An infinite regress is not an explanation

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, religion, bad faith, identity. . .and. . .and

“We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency” (Denise Levertov, poet, 1967)

Which #1 global crisis? I could pick recent articles from any well-known media outlet. That I choose the online Guardian is not intended to single it out as worse. It’s just that these four competing examples came at around the same time there:

• Here is Francine Prose, former president of PEN, saying that the Trump authoritarian turn is the our number 1 gravest threat today– https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/america-feels-like-a-country-on-the-brink-of-an-authoritarian-takeover.
• Here is George Monbiot, Guardian columnist, saying it’s not Trump, but global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that deserve the global attention–https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi-national-security.
• But no, someone else says it’s actually overshooting the 1.5C of warming that is the global unprecedented crisis– https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/26/number-of-people-living-in-extreme-heat-to-double-by-2050-if-2c-rise-occurs-study-finds
• And there is the polycrisis crowd that insists all of this and more are interactively interconnected into one mega, numero uno constellation of sub-crises–https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped

With so many #1 crises competing for our attention, which to choose? The fact is that there is no choice to be made.

Not one of the four is at a level of granularity with which to assess whether this #1 is more hazardous than the other #1’s and under what conditions. This is particularly true as the hazards are in terms of uncertainties (i.e., their respective unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.)

Crises of course can be reported in short- or long-form media articles. But in the same way that no decisionmaker should want to take a policy decision on the basis of one piece of information only, so too should decisionmakers treat “this is our number 1 crisis” as one piece of the needed. Real-time action is taken for more granular, context-based reasons.

For example, the creators of AI may have a variety of crisis scenarios about the downside of AI. But when they say that the AI scenarios pose threat-equivalents to nuclear war or worse, you need to remind yourself that they have no equivalent level of detail for the latter as they do the former. In fact, they might be the last people on Earth you’d ask for nuclear war scenarios.

The doctrine of catastrophe-unless, then and now

“Keynesianism, then, was a doctrine of catastrophe-unless: the worst can still be avoided through swift and decisive political action…”

George Watson (1977). “The Myth of Catastrophe.” In his Politics and Literature in Modern Britain, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ.

Unlike half a century ago, the doctrine of catastrophe-unless now holds far wider. Inequality, the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, racism, militarism and so much more can only get worse, unless swift and decisive political actions are taken.

Watson was interested in understanding the fatalism of British literary intellectuals over capitalism in the Thirties. By extension, it would now seem we’re all intellectuals in our negativity, artificial or organic. “There is the sheer intellectual prestige of pessimism,” writes Watson. Ditto: “Many men, and especially intellectuals, would rather be thought alarmist than complacent.”

So what? “What is more, it is supremely satisfying to the aesthetic sense to watch a drama in which all the virtue is on one side.” In this view, “Life just cannot meander on. Intellectual nature abhors a vacuum; and if one apocalyptic vision is taken from mankind, like the Christian [one], then the same instinct will take itself to another.” Watson seems to believe the latter, however, is not also part of the meandering.

Stop imagining

Imagine that you’re in a room with four very tall walls, and they’re totally smooth. There are no footholds, and there’s no way out, and you’re in there with nothing, and there’s water pouring in from the top in all directions. What do you do? We were stumped, proposing one solution after another, and none of them worked. And then, the answer to his riddle was: Stop imagining.

https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/

Not, “stop imagining” because what’s imagined is already here. But rather, “stop imagining because it’s getting us nowhere.” As in: “Imagination: Always ‘lively.’ Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination” (Gustave Flaubert, novelist).

And yet: “What we have here is a failure of imagination,” intone the critics of this or that policy failure or crisis. But they are just as likely to demand we take seriously any of their crisis scenarios, even when they are unable to specify what it takes to disprove the scenarios or prevent their recurrence or come up with details about the response structure to be in place after the losses incurred by said crises.

To do the latter requires deep knowledge and realism—that is, far far far far more than the touted imagination. Having the former may even cure us of some crises.

And anyway, how do you know Next-Is-Worse?

Many ecologists and environmentalists I’ve read or with whom I’ve worked insist that, when it comes to ecosystems and the environment, more things can go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong than right.

