We are told to go beyond the enclosures of genre. (Which by the way is an old story: Ballet was a subgenre of dance, only later to be reclassified as a subgenre of theatre.) My preferred way of doing so means searching for the surprising but suggestive contrast, e.g.:
The artist, collector and critic Roger de Piles presented a defence of painting as make-up (la fard) in his 1708 Cours de peinture par principes. . .Piles argued that ‘it is well known that all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive, and that the greatest deceiver in this art, is the greatest painter’.
Or to apply the contrast, I may say this practice is evidence-based, while you insist that all such evidence is little more or less than the testimony made up by someone or another–and we know the limits of eyewitness testimony! But “testimony” itself is a differentiated genre and can have cross-genre synergies that are policy relevant. Brazil’s leading literary critic, Roberto Schwarz, describes a play of his:
The most striking formal feature of the play, in my view, is the length of the characters’ lines. They don’t stop at the point that psychology or the art of realistic dialogue might dictate. They only end when their reasoning is complete. This turns some of them into miniature essays. The play becomes a sort of cantata of counterposed viewpoints, spoken or shouted at each other, on the brink of social transformation, in a space of crisis and public argument that transcends psychological theatre and the bourgeois view of life. The issues at stake decompose the individual, go beyond him, exceed him.
(One early boss insisted my official correspondence should have sentences no longer than seven words or 13 syllables, when writing to him at headquarters.)
In other words, grabbing one practice to reinterpret another practice from elsewhere also means reminding oneself of intra-genre differences. And with those differences come limitations. Postcards are a genre, but they really don’t do well in reducing paintings and sculptures to the same size for comparison’s sake. Or to keep to my point, if by “evidence-based” I reduce my comparison through one and only one method or framing, then I must at the same time admit the policy and management limitations, often evidential in their own right, of doing so. (This is why I agree with those who say the real contribution of social sciences is the mixed methods sample survey.)
From another direction, recasting is the policy analyst’s curatorial exercise of assembling not only new installations, but also reinstallations–both of which defamiliarize in order to create a new viewing public or reanimate an existing one. And let’s not forget that this curatorial function of (re)installation can be improvisational as in bricolage:
. . .the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were forced to practise bricolage after the accident caused by the earthquake in Japan on 11 March 2011. In order to try to mitigate the effects of the accident, the plant’s operators working in Reactor 1 engaged in multiple acts of bricolage, diverting the functions of whatever was at hand to address the situation. For instance, as their monitoring system had ceased to function, they diagnosed the state of the reactor using sounds, and the colour of steam, as this was their only option. Likewise, as the water pipes inside the nuclear plant were no longer working, they had to change the function of a diesel pump so that it would pump water directly into the reactor.
It was argued that for the classical ballerina, “every posture of her dance must be so natural and full of taste that any moment of it could serve as a model for an artist or sculptor.”
So too in policy we find professionals even today calling for blueprints and implementation according to the plan. But just as ballet, painting and sculpture are different genres, so too the stages of the now classic policy cycle–agenda setting, policy formulation, adoption, implementation (including operations), and evaluation–are themselves different genres. This difference is why “implementation”–let alone really-existing versions of the other stages–is easily a permanent critique of something as abstract as “a policy cycle.” (There’s no little irony that the early promoters of the policy cycle thought it a more professional way of describing what others up to that point considered low and meaning cunning in “the politics of the budgetary process.”)
So what? Implementation is often said to be defacto policymaking, in the sense that operations make the real policy on the ground. That, however, misses implementation and “policy-making” being different genres, the importance of which is that implementation offers the prospect of a different closure (beginning–middle–end) than, say, setting the agenda and initial policy formulation–or for that matter, evaluation. Which leads us to the next point.
III
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .
Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.
For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation/operations about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.
That policy instead is the music and that implementers/operators are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. So too that evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.
Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its operations is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, think of repair and maintenance as part and parcel of formal and informal evaluations. Yes, even classical ballet had no stable choreography, yet how still to separate the dancer from the dance when performance is not just evolving maintenance but also its own kind of repair?
IV
In explaining how he came to write his 2024 Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, Edwin Frank offers this background,
My thoughts turned again to the Russian novel, and the way it had made such an extraordinary impression on the literature of the world almost entirely in translation. “In translation” was the key, opening the way into the story of the novel, which was, as I suddenly saw it, a story of translation in the largest sense, not only from language to language and place to place but more broadly as the translation of lived reality into written form, something the expansive and adaptable form of the novel had from the start been uniquely open to, which the last century had provided the perfect—what?—petri dish in which it could further develop. On one hand, the twentieth century had been a century of staggering transformation—world war, revolution, women voting, empires falling, cities sprawling, expanded life spans and lives cut short, mass media, genocide, the threat of nuclear extinction, civil and human rights, and so on—a century to boggle the mind, which demanded and stretched and beggared description. On the other hand we had the novel, emerging from the nineteenth century as a robust presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook up. Hadn’t the two, as the phrase goes, been made for each other?
It’s difficult for me not to see “development” in just these terms. Development remains consumed by twentieth-century languages of transformation, a hangover (yes, the intention is to jar) from a century of already great transformations. And yet development remains what it has always been, the translation of lived reality into reduced forms that look like stories with beginnings, middles and ends, albeit your fiction their non-fiction; your performance their performance.
V
Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the realism I know and experience. For those of us stuck in this unstable in-between, it’s an irony that we are not comfortable, let alone happy, with one future only. There must be multiple futures and choices, stuck as we are indefinitely in the here and now.
