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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to live from uncertainty?
Drawing on experiences from across the world, the chapters in this book explore finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. Each chapter contrasts an approach centred on risk and control, where we assume we know about and can manage the future, with one that is more flexible, responding to uncertainty.
The book argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and to develop new approaches, including some reclaimed and adapted from previous times or different cultures. This requires a radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices for successfully navigating uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 Navigating Uncertainty
Introduction
Centring uncertainty
A risk society?
Locating uncertainties
Risk, uncertainty and ignorance: what do we mean?
Diverse perspectives
What about politics?
Themes and questions
Notes
2 Finance: Real Markets as Complex Systems
A complex, opaque and poorly regulated financial system
Models and mayhem
Regulatory manoeuvres
Political economies
Real markets in pastoral areas
The human touch
Conclusion
Notes
3 Technology: What Is Safe and for Whom?
Introduction
Risk assessment and management: attempts at control
What about uncertainty?
Biotechnology battles
Regulatory contexts
Science and the law
Regulation, precaution and ethics
Science, technology and society
Conclusion
Notes
4 Critical Infrastructures: How to Keep the Lights On and the Animals Alive
Introduction
Normal accidents
Electricity systems: keeping the lights on in California
Pastoral systems: responding to drought and disease
Beyond the politics of design and control
Conclusion
Notes
5 Pandemics: Building Responses from Below
Epidemiological certainties?
Complexity, uncertainty and grounded experiences
Zimbabwe: where there are no models
Unsung heroes
The politics of pandemics
Rethinking pandemic preparedness
Notes
6 Disasters: Why Prediction and Planning Are Not Enough
Introduction
From Sendai to southern Ethiopia
Techno-managerial solutions
Preparing for the worst
Insuring against disaster
The politics of disasters
Conclusion
Notes
7 Climate Change: Multiple Knowledges, Diverse Actions
Introduction
Promises of prediction
The social and political lives of climate models
Adapting to climate change
Local responses
Co-producing knowledge for action
Conclusion
Notes
8 Looking Forward: From Fear to Hope, from Control to Care
An uncertain world
Navigating uncertainty
Complex, non-linear systems
Individual and collective capacities for generating reliability
Policy and decision-making processes
Political economy contexts
Ways forward?
A paradigm shift: learning lessons from the margins
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 8
Table 8.1
Shifting to an ‘uncertainty paradigm’
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Dimensions of incertitude.
Source
: Based on Stirling (1999, 2010)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For Jake and Kate, both navigating an uncertain world in their own ways.
Navigating Uncertainty
Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World
Ian Scoones
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Ian Scoones 2024
The right of Ian Scoones to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is also available in an Open Access edition, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6007-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6008-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024931431
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For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book has emerged through a long process. The disconnect between accredited science and so the recommendations for management and policy – often steeped in western, colonial assumptions – and what farmers and pastoralists in many parts of the world actually do as they navigate uncertainty has troubled me for a long time.
In the 1980s, I trained as a biologist and for my PhD was expected to use quantitative bioeconomic modelling techniques to look at livestock population dynamics, but the field realities in Zimbabwe just didn’t match. Later, I went on to think more broadly about pastoral systems and how, in highly variable environments, mainstream rangeland management approaches are a poor fit. Uncertainty was a central theme, and I even edited a book called Living with Uncertainty in 1994, building on research collaborations with Roy Behnke, Camilla Toulmin and others exploring ‘non-equilibrium’ rangeland ecologies. My post-PhD work in Zimbabwe focused on risk and uncertainty in dryland farming systems and was explored in our 1996 book, Hazards and Opportunities.
Through all these experiences, how standard ways of thinking and approaches to planning and management do not match lived realities became increasingly apparent. The existing approaches to development were simply not working in uncertain settings. Subsequent work on environmental policy narratives, sustainable livelihoods and the politics of policy processes all reinforced this. It was through the ESRC STEPS Centre, based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex from 2006 to 2021, that these themes really came together. In our 2010 book, Dynamic Sustainabilities, we explored how pathways to sustainability are always contingent, uncertain and negotiated politically.
