A truly just [energy] transition rests on five interlinked dimensions:

• Recognition justice: respecting the rights, knowledge systems and lived experiences of marginalized communities.
• Procedural justice: ensuring inclusive, democratic and transparent decision-making.
• Distributive justice: reducing inequality by fairly sharing both the benefits and burdens of the transition.
• Remedial justice: redressing past and ongoing harm through structural change and meaningful reparation.
• Transformative intent: going beyond avoiding harm to tackle the root causes of injustices. This also means having a long-term vision, working within existing structures while enabling the emergence of fairer alternatives that dismantle colonialism. https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/unjust-transition-reclaiming-the-energy-future-from-climate-colonialism/

QED. There are more different types of unjust transitions than there are just ones.

Why?

In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, political writer and social theorist William Davies bemoans the fact that:

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve worked on issues and jobs in development where the driving ethos included “circumvent the world of academia altogether”.

Well, yes, of course, that’s true, but thinking it through shows how usefully more complex the actual points are.

Following an earthquake or major fire, infrastructure may well be rebuilt to better, current standards. Yes, it would have been more cost-effective to have done so beforehand, but that “would” is a very deceptive “would.”

The intervening variable is the well-documented prevention cycle, where preventative budgets increase only after a major disaster but thereafter taper off as the initial hype declines (Heerma van Voss 2023). I take this to mean that the counterfactual–the really-existing next best alternative–to just before the next disaster isn’t undertaking the otherwise delayed mitigation but rather experiencing different versions of the already-existing path dependency of tapered-off budgets.

If the latter is true, then the real issue of cost-effectiveness centers on undertaking the mitigation as soon as possible after the disaster, e.g., starting in immediate response and initial service restoration. Why? Because, pace the prevention cycle, more funds are likely to be available earlier rather than later.

---

Heerma van Voss, B. 2023. “The Prevention Cycle: State Investments in Preventing System Risks over Time.” European Journal of Risk Regulation 14(4): 656-673 (accessed online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-risk-regulation/article/prevention-cycle-state-investments-in-preventing-system-risks-over-time/E4AB5CE30C57318253ECBC98E1AF273D)

Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as a complex infrastructure in its own right and globally so, an sharper contrast emerges: While governments seek to modernize their economies and societies by ridding themselves of longstanding pastoralist systems, global infrastructure equity firms and infrastructure debt funds at the same time are assetizing and securitizing more and more local, regional and national infrastructures for financial returns.

Now, of course, the treatment of livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks or rangeland as assets has been an undeniable feature of pastoralism. But the question here is: “Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures?” My answer: not entirely, and significantly so.

Start with the fact that the current literature on infrastructure financialization focuses on how schools, health facilities, police and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.

Why then are persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, stationary health facilities, and large livestock projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization.

Or to put the point from a different, more positive direction: By viewing pastoralism as infrastructure, do we invoke a longer-term at work than would be the case, were its assets rendered turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in markets and finance? In this view, the benchmark to compare pastoralist systems aren’t those fabled optimizations of livestock ranches and dairy businesses but rather the fully asssetized “co-living community dwelling sector” with its individual beds to rent and shared work spaces to contract.

Inter-infrastructural cascades may be more granular with respect to duration and open to management than assumed in formal modeling and some planning. Certainly, interviewees in our recent research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest described major emergencies as more punctuated than as single headlong rush of disasters.

Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen and were observed in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina and, later, in northern Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Yet cascade models by and large assume an unmanaged, near-immediate escalation in failure probabilities and consequences across interconnected systems. Really-existing infrastructures, like water, electricity and telecommunications, are however managed. Individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operations to failure across systems can be a punctuated duration.

This means there is a granularity in both space and time between infrastructures in which reliability management can make a difference in the probability of failure of an individual infrastructure and failure across infrastructures. To put the point from the opposite direction, some of the recorded near misses and close calls demonstrate that operators have the time, albeit sometimes just in time, to prevent (significantly more) knock-on effects from initial disruptions or outright failures.

This means that any assumption that infrastructures are not managed in failure is highly misleading. In many cases neither infrastructure control rooms nor their reliability contributions disappear during or after a large system failure. This also means disaster response actually begins in the infrastructures.

It begins before the formal activation of the emergency management infrastructure with its Incident Command System (ICS), such as incident management teams (IMTs) and emergency operations centers (EOCs). “When the M9 hits,” said a city water distribution manager, “my group, we’re going to be the first in. . .We’re the first responders for the water system. I may even have to call someone who lives nearby and tell them to drive up to our major water tank and close the shut-off valve.”