It is easier to mismanage an ecosystem than it is to manage it. Ecosystem collapse is more certain than ecosystem sustainability. Negative externalities in the environment are to be expected, positive ones not. Probabilities of large system failure and cascades are primed to flip to 1.0 in no time flat.

We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one should expect technology to help. Economic growth is never a sufficient condition for improving the environment, and economic growth’s impacts on the environment are always sufficient for precaution. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, which means everything must be at risk.

Let’s call this, next-is-worse-ism. What, though, are its limits?

Let’s agree today’s rotten core is modernity—international capital, fossil fuel, global urbanization, the Enlightenment project—while in the same breadth insist all this is best understood in the very terms of that modernity: Anything and everything is at risk; all thinkable risks are warnings; any could be catastrophic.

In putting the paradox this way, we are like those trying to predict a poet’s next poem from their current body of work. A more productive approach, I suggest, is to ask: What are we getting from this habituation to next-is-worse-ism? One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out details.

Keynesianism, then, was a doctrine of catastrophe-unless: the worst can still be avoided through swift and decisive political action… George Watson (1977). “The Myth of Catastrophe.” In his Politics and Literature in Modern Britain, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ.

Unlike half a century ago, the doctrine of catastrophe-unless now holds far wider. Inequality, the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, racism, militarism and so much more can only get worse, unless swift and decisive political actions are taken.

Watson was interested in understanding the fatalism of British literary intellectuals over capitalism in the Thirties. By extension, it would now seem we’re all intellectuals in our negativity. “There is the sheer intellectual prestige of pessimism,” writes Watson. Ditto: “Many men, and especially intellectuals, would rather be thought alarmist than complacent.”

So what? “What is more, it is supremely satisfying to the aesthetic sense to watch a drama in which all the virtue is on one side.” In this view, “Life just cannot meander on. Intellectual nature abhors a vacuum; and if one apocalyptic vision is taken from mankind, like the Christian [one], then the same instinct will take itself to another.” Watson seems to believe his reflection is not also part of the meandering.

“commensuration – the process of measuring according to a common standard, or bringing things into relationship for quantification or proportional comparison”

A great deal has been said about the personnel cost from long shifts in infrastructure control rooms interspersed between tedium and emergency. Such burnout is often credited to the extraordinary demands, cognitive and behavioral, placed on their centralized control rooms because of their high reliability mandate to provide safe and continuous services even during emergencies and worse. Operators there are expected to be everyday heroes. Matters look different, however, when the starting point is the commensuration that comes with markets for infrastructure services. Here the causal analysis of high personnel costs shifts to the violence that comes with simplification and quantification (famously: “getting the prices right”).

Commensuration is core to the market transactions. Energy markets produce prices, prices have price-takers, and in this case the price-takers are denominated as energy suppliers and consumers, singly and in aggregate. The control room fulfills its high reliability mandate by putting limits to commensuration in real time operations. This is because of widespread societal dread over systemwide failure of society’s critical infrastructures. People die when the grid fails. When failure threatens, the control room ceases to treat its energy users as aggregated suppliers and consumers. The “end-users” are instead people to be saved, whose collectivity is vastly more differentiated along many dimensions than solely or equally economic.

Market software exists in the transmission grid infrastructures to establish and operate on the basis of real-time energy prices. Centralized control rooms there turn out to be an unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time load and generation. This means preventing the physical and operational collapse of the infrastructure while undertaking these market transactions. (There have been notable cases where market designs and transactions have physically endangered the underlying infrastructure for those markets.)

Several features following from control room efforts to contain and limit a fully commensurated provision of real-time energy. Widespread societal dread of systemwide failure translates into what control room operators call “nightmares that keep us awake at night.” These are what-if crisis scenarios are of greater granularity than, say, the crisis narratives that energy users, for example, may have over climate change impacts on interconnected infrastructure operations. But because of grid and task environment complexities, what-if scenarios of infrastructure operators are NOT predictions of what will happen, but only of could—thus the scenarios’ “nightmare” status.