My European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant that supported the PASTRES programme (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins, pastres.org) from 2017 to 2023 was the opportunity to examine some of these issues more deeply. Working with six amazing PhD students and other colleagues conducting studies in six countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, we investigated how pastoralists understand and respond to diverse uncertainties. Our collective book published in 2023, Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development, shared some of the findings. Some of our cross-cutting research on uncertainty, which this book draws on, is now illustrated in a series of fantastic cartoons drawn by Dan Locke (pastres.org/uncertainworlds), while photo-stories and documentary photography curated by Roopa Gogineni and Shibaji Bose highlight how uncertainty is perceived across our research sites (seeingpastoralism.org).
In 2019, the PASTRES programme and the STEPS Centre co-hosted an incredibly formative symposium focused on the theme of ‘uncertainty’. With contributions on topics ranging from finance to pandemics, migration, crime and religion, we examined how a focus on uncertainty offered important challenges for societal transformation (steps-centre.org/uncertainty). The 2020 book that I co-edited with Andy Stirling, The Politics of Uncertainty, offered a huge range of perspectives across twelve great chapters.
This book emerges from all these experiences and more. While the wider intellectual debates about risk and uncertainty have informed and challenged my thinking, it has been the grounded experiences in different places that have brought these to life. In this book, I have tried to combine real-life case studies with broader reflections, linking to debates in the literature. Many of the cases come from my own research work, but there are also others from students and colleagues who have been working on these themes. All informants’ quotes have been anonymized, but hopefully these voices help make the arguments more tangible and real. In each of the chapters, I have included examples from both the so-called ‘global North’ and ‘global South’ since the uncertain challenges we face are of course universal.
Each chapter in this book takes a different theme, most of which I have worked on in one way or other. The chapter on finance connects the experience of the global financial crash with work I have done on informal markets in pastoral areas and connects to the wider challenges of ensuring that economic analysis addresses the epistemic challenge of uncertainty. The next chapter on technology draws on our work on agricultural biotechnology in Brazil, India, southern Africa and the United Kingdom, while the following chapter on critical infrastructure is indebted to conversations with Emery Roe over many years and PASTRES work with pastoralists in Kenya. The chapter on pandemics builds on work by the STEPS Centre and more recent work in Zimbabwe on the COVID-19 pandemic, while the final two thematic chapters on disasters and climate change in many ways cut across work that I have done over a long time on drought responses in dryland farming and pastoral areas in Africa.
This is not a conventional ‘academic’ book, although I hope it shows rigour and depth, and sources for further reading are provided in the text. Instead, this short book aims to offer a big-picture argument in a reasonably accessible style about how taking uncertainty seriously must reshape our world. The radical rethinking in the subtitle means drawing on diverse sources and inspirations, and making the connections across places, people, disciplines and sectors that only a book covering such a wide range of themes and cases from such diverse settings can do.
Responding to uncertainty requires the skills of navigation, the book argues. This means drawing on multiple knowledges and deep practical wisdom. There is no single path, and destinations must always be negotiated. Under conditions of uncertainty, we cannot predict and plan but must use a range of skills and capabilities to ensure a reliable passage. Such navigation may be challenging, and there can be many obstacles. Political, economic, social or cultural barriers may prevent some people reaching a desired destination, while for others sailing through is easy. Histories of colonization, marginalization and exclusion may affect what uncertainties emerge for whom. Navigating uncertainty – the title of the book – is thus always political, contested and contingent.
Writing this book was made possible by a three-month writing sabbatical from IDS, my first in 28 years at the Institute. Additional thinking and writing time were made possible through my wonderfully flexible ERC Advanced Grant (No. 70432), which also supported the open-access publication of this book. Being able to think, reflect and write over several months during 2023 was an incredible luxury. A big challenge was making the book short and clear, as there was so much to say and inevitably many omissions. I hope, though, that the result is worth reading.
A book of this sort of course emerges from many interactions over many years, and there are far too many people to thank here. As co-directors of the STEPS Centre, Melissa Leach and Andy Stirling have been especially important. Others associated with the Centre have had an enormous influence, too, including, among many others, Dipak Gyawali, Mike Hulme, Sheila Jasanoff, Emery Roe and Brian Wynne. For nearly 40 years, my field-based inspirations have particularly come from Zimbabwe. These are rooted in a long-term collaboration with Felix Murimbarimba and the late B. Z. Mavedzenge and as part of collaborative research with Ben Cousins, Ruth Hall and others at PLAAS in South Africa. In East Africa, research linked to the PASTRES programme with Tahira Mohamed, Hussein Mahmoud, Michele Nori, Masresha Taye, Hussein Wario and others has also been enormously influential. And among all this, the brilliant newsletter, The Marginalian, put together by Maria Popova, has been an important weekly encouragement to read more widely and purchase yet more books.