And the way we create these futures is to stay in a present that is so complex it cannot be interpreted one way only. This means no one genre is good enough for recasting forward the present. Roberto Schwartz in another essay provides a very pertinent example of this:
In Endgame, [Samuel] Beckett modifies the status of slapstick comedy, making it say something unexpected. As a genre, slapstick expresses a derisory vision of humanity—but as one view among others, with which it normally coexists. There are tragedies, serious dramas, light comedies, and each carries its own assessment of the human being. What did Beckett do? He took slapstick, and rather than conceiving of it as one genre among others, attempted to demonstrate that humanity today resembles its vision more than anything else. In doing so, slapstick ceased to be a conventional genre and paradoxically acquired the privileged function of realism, upsetting the established order of precedence.
Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that only a mad prince orders the seas to be thrashed. But press “forward,” and that’s what our princes do today. That slapstick is realism.
VI
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?”
Earlier blog entries discussed the key notion of “policy palimpsest” in public policy and management. The upshot is that current statements about complex policy issues are the composites of arguments and narratives that have been overwritten across time. A composite argument rendered off a policy palimpsest reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved—but none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening effacements and erasures. Arguments have been blurred, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes.
A lot follows by way of implications. Here I highlight the violence in all this. Another term for “effacements and erasures” is lacerations, and composite arguments are formatted to hide the still active scaring from suturing together this and that fragment into this or that composite argument. The role of the policy analyst is to surface the scars and what has been excised. It is also to remind us that favored phrases, like “emergence,” should not be assumed to denote the up-thrusting of something organically new but the loss, the profound loss and absence, of what had been there.
II
I recently came across a far better illustration of the palimpsest violence and the analyst’s duty of care than I could provide. It’s from the art historian, Androula Michael, and her analysis of the work of artist, Kara Walker, on slavery. It’s spot-on–this is about surfacing the missing that is still there–and I quote at length (the only edits are deletion of internal endnotes):
Against Erasure: Kara Walker and the Reactivation of Silenced Histories
7 In response to historical erasure and collective forgetting, the task becomes one of reanimating buried memories through the archive — of reactivating traces and layering over the so-called historical truth another reality: that of the absent, the erased, the silences of history. This approach is strikingly visible in Kara Walker’s series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), in which her cut-out silhouettes of Black figures are superimposed onto official historical illustrations. The original volume — richly illustrated with maps, diagrams, portraits, scenes, and texts relating to major events and figures of the Civil War — was part of a broader series of publications and public commemorations aimed at promoting reconciliation between North and South. While its editors claimed to “narrate events just as they occurred” (Guernsey and Alden, n.p.), the narrative systematically omitted a significant portion of the reality. Kara Walker poses the critical question: how is it that African Americans and the lived experience of slavery are so conspicuously absent from this work?
8 On the rare occasions when African Americans are depicted, they appear only through a textual framing that emphasizes, with strategic distance, the federal government’s designation of Black people as “contraband of war,” entirely sidelining their human experiences, subjectivities, and humanity. Kara Walker’s opaque Black silhouettes disrupt the legibility of the original images.
The stark contrast between black and white is visually striking. The scale of the figures — sometimes oversized — imposes the presence of those long excluded from official history. Anonymous yet monumental, they belong to an aesthetics of stereotype: archetypal, distorted, and yet turned against itself. They reactivate the racialized codes of the slaveholding imaginary only to detonate them from within.
9 Their radical blackness acts as both a screen and a mirror, a surface upon which repressed memories are projected. They invade the space, contaminate the image, and haunt the historical scene. These are visual specters: neither fully present nor entirely absent. Figures that evade immediate readability, that unsettle and disorient. Walker summons these ghosts — the erased Black bodies of American history, the forgotten violences, the suppressed narratives. The specter is that figure of the past which returns to haunt the present precisely because it has not been acknowledged, reckoned with, or worked through. In Walker’s work, the absent become visible — but in a form that resists pacification, or any straightforward restitution.
In the era of Trump, you can’t help but feel a bit like Bruno Latour ending up having to defend climate change against the argument that it’s all socially constructed. Today the media report that the US Environmental Protection Agency has suspended use of a dollar value on a statistical life in its pollution cases. I remember way back when this was first introduced, making the same objection: You can’t give human life a price!
No, I am not now, nor was I anachronistically then, in the camp of Trumplethinskin and his dwarves.
Of course, I can appeal to all the standard defenses: It was commodification we were objecting to, Trump’s real reasons for the reversal are venal and punitive, it’s better to keep to a flawed practice than go without it, etc. etc. But it was always—is still always—the case that the burden of coming up with better appraisal techniques, and one that did not ride on the dollar value of a statistical life foregone, was on those of us who objected.
If the EPA goes ahead with this, it’s our duty of care to have better alternatives head.
The most telling feature of present-day crisis thinking is that it’s doubled. Not only are we said to be at the crossroads of so many dire consequences (think Woody Allen’s quip: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly”). But it’s worse than that.
We’re also temporizing while in the crossroads. We’re deluding ourselves with getting by, coping, delaying and waiting. As if the longer we can suspend choice, the greater chance the crossroads will go away. As if these were only rumors to be waited out.
So whether we find ourselves at the last set, but always increasing number, of crossroads or procrastinating with no real escape route. The polycrisis of interconnected crises–that singular noun for multiple phenomena–is fast becoming its own plural, polycrises.
To summarize and recast, our problem is not only crisis-thinking but also its hackneyed metaphors–all those crossroads, all that tarrying while Rome burns, really?
