I

One of the ironies of infrastructure analysis is the finding that fixed infrastructures and continuous supply of services are saturated with and by contingencies, not least of which are shocks and surprises.

First, the fact that infrastructures involve on the ground assets has long been recognized as rendering them vulnerable to all manner of wider environmental contingencies:

Once developed, these infrastructural assets are difficult to relocate or repurpose. In effect, capital investments become affixed to specific built environments and localities, forming stable networks of spatial interdependence. These networks, on the one hand, facilitate circulation and accumulation by linking resource frontiers, but on the other, also expose capital to territorial and political contingencies inherent in fixed spatial arrangements. . .

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2025.2569670)

So too at the start of infrastructure development with the lag between investing in new infrastructures and their provision of critical services:

. . .investments were by their very nature ‘fixed’ at a certain point in time, introducing another source of uncertainty: when money was converted into physical means of production, it took an extended period of time before it began to deliver returns, but it was hard to predict all the changes that could occur while the investor was waiting to realise them.

(accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711, p. 29

That extended period of time includes the shocks and surprises that explain those much-recorded gaps between infrastructure plan and implementation and between implementation and actual operations of what are in practice and on the ground, interconnected critical infrastructures.

It is in this context of unpredictability and contingency that we must understand the role of “infrastructure maintenance and repair”–at least as actually undertaken during really-existing infrastructure operations. M&R is, if you will, the best proof we have about whether or not infrastructure operations survive the unholy trinity of: the solutionism of fool-proof designers and planners; “advanced” technologies introduced prematurely only to become obsolete earlier than expected; and our intensified dependence on the resulting kluge and amalgam for actual services in real time and over time.

II

So what?

Well, we at least have a different answer to why people seek first to restore the infrastructures they have, even when as bad as they have been. For example, why doesn’t the persisting prospect of catastrophic failures with catastrophic consequences of a magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State convince the populations concerned that the economic system that puts them in such a position must be changed before the worst happens? The answer: Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, re-establish, or rebuild–is the real-time priority for immediate response after a catastrophe.

Yes, let’s talk about replacing or repurposing the infrastructures we have before a catastrophe; yes, let’s talk about alternative systems with entirely different demands for maintenance and repair. But never forget that, when that catastrophe hits, the priority is to get back to where we were before the disaster, if only to repair what we what we are familiar with and know how to maintain thereafter.

A huge challenge will be to design an international set of industrial policy standards to avoid the current trend towards highly nationalist policies at the expense of others, e.g. conflictual trade and tariff wars. The ultimate goal should be to develop a cooperative global governance that allows industrial policies on a national or transnational level, for reasons that are commonly seen as legitimate. Having such rules could even be a prerequisite for saving free trade in all other well-defined sectors where markets function to the benefit of the many. https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/5/article/winning-back-the-future-preparing-for-a-comeback-of-democracy.html

It’s not just that weasel phrase: “could even be a prerequisite,” which of course entails “may still not be one”. It’s not just that high-altitude floating signifier, “cooperative global governance”–think here the Academy of Lagado’s efforts to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. No, it’s that god-awful “design”.

Are there actually people who believe macro-design produces really-existing necessary and sufficient conditions for this or that human behavior? Design as control of inputs, processes and outputs of this most complex socio-political-economic-ecological globe?

I wish these believers the best, but in the absence of verification criteria for their claims, I’ll treat them as self-refuting propositions as in “everything is relative.”

The playhouse manuscript, Sir Thomas More, has been called “an immensely complex palimpsest of composition, scribal transcription, rewriting, censorship and further additions that features multiple hands”. One of those hands was Shakespeare–and that has contemporary relevance.

–The authoritative Arden Shakespeare text renders a passage from Shakespeare’s Scene 6 as follows (this being Thomas More speaking to a crowd of insurrectionists opposing Henry VIII):

What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain…

The last two lines, however, had been edited by another of the play’s writers (“Hand C”), deleting the bolded lines Shakespeare had originally written,

Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot.
In, in to your obedience. While even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
What rebel captain….

–What has been effaced away by the deletion is, first, the notion that contrition is itself a kind of war and a safer war, at that.

According to the Arden Shakespeare, “The act of contrition might be described as wars because the former rebels would enlist themselves in the struggle of good and evil, and would fight against their own sin of rebellion.” In either case—contrition or rebellion—obedience is required. Actually, nothing was less safe than rebellion whose “discipline is riot”.

–What has also been scored out, in other words, from Shakespeare’s original passage is the clear accent on contrition and peace over continued upheaval. But the absence of contrition by those involved in the formulation and implementation of war policies is precisely what we have seen and are seeing today.