Under the deregulation initiatives of the late-last century, the introduction of energy markets into infrastructure provision became very intense, and with it, the position of real-time control operators managing under high reliability mandates. The control rooms we have studied then and since then continue to do a great deal of boundary work in ensuring an autonomy or semi-autonomous position because of the real-time urgency in having to make hour-by-hour decisions for an entire, complex system. 

Two important practices in seeking/establishing this autonomy deserve mention. An important part of the boundary work is the control’s unique (but not guaranteed!) capability of achieving team situational awareness in times of emergency (where “keeping the bubble” can be thought of as a kind of mutuality-in-autonomy). Second, the importance of improvisational behavior when push comes to shove. A great deal of creativity in assembling options for the next step ahead can be observed in situations where formal protocols and procedures do not apply or have yet to be rendered.

So what? The cognitive and behavioral demands on operators and the worlds in which they work are more differentiated and variegated than many outsider analysts suppose. “It takes endless labour. . .to ‘measure’ and ‘contain’ these worlds.”

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NB. This blog has been inspired by the quotes, terms, insights and framework of N. Buitron, F. Mühlfried, and H. Steinmüller (2026). “Nightmare egalitarianism: Commensuration, autonomy, and imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70062).

Also see Why economics is not high reliability

Initiatives that appear novel in certain geopolitical contexts may represent established practices elsewhere. For instance, calls for socio-ecological transformation considered ‘radical and advanced’ in the Global North have been embedded in the Global South ‘ecopedagogy’ since the 1990s (Hjorth Warlenius, 2022). The ‘right to repair’, now gaining traction in the West (Graziano and Trogal, 2019), is deeply rooted in subaltern practices of maintenance and continuity. Likewise, the concept of precarious work in neoliberal contexts presumes a lost past of stability and an uncertain future, whereas in other settings the same labour is simply situated in an enduring present with no expectation of change (Tilly, 2021). . . To regard repair as ‘innovative’ or work as ‘precarious’ is to normalise a progressive, linear temporality that may obscure other cyclical or continuous ways of inhabiting the present. . . .Experiences of post-communist transition sit alongside experiences of neoliberal precarity, colonial legacies, climate anxiety and so on. These are not merely different perspectives on a shared present but distinct temporalities: some students inhabit futures of promise while others carry legacies of loss; some experience time as acceleration and pressure, others as interruption or delay to something else entirely.

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507626141; my bold)

It’s easy to dismiss counternarratives. “To be ‘counter’ to hegemonic planning and history is to remain within their logic, playing the same game under a different banner. To be radical. . .is to make the game itself irrelevant.” That said, the sheer number of counternarratives already in a complex world is the best indication we have of the sheer number of radical alternatives also out there.

Climate Migrants

“The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).”

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264#abstract)

Migrants into Europe

“Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.”

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glob.12312)

Latin American Mobility and Border Controls

“While this spectrum defines the cognitive horizon within which most migration law operates, it misses what the infrastructuring perspective is able to show, namely that border regulation in practice is less hermetic and controlled (by states), and that those on the move have considerably more agency than is often assumed, and that the particular legal configurations that enable or disrupt mobility are constantly being infrastructured and (thereby) changed. Again, Latin America is a prime case study here as it features all the factors that allow for such legal infrastructuring.”

(accessed online at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qm9pr_v1)

Digital Networks

“With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings. As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’, where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’.”

(accessed online at https://reliefweb.int/report/world/rsc-working-paper-series-no-143-refugia-reflection-five-years-june-2025)

Remittances and the COVID Pandemic

“1.6% — The decline in global remittances, or money that foreign-born workers sent back to their home countries, to low- and middle-income nations last year. That drop was far less than the 20% decline projected by the World Bank early in the pandemic. Migrant remittances have become crucial economic lifelines as the recoveries of rich and poor countries diverge.” (accessed online at https://whatsnews.cmail20.com/t/d-e-qidpld-jdkdtdwtj-r/)

“Remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries in 2020 as a whole remained resilient, contrary to initial projections and despite having recorded a strong decline in Q2 2020. The latest available data shows remittances are estimated to have reached USD 540 billion in 2020, just 1.6% below the 2019 total of USD 548 billion. . .The decline was smaller than that recorded in 2009 during the global financial crisis. Fiscal measures in migrants’ host countries, including cash transfers and employment support programmes implemented in many large economies, the widespread use of remote work, and migrants’ commitment to continue providing a lifeline to families by cutting consumption or drawing on savings contributed to this better-than-expected outcome. However, there are important regional and intra-regional differences, including between the countries covered in this study.” (accessed online at https://www.esm.europa.eu/system/files/document/2022-11/ESM_DP_18.pdf)

Children’s Labor

“We examined a number of dimensions of children’s work in African agriculture in papers published in 2020 and 2022. It is certainly the case that some children are harmed by the work they do, and others may be forced to work, exploited or trafficked.

Yet, based on this and other work informed by extensive literature review and initial research, children who are harmed by working represent a minority of working children. And critically, neither their interests, nor those of other rural children, are necessarily served by ongoing efforts to eradicate child labour from African agriculture.”

(accessed online at https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/child-labour-on-farms-in-africa-its-important-to-make-a-distinction-between-whats-harmful-and-what-isnt/)

COVID Pandemic in Africa

“Viewed through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis narrative, Africa’s exceptionally low rates of COVID-19 mortality amid pervasive informality have widely been regarded as a delayed reaction, or a product of low testing capacity, masking a ‘ticking time bomb’. Yet, the statistical evidence shows that, nearly two years into the pandemic, high levels of informality remain inversely related to levels of COVID-19 mortality in Africa, and this pattern has continued to the present. The reality is, for a variety of reasons, larger informal economies are not associated with a higher level of COVID-19 mortality, either at a global level, or at the level of African sub-regions. However, social policy measures to facilitate lockdowns for precarious workers have been more problematic, supporting efforts to crowd the poor together in informal settlements and social provisioning activities.”

(accessed online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877792/)

COVID Pandemic in Europe (newly added)

“In the weeks that followed the late March summit [the EU Council’s video summit of March 26 2020), a new morality tale seemed to gain shape in the public debate around governing the pandemic. According to the interviews, it took a short time for the idea of a coordinated response to emerge as consensual and for divisions to emerge on
the relative weight of grants and loans: ‘By May everyone agreed that we had to throw money at this’ (Interview #3). Pushed by southern countries, but also by the heads of EU institutions, the crisis was framed not as a result of faulty domestic politics, but as an exogenous, symmetric (if delayed) shock for which, as the letter affirmed, no country could be held responsible. As an interviewee put it:

To phrase it in a very blunt way, as if I was Dutch, it was not their fault. It was not the question of spending on booze and women as Dijsselbloem [former Eurozone President and Dutch Finance Minister] said back in 2009 or 2010. . .(Interview #3)

During the pandemic, a consensus emerged that failure of EU coordinated action – and solidarity – would pose an existential threat to the bloc (Ferrera et al., 2021), already affected by the long and difficult process of partial disintegration posed by Brexit. As Conte said to the German media in April 2020, ‘we are writing history, not an economics textbook’ (Fortuna, 2020).”

(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755773925100295)

The World Bank’s Mixed Role in Global Neoliberalism (newly added)

“By developing this historical account, the article deepens our understandingnot only of the World Bank, but also of global neoliberalism. It draws out three principal insights. First, the article reveals that although neoliberalism was a global regime—in that it reached much of the world—it was never a universal one. Second, the article observes that the World Bank did not act straightforwardly as an agent for the United States, despite the considerable control that the United States held over the institution. Finally, the article suggests that by investigating the work of international organizations in China in the final decades of the twentieth century, scholars can find new linkages between two major historical developments of recent decades: the decline of neoliberalism and the global rise of state capitalism.”

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6072727)

NB. In some cases, footnote numbers and internal citations have been deleted for ease of reading.

In all three contexts we found that crises tend to be multifarious and compound in nature, affecting a diverse array of population groups. These groups are impacted differently and try to respond and cope in similarly diverse ways. Across the three contexts considered, it is not the case that a single or very simple set of characteristics unify the affected populations, which makes these groups difficult to identify using the kinds of standard eligibility criteria usual in social assistance programming.

(accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Targeting_Social_Assistance_in_Protracted_Crises_Lessons_from_Ethiopia_Niger_and_Nigeria/30657650?file=59698364https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Targeting_Social_Assistance_in_Protracted_Crises_Lessons_from_Ethiopia_Niger_and_Nigeria/30657650?file=59698364)

Remember the days when you could agree with the Bogotá mayor, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation”?

Not anymore, if you believe the critiques!

First, if the rich actually did use more public transport, they’d demand more security and survellance systems. Here, the presence of what is already there needs to be corrected. But such surveillance is a big no-no for critics. Second, segments of the poor are routinely under-served, if served at all, by public transport. Here the absence of what is not there needs to be corrected. In this way, supporters of existing infrastructures rightly feel they are damned for what they do, and damned for what they don’t do.

What then do critics recommend? For some, the answer is, well, “people-as-infrastructure.” The hope is that the marginalized potential users would self-organize and coordinate their own transport services and care systems. Presumably, if in so doing they put up a lot of CCTVs and opened access to everyone (including the rich), only then would those amendments be A-okay.

For this line of infrastructure thinking, I too say “Not anymore!”

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These different positions are usefully captured in https://doi.org/10.1093/secdia/xhaf001

I

“Make a decision” is what policy analysis is supposed to be all about. Gather the information, choose the evaluative criteria, and then decide and make a recommendation for possible implementation and afterwards evaluation of actual impacts, if any. Of course, we were taught it’s more complex and less hydraulic than that. But still the objective was that really-existing deliberation led to a decision followed by some kind of execution (with delays or changes along the way).

The complexification comes from the necessary center-staging of the “balancing test” that is: the weighing of the information in light of the economic, technical and political feasibility criteria for deciding the case at hand. Weighing the pros and cons, the push and pulls, and those hard-to-determine costs and benefits or risks-and-returns can end up feeling like the last resort over and within a longer process. Having to balance is what you do when the evaluative criteria selected–efficiency, equity, feasibility, whatever–do not clearly lead to a recommendation.

In this way and now more broadly, “decide” can feel like not just last-minute, but also a “last ditch effort” in the face of urgency but lack of clarity. When so, it’s rather odd that the next steps, “implement, operate and evaluate” rarely make explicit mention of the chief consequence of making a decision under urgency but lack of clarity while undertaking the balancing, namely: the need for repair afterwards. As Isaiah Berlin put it, this “promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium. . .is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.” Last-resort decisionmaking continues well after the “decide” step, as new information comes in and subsequent responses are crafted. To call the latter “adaptation” or “muddling through” misses, literally, the ongoing repair needed for the infrastructures and processes undergirding ongoing decisionmaking.

This means that an often under-acknowledged feature of the “decide” cycle are the organizational/institutional efforts to normalize last-ditch efforts under conditions that feel last-resort.

Courts are institutional niches in which to make real-time decisions, including those for which there is no clear precedent or existing legal norm (Duncan Kennedy 2024). Centralized control rooms in critical infrastructure turn out also to be an unique organization formation to balance competing system and local demands is under pressures of real-time (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016). (In narrative analytical terms, such formats are meta-narratives that accommodate, at least in real time, conflicting/uncertain storylines.) These and other institutionalized formations merit, I believe, as much attention as currently given to extraordinary powers granted to executives during emergencies. Both mechanisms necessitate “repairs” afterwards, but of a very different nature.

ll

To see how, consider recent developments with the US Supreme court. A growing concern has been its expanding “shadow docket.” “Emergency applications,” writes the New York Times‘s Adam Kushner,

require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.

What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:

None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.

The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.”

(accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/briefing/a-supreme-court-mystery.html

The problem is Alito’s analogy. Our early Federalists also worried about systemwide emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times (think of Lincoln during the Civil War). But these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter (Fatovic 2009). Or in the case of the shadow docket, the final legal determination comes later after lower court deliberations.

Yes, there are doctors in the emergency room, but the point here is that the justices are not incident management teams in emergencies, and physicians the rest of the time. Career physicians and career emergency staff are different professions requiring different skills and orientations, at least if you take the management literatures seriously.