To puncture this thinking requires you to ask: But what about the accomplishments of real people, in real time, with real problems? Do they—both the people and the accomplishments—count for little or zilch, even when terms like “progress” and “success” are no longer as useful? What do we do with the developmentfact that accomplishing things means less about “keep on going” than it is does about “this is what we have nevertheless done, even with setbacks, when it matters most”?
When people improvise in order to accomplish, then reducing that to coping and the sub-par seems to me one crisis too many. Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet and novelist, is reported to have said that life creates events to distract our current attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.
II
So what?
Pose questions that offer up new metaphors on the principle that to change reality is at least to change the metaphors that last. Roberto Schwartz, the great Brazilian literary critic, recently described a play of his that tried to interrogate the certainties and contradictions in popular culture:
The problems are numerous: are cultural niches and racial quotas tantamount to prisons? Does a samba school band deserve the Nobel Prize? Is poverty picturesque, shameful, a solvable problem, a crucial world issue? The favela: rather than backward, don’t we all know that it’s the future of humanity? What are its teachings? Is popular culture revolutionary? Is individual success a betrayal? Does the favelado artist compete with contemporary art on an equal footing? Does it compete with him? The proliferation of questions and the critical freedom to confront them don’t guarantee a solution, but they bring fresh air and enjoyment.
Now we wouldn’t typically notice the accomplishments of “fresh air” and “enjoyment” while in the multiple crossroads of planetary polycrises.
But—and this is the thought experiment—if Schwartz’s questions are the ones we could be asking not only in Brazil but also everywhere, then the analyses of everywhere else is, importantly, with respect to samba school bands, the favela, and individual success as betrayal of collective efforts to address poverty variously defined. My wager is that out of these comparisons emerge not only new questions that defamiliarize both what is considered intractable in some places and terms like success/failure, which it turn out don’t get us far enough in a world where failure is not empty of accomplishments and success is not empty of setbacks.
Ecologists have for years studied social-ecological systems, like ecosystems and landscapes; at the same time organization theorists have investigated socio-technical systems, like electricity grids and other critical infrastructures. Because some of the latter are grounded in some of the former (think watersheds and hydro-power), it’s not surprising that conceptual understanding in these different disciplines overlap. In particular, it’s a fairly easy matter to find each highlighting social complexity and system interconnectivities (see Sources for a sample).
What is more surprising, in my view, are key differences, “key” in the sense that their respective policy and management implications differ so. I know far more about critical infrastructures than I do about ecosystems, but I have published about the latter and continue to read relevant literature. What follows are, I believe, well-informed observations, but I welcome correction of these opinions.
Finally, the two major differences identified should not be interpreted as challenging or disparageing the huge overlap between the social-ecological and socio-technical literatures with which I am familiar. A focus on overlaps and their implications for policy and management awaits a longer venue.
II
Ecologists frequently talk about tipping points in systems that have not been (or could not be) managed properly. The human-dominated ecosystem flips from one state into another (and anyone who doubts this is happening hasn’t been following the climate emergency). The new state can and often looks little like the immediately preceding one.
It is also common to talk about large critical infrastructures (again, think of large water supplies) “flipping into systemwide failure,” where operations during systemwide failure look nothing like “normal” that preceded it. But organization theorists are just as interested in the drift of operators away from shared situational awareness and common operating picture of their system that may precipitate outright failure later on. I do not know of any comparable ecological literature on real-time ecologists, e.g., working in the field on ecological restoration or ecosystem design projects, who drift over time from better practices identified across a run of diverse cases in their respective fields.
That focus on real time also differs between the social-ecological and socio-technical. The difference ironically stems from a common assumption shared by both: namely, the respective systems are no longer (if they ever were) stationary: They are dynamic and fast changing. Some ecologists take the lesson to be that the options horizon is necessarily the longer term over which to be more adaptable and flexible. Some organization theorists, in contrast, take the lesson to be that if you can manage more reliably and safely in real time, right now when it matters, why believe those who say they can do better over the longer-term? Again, there may be a track record about which I do not know of staff and consulting ecologists who have been brought into infrastructure control rooms or their immediate wraparound support units in order to provide real-time advice.
III
So what?
It’s inconceivable to me that the two different approaches, each of which share common assumptions about really-existing complexity and interdependencies and each of which promotes interdisciplinary research and boundary work, don’t collaborate more. It is no longer useful for ecologists to refer to critical infrastructures as “engineered” systems when manifestly they are socio-technical throughout and where that “socio” continues to considerably overlap with the “social” in social-ecological.
Nor is it useful for organization theorists to ignore that the mandate of critical infrastructures is to square as much of the circle of service reliability and ecological restoration, at least in real time. And given the priority both disciplines assign to variation and diversity—called requisite variety in organization theory and response diversity in ecology—you’d expect far more cross-references than I have found to date.
So too would you think that given the shared emphasis on “transformation”—long-term regime transformation from the ecological side, real-time transformation of high input variability into low and stable output from the organizational side—there would be more interchange, especially when the center of analytic and normative attention shifts to capacious (essentially contested?) concepts like “governance,” as it now often does in both approaches.
Sources.
Allen, C. R., A. Garmestani, T. Eason, D. G. Angeler, W. Chuang, J. H. Garcia, L. Gunderson, and C. Folke (2025). “Disastrous consequences: shortcomings of resiliency strategies for coping with accelerating environmental change.” Ecology and Society 30(4):21. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16668-300421
Ashby, R, (1952). Design for a Brain. Chapman and Hall, London.