For to prioritize contrition would mean refocusing obedience from battle to a very different struggle in securing peace and security, a mission in which our ministries of interior and defence are notably inferior, be they in Russia, the US, or elsewhere.

Principal sources

Sir Thomas More (2011), ed. John Jowett (Arden Shakespeare, third series. Bloomsbury, London)

Van Es, B. (2019). Troubles of a glorious breath. TLS (March 22)

I

What do we call the stage of knowledge-making between technological incompletion and delaying completion? Might it be something like learning from prototyping, or from repairing and repairing again?

But what if prototyping and repair seem without end these days? That is, obsolescence more and more precedes completion, which in turn leads us right back to unknowledge? What if no one saw the need to record the processes of prototyping or repair because something new or better always comes along early (or so they thought). Such indeed “is why we know the names of every Roman emperor but don’t know how they mixed their concrete, or why we have thousands of pages of Apollo program documents but couldn’t build a Saturn V today” (https://www.scopeofwork.net/ise-jingu-and-the-pyramid-of-enabling-technologies/).

An important, but under-acknowledged, consequence follows from technologies as well as technological processes always being immanently obsolete. This too supports the temporary and flexible over the permanent and institutional when it comes to organizational structures to handle technological policy and management. If wicked social problems by definition withstand institutional solutionism, then why expect permanent opposition to the short-run and adaptive in organizational response to technology?

II

The problem with the preceding paragraphs is that they stop short of the needful. “Short-run,” “adaptable” and “flexible” are not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specifics–that is, often improvisational–properties of actually-existing adaptation, flexibility and performance under real-time urgencies. When in the face of complex technological disruption or failure, what you have before you are not distinct and separate probabilities and consequences, but rather the mess of contingencies and aftermaths.

To put the same point positively, we are talking about the requirement to be case-specific in regards to technological change. And just what cases would these be? Let me conclude with one example of what I am trying to describe above:

Like barcodes, QR codes were not originally designed to become components of global information infrastructures: their success as infrastructural gateways was largely unplanned and contingent on unpredictable sociotechnical convergences. Every step of this gradual historical process has been situated in specific national or regional contexts, scaling up “entire infrastructural systems out of situated local needs” (Edwards et al., 2009, p. 370): barcode standardization has shaped the U.S. market economy; the machine-readability of QR codes has enhanced the efficiency of Japanese manufacturing logistics; their uptake as analog portals was made possible by the rapid informatization of East Asian countries; their consolidation as meta-generic gateway was catalyzed by the infrastructuralization of Chinese digital platforms. Lastly, the emergence of QR codes as infrastructural gateways was opportunistic, as they occupied a niche that competing gateways were not flexible enough to cover: through services like Alipay and WeChat Pay, QR codes took on the role of debit and credit cards, which had never achieved the same success as a gateway in China as they did in 20th-century America (Lauer, 2020, p. 11)

(accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20594364231183618; highlighted terms by the article’s author)

Also, no one should doubt that obsolescence has been well at work in this domain, e.g., in the transition from barcodes to QR codes (https://www.nrfbigshoweurope.com/en/industry-trends/Barcode-era).

I

Over time I’ve been struck by an institutional contrast in the claim to providing highly reliable services.

On one hand, we have the state and federal regulators and legislators who pass the laws and standards to be followed by critical infrastructures and, on the other hand, the real-time professionals in the respective control rooms who have had to operationalize the standards in order to maintain system reliability in real time. For insiders, this contrast is not surprising: No plan withstands contact with the enemy, and it isn’t news that frequent but unpredictable shocks and surprises require operationally redesigning official procedures and defective technology so to meet these regulatory and legislative mandates for infrastructure reliability.

So what? More formally, the centralized infrastructure control room turns out to be a unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time. You don’t find other institutions able to do this, nor should you expect to. Infrastructure control rooms are cen­tralized for system-wide response and management by their real-time dispatchers and schedulers, but that centralization entails the rapid management by these reliability professionals of system control variables—such as electricity frequency, natural gas pipe pressures, and waterflows—whose movements can have immediate decentralized (local­ized) interactions.

II

It’s banal to say the state and federal legislatures are not operational control rooms in the sense just described.

But let’s shift the analysis to Kenya pastoralists, at least those who are equivalent real-time reliability professionals in the drylands, and contrast them to the MPs in the country’s Parliament. Two implications are immediate.

