hurrying up the steps to a house or flat, the chase, the tense interchange in the interview room.

Just as a good part of the craft in kdrama is how to freshen the clichés, so too the craft in police procedurals is in the twists to the sequencing the clichés. (Yes, the early fish-eye kisses in kdramas was so hackneyed—the woman’s eyes pop open and remain so as his lips suddenly touch hers—until, that is, you watched how Jun Ji Hyun does it in My Love from the Star.) To catch any freshening of clichés requires not only a new level of watching and thinking on the part of this viewer. The recurring clichés also drive intertextual resonance across different kdramas—connections and interconnections I hadn’t seen on first viewing. The clichés present an entirely new comfort zone to discover when watching.

So there: Watching kdrama is more complexly rewarding than my interlocutors think.

IV

Now on to equally important stuff. We’ve scheduled a layover in Taiwan so I can see tour some of the tdrama sites (my favorite song ever is Aaron Yan’s “That’s Not Me”(這不是我 on Spotify) and if you haven’t seen the tdrama, Before We Get Married, then don’t—JUST-DO-NOT—or else you’ll be addicted (you have to watch it twice, if only to get the significance to the last scene’s “Let’s have coffee”)—and speaking of “Addicted,” that amazing cdrama is unlike any other subtitled cdrama out there (go on the web to find out the backstory)—but let me stop before I get started on how jdrama differs…

To argue, as some do, that environmental movements have failed because they have not stopped the climate emergency is a significant point of departure. After all, the movements helped articulate the crisis narratives about that emergency in the first place.

To think this way means the emergency is occurring in part because the recommendations of environmental movements have not been adopted and implemented. Another response is that details of implementation have been woefully lacking.

Why? Because, when it comes to specifics, the planet is not and cannot be a control scenario. Here the later Foucault is spot-on:

No power goes without saying, no power, of whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable, no power warrants being taken for granted. Power has no intrinsic legitimacy. All power only ever rests on the contingency and a fragility of a history.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0967010620968345

I

It’s easy enough to take “right, center and left” and make a linear continuum: as when politics moves from the right through the center into the left.

But the straight line becomes V-shaped, when the center is stretched and pulled away from the other two ends, as when the sequence, beginning-middle-end of a story, is made to sag, like a hammock.

Think here of the time-consuming catch-up to the contingencies that come our way in medias res, rendering beginnings long gone (or always disputed) and ends further off than our stories assumed at the start.

That’s what wake-up calls do when they identify intervening crises that stretch time and space out of shape between thought-to-be beginnings and thought-to-be endings.

II

For example, the Covid-19 pandemic was reported to us by several emergency managers as “a wake-up call” with respect to the interconnectivities and vulnerabilities among water, electricity, roads and other backbone infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. In the view of a very experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.

Covid-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of experienced interviewees (e.g. in Oregon). So too shortages in road staff in the aftermath of a vaccine mandate were mentioned by a state emergency manager for transportation as making it harder to undertake operations. Covid-19 responses also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

The pandemic combined at the same time with other emergencies. A heat dome episode required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created Covid-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created issues.

“We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads: “If we had a catastrophic disaster three months ago that would have been a challenge for us to work through.”

“All [Covid-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this,” said a state logistics manager of their early response. The interviewee added: “Covid is so unique and out of the box that we’ve developed rules and processes that we’re only going to use during Covid because they don’t make sense in any other disaster”.

In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to front-line managers about interconnectivities, but not even a rehearsal for what is also to come their way in terms of other crises (including the much-predicted catastrophe of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the two states’ coastline).

III

Many crises are, I submit, V-shaped, notwithstanding their linear scenarios. So what?

Minimally, it means that table-top exercises (a.k.a. rehearsals) based on beginning-middle-end crisis scenarios will inevitably be less V-shaped than needed. This is not to say the former are not useful. It is to say that the most useful table-tops are likely to be wake-up calls to more crises or different ones than thought pre-tabletop–and requiring nowNOW attention, also.

The point is that we are once again back to a key narrative discrepancy in crisis scenarios—between the stated urgency to DO SOMETHING NOW on the one side, and the stated requirement to do so safely with respect to the ends in sight on the other side—while all the time recognizing that both requirements are urged on us and underwritten by the very same unpredictability at the very same scale of analysis, the system level.

On one hand, it is argued we have to experiment even if it risks the limits of survival; on the other hand, being safe means no error should ever be the last trial. This is a discrepancy because it can’t be written off or talked out of; it has to be managed as one of the Anthropocene messes we are in. COVID wasn’t a prequel to another story with its own beginning, middle and end. That is the wake-up call!

Source: The research, from which are drawn interviewee quotes, is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 2121528.

Improvisations within and across interconnected critical infrastructures

I

We spent considerable time in our 2008 High Reliability Management describing the important role and assembly of just-in-time improvisations in maintaining ongoing operations of a major transmission grid. Our 2016 Reliability and Risk continued and extended that discussion to interconnected infrastructures under normal and temporarily disrupted conditions. Our latest research on large socio-technical systems in failure, especially the interconnected backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms, has also underscored the criticality of improvisations.