Langston, J. D., A. Sanders, R. A. Riggs, S. A. Afiff, R. Astuti, A. K. Boedhihartono, S. Chakori, B. Dwisatrio, C. Griffin, N. J. Grigg, H. Kurniasih, C. Margules, J. F. McCarthy, D. S. Mendham, C. Múnera-Roldán, R. D. Prasti Harianson, J. A. Sayer, D. Susilawati, M. van Noordwijk, and S. M. Whitten (2025). “Landscape transition science: relational praxis for continuous learning.” Ecology and Society 30(4):53. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16725-300453
Pettersen, K., and P. Schulman (2016). “Drift, adaptation, resilience and reliability: Toward an empirical clarification.” Safety Science 117: 2–9.
Roe, E. (2023). When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene. IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025
Roe, E., and P. Schulman (2008). High Reliability Management: Operating on the Edge. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
————————————– (2016). Reliability and Risk. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA.
Roe, E., and Michel J.G. van Eeten (2001). “Threshold-Based Resource Management: A Framework for Comprehensive Ecosystem Management.” Environmental Management 27 (2).
—————————————————— (2002) “Reconciling Ecosystem Rehabilitation and Service Reliability Mandates in Large Technical Systems: Findings and Implications of Three Major US Ecosystem Management Initiatives for Managing Human-Dominated Aquatic–Terrestrial Ecosystems” Ecosystems, 5 (6): 509–528.
Schick, E., M. Döring, J. Knieling, B. M. W. Ratter, J. Pein, and K. Dähnke (2025). “Turning the tide in estuary governance through collaboration? A systematic review, meta-synthesis, and conceptual framework.” Ecology and Society 30(4):6. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16321-300406
van Eeten, M. J. G., and E. Roe (2002). Ecology, Engineering and Management: Reconciling Ecological Rehabilitation and Service Reliability. New York: Oxford University Press.
Walker, B., A.-S. Crepin, M. Nyström, J. M. Anderies, E. Andersson, T. Elmqvist, C. Queiroz, S. Barrett, E. Bennett, J. C.Cardenas, S. R. Carpenter, F. S. Chapin III, A. de Zeeuw, J. Fischer, C. Folke, S. Levin, K. Nyborg, S. Polasky, K. Segerson, K. Seto, M. Scheffer, J. F. Shogren, A. Tavoni, J. van den Bergh, E. U. Weber, and J. R. Vincent. (2023). “Response diversity as a sustainability strategy.” Nature Sustainability 6:621-629. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01048-7
Weick, K, (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage, Thousand Oaks CA.
If I am reading historians Istvan Hont and Michael Sonenscher correctly, 18th century thinkers wrestled again and again with the constitutional means for reining in the bad-side of public debt (e.g., rulers use the monies for war), while promoting the good-side (e.g., rulers build the infrastructure Adam Smith himself saw necessary for human betterment).
Today, what to do about the public debt is even further from settked. Constitutional proposals to ensure balanced budgets have come and gone; actual constitutional amendments, e.g. Germany’s restricting budget deficits to no greater than a certain percent of GDP, are suspended or circumvented. Green golden rules are proposed today that “would exclude any increase in net green public investment from the fiscal indicators used to measure compliance with fiscal rules,” recognizing however that “by allowing green spending to be financed by borrowing. . .could undermine public debt sustainability”. Etc. Etc.
In fact, nations now divide into two with respect to public debt: those that kick their public debt bucket down the road and those finding it more and more difficult to do so. ““This idea that we can continue to kick the can down the road” is no longer tenable,” [an expert recently put it about this debt]. “That horizon is coming very much closer to us.”” Even closer when you add the increasing pressure on governments to pick up private-sector pension commitments that can’t be met.
What to do?
II
One answer is to rethink the public debt beyond “it’s our investment in the future.” Not that the latter isn’t true, but rather its truth-value and contexts need to be pushed further if we are to render the currently intractable debt more tractable.
How? For starters, think of public debts like keystone ecosystems, the way groundwater systems are central to other dependent terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Or that public debts are the infrastructures experienced as the social property of the propertyless, who know best when and how to depreciate their assets. If the public debt is our ruination, then we have to push that point further to how public debts are experienced, here and now.
III
This experience of public debt in real time is the perfect place to start reframing. Begin with the 2020 Zambia government default:
Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief.
BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to the country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full.
Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.
It should be noted that compared to BlackRock, only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock (whose recent assets are reported to be well over $10 trillion). It’s also reported that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.
That said, yes of course, we still must say that this and other current sovereign debt crises could be better managed. Fair enough.
But it would be more accurate to say that BlackRock is actually being managed in ways the sovereign debt crisis can’t, i.e., BlackRock has a C-suite nations don’t have. Why then not start with BlackRock as the catalyst for better management? (After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008.)
Or from the other direction, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as the smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise. We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the global behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.
IV
Consider another example of how to reframe the public debt (or at least the experience of that debt): off-budget items as a way of funding that can’t be financed through public debt:
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.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/
Here focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.
Once upon a time, the basic idea of a budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits net of expenses. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints:
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. . .
Article 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 increasingly out-of-date riposte work, namely: Future generations will have more income than we to cover these debts, invisible or otherwise. 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. Note also that if you agree, 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, again, what’s to be done? Again, reframe. What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis? That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for those breaches in political economies and heterogeneities that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere else to go.