First, it’s also no news that the Kenya Parliament, and its MPs, are criticized for many things, i.e.,

African parliaments present a number of shortcomings, including (i) the commodification of parliamentary seats, (ii) the lack of social representativeness of elected representatives, (iii) the fact that elected representatives can be captured by partisan or illegitimate interests, (iv) their lack of competence on most of the subjects they are supposed to debate, and (v) the fact that they do not necessarily deliberate on urgent matters in a timely fashion. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/analysis-of-the-nexus-between-democratic-governance-and-economic-justice-in-africa

Fair enough, but nevertheless to underscore that Kenya MPs, like legislators in much of the West, are not as timely in emergencies as are reliability professionals is hardly noteworthy. (The Sámi parliament in Finland was neither consulted nor informed in advance of proposed US troop and weapons activities in 2024, for example [https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article72359])

III

More, once you start thinking in terms of African Parliaments as lenses to analyze critical service reliability in their respective countries, you realize how little research, with some notable exceptions, has been done on the topic. When was the last time you read any academic recommending improving development by improving African Parliaments?

Or to put the point more properly and comparatively, it’s the respective President and Cabinet ministers who get more attention and analysis. The assumption, of course, has been that parliaments are subordinate to the president, party, or military. But we risk stigmatizing all parliaments in the same sense others, including some MPs, stigmatize all pastoralists. Really, are African Parliaments to be dismissed that easily?

In any case, it’s problematic for academic researchers to recommend that government officials and NGO staff be in authentic collaboration with pastoralists taking the lead, when those very same researchers wouldn’t be caught dead collaborating with the political elites, including MPs. This “development collaboration,” such as it is, is especially problematic when (1) pastoralists bear all the risks if the resulting research recommendations go pear-shaped and (2) government would be blamed anyway when mistakes in implementing the recommendations were not caught beforehand.

---

NB. For more on pastoralists as reliability professionals, please see:

Roe, E. 2020. “Pastoralists as reliability professionals.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2020/04/17/pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals/)

———. 2025. https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

A while ago, a joint statement was issued by the Center for AI Safety. It was the one sentence quoted above. Famously, it was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures.

Now, of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence.

But, just as clearly, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.

---

The conventional balance of terror and ecocide

Article 8. . .Ecocide

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. . . .

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5273187)

It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.

Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:

[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.

Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.

---

“So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die, so I can be sustainable

To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]

The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).

Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end really matters:

Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .

It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.

(accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton)

---

Underdog metaphysics

“Underdog metaphysics,” coined by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, has been defined as:

On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”

C. Wilén and Johan Söderberg (2025). “Against Underdog Metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory.” Acta Sociologica (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00016993251356339)

Let’s not forget, however, just who finds powerlessness to be an elite position:

American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.

P. Mishra (2025). “Speaking Reassurance to Power.” Harpers (accessed online at
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/speaking-reassurance-to-power-pankaj-mishra-easy-chair/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)

---

Design leadership!

Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

• Plato and Dionysius II;
• Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
• Seneca and Nero;
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
• Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
• Montaigne and Henri IV;
• Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
• Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
• Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
• Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
• in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
• Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)

So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”

---

Sorry to interrupt, but is your point. . .?

. . . .Given the scope and scale of the financing (and divestment) required for mitigation and the support for adaptation, current financing gaps suggest transitions are not happening at the pace or scale they need to cope with catastrophic change. CPI find that global climate finance needs will amount to $6300 billion worldwide in 2030 (Buchner et al., 2023) and should have reached about $4200 bn in 2021. Yet in 2021, total climate finance amounted to $850 bn: a significant sum, but nowhere near what is required. This is hugely challenging, yet needs to be set against the costs of inaction. Without such interventions, warming will exceed 3°C, leading to macroeconomic losses of at least 18% of GDP by 2050 and 20% by 2100 (NFGS, 2022). . . .

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10245294251318468; my bold)

Excuse me, but is your point that the $850bn would have been better spent elsewhere?

---

You just want to tell him. . .

“Good God, Trump, get a grip! We’re adults here.”

I’m reading an article on LatamGPT, the development of a Latin American version of ChatGPT:

When researchers from the LatamGPT project asked ChatGPT for a 500-character description of Latin American culture, the response was polite but revealing: “Latin American culture is a vibrant amalgam of Indigenous roots, African influences, and European heritage. It is characterized by its rich diversity in music, dance, and cuisine, reflected in festivals like Carnival and the Flower Fair.” While the formulation may seem inclusive, what it reveals is a superficial and standardized understanding of a region marked by the imperial overseas conquest and colonization, through which a mestizaje of exceptional density and complexity took place—rarely found elsewhere in the world—whose tensions, memories, and ways of life far exceed any tourist postcard or folkloric representation. In its stylistic correctness, the response betrays the limits of an AI trained from outside the experience it aims to describe.