Finally, I must thank my editors at Polity, Karina Jákupsdóttir and Jonathan Skerrett, the three extremely helpful anonymous reviewers and those that kindly read different parts of the manuscript, including Shibaji Bose, Michael Jonik, Hayley McGregor, Lars Otto Naess, Emery Roe, Shilpi Srivastava, Andy Stirling and Masresha Taye, as well as support with copyediting, formatting and reference checking from Ben Jackson and Gail Ferguson.
Ian Scoones, Brighton, December 2023
1Navigating Uncertainty
Introduction
Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, pandemics, disasters, financial volatility, new technologies or the outbreak of war, we don’t know what the future holds. Navigating uncertainties, where we cannot predict what will happen, is essential. But how is this done, and what can we learn about responding to, managing and living with, and indeed from, uncertainty from different experiences?
As Helga Nowotny (2015: 1) argues, uncertainty ‘is written into the script of life’. Similarly, Bruno Latour (2007: 245) explains, ‘The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled with a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.’ This book is concerned with the ‘vast ocean of uncertainties’ as they appear in different facets of contemporary life. In order to understand this, I have sought to ground the book in a series of themes, each central to getting to grips with how we understand and act on uncertainties, with examples drawn from diverse settings, from both the so-called global North and global South.
In terms of the themes that the book covers, I start in the next chapter with an exploration of financial crises and the challenges of managing financial volatility and the implication of taking uncertainty seriously within economic thinking and practice. I then turn to a discussion of technology and the politics of regulation, asking what is safe and for whom? Next, I move on to exploring ‘critical infrastructures’ and how reliability is generated by a variety of professionals and their networks, before examining the challenges of disease outbreak preparedness, drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. After that, I discuss disasters more generally and the way we prepare for and respond to them. The final thematic chapter looks at climate change, perhaps the biggest challenge of all, and how we must all learn to live with high levels of climate variability while continuing to reduce emissions. The book concludes with a discussion of ways forward and the need to transform our perspectives on uncertainty from ones of despair and fear to those of hope and opportunity, creating a new politics of care and responsibility for a turbulent world.
Later, I introduce the concept of uncertainty and distinguish it from risk.1 All the chapters that follow contrast a control-oriented, risk-based calculative approach, where we assume we know about and can manage the future with a more flexible, practice-based approach that is responsive to uncertain conditions. The book argues that, if uncertainty is to be navigated effectively, new approaches are needed that are more open, inclusive and collective, some reclaimed and adapted from previous times and different cultures.
Uncertainties – where we don’t know, or are not confident about, the likelihoods of future outcomes – are not new. While the world has always been uncertain, as the chapters that follow show, it is perhaps our modernist attempts to predict, manage and control that are failing. Today, our collective capacities for navigating uncertainty and dealing with ignorance have declined. Yet, despite the ideological commitments to certainty and control, a hubristic faith in technology, together with controlling forms of economic and political order, can quickly unravel. Providing encouragement for the future, throughout the book we will encounter different people who are incredibly well practised at living with and from uncertainty, and the book argues that we can learn a lot from them to equip us better for today’s challenges. The big question for us all today is whether the dominant approach to confronting uncertainty – to reduce everything to calculable risk – is sufficient, or whether we have to re-learn and revive other approaches more attuned to an uncertain world.
Centring uncertainty
As I explore later in this chapter, there are many examples of diverse intellectual and cultural traditions where uncertainty is central. It is perhaps a peculiar anomaly that, for a relatively short period, western visions of modernity have ignored or suppressed uncertainty in the pursuit of a particularly narrow vision of ‘innovation’ and ‘development’. Indeed, as we shall see, even within the core western canons that have framed our ideas of modernist progress, there have been many heterodox, dissenting views where uncertainties are taken seriously.
The physical and natural sciences, seen to be at the heart of modernization and progress, are of course founded on principles of uncertainty and doubt, with ignorance driving the quest for new, but never certain, knowledge (Firestein 2012). Uncertainty is key to an enlightened scientific view, much preferable, some argue, to the unconditional faith of religion.2 As the Nobel prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman notably said:
It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. (Feynman 2001 [1956]: 247–8)
While Newtonian perspectives dominated with a fixed vision of universal laws, this was disrupted by quantum physics – not least through Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ – and more recently by developments in complexity science and chaos theory, where non-linear dynamics of complex systems are explored. Ilya Prigogine, another noted Nobel Laureate and recognized for pioneering work on complexity, dissipative structures and patterns of irreversibility, argues that ‘The future is uncertain; this is true for the nature we describe and this is true on the level of our own existence. But this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.’3 He observes, ‘In an unstable world, absolute control and precise forecasting are not possible’ (Prigogine 1989: 396). In the celebrated book, The End ofCertainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, written together with philosopher Isabelle Stengers (1997), they note, ‘The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.’