V
“Breaches and heterogeneities”? That level of analysis requires us to be more granular than appeal to abstract levels of this or that political economy. For example, it’s not varieties of capitalism (or anti-capitalism for that matter) we are looking for but rather specific hybrids and subsystems. Let’s take the example of free ports as illustrative.
The instance of free ports would 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
So what? What does this mean practically?
Consider a familiar recommendation: “Suspend and cancel debt payments when a climate extreme event takes place, so countries have the resources they need for emergency response and reconstruction without going into more debt.” This statement has no semantic meaning for really-existing policy and management in the absence of drawing conclusions from the run of diverse cases of “extreme events,” including but not limited to equally granular cases of free ports.
We know that central notions of market clearing prices, opportunity costs and economic incentives have serious limitations in the areas of pastoralist development, e.g., water provision, health and humanitarian aid. Nor are such limitations news to economists working in other substantive areas of high uncertainty and complexity in policy and management.
Fortunately, the notion of pastoralist systems as critical infrastructure and (some) pastoralists in these systems as reliability professionals is associated with its own kind of economics, termed here “reliability-seeking economics.”
II
This economics tells us that in addition to household livelihoods and community well-being, we should focus on the foundational economies in the pastoralist areas of interest; that these local and regional economies rest on formal government infrastructures for water, transportation, and other services—actually often the absence of said structures—but also include far less visible infrastructures especially important for local and real-time transactions (e.g., bush livestock markets, local security arrangements, seasonal and fallback water points); that these transactions and economies necessarily tailor higher-level government and NGO concerns about risks, trade-offs and priorities (local views about drought differ so often from those of outsiders); that this tailoring occurs at more granular levels than terms like “adaptable” and “flexible” convey in formal mission statements and administrative protocols of government and the donors; that these more granular levels also make visible what the vast majority of pastoralists will not trade-off in real time (forgoing, forever, livestock and grazing/browsing); and that recognizing all this is one very major way of building up and extending the economic expertise of government and donor professionals in pastoralist development well beyond a necessary “taking traditional knowledge into account.”
III
Much more can be said and recommended, but for the reasoning behind the preceding paragraph and an explanation of key terms, please see the broader rethinking of economics in light of critical infrastructures and high reliability in
Then take less than 10 minutes and listen an inadvertently prescient Walt Disney in the opera, The Great American, by Philip Glass (starting at minute ~35.00 and ending minute ~41.30):
I come from a profession, US policy analysis and public management, that was premised from the get-go on being interdisciplinary: not just some training in economics, but also in law, research methods and political science, among others. So, economics has always had heterodox contexts for many of us.
Over my career, economics has come under a great deal of criticism. Some economists have offered fixes and their heterodox alternatives. Below is an alternative reading of economics across nine topics from a policy analysis perspective that has never been economics alone and which seeks greater policy and management relevance in being so.
1. Rethinking opportunity costs
2. “Given market-clearing prices. . .”
3. The chop-logic of risks, trade-offs and priorities
4. Another way to put #3 is that economics and reliability are not the same precisely when the disaster is majorly economic or financial
5. Nonfungibility in supply-and-demand analysis
6. The foundational economy
7. Rethinking investment
8. Rethinking public debt
9. Rethinking capitalism
1. Opportunity costs
Start with a 1977 conversation between Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist, and his Colombian interviewer, Diego Pizano.
Kaldor asserts: “There is never a Pareto-optimal allocation of resources. There can never be one because the world is in a state of disequilibrium; new technologies keep appearing and it is not sensible to assume a timeless steady-state” (Pizano 2009). Pizano counters by saying the concept of opportunity costs still made sense, even when market conditions are dynamic and unstable. But Kaldor insists,
Well, I would accept that there are some legitimate uses of the concept of opportunity cost and it is natural that in my battle against [General Equilibrium Systems] I have concentrated on the illegitimate ones. Economics can only be seen as a medium for the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses” in the consideration of short run problems where the framework of social organization and the distribution of available resources can be treated as given as heritage of the past, and current decisions on future developments have no impact whatsoever. (Ibid)
Consider the scorpion’s sting in the last clause. Even if one admitted uncertainty into the present as a function of the past, a dollar spent now on this option in light of that current alternative could still have no impact on the allocation of resources for a future that is ahead of us.
Why? Because markets generate resources and options, not just allocate pre-existing resources over pre-existing alternatives. “Economic theory went astray,” Kaldor adds, “when theoreticians focused their attention on the allocative functions of markets to the exclusive of their creative functions, which are far more important since they serve as an instrument for transmitting economic changes”.
I want to draw your attention for what follows to the importance of real-time generation of resources and options. Improvisations, at least in real time, have no “pre-existing” alternative and in that way no opportunity cost as conventionally understood. There is no workaround for improvisation.
2. “Given market-clearing prices. . .”
Speaking of convention, how many times have we heard something like, “Given the right incentives,,,,” “If implemented as planned…,” or “Given market-clearing prices…”? Just like that older version: “Monarchy is the best form of government, provided the monarch possesses virtue and wisdom.”
“If implemented as planned,” when we know that is precisely the assumption we cannot make in the face of unpredicted contingencies. (Why else the need for improvisation?) “Given the right incentives,” when we know that “right” is unethical without specifying what the case before us is. “Given market-clearing prices,” when we know not only that actually-existing markets often do not clear (supply and demand do not equate at a single price)–and even when they do, their “efficiencies” can undermine the reliability of the very markets that produce those prices.