The court is not a control room, and this is best seen when it comes to urgencies and their respective balancing tests. Repairs undertaken to restore activities back to the prevailing normal–back into the current legal system and adjudication processes–look very different from repairs that end up leading to a new normal and legal precedents.

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Other sources

Berlin, I. (1998). “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, p. 16. (For those who associate “repair” with “maintenance”, see p. 15 where Berlin focuses on the need to “maintain” this precarious equlibrium).

Fatovic, C. (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kennedy, D. (2024). “The reception of Jacques Derrida in American Critical Legal Studies.” Accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6009714

Roe, E. and P.R. Schulman (2008) High Reliability Management, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

—————————————– (2016). Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. 

I

“Make a decision” is what policy analysis is supposed to be all about. Gather the information, choose the evaluative criteria, and then decide and make a recommendation for possible implementation and afterwards evaluation of actual impacts, if any. Of course, we were taught it’s more complex and less hydraulic than that. But still the objective was that really-existing deliberation led to decision followed by some kind of execution (with delays or changes along the way).

The complexification comes the the necessary center-staging of the “balancing test” that is: the weighing of the information in light of the economic, technical and political feasibility criteria for deciding the case at hand. Weighing the pros and cons, the push and pulls, and those hard-to-determine costs and benefits or risks-and-returns can end up feeling like the last resort in a longer process. Having to balance is what you do when the evaluative criteria selected–efficiency, equity, feasibility, whatever–do not clearly lead to a recommendation.

In this way, “decide” can feel like a last ditch effort in the face of urgency but lack of clarity. It’s rather odd then that the next steps, “implement, operate and evaluate” rarely make explicit mention of the chief consequence of making a decision under urgency but lack of clarity while undertaking the balancing, namely: the need for repair afterwards. As Isaiah Berlin put it, this “promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium. . .is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.” Last-resort decisionmaking continues well after the “decide” step, as new information comes in and subsequent responses are crafted. To all the latter “adaptation” or “muddling through” misses, literally, the ongoing repair needed for the infrastructures and processes undergirding ongoing decisionmaking.

This means that an often under-acknowledged feature of the “decide” cycle are the organizational/institutional efforts to normalize last-ditch efforts under conditions that feel last-resort. Courts are institutional niches in which to make real-time decisions, including those for which there are no clear precedent or existing legal norm (Duncan Kennedy 2024). Centralized control rooms in critical infrastructure turn out also to be an unique organization formation to balance competing system and local demand is under pressures of real-time (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016). (In narrative analytical terms, such formats are meta-narratives that accommodate, at least in real time, conflicting/uncertain storylines.) These and other institutionanalized formations merit, I believe, as much attention as currently given to extraordinary powers granted to executives during emergencies. Both mechanisms necessitate “repairs” afterwards, but of a very different nature.

ll

To see how, consider recent developments with the US Supreme court. A growing concern has been its expanding “shadow docket.” “Emergency applications,” writes the New York Times‘s Adam Kushner,

require a snap decision about whether a policy can go ahead or must wait while lower judges argue over its legality. Critics call this the “shadow docket,” and the court usually rules on the urgent cases within weeks. Trump has won almost all 18 of these petitions. And unlike normal rulings, justices often don’t explain their rationale.

What is of interest here isn’t so much the shadow docket itself as it is how some Justices see what they are doing in deciding this way. Kushner elaborates:

None of these emergency decisions are final. In each, lawyers can fight the policy in lower courts. Perhaps the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the government can’t deport migrants from around the world to Sudan or unmake a federal agency without the say-so of Congress. But by then, critics of the shadow docket say, the work will already be done.

The justices themselves have battled over the propriety of emergency rulings. In a 2021 dissent, Elana Kagan rued a midnight ruling that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade in Texas. A month later, Samuel Alito returned fire in a speech:

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways. … You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when they are handling a matter when time is not of the essence in the same way.”

(accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/briefing/a-supreme-court-mystery.html

The problem is Alito’s analogy. Our early Federalists also worried about systemwide emergencies, and the accommodation they made was that, yes, presidential emergency powers may be needed in extraordinary times (think of Lincoln during the Civil War). But these would not serve as precedent for governance thereafter (Fatovic 2009). Or in the case of the shadow docket, the final legal determination comes later after lower court deliberations.