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11569-025-00480-1; internal footnote deleted_

Sounds right, but what does “mestizaje” mean, you and I ask? The article further along produces the synonym, “hybridization”, but nothing formal.

So I google: “mestizaje meaning.” Oops, the first thing that pops up is the AI-generated:

Mestizaje is a term for the mixing of different racial and cultural groups, historically referring to the blending of Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also including the later addition of African, Asian, and other ancestries. Beyond just race, it encompasses the fusion of languages, customs, and religions that occurred during and after Spanish colonization, and the term is still used today to describe mixed-ancestry identities and cultural exchange. It is a complex concept that is sometimes critiqued for oversimplifying identity, but it remains a significant part of many national identities in the Americas.

Well, this covers some of what the article’s authors describe, but then again, there’s that use of the contentious term, race. . .

So I end up searching further down the google search results and find:

“Mestizaje,” which is associated with the word “mixed,” can be understood as the product of mixing two distinct cultures—that is, Spanish and Indigenous American. While it is etymologically connected to the French métis (a person of mixed ancestry, similar to mestiza/o in Spanish) and métissage (the cultural process that leads to this) and to the Portuguese mestiço (a person of mixed ancestry), it is an unstable signifier that has different meanings depending on its context. Referring to the biological and cultural mixing of European and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, mestizaje can be understood as the effect caused by the impact of colonization. In North America, the closest approximation to “mestizaje” is the word métis, indicating a person of mixed aboriginal and European ancestry. For example, in western Canada the term is used in reference to people of Caucasian and Native Indian ancestry. However, both métissage and métis are used primarily in Francophone culture and literature. English, on the other hand, has no equivalent for “mestizaje,” although in theory, it has been identified as synonymous with cultural hybridization or hybridity, as both represent the space-in-between (Anzaldúa 1987; Bhabha 1994; García Canclini 1995).

(https://keywords.nyupress.org/latina-latino-studies/essay/mestizaje/)

Kind of Eurocentric, but, hey, it gets us back to “hybridization”, the synonym in the original article. Still, there’s nothing explicit about cuisine (as in the article’s quoted passage), and what about that bit about mestizaje being “an unstable signifier”?

I have no problem with mestizaje being complex, but I wonder what any GPT prompt-and-response can say about the term’s continuing significance as an unstable signifier?

Famously, Napoleon and Goethe met at Erfurt for an hour’s interchange in October 1808. They discussed many topics, each of which Napoleon would often end with the above “Qu’en dit Monsieur Goet.?”

Here I want to focus on one of Napoleon’s remarks to Goethe:

You, for instance, ought to write a tragedy about the death of Caesar one really worthy of the subject, a greater one than Voltaire’s [La Mort de César, presumably]. That could be the finest task you ever undertook. You would have to show the world how Caesar would have been its benefactor, how everything would have turned out quite differently if he had been given time to carry out his magnificent plans. You must come to Paris; I absolutely insist on it. We have a larger view of things there!

Ah, the certainty of those “would’s” and “magnificent plans”! And that phrase, “we have a larger view there,” said to the man who had written the first part of Faust by then.

Ah, “the glittering garb of societal relevance belongs to the rented costume of rhetoric,” Hans Blumenberg, the philosopher, said of an essay by historian, Reinhart Koselleck.

---

Source.

https://www.scribd.com/document/511461854/Goethe-s-Encounter-With-Napoleon-2-Accounts-1808

http://the-tls.com/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/die-ontologische-distanz-briefwechsel-hans-blumberg-reinhart-koselleck-der-riss-in-der-zeit-stefan-ludwig-hoffmann-book-review-angus-nicholls

Sometimes I’m asked if there’s anything new to add Narrative Policy Analysis (1994). Below are three longer blog entries that expand points in the book which may help its current readers.

The siloing of approaches to discourse and narrative analyses in public policy

The problem for Narrative Policy Analysis is not one of operationalizing policy narratives but rather of evaluating them regardless

Folktale development, Or: the narrative analytical limitations of critique

Edited from: E.M. Roe (1989). “Folktale development,” The American Journal of Semiotics 6(2): 277-289. An epilogue explains why the article was not republished with others in my Narrative Policy Analysis (1994).