3. The chop-logic of risks, trade-offs and priorities
Take any major policy issue–an economic emergency or financial crisis. Immediately, the talk becomes one about the risks and trade-offs involved, and the priorities called for when both are taken into account. This chop-logic—-when it comes to economics and policy writ large, identify the risks, look for trade-offs, and then set priorities—is so naturalized as to be taken for granted and treated as preknown.
But the chop-logic is to be questioned in cases of critical infrastructure emergencies having major economic and financial consequences. There are at least three sets of empirical reasons for this:
(1) Empirically, yes major critical infrastructures – like those for electricity, water, and telecoms – operate under budget and personnel constraints. Obviously then, risks, trade-offs and priorities surface and at times take center stage when path dependencies are as extended as in society’s critical infrastructures.
Even so, there is a point at which infrastructure centralized control rooms (if present) will not trade-off systemwide reliability in service provision—that is, the safe and continuous provision of the service, even during (especially during) turbulent times—for, say, cost reductions or labor savings. Why? Because when the electricity grid islands, people die; people. Preventing disasters, more routinely than not, is what highly reliable infrastructures do.
(2) Empirically, when a catastrophe happens, the pressing logic and urgency of immediate emergency response have been repeatedly demonstrated, namely: Restore electricity, water supplies, telecoms, and roads, right now. Improvisations and ingenuity, jointly undertaken and shared, move center stage. In fact, there is no better acknowledgement of the importance and centrality of vital service infrastructures than the self-evident necessity of restoring backbone services as soon as possible when their usual infrastructure operations fail.
(3) Empirically, yes, risks, trade-offs and priorities also move center stage in longer-term recovery after economically important infrastructures fail, but only to the extent high reliability in service provision has yet to be restored to (a new) normal for the (sometimes replaced) infrastructures. Typically, analysis and deliberation during economically significant recovery are far messier than “the risks, trade-offs, and priorities with respect to flood recovery are the obvious center of attention” (for more, see Roe 2013, 2020, 2023).
4. Another way to put #3 is economics and reliability are not the same precisely when the disaster is majorly economic or financial.
Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure high reliability (which includes systemwide safety) assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services or generating them anew (as in improvising). There is a point at which nonfungible high reliability and fungible trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water (Roe and Schulman 2008, 2016).
One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure high reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time. The safe and continuous provision of a critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times, cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents and be paid to you instead of the service.
5. Nonfungibility in supply-and-demand analysis
Take the conventional supply and demand curves, like the one below from Wikipedia:
That is: assume demand and supply curves intersect with equilibrium price P* and quantity Q. Now the thought experiment: At some point, say the supply curve shifts downwards and intersects with the horizontal axis (as with the dotted Supply 1 curve in the figure).
When so, then at that point, there is a quantity supplied even when price is zero. To put it another way, a portion of the quantity demanded is actually provided at no price because, say, suppliers are confused, or everyone got just lucky, or, as I suggest, highly reliable supply is non-fungible up to the intersection point.
6. The foundational economy
I
An AI-generated definition is good-enough to start: “The ‘foundational economy’ (FE) is the infrastructure of everyday life, including essential services like water, electricity, healthcare, and housing, that are required for society to function.” (The key website is The Foundational Economy.) Even at that level of abstraction, it’s clear there is no one and only FE with one and only one set of critical infrastructures in each.
How so?
II
Here are ten propositions by way of answer:
(1) By definition, a foundational economy would not exist if it were not for the reliable provision of electricity, water, telecoms, and transportation. Here again reliability means the safe and continuous provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) turbulent times. This means, for example, that the physical systems as actually managed and interconnected on the ground establish the spatial limits of the FE in question.
(2) By extension, no markets for goods and services in the FE would exist without critical infrastructure reliability supporting their operations. This applies to rural landscapes as well as urban ones.
(3) Other infrastructures, including reliable contract and property law, are required for the creation and support of these markets, though this too varies by context. One can, for example, argue healthcare and education are among the other infrastructural prerequisites for many FEs (as above).
(4) Preventing disasters in the face of existing and prospective uncertainties is what highly reliable infrastructures do. Why? Because, to reiterate the point made in #3, when the electricity grid islands, the water supplies cease, and transportation grinds to a halt, then people die and the foundational economy seizes up (Martynovich et al. 2022).
(5) Another way to say this is that within a foundational economy you see clearest the tensions between economic transactions and reliability management mentioned earlier. To repeat, economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services.
(6) Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the market transactions would be such that you can never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying.
(7) This in turn means there are two very different standards of “economic reliability.” The retrospective standard holds that the foundational economy–or any economy for that matter–is performing reliably when there have been no major shocks or disruptions from the last time to now. The prospective standard holds that the economy is reliable only until the next major shock, where collective dread of that shock is why those networks of infrastructure professionals try to manage to prevent or otherwise attenuate it (Roe and Schulman 2016). The fact that past droughts have harmed the foundational economy in no way implies people are not managing prospectively to prevent future consequences of drought on their respective FEs–and actually accomplishing that feat.
(8) Why does the difference between the two standards matter? In practical terms, the foundational economy is prospectively only as reliable as its critical infrastructures are reliable, right now when it matters for, say, economic productivity or societal sustainability. Indeed, if the latter were equated only with recognizing and capitalizing on retrospective patterns and trends, economic policymakers and managers in the FE could never be reliable prospectively in the Anthropocene.
(9) For example, the statement by two well-known economists, “Our contention, therefore, following many others, is that, despite its flaws, the best guide to what the rate of return will be in the future is what it has been in the past” (Riley and Brenner 2025) may be true as far as it goes, but it in no way offers a prospective standard of high reliability in the foundational economy (let alone other economies).