Yes, there are doctors in the emergency room, but the point here is that the justices are not incident management teams in emergencies, and physicians the rest of the time. Career physicians and career emergency staff are different professions requiring different skills and orientations, at least if you take the management literatures seriously.

The court is not a control room, and this is best seen when it comes to emergencies and their respective balancing and last ditch efforts. Repairs undertakento restore activities back to the prevailing normal–the current legal system and adjusication–look very different than repairs that end up leading to a new normal and legal precedents.

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Other sources

Berlin, I. (2013). “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity 2nd edition. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fatovic, C. (2009). Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kennedy, D. (2024). “The reception of Jacques Derrida in American Critical Legal Studies.” Accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6009714

Roe, E. and P.R. Schulman (2008) High Reliability Management, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

—————————————– (2016). Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. 

I

It’s common to think of frustration as distinctly personal and individual–at least until I get to the point of explaining why you and others are cause the frustrations. At that point, frustrations aren’t just interpersonal; the type of relationship we have with each other may well not exist without the velcro of frustration. As the psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, and others underscore, you know you’re connected precisely because it’s frustrating (e.g., Phillips 2012).

Take a random walk through the pastoralist literature and you will find explicit references to: frustrated pastoralists and communities (Nori 2022, passim); frustrated politicians in pastoralist areas (Allouche et al 2025, p.16); security forces frustrated by pastoralists (Casola 2022, p. 25); pastoralists frustrated by security forces (Scott-Villiers et al 2025, p. 29); pastoralists frustrated with researchers (Bell et al 2025, p.10/17), and frustrated researchers in pastoralist areas (Semplici et al 2024, p. 13). There are also frustrated younger men in pastoralist Kenya and their frustrated elders (Muneri 2024, passim; Hazama 2023, p. 267), along with frustrated—well, you get the picture.

Pastoralists are frustrated, researchers are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. To repeat, that is how they know they’re connected: They frustrate others and others frustrate them. They wouldn’t be in these relationships if they weren’t annoyed with each other.

So what? Now, here is where things get interesting from a pastoralist development perspective!

II

To start with, frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling their joint frustrations is what pastoralists, NGO staff, researchers, and government officials are to do between bouncing back and bouncing forward.

This is why it’s such a big issue to determine just with whom pastoralists are in fact interacting. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Or is it that the others are more a nuisance for them, if that? Is the researcher actually frustrated with the pastoralists s/he is studying and, if so, in what ways is that frustration keeping their interactions going? Answers to such questions problematize currently popular binaries like caring/not caring and not only notions of caring and private self/public role.

The follow-on analytic step then is to look at other major pastoralist binaries and see to what extent, if any, frustration relationships problematize them as well. The reader is already familiar with the debunking of any hard and fast line between nature/nurture and ecosystems/humans, so no need to repeat the familiar criticisms here. What does need highlighting, I believe, is the critics’ own use of another very popular binary, that of justice/injustice, as if there were in fact just systems which can or should correct for the equally well-known injustices pastoralists undergo and have undergone.

The twofold obstacle to any such conclusion is that (1) all manner of injustices are incurred without specific reference to principles or norms of justice and, anyway (2) those principles and norms prove contradictory, inconsistent or ambiguous when it comes to specific contexts (Douglass 2025). This is both an empirical and theoretical argument most recently associated with the political philosopher, Judith Shklar:

What sort of problem is injustice? One way of thinking about it is as an ethical problem. If not the first virtue of social institutions, justice is one of the most important moral values that should guide our reflections on politics. Injustice negates (or is a departure from) justice and is therefore a problem. Understood this way, there is a strong case for maintaining that we require principles of justice to evaluate cases of injustice: we can only identify the nature and scale of injustices with reference to some prior idea of justice. As should now be evident, this is not Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. She instead starts from our experiences of injustice and explores the political problems to which they give rise. The sense of injustice that we all experience should be understood in reference to the plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations that exist within any society, which cannot be formalized into determinate principles of justice. As this sense of injustice is a deep and inescapable feature of all social life, there is a political imperative to find ways of living together that can mitigate it as effectively as possible without (at the extreme) descending into cycles of violent revenge. To understand the problem of injustice in this way is to treat it as a political problem, first and foremost, rather than as an ethical one.