Economics with its huge influence on contemporary policy has often tried to emulate the assumed certainties of a scientific discipline through ‘blackboard proofs’ and elaborate equilibrium models, but these have often failed to live up to their claims, providing poor policy tools for increasingly complex and volatile economic systems (Colander and Freedman 2018; Coyle 2021; DeMartino, Grabel and Scoones 2024), just as similarly doctrinaire Soviet-style state planning (Innes 2023). Despite the attempts at developing an ‘economics of control’ (Lerner 1944) that would guide policy through what Milton Friedman (1953) called a ‘positive economics’, which was to be based on universal laws and standard models of neoclassical economics, many have argued that the pursuit of such a mechanistic view is pointless.
Prior to the narrowing of the discipline, many leading economists of course recognized the importance of uncertainty. Frank Knight, in particular, highlighted the distinction between risk and uncertainty in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Similarly, when thinking about future economic trends, John Maynard Keynes observed, ‘about these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know . . .’ (Keynes 1937: 213–14). In the same vein, but from a very different political standpoint, Friedrich von Hayek argued in his famous article, The Use of Knowledge in Society, that economists must take account of ‘unorganized’ knowledge, ‘the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place’ (Hayek 1945: 521). In his 1974 Nobel Prize speech, he argued that ‘I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false’ (Hayek 1975: 438). Fortunately, such older, foundational debates in economics are being returned to today as economists grapple with our uncertain world (DeMartino, Grabel and Scoones 2024).
Such heterodox perspectives that take uncertainty seriously articulate well with the growth of ideas within other allied disciplines that also influence policy thinking, whether social psychology, sociology or anthropology. Advances in our understandings of neurobiology and associated developments in psychology, for example, point to the importance of human cognition being centrally around ‘surfing uncertainty’, with the brain understood as an ‘action-oriented engagement machine’ (Clark 2015: 295), which is able to learn from incoming stimuli on the go with initial guesses adapted in order to respond to a highly dynamic world. In navigating uncertainty, the interactions between reason, intuition and emotion become vitally important (Damasio 2006). Current understandings go far beyond the earlier perspectives based on risk-based experiments around gambling games and ‘risk aversion weightings’ (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982; Pidgeon and Beattie 1998) to a recognition that engaging with uncertain conditions requires continuous context-sensitive, intuitive and emotional responses that are always adaptive, but never optimal.4
Within social anthropology, Mary Douglas (1966, 1986, 1992) was a pioneer in arguing that cultural perspectives on uncertainty are essential to understanding contemporary life. She observed that, ‘Every choice we make is beset by uncertainty. That is the condition of human knowledge . . . unwrapping the gifts we receive from randomness, thriving on the cusp of uncertainty and knowing when is the right moment to act, delay or forgo action are different ways of embracing uncertainty’ (1986: 42, 172). In discussions of how cultural practices and religious beliefs intersect with day-to-day responses to uncertainty, social anthropological perspectives highlight how in many settings across the world – and certainly not just confined to some idealized ‘traditional’, ‘pre-modern’ world – uncertainties are key (da Col and Humphrey 2012; Cooper and Pratten 2014).
Across disciplines and policy domains, therefore, it is increasingly realized that assuming a stable, linear mechanistic view is inadequate, even dangerous. Disciplinary training and educational systems that teach ‘certain’ knowledge through established models therefore may not be fit for purpose. Take the education of children at school. Perhaps one of the most important attributes of a contemporary education must be to navigate uncertainty. It is something that we all must do, and increasingly so in the face of climate change, pandemic events, economic shocks and so on. Yet the didactic, top-down form of education – even when it embraces themes such as ‘sustainability’ – too often fails to address the soft skills required to navigate uncertainty, preferring instead to deliver ‘facts’ from an assumed settled ‘science’. The same applies to many areas of education – like training to be a medical doctor, for instance – where in the end it is the practical skills, tacit knowledge and learned wisdom that are crucial when confronting complexity and uncertainty. At all levels, new forms of education and training are therefore required that put uncertainty centre stage (Kirby and Webb 2023).