(10) So what? A retrospective orientation to where the economy is today is to examine economic and financial patterns and trends since, say, the 2008 financial crisis; a prospective standard would be to ensure that–at a minimum–the 2008 financial recovery could be replicated, if not bettered, for the next global financial crisis. Could the latter be said of the FE in your city, metropolitan area or across the rural landscape of interest?
“What is the first act that creates the economy? It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate with investment.” (Daniel Judt 2025. “Storage, Investment, and Desire: An interview with Jonathan Levy,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog accessed online at https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/02/24/storage-investment-and-desire-an-interview-with-jonathan-levy/)
I
Greg Raymond makes a convincing case for his epigraph point and I too among many emphasize, as above, the centrality of infrastructures and their interconnectivities in underwriting economies and the maintenance of market transactions.
The point here in #7, however, starts with the argument of economist, Jonathan Levy, in his recent The Real Economy: Contrary to conventional economics with its fulcrum of allocation and exchange, it is investment which creates economies. Real-time improvisations may have no formal opportunity costs, but they are most decidedly an investment in the infrastructures concerned.
Thinking infrastructurally about investment highlights three under-recognized insights that are highly policy relevant.
II
First, investments import the long run into infrastructure analysis in ways that a focus on allocation and exchange do not. These ways range from the banal—it takes time for the infrastructure to be planned, funded, implemented and then operated as constructed and managed—to more invisible considerations.
The pressures to innovate technologies, in particular, means that some infrastructure technologies (software and hardware) are rendered obsolete before the infrastructures have been fully depreciated. This brings uncertainty into investing in technology and engineering of infrastructures that can last ahead, say, two generations or more. Here, the long run means another short-run, and those short-runs at times can look like boom and busts, well away from anything like “infrastructure full capacity.”
And yet, second, there are examples of infrastructures being operated beyond their depreciation cycles. Patches, workarounds and fixes–many improvised–keep the infrastructure in operation, even if that reliability is achieved at less than always-full capacity. It takes professionals inside the infrastructure to operationally redesign technologies (and defective regulations) so as to maintain critical service provision reliably during the turbulent periods of exogenous and endogenous change.
Third, while this professional ability to operationally redesign systems and technologies on the fly and in real time in effect extend reliable operations, the actual workarounds and fixes are often rendered invisible under the bland catch-all, “infrastructure maintenance and repair,” where even improvised operations become part and parcel of corrective maintenance.
The latter means, however—and this is the key point here—that maintenance and repair are far from being bland and worthy only of passing mention. Really-existing maintenance and repair and their personnel are in fact the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of infrastructures faced with uncertainties induced from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and from the inside (e.g., those premature engineering innovations).
III
So what?
Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of globalized and interconnected challenges, ranging from defective international banking to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by central banks and massive new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.
What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures necessary for functioning economies and supply chains, let alone for “economic stability.” Nor have we seen in the subsequent formal investments in science, technology and engineering anything like a comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability management of those backbone critical infrastructures. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would not be primarily directed to innovation as if it were basic science, but rather to applied research and practices for enhanced maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof for scaling up.
In sum, if I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of backbone infrastructures as the resilience of an economy that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure maintenance and repair–and their innovations–move center stage in ways not yet appreciated by politicians, policymakers and the private sector.
8. Rethinking public debt
I
If I am reading historians Istvan Hont and Michael Sonenscher correctly, 18th century thinkers wrestled again and again with the constitutional means for reining in the bad-side of public debt (e.g., rulers use the monies for war), while promoting the good-side (e.g., rulers build the infrastructure Adam Smith himself saw necessary for human betterment).
Today, what to do about the public debt is even further from being reconciled, at least as a matter of an economics that is reliability-seeking. Constitutional proposals to ensure balanced budgets have come and gone; actual constitutional amendments, e.g. Germany’s restricting budget deficits to no greater than a certain percent of GDP, are suspended or circumvented. Green golden rules are proposed today that “would exclude any increase in net green public investment from the fiscal indicators used to measure compliance with fiscal rules,” recognizing however that “by allowing green spending to be financed by borrowing. . .could undermine public debt sustainability”. Etc. Etc.
In fact, nations now divide into two with respect to public debt: those that kick their public debt bucket down the road and those finding it more and more difficult to do so. ““This idea that we can continue to kick the can down the road” is no longer tenable,” [an expert recently put it about this debt]. “That horizon is coming very much closer to us.”” (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/473151/sovereign-debt-crisis-wall-strwet) Even closer when you add the increasing pressure on governments to pick up private-sector pensions commitments that can’t be met.
What to do?
II
One answer is to recast the public debt. Infrastructurally, think of public debts like keystone ecosystems, the way groundwater systems are central to other dependent terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Or that public debts are the infrastructures experienced as the social property of the propertyless, who know best when and how to depreciate their assets. If the public debt is our ruination, then we have to push that point further to how public debts are experienced, here and now.
III
This experience of public debt in real time is the perfect place to start reframing. Begin with one of the most recent cases, the 2020 Zambia government default:
Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief.
BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to a country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full.
Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.
It should be noted that compared to BlackRock, only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock (whose recent assets are reported to be well over $10 trillion). It’s also reported that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.
That said, yes of course, we still must say that this and other current sovereign debt crises could be better managed by the governments concerned. Fair enough.