I

There is something exhilarating in finding a book, now almost a century old and from an entirely different field, that is nonetheless still timely. This is the case of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Propp’s argument and supporting textual analysis are that what sets the folktale apart from other literary genres is not its characteristic themes or story plots, but rather the cast of “actors” which appear in the folktale, the types of activities (“functions”) performed by these characters, and, most important, the sequence of these activities. From his analysis, Propp found seven different dramatis personae, some thirty-one different functions, but only one prototypical sequence of action in all folktales. Summarizing that sequence will strike a resonant chord for even those readers who are only superficially familiar with the politics or practice of rural development.

According to Propp, there may be a number of ways in which a folktale is initially introduced and situated, but the action really does not begin until there is either an act of villainy or a lack manifests itself. There may be a villain who does some form of harm, or it may be that something is simply missing, thereby motivating action. The hero decides that this misfortune has to be corrected and he or she departs from home to do so. On the journey, the hero is interrogated and tested by what, presciently for us, is called the donor. With the aid of a magical helper, the hero comes to a place where the object of the search lies. What follows depends upon whether or not the initial misfortune was caused by the villain. If it was, then the hero struggles in direct combat with the villain. The hero wins or gets what she or he is looking for and starts out to return home. If no villain was initially involved, then the struggle to achieve what is desired consists of performing a difficult task or series of tasks and enduring ordeals.

After apparently winning, the hero finds himself pursued while trying to return horne. His victory was only temporary and he has to be rescued from his flight, again by a series of donors or helpers. The hero finally makes it back, metes out justice, marries and ascends the throne. This description is only a partial one, since not all the functions or dramatis personae are listed. Still, it provides the rough schema of a folktale, where not all folktales have the same characters or functions, but what functions they do have should follow the Proppian sequence.

Parallels between what we who work in so called developing countries experience and Propp’s schema can easily be drawn: We have seen the exiled nationalist leader as hero, the colonial master as villain, the struggle to throw off the yoke of oppression, the victory, the “achievement” of independence, and so on. But the “hero” is not really free, pursued by neocolonial exploitation and North-South dependency, beset by the task of building a nation, tested at every turn by financial donors, major lenders, or the stations of the cross in the International Monetary Fund austerity package. Only temporarily rescued by aid and debt rescheduling, the leader of the country tries to reverse the slide toward political instability by crowning himself President for Life. Suddenly, sic semper tyrannis, and the cycle begins again.

Propp appreciated what my fellow practitioners by and large have not: to think in terms of villainy, struggle, pursuit, and tasks means we pair these concepts with their antonyms, implying that these are the possible and preferred alternatives, i.e., victory, rescue, resolution, and the end of misfortune. Such terms embrace both the vocabulary and the grammar of folktale development, which has, in turn, become the mainstream view about how the rural development effort is undertaken in the so-called Third World.

II

Thirty-five years after his Morphology, Propp published an article called “Folklore and Reality”, in which he gives us a clue to what needs to be done by way of responding to the versions of folktale development today. “In folklore the narrative is not based on normal characters or normal actions in a normal situation; just the opposite: folktales choose things strikingly unusual . . . Average types (which constitute the majority in life) do not occur in folklore” (Propp 1984: 19, 20).

Imagine, that is, a rural development without its inflated cliches about heroes and villains, winners and losers; a rural development where difficult tasks and accomplishments achieved do not imply eventual solutions and success; where the war against ignorance and poverty is not going to be “won”; where the rescue from underdevelopment is never guaranteed–imagine that and you confront the end of folktale development. The fact that policies all too often fall short of expectations, plans lead to unintended consequences, projects are stymied by poor implementation rates, and “target” populations become disaffected and alienated is not simply due to bad planning and design. Some of this follows because the grammar and ideology of rural development has us thinking in and acting upon such terms.

Folktale development will have passed away when we have ceased to think of a government department or self-help group as a potential hero whose failures suddenly or continually disappoint us. The next phase of rural development will be the one where we drop the rhetoric of “the road to development” with its inevitable failed redemption. Most of us could start making change now, by realizing the loss of magic that comes with admitting that we don’t need any more folktales about this Third World.

Epilogue (Octobr 2025)

Once I knew I was publishing articles that could be integrated into a single book and approach, called narrative policy analysis, I realized “Folktale Development” would not be one of them.

In narrative analytical terms, the article was at best a critique, and critiques are not counternarratives. Stop doing what we’re currently doing and thinking by way of rural development is not an alternative policy narrative, let alone metanarrative for recasting rural development in positive terms. My book would be about an approach to the latter. Plus I realized that if I did somehow squeeze in this article, I would inevitably be asked: Emery, are you the hero or villain of Narrative Policy Analysis?

---

References

V. Propp (1984). Theory and Practice of Folklore. Translated by A. Y. Martin and R. P.
Martin and several others. Anatoly Liberman, editor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.