It is perhaps no surprise that there is now a plethora of pop-psychology manuals, business guides and inspirational self-help books, Instagram feeds, TikTok accounts and YouTube videos available that highlight how individuals can confront their fears, manage risk and embrace uncertainty to become more ‘resilient’.5 This book, you may be glad to hear, is not one of this genre, but it has a similar starting point: uncertainties are very real and are central to today’s world, and we need new ways of responding. Despite the dissenting, heterodox voices across disciplines and areas of practice, the very premises of many mainstream policy positions are fundamentally challenged if uncertainty is taken seriously. Whether these are equilibrium versions of neoclassical economics, the need for market-based insurance provision to ‘de-risk’ society or the requirements of standard risk-based regulatory systems or audit and security regimes to control and manage populations, all fail when uncertainty and ignorance impinge – where we don’t know the likelihoods of outcomes or even the array of possible outcomes at all.
The core argument of this book, therefore, is that taking uncertainty seriously means rethinking our world quite fundamentally – from top to bottom, from politics and policy to individual practice. This is, as I have already hinted, not a new argument, but it is definitely an urgent one. Luckily, there are many ideas, frameworks, experiences and practices to draw from, reviving and renewing perspectives from the past and taking inspiration from diverse places and people for new, uncertain challenges. In the chapters that follow, juxtapositions of experiences from very different settings allow for wider lessons to be learned on how we need to transform our worlds of both thinking and practice in order to embrace uncertainty.
A risk society?
In 1986, Ulrich Beck’s book, Risk Society, was published in Germany. It came on the back of a series of disasters, most notably the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, but also the Challenger space shuttle disaster, a massive pollution leak in Basel and so on. Risk seemed to be dominating the world, the inadvertent consequence of technological, capitalist modernity. This, Beck argued, was refashioning politics, requiring a rethinking of expertise and institutions for governance. Rather than class differences, it was the distribution of risks that had become the salient political category, he suggested (Beck 1992). The new ‘sub-politics’ that emerges among publics responding to the diverse risks of modernity becomes part of a period of ‘reflexive modernization’, he argued, leading in turn to a more ‘cosmopolitan society’ of engaged citizens confronting diverse risks (see Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Giddens 1999; Adam, Beck and van Loon 2000; Beck and Levy 2013).
Not surprisingly, these debates about ‘risk’ (actually in most cases referring to uncertainty and ignorance in the terms of this book; see below) generated a fevered reaction among sociologists, political scientists and public commentators. Was this really a new period in world history, one set apart by the consequences of technological risks? Or was there in fact much more continuity, with the experiences of the mid-1980s a peculiar and particular set of circumstances (Curran 2018)? Was this a phenomenon of capitalism in (mostly) northern Europe, which didn’t translate into other settings? Were there in fact other forms of ‘risk society’ in other places and cultures (Caplan 2000; Leach, Scoones and Thompson 2002)? And has ‘risk’ really displaced class or other dimensions of social difference as the driver of politics, or is it actually the intersections between risk and uncertainty and class, race, gender and other dimensions of difference that are of interest (Mythen, Burgess and Wardman 2018)?
Other theorists have captured the contemporary moment in other ways. Niklas Luhmann (1993) argued that the notion of risk emerges in modern societies to replace concepts of ‘danger’ and more predetermined futures. Zygmunt Bauman (2013) talks of our ‘liquid times’, where the certainties of the past no longer apply. ‘Nomadism’, he suggests, is an important trait of ‘liquid modern humans’ as we move between networks, identities and occupations. ‘Nomadic subjects’ are those, Rosi Braidotti (1994) argues, who must continuously negotiate a fluid, hybrid, globalized world with new sensibilities and identities. Life is therefore necessarily shifting and mobile, improvised and adaptive, rather than fixed, sedentary and static. Societies centred on networks emerge through the accelerated processes of globalization and mobility, as well as technological connectivity (Castells 1996; Negri 2008) and, within societies, relationships are connected ‘rhizomatically’, creating a new form of politics constituted by uncertainty (Deleuze and Guattari 1988).