But it would be more accurate to say that BlackRock is actually being managed in ways that nations can’t manage sovereign debt, i.e., BlackRock has a C-suite nations don’t have. Why then not start with BlackRock as the catalyst for better management? (After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008.)
Or from the other direction, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as the smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise. We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the global behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.
IV
Consider another example of how to reframe the public debt (or at least the experience of that debt): off-budget items as a way of funding that can’t be financed through public debt:
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.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/
Here focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.
Once upon a time, the basic idea of a budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits net of expenses. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints:
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. . .
Article titles, like “The Eurozone’s Evolving Fiscal Ecosystem: Mitigating Fiscal Discipline by Governing Through Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies,” give the game away.
Moreover, the increasingly out-of-date riposte no longer works, namely: Future generations will have more income than we do 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 you agree with the latter, then note also that the wider declension narratives at work—apocalypse, catastrophe, polycrisis—undermine the very persistence of concepts, like government budgets, intergenerational debt and “future generations.”
So, again, what’s to be done? Again, start by reframing. What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis? That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for those breaches in political economies and heterogeneities that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere else to go.
V
“Breaches and heterogeneities”? That level of analysis requires us to be more granular than appeal to abstract levels of this or that political economy. For example, it’s not varieties of capitalism (or anti-capitalism for that matter) we are looking for but rather specific hybrids and subsystems. Let’s take the example of free ports as illustrative.
The instance of free ports would 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
So what? What does this mean practically?
Consider the familiar recommendation: “Suspend and cancel debt payments when a climate extreme event takes place, so countries have the resources they need for emergency response and reconstruction without going into more debt.” This statement has no semantic meaning for really-existing policy and management in the absence of drawing conclusions from the run of diverse cases of “extreme events,” including but not limited to equally granular cases of free ports. At a minimum, this means capitalism is far far more complicated, granularly.
9. Rethinking capitalism
(1) What does anti-capitalist actually mean these days?
Ending capitalism isn’t just hard to realize; it’s hard to theorize and operationalize. That is: “Under capitalism” means that even in always-late capitalism, we have
laissez-faire capitalism, monopoly capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, party-state capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporate-consumerist capitalism, bourgeois capitalism, patrimonial capitalism, digital capitalism, financialized capitalism, political capitalism, social (democratic) capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, crony capitalism, cannibal capitalism, wellness capitalism, petty capitalism, platform capitalism, cloud capitalism, surveillance capitalism, infrastructural capitalism, algorithmic capitalism, welfare capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, turbo-capitalism, post-IP capitalism, green (also red and brown) capitalism, climate capitalism, extractive capitalism, libidinal capitalism, clickbait capitalism, emotional (affective) capitalism, tech capitalism, American capitalism, British capitalism, European capitalism, Western capitalism, transnational capitalism, global capitalism, agrarian capitalism, disaster capitalism, rentier capitalism, industrial capitalism, post-industrial capitalism, fossil capitalism, settler-colonial capitalism, supply chain capitalism, asset manager capitalism, information (data) capitalism, cyber-capitalism, cybernetic capitalism, racial capitalism, necro-capitalism, bio-capitalism, war capitalism, crisis capitalism, managerial capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, techno(scientific)-capitalism, pandemic capitalism, caring capitalism, zombie capitalism. . .
Oh hell, just stop there. Much of this proliferation looks like classic product differentiation in competitive markets. In this case: by careerists seeking to (re)brand their lines of inquiry for a competitive advantage in professions that act more and more like markets anyway.
Now, of course, it’s methodologically positive to be able to differentiate types and varieties of capitalism, so as to identify patterns and practices (if any) across the diversity of cases. But how is the latter identification to be achieved with respect to a list—namely the above—without number?
Or from the other direction, some of the terms do seek to denote specific contexts and levels of granularity and commonalities across cases. But, as others do not, what then does being “anti-capitalist” actually mean?
(2) One answer: Anti-capitalism depends on taking the losers in any such list seriously.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).” But even if true, is the implication that at least some of the capitalisms listed above were “better” then than now?
For example, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad? Didn’t many of our parents and grandparents suffer under conditions of capitalism all along just as we are?
Yet any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of “its” death rattle but of the vitality in morphing through losers after losers after losers? That is, it’s the losers in the above list that first need to be differentiated and tracked.
(3) The upshot: Superfluidity of terms in #(1) hides a superfluidity of capitalisms’ losers in #(2).
So what? Well, for one thing, Hicks-Kaldor can finally take its last breath.
According to the Hicks-Kaldor compensation principle, it’s good enough when an economic change means its winners would be better off even if they could compensate the losers of this change. The notion that actual compensation does not need to take place over the course of this now very long history of differing losers and differing losses is now even more ludicrous than before. Indeed, to be anti-capitalist is today to be anti anything like an abstracting Hicks-Kaldor. What then should we be saying about winners and losers, at least those who are right now in real time? I prefer this:
We cannot even imagine a happy world in which winners might not be hateful. Only in those who lose do we feel we might recognise fellow human beings, because if we call them unlucky, downtrodden victims, at least in the present moment we can be certain that we are not mistaken. (Natalia Ginsburg, 1970, accessed online at https://www.equator.org/articles/our-monstrous-ideas-natalia-ginzburg)
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Pizano, D. (2009). Conversations with Great Economists. New York: Jorge Pinto.
Riley, D. and R. Brenner (2025). “The long downturn and its political results: a reply to critics.” New Left Review 155, 25–70 (https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711)
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———- (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, Brighton: STEPS Centre
———- (2023). When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene. IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025
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WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 