Such a sense of injustice repeatedly appears in the pastoralist literature (e.g., Krätli and Toulmin 2020, p. 68). That there is injustice across many pastoralist areas and that the frustrating challenge is a political one in preventing or coping with ensuing cycles of violence are neatly captured by many pastoralist observers, including Nori (2022; see also Benjaminsen and Ba 2021):

Political leaders, mafia-like organisations, and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated ethnic identities, political asymmetries, and local grievances to mobilise support for their activities. These provide weapons, salaries and opportunities to seize power at the local level, and with these the promise of redressing the many injustices faced by pastoralists and thereby transforming the local political economy. Cases include Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Sahelo-Saharan fringes, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region, Al-Shabaab in the Somali ecosystem, and other organisations operating across SSA drylands and beyond, where local communities are drawn into a ‘war economy’ dominated by politicians, smugglers commanders, and fighters whose interests lie in generating new forms of power, protection and profit. . .

In other words, it should not be surprising when existing local justice systems are commended for providing some everyday order and stability (e.g., Scott-Villiers 2025, p.35).

Why? Because even weak systems demonstrate the frustrating–really, frustrating–importance of giving injustice and grievances their due, whatever the global justice systems appealed to (see also Douglass 2025; on local and global justice systems and their tensions, start with Elster 1992).

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Sources

Allouche, J., C.Y. Yao, K.S. Amédée 2025. “Rethinking ‘Farmer-Herder’ Conflicts in Ivorian Internal Frontier.” African Affairs 123/493: 449–467 (access online at https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/123/493/449/7951617)

Bell, A. R., O. S. Rakotonarivo, W. Zhang, C. De Petris, A. Kipchumba, R. S. Meinzen-Dick. 2025. “Understanding pastoralist adaptations to drought via games and choice experiments: field testing among Borana communities.” Ecology and Society 30(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15836-300125)

Benjaminsen, T.A., B. Ba 2021. “Fulani-Dogon Killings in Mali: Farmer-herder conflicts as insurgency and counterinsurgency.” African Security (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392)

Douglass, R. 2025. “Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice.” American Political Science Review: 1–12 (accessed online at http://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/who-needs-a-theory-of-justice-judith-shklar-and-the-politics-of-injustice/5B25A4AF90526DAE217F93E87765E074)

Elster, J. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens, Russell Sage Foundation: New York NY

Hazama, I. 2023. “Man-Animal Social Relationship as Source of Resilience,” Chapter 9 in Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Toward a Relational and Contextual Approach, Eds. S. Konaka, G. Semplici and P. Little, Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press, Japan

Krätli S., C. Toulmin 2020. Farmer–Herder Conflict in Sub-saharan Africa? IIED, Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development, London (accessed online at http://pubs.iied. org/17753IIED)

Muneri, E.W. 2024. Intersectional Subjectivities, Embodied Experiences, and Everyday Responses among the Maasai Pastoralists Amidst Environmental Changes: Insights from the Mara in Kenya, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (accessed online at https://sussex.figshare.com › ndownloader › files)

Nori, M. 2022. Assessing the Policy Frame in Pastoral Areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Research Paper No. RSC 2022/03, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Italy (accessed online at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4071572 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4071572)

Phillips, A. 2012. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY.

Scott-Villiers, P., A. Scott-Villiers, and the team from Action for Social and Economic Progress, Somalia 2025. Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands. IDS Working Paper 618, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Navigating_Violence_and_Negotiating_Order_in_the_Somalia_Kenya_Borderlands/28715012?file=53375021)

Semplici, G., L.J, Haider, R. Unks, T.S. Mohamed, G. Simula, P. Tsering (Huadancairang), N. Maru, L. Pappagallo, M. Taye 2024. “Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world.” Ecosystems and People, 20(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928)

West, S., L.J. Haider, S. Stålhammar & S. Woroniecki 2020. “A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations.” Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 304-325 (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2020.1814417)