---

Sources: The above is a slightly edited consolidated extract from:

1. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf).
2. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2016). Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. Stanford Business Books: Stanford CA.

I

Operators of large-scale infrastructure are never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and more, who claim to know better and have a special purchase that demands all our attention.

A less banal observation is the cross-cutting fault-line once each discipline’s poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up analysis to the global, others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or to understanding the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.

We’re told, by way of example, that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that policy–up or down:

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

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

II

I however come from profession, policy analysis, whose disposition is to dig down rather than ratchet up, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. Here, the “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important for them alone to determine how to move the analysis toward policy relevance.

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

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

---

Source.

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

The “wake-up call” in emergency management, while never guaranteed, may be a series of events and not just one. The point is that this sequence/event triggers new insights by the emergency managers and infrastructure operators that other things are going on by way of needed response.

We were told in our Pacific Northwest research that, generally speaking, ice storms, fires and floods had been predictable with respect to times of onsets as well as with wind force and precipitation estimates. A senior engineer in a major power transmission company noted, “I would say we lose 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 towers a year due to wind, ice, trees. . .We see lots of those [kinds of] events”. Emergency management planners could reasonably expect to provide public warnings beforehand and many emergency protocols to be in effect. Emergency responders can also reasonably expect their own buildings and facilities to remain intact with emergency power and some telecommunications during seasonal ice storms, flooding and wildfires.

But the frequency and combination of events started changing. “2020 was of course nothing like they’d seen before [when it came to wildfires],” said one state-level manager. A single 2017 winter event of freeze-thaw-freeze majorly affected Portland’s above- and below-ground infrastructure, roads and water. Two back-to-back floods in one day were reported for a Washington State city in 2019, affecting multiple infrastructures. An Oregon interviewee spoke of 2019 witnessing flooding, drought and snow “all in the same space”.

Then came “the wake-up call” on top of all this: the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official. No one predicted the pandemic’s very real impacts for the wide swath of local, state and federal emergency managers and infrastructure operators. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response was “unparalleled”.

The pandemic meant many emergency staff had to work virtually via internet from home during the 2020 Labor Day fires. A heat dome emergency 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 physical plant created issues. “We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads.

But just what was the “wake-up call” with respect to? 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). The pandemic also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

---

Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.

I

Consider the following:

The EU cannot finance its budget through debt, but the EU Treaties do not prohibit the issuance of EU-27-backed securities or bonds for off-budget operations, as long as they are approved by the Council. The largest collective borrowing operation in EU history so far was the temporary Covid-19 recovery program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which received 90 per cent of its financing through the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) for which the European Commission borrowed €807 billion on behalf of the EU-27 by issuing green bonds. NGEU presents itself as a green industrial investment program for the benefit of future generations, but it is pervaded by a fundamental contradiction: the repayment involves an intergenerational debt transfer, burdening future generations with €30 billion in annual debt servicing , starting in 2028 and ending in 2058.

Angela Wigger (2025). “Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic: Public Guarantees, Private Gains, and the Illusion of Climate Action,” accessed online at https://www.somo.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/

I’d like you to focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.

First, that notion of off-budget. Here a familiar adage is nowhere truer: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Once upon a time, the basic idea of a system budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits and costs. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints. Statements like

Technocrats’ creative reinterpretation of their own authority and governments’ creative fiscal accounting via off-budget financing vehicles can improve fiscal-monetary coordination and create significant fiscal space (van ’t Klooster, 2022; Guter-Sandu and Murau, 2022). However, the hidden and interim nature of these solutions preempts. . .

(accessed online at https://scispace.com/pdf/green-macrofinancial-regimes-2o45dbuoim.pdf)

. . .and in the process referring to articles with titles like “The Eurozone’s Evolving Fiscal Ecosystem: Mitigating Fiscal Discipline by Governing Through Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies,” give the game away.

Nor does the old-fashioned riposte work: Future generations will have more income than we to cover these debts. We’re in times of decreasing per-capita incomes and near-zero discount rates, where the generations ahead are to be treated just as alive as we are.

If however you really do believe the latter, then the wider declension narratives at work–apocalypse, catastrophe, polycrisis–undermine the very persistence of concepts, like government budgets, intergenerational debt and future generations.

So what? What’s to be done? Well, one question and answer suggests itself: What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis?