Many of these ideas continue to resonate,6 especially in the context of the wider environmental crisis. A particularly influential strand highlights the ‘systemic risks’ to the planet and human survival of crossing what are termed ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al. 2009; Rees 2021), with ‘tipping points’, potentially pushing the system over the edge (Lenton et al. 2019). There are, many argue, multiple, systemic, compounding and cascading risks that are a major danger to life on Earth, combining climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, pandemic threats and a host of other threats.
However, too often apocalyptic, dystopian visions result in calls for a control-oriented response, creating ‘Earth system stability’, for instance, through strong, centralized risk-based intervention, rather than imagining an alternative politics of uncertainty and sustainability. The image is of a ‘cockpit’ controlling the Earth, with science at the centre (Hajer et al. 2015). A strange combination of doomsday-style hype and technocratic solutionism dominates, whether around artificial intelligence or climate policy (Hulme 2023). Sadly, such a view is promoted by many who are completely sanguine about the failures of top-down technocratic approaches of the past, yet are somehow drawn to such solutions with often fantastical imaginaries of ecomodernist technology, rigid approaches to ‘risk management’ and a strong system of centralized environmental global governance saving the day (e.g., Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015).
This tension around appropriate political responses to systemic risks and complex crises is being played out too around the fashionable idea of the ‘polycrisis’. Popularized by economic historian Adam Tooze7 and derived from older ideas of French sociologists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern,8 the term has been widely discussed by everyone from Larry Summers to the World Economic Forum in Davos.9 That there are intersecting crises that have a combined effect is fairly obvious, and too often the discussion follows the line that the polycrisis simply needs to be managed, returning to assumed normality and stability through techno-managerial intervention. As so often happens, the term then becomes depoliticized and anodyne. Yet the idea of the polycrisis, Tooze argues, suggests that it is the systemic consequences of combined, simultaneous crises that are important – where the emergent whole is more than the sum of its parts. The polycrisis is thus new, strange, weird, something that is not ordinary or easily tamed through standard approaches.10 This perspective draws on long-established ideas about complex systems, where non-linear interactions and deep uncertainties intertwine. In this sense, ideas around uncertainty – rather than simple risk management and control – become important.
The polycrisis is, however, not a single, time-limited event, but one located in a long history of recurrent crises of capitalism, accelerating in the ‘neoliberal’ era (Harvey 2007). As Giovanni Arrighi (1994) points out, centres of power are always shifting and, with a ‘long view’, instability is normal as contestations are continuous. Similarly, Mike Savage (2021) argues that today’s world is guided by what he calls an ‘imperial modernity’, one constituted through actually quite predictable long-term political-economic processes centred on capitalist accumulation, colonial expansion and class, gender and racial discrimination.11
However, such long-run patterns, even if in some senses predictable, give rise to ongoing uncertainties about the future. The assumed stability of an international ‘world order’, for example, no longer applies, as power, politics and international relations reconfigure. In contrast to the conventional risk-based ‘control’ view, this gives rise to what Peter Katzenstein and Lucia Seybert (2018) describe as a ‘protean’ view of power. Taking uncertainty and complexity seriously, they argue, radically overturns standard views of global politics and international relations. Crises in capitalism – or state socialism for that matter – provoked by changing configurations of capital, land, labour, social reproduction, technology and power, and increasingly through the effects of environmental and climate change, thus give rise to new uncertainties and so new challenges for society, policy and governance, locally, nationally and globally.
Crises, like uncertainties, are constructions of knowledge, narratives that are told about both the past and the future; they are not simply ‘out there’ in nature. Depending on where you are situated, crises look very different – for some horrifying and scary, for others nothing out of the ordinary, just part of everyday life. As Janet Roitman (2013) argues, the idea of ‘crisis’ must be seen as a narrative device used to explain critical junctures, periods of contingency and fluidity, moments when truths are revealed and choices about the future are made. Crises in turn may be invoked – or actively manufactured – to support particular, powerful positions and claims, very often as routes to bringing things back to a desired ‘normal’. Crises are therefore normatively defined, both in relation to what went before and what is desired for the future (Koselleck 2000).
As Antonio Gramsci (1971: 276) famously observed, ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Such ‘morbid symptoms’ may be used to argue for a return to the status quo or may be the basis for imagining alternatives at moments when things are uncertain and in flux. Who gets to define and frame a crisis is therefore extremely important. Economic, environmental, food, energy or health crises – and their many intersections in the form of the polycrisis – are constructed in this way. This is why a focus on navigating uncertainties – the product of incomplete, unsettled, indeterminate knowledges – rather than focusing on crises as ontologically defined tangible ‘things’ to be managed and controlled becomes so important.