How so? Both these can be called improvisations: the staff in a power plant working with what is at hand to bring back into operations a generator that suddenly went off line and the water treatment plant reaching out for mobile generators, including those from the power company, in order to get the plant back in operations.

The two are, however, different improvisations when in the former the water treatment plant didn’t experience a disruption in service from the power company (e.g., the power company was managing to an n-1 contingency), while in the latter. disruption and worse was being experienced by the water treatment plant. They differ in degree and kind because of the different shifts in interconnectivity and system control variables (electricity frequency and water pressure) taking place.

II

A huge category mistake thus exists in thinking the workarounds within an infrastructure to ensure ongoing operations and the workarounds improvised post-disaster are similar, i.e., thinking only that both involve flexible, creative behavior and are interinfrastructural by definition.

To think that way is to obscure an essential demarcation in infrastructure operations taking place via interconnectivity shifts, namely, those occasions where: Improvisations jointly undertaken by two or more infrastructures around their shared or overlapping control variables become themselves a primary mode of operation.

That said, improvisational behavior beforehand can pose a benchmark for improvisation later on. “What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, and answered: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.” Success, in other words, is when base-level interconnectivity does not altogether disappear, however much it is reconfigured later on.

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Rethinking pre-disaster mitigations for critical infrastructures

I

How do you choose which bridges to retrofit now and just ahead, when so many major ones here could fail in the next big earthquake?

That question is misformulated and its answers accordingly misleading.

II

Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and other infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.

This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the implication: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and learn from.

Since there are real material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.

III

In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”

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Five points in regard to emergency management for critical infrastructures

(1) The partisans and champions of requisite variety for matching right-now demands with right-now resources must reflect the inter-infrastructural, i.e., they are to be found not only in the emergency management agencies but as prominently in the backbone infrastructures and control rooms of interconnected water, energy, and telecommunications.

Nor is this wider catchment just to increase the partisans and champions. It’s also to compensate for professional blind-spots. “Emergency management is an old game,” an interviewee told us, adding: “We still see a lot of the old guard in this. . .working against innovation even if it’s not intentional on their part”.

(2) Any notion that, if established, a post-disaster normal will necessarily repopulate sequential interconnectivities between and among infrastructures back to a pre-disaster baseline, should be checked.

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

(3) The other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” To paraphrase one interviewee: It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts. “We can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” the regulator said by way of example.

Things are connected, but more often loosely so than some would prefer.

(4) “Who’s available and what’s left to work with?” applies to both sides of a major emergency.

This means that the focus on continuity of operations and management skills, along with changes in delegating authority and duties during incidents, isn’t only understandable. It’s a huge priority and attention sink. Ensuring both pre-disaster and post-disaster continuity of operations is an imperative for monitoring the performance of prior mitigations and placement of precautions.

(5) From the above perspective, “cascading failure across infrastructures” should be disaggregated into different interconnectivity configurations and their respective system control variables (frequency for electricity, water pressure for potable and wastewater systems).

This must be done before assuming anything like cascades are instantaneous and unmanageable. Some documented cascades have been more granular with respect to duration and open to management than typically assumed in formal modeling and planning processes.

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Time, but not timelines, in emergency response

For all that clarity, logic and urgency of emergency response, “it’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling during immediate response, underscored an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner.

In fact, it’s by no means clear how some response actually happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official to us before trying to explain.

Also, it is unlikely in the US setting that senior politicians and government officials–committed as they are to immediate restoration of backbone services–will stay out of the way of infrastructure operators and emergency managers doing the needful. Timelines of interventions are the least of real-time worries.

–For all that clarity, logic and urgency of emergency response, “it’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling during immediate response, underscored an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner. In fact, it’s by no means clear how some response actually happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official to us before trying to explain.

–Also, it is unlikely in the US setting that senior politicians and government officials–committed as they are to immediate restoration of backbone services–will stay out of the way of infrastructure operators and emergency managers doing the needful. One thinks most immediately about on-the-ground damage assessments. Timelines of interventions are the least of real-time worries.

Economism exemplifies what literary critic and poet, William Empson, called Jam Theory. All you really need is under the lid of that wee jam jar of economics.

There are never enough markets to spoon out until reality matches the design of market competition. So what if actually existing markets are one of the most hybridized of social institutions? Not to worry, cuckoo clocks are made without the bird-shit, so too for markets.

Economism is like the actor playing Hamlet who finishes the scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius. When in fact economics differs little from other disciplines knee-deep in uncertainty.

Which then is more bloviating? The school economist’s “the opportunities are attractive, if technological and regulatory challenges are overcome” or the school engineer’s “the opportunities are attractive, if economic and regulatory challenges are overcome”? The scapegoating of regulation in both cases, of course, is essential to the hard sell.