II

Are there, more specifically, the equivalent of free ports out there? “Free ports”?! Where did that come from? You can thank complexity for all manner of novel analogies.

Current free ports are to be found in places like Singapore, Luxembourg, and Geneva, and it is reported that the largest of them, Geneva Freeport, houses about 1.2 million artworks, some six times that of New York City’s MOMA. By extension, if “all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive,” then are there equivalent free ports of such diverse testimonies as to offer far more and different metaphors than present-day reductionism provides? As in: realities are metaphors that last longer.

The analogy of free ports would, however, seem to take us right back to the heart of capitalism, with its Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and such. But we would be wrong. The authors of a recent global study of free ports, Koen Stapelbroek and Corey Tazzara (2023), stress their own version of “off-balance sheet”. “Free ports offered essential services that the prevailing system of political economy scarcely allowed.” More specifically:

Rather than treating free ports as intrinsically liberal or illiberal, it is better to see them as controlled breaches in the prevailing political economy, whether that be of a state or of an entire trading system. With respect to national political economy the breach is obvious, since by definition a free port policy entailed a relaxation of ordinary controls over trade and often other parameters such as immigration. The extent of control varied for reasons ranging from technology to the fiscal trade-offs unavoidable in any customs policy. The underlying strategy varied, too – in some cases, free ports served to stabilise a state’s political economy (as in Genoa), in other cases as a forerunner to transform the interior economy (as in the Caribbean). The free port shows that the modern state has never endorsed homogeneous space: there have always been breaches, sometimes of great importance.

Koen Stapelbroek & Corey Tazzara (2023) The Global History of the Free Port, Global Intellectual History, 8:6, 661-699, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2280091

That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for these breaches in political economies, state controls or not; that is, we are looking for heterogeneities–early commercial, mercantilist, capitalist, hybrid–that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere to go on their own.

---

Other sources

https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/26/an-aesthetic-autonomy-rebuilding-the-art-world-after-its-neoliberal-degradation/

https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/craf018/8202932

“In the run-up to the 2008 election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney advanced an assault on Barack Obama’s healthcare coverage program, which the former derisively labeled ‘Obamacare’. Eighteen days before the election, Obama advanced a rhetorical counter-offensive that effectively reframed the whole parameters of the discussion. Invoking the presumable medical condition of ‘Romnesia’, Obama cited, in the most simplistic and nonchalant way, all of Romney’s policy flip-flops: ‘Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said the last year […] We’ve gotta name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called Romnesia […] I’m not a medical doctor, but I do wanna go over some of the symptoms with ya, because I wanna make sure nobody else catches it’. He proceeds:

If you say you’re for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you’d sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia […] If you say you’ll protect a woman’s right to choose but you standup in a primary debate and said that you’d be delighted to sign a law outlawing that right to choose in all cases, man, you’ve definitely got Romnesia. . . .

“Extending the rhetorical logic to a series of other examples, Obama reached his rhetorical apex by reclaiming the term ‘Obamacare’ in the most effective way possible, while shattering Romney’s offensive without making any factual references to his healthcare coverage program: ‘And if you come down with a case of Romnesia and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for president, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions!’ (Obama, 2008). Irrespective of whether one is in agreement or not with Obama’s policies, one cannot deny his mastery of political rhetoric, which to a considerable extent facilitated his (out of nowhere) rise to power.”

Michaelangelo Anastasiou, slightly edited and accessed online on September 9 2025 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01914537251374951.

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. As early as 1985, Habermas voiced the concern that utopian energies were exhausted (Habermas 1985), and variations of this sentiment are often echoed in reference to the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. . . .

Against this backdrop, I propose the following starting definition of the role of imagination in critical theory: It is presented as a capacity that, at once, cannot be cut off from the social order (i.e., it is potentially ideological or delusional) while being often referred to as an element within the human psychodynamic that leaves open the possibility for transcending the social order. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

If there truly were a totality of the social order that inscribed itself perfectly into the psyche of every individual, not only would emancipatory change be impossible, but any form of change at all would be precluded— an evidently absurd notion. I rather think that attributing the possibility of change (i.e., contingencies in the social order) to an individual capacity implies that there are no social processes on the horizon for a critical theory to cling to (such as theorems like the diminishing rate of profit, etc.). In a sense, this way of thinking about imagination suggests that a better future is possible against all odds.

Gante, M. (2025). “Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics” Constellations, pp. 1 – 10 (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009)