As in previous periods of massive upheaval – whether the European uprisings of 1848 (Clark 2023) or the creating of a new global order in the interwar years (Tooze 2014) – what is clear today is that there is no possibility of returning to a stable ‘normal’: accommodating instability and navigating uncertainty are at the core of contemporary policy challenges. The process is always contingent, contested and often conflictual: there are multiple pathways and no single goal. The abiding myth of linear progress towards a singular modernity is well and truly shattered.
One default response to an acknowledgement of the centrality of uncertainty and the rejection of a planned, linear approach is to argue that an individualized, market-based response must follow, centred on a (neo)liberal, open-ended vision of modernity, where technology and the market come to the rescue. However, periods of crisis and associated uncertainty can also suggest alternative paths. As stable, linear views are challenged, multiple visions of progress and modernity open up, redefining what we mean by ‘development’ or ‘innovation’, for example. As this book argues, the challenges of navigating uncertainty can instead reveal more effective, often collective, collaborative responses. And in the process, diverse forms of what might be called a ‘risk society’, located in different contexts, are revealed, conditioned by a new politics of uncertainty.
Locating uncertainties
Uncertainties – and the traversing of planetary boundaries, the polycrisis and the rest – therefore do not come from nowhere. As all the chapters discuss, they are the result of long-run processes of change that generate vulnerabilities that are distributed unevenly, both across the globe and within societies, according to class, race, age, gender and so on. There are, as Amitav Ghosh (2021) explains so powerfully in The Nutmeg’s Curse, always colonial imprints in crises. Experiences of empire and conquest help explain current crises and the responses that follow.12
Crises of course look different to different people in different places and must be understood as ‘context’ (Vigh 2008), just as uncertainty must be understood in relation to how people appreciate, accommodate and respond to variability. As Brian Wynne showed for sheep farmers in Cumbria in the United Kingdom in the wake of the Chernobyl radiation release, they understood risks in very different ways to scientists:
Much of [the] conflict between expert and lay epistemologies centred on the clash between the taken for granted scientific culture of prediction and control, and the farmers’ culture in which lack of control was taken for granted . . . The farmers assumed predictability to be intrinsically unreliable as an assumption, and therefore valued adaptability and flexibility, as a key part of their cultural identity and practical knowledge. (Wynne 1996a: 67)
In the same way, other herders – this time in Amdo Tibet in China – see uncertainties in relation to their own Buddhist worldviews. As one mentioned, ‘What happened is already in the past, and what is going to happen is unpredictable; all we can depend on is the present, we deal with what is happening now.’ In an impermanent world, herders have to ‘embrace the ongoing, perpetual and contingent flow of processes and relations’ (Tsering 2023: 53). Uncertainties are therefore not ‘out there’ in the world but emerge from ‘the relationships between what is known and who is doing the knowing’ (Scoones and Stirling 2020: 11).
This grounded, contextual perspective on uncertainty of course chimes with ideas of situated knowledges and plural and partial perspectives highlighted in feminist epistemology (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991). As with ‘actor network theory’ (Latour 2007), the emphasis is therefore on knowledge relations ‘all the way down’, as uncertainties and their implications have to be understood from different ‘standpoints’ and in relation to the hybrid networks that form our ideas and their effects. This may be in respect of gender, race, class or indeed emerge from the entanglements of human and non-human worlds.13
Risk, uncertainty and ignorance: what do we mean?
In this book, I do not use the terms ‘risk’, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘ignorance’ interchangeably. There are quite distinct meanings of each, with very different implications. As Andy Stirling explains (1999, 2010: Fig. 1.1), a simple matrix comparison can be drawn that contrasts knowledge about outcomes and knowledge about likelihoods of them happening, suggesting four dimensions of incertitude.
Figure 1.1 Dimensions of incertitude. Source: Based on Stirling (1999, 2010)
Risk
is when we know and are confident about the likelihoods of known outcomes, so we can predict, plan, calculate and control. This is the dominant technocratic vision, which works well in some circumstances and remains important – like when engineering a bridge, for example. But in many circumstances these conditions do not apply.
Uncertainty
is when we know the range of possible outcomes, but we don’t know – or are not confident about – the likelihoods of them happening. This is very common. High levels of variability, non-linear interactions and complex systems all give rise to uncertainties – think any ecological, economic or political system. This of course represents quite a lot of the world’s challenges.
Ignorance
is the condition when we don’t know the outcomes nor their likelihoods when, in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld, former US Defense Secretary, we need to address the ‘unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know’.
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Ignorance can be dangerous, whether it’s the emergence of what the World Health Organization refers to as ‘disease X’ that emerges totally out of the blue or the surprise that arises from a ‘black swan’ event in a complex financial system (Taleb 2007). These are real possibilities, meaning ignorance, or non-knowledge, has to be thought about.
Ambiguity
is where there is dispute about the outcomes and their importance, even if we are confident about the likelihoods. Here contestation of what is important in a complex system comes to the fore, with different views expressed from different standpoints. The key issues are therefore about meanings, values and alternative views, rather than about probabilities.
Note that all these dimensions refer to knowledge about outcomes and their likelihoods – uncertainty (and incertitude more broadly) is not a description of the world but is about our (inevitably differentiated) understanding of it (Wynne 1992). To repeat, uncertainty is a state of knowledge, not a state of nature.15 As this book argues across a number of cases, a variable, volatile, turbulent world gives rise to multiple forms of uncertainty, which in turn create a new politics, one that is radically different to our stable, linear, modernist view.
How, then, are uncertainties responded to? As already noted, modernist social and technical imaginaries offer an illusion of control, often based on the paraphernalia of risk management – managing according to assumptions of risk when the reality is uncertainty, even ignorance (Beck et al. 2021). Yet, as Michael Power (2004) argues, the ‘risk management of everything’ that has emerged as a solution as part of the ‘audit culture’ of the neoliberal era too often fails. Standard forms of risk assessment, management and communication – what some call risk governance (Renn 2008) – are designed to provide for the regulation of technology and the assurance of safety in the face of identified risks. However, even with greater participation in the process, including via public consultations, most such processes resort to instrumental, mechanistic routines. These fail to open up to diverse knowledges and framings, offering instead narrow, definitive pronouncements on risk, rather than plural and conditional advice that is required under conditions of uncertainty and ignorance (Stirling 2008). In the context of systemic risk – or the polycrisis, if you like – such risk management approaches are frequently applied, aiming to give a sense of authority and control.
In some ways, despite the mainstream obsession of closing down to risk and holding on to control, approaches that enable uncertainties to be navigated are becoming increasingly mainstream. The military have long recognized that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) are essential features of any operation, and military strategy and organization must take these features seriously.16 Major business consultancies, such as the RAND Corporation, have similarly developed approaches to robust decision making under deep uncertainty (Marchau et al. 2019), while large corporations, notably the oil company Shell, have long made use of flexible scenarios to think about uncertain futures as part of business planning.17 In the international aid and humanitarian sector as well as environmental management, ‘operating at the edge of chaos’ (Ramalingam 2013) and ‘adaptive management’ (Allen and Garmestani 2015) have become increasingly influential in challenging complex, often conflict-prone places where conventional planning will not do.
These are all good starting points but do not always deal with the more radical epistemic challenges of uncertainty. Here a useful entry point is the idea of ‘post-normal science’, first suggested by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz in 1990, and extensively developed since. In conditions where uncertainties are everywhere, values clash, stakes are high and the issue is urgent (which is the case for all the themes discussed in this book, most of the time), a different type of science is needed, they argue. This requires both different sources of evidence – from multiple different origins involving different types of knowledge – and different styles of assessment – involving a wider ‘extended peer community’ to assess what is going on. Such an approach has many methodological as well as practical implications, not least how to deal with what John Law (2004) calls ‘mess’, the indeterminate, mobile, messy complexity of uncertain realities. Since most of the settings we work in can be characterized in these terms, then asking, again following Andy Stirling (2008), about how to ‘open up’ to uncertainty rather than ‘close down’ to risk is a central challenge for all of us.
Diverse perspectives
Uncertainty is therefore vital for how we navigate the world. But how is uncertainty understood more broadly? As hinted at earlier, uncertainty has been central to debates in physics, ecology, economics, social psychology, anthropology and many other disciplines, but it sometimes becomes shrouded by false certainties and hubristic visions of control as disciplines narrow. If we are to open up to uncertainty once more, given the challenges we all face, then what inspirations can we draw from? Fortunately, there are many – from diverse places and voices.
Perhaps each era is claimed as an ‘age of uncertainty’, as J. K. Galbraith argued for in his 1977 television series on economic and political thinking, as in each period we must face new unknowns.18
