The Politics of Uncertainty

Challenges of Transformation

Ian Scoones, Andy Stirling, Ian Scoones, Andy Stirling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000163407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Financial Risk Management
• Index: Business

Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book's chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion.

The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend deeply on political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new – more collective, mutualistic and convivial – politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle.

Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.

1

Uncertainty and the politics of transformation

Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling

Opening up the politics of uncertainty

Why is the idea of uncertainty so important to politics today?¹ Why is it especially significant for crucial debates about transformations to sustainability? This book tackles these big questions by exploring the politics of uncertainty across a range of domains and diverse case studies.

The book argues that the embracing of uncertainties – as constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice – means challenging singular notions of modernity and progress as a hard-wired ‘one-track’ ‘race to the future’. Ideas of development and sustainability are very often associated with a linear perspective on progress, dominated by narrow views of science and economics (Folbre et al. 2018). As a result of this, there is often a reliance on simplistic notions of innovation, focusing on those ‘lagging behind’, who must ‘catch up’ or ‘leapfrog’ to where others have reached. In this way, the framing of innovation and progress is reduced to merely how much, how fast, who is ahead and what is the risk of proceeding along an assumed pathway. Such debates too often ignore more important political questions about which way, what direction and who wins and who loses, where issues of uncertainty are central (Stirling 2015). Given diverse uncertainties, there is no single assumed endpoint; no one version of modernity and progress, and so directions chosen in the pursuit of sustainability and development depend on political and social choice (Scoones 2016).

Too often, ideas of transformation and sustainability are framed around particular, expert-defined ‘solutions’, with uncertainties blanked out. Typically asserted with great confidence, burgeoning notions around, for example, ‘smart cities’, ‘climate-smart agriculture’, ‘clean development’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘green growth’ or ‘zero-carbon economies’ act to suppress appreciation of many forms of uncertainty. Conceived in narrow, technical terms, informed by relatively homogeneous, specialist views, these core organising ideas for high-level global policy-making typically emphasise aspiring control, asserting romantic visions of visionary leadership, heroic expertise, deterministic systems, orderly values, convergent interests, compliant citizens and expediently predictable futures.

As a consequence, some highly uncertain issues that should remain open for political debate are imagined in circumscribed, biased and one-directional ways. The loudest voices and most powerful interests thus come to enjoy a disproportionate influence in defining what is meant by ‘progress’. The contrast could hardly be greater with the potentially open arena for political deliberation constituted by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Arguably, for the first time in history, these establish a globally-shared discourse enabling the exercise of agency not only over the possibility of progress but also with regard to its direction. The general orientation is clear – towards equality, well-being and ecological integrity; but the particularities of what these values might mean in practice – and how best to go about realising them – remain deeply uncertain.

Why this matters is that a rich and open-ended array of far wider, deeper and more plural kinds of possible societal, cultural and political transformations get obscured (Scoones et al. 2015). These many closures of uncertainties in mainstream, global discourses around science, technology and social progress typically serve to suppress the interests of the most marginalised communities, cultures and environments. Such failures to embrace uncertainty can presage perhaps the gravest form of oppression in the world today: the invisible foreclosing of possible futures. As a result, we argue, the opening up of political space to confront radical uncertainty can become as crucial to emancipatory politics as many more direct assertions of neglected interests.

Uncertainties are inevitable in this negotiation of diverse, possible futures concerning different pathways and their consequences (Leach et al. 2010). Uncertainties should not be reduced to risk, framed as a zero-sum threat that is in need of taming, controlling and managing, lest innovation is somehow ‘held back’ (Kearnes and Wynne 2007). In today’s complex, turbulent, interconnected, globalised world, uncertainty must be embraced as perhaps more central than ever. We argue that opening up to uncertainty offers opportunity, diversity and a politics of hope. This in turn offers a more plural vision of progress, defined according to different standpoints, with multiple modernities at play.

The hegemonic ideas of linear progress and modernist development that so dominate Western cultures have been exported to the world through waves of colonialism, trade and aid. This ‘globalising modernity’ (Ahuja 2009; Hobden 2002) is of course not fixed. Indeed, even in the West, past ideas of progress have been framed differently: for example, around cycles of growth and renewal, rather than linear change (Cowen and Shenton 1996). In non-Western cultures, notions of development, progress and modernity often have very different connotations, rooted in subaltern identities and cultural and religious perspectives (Oxley, Chapter 12). This book argues that this globalising version of modernity and progress need not colonise the future in the ways it is presently doing. Instead, a more diverse, plural and contingent perspective can be advocated, involving an appreciation of uncertainty and its diverse framings.

The book reflects on different cases in different settings, each offering narratives about the future, with uncertainty central to the storyline. The chapters focus on banking and finance; insurance systems; the regulation of technology; critical infrastructures; cities; climate change; disease outbreaks; natural disasters; migration flows; crime and terrorism and spirituality and religion. All suggest that the contemporary moment poses fundamental challenges to the status quo. Old assumptions of linear, stable systems, amenable to technical risk management and control, do not hold.

This challenges the globalising modernity of (neo)liberal capitalism – with its pretence of stable environments and economies, and assertion of particular cultures of expertise and structures of appropriation and control. Futures are unknown: even when seen from any individual viewpoint, uncertainties are ubiquitous. Diverging interests and perspectives introduce further ambiguities. Underlying all this is the radical, ever-present potentiality of downright ignorance and surprise. Today, financial instability, pandemic disease, climate chaos, recurrent natural disasters and threats to liberal, ‘democratic’ orders across the world are refashioning the ways policy, politics and governance are thought about. Arguing that uncertainty in all its forms is central, this book suggests a new politics of uncertainty: one that offers opportunities, but also dangers.

The stakes could hardly be higher. On the one hand, the landscape of possible futures for globalising forms of modernity suggest trends towards narrow, technocratic, fearful, risk-focused intensifications of control. On the other hand, subaltern, ‘alternative’ (Kaup 2012; Gaonkar 1999) and ‘minoritarian’ modernities (Taraborrelli 2015) – as well as wider emerging ‘non-modernities’ (Ibarra-Colado 2006) – offer imaginings of new institutions and practices for embracing – even celebrating – uncertainty. It is arguably through more equal engagements between these diverse cultural, political and organisational forms that space can be found for a more plural, mutualistic and hopeful politics of care and conviviality (Stirling 2019b; Arora 2019; cf. Illich 1973).

From framings to practices of uncertainty

Uncertainties are not merely about the absence of knowledge (Walker et al. 2003): they can be very concrete – and formatively diverse – in their manifestations. The literatures on uncertainty span many different disciplines, applied to a diversity of domains (Scoones 2019), but a key distinction – highlighted long ago by Frank Knight (1921) – is that between risk and uncertainty. Risk is where we know what the possible outcomes are and can estimate their probabilities. Uncertainty is where we are unsure of the probabilities of particular outcomes. This is important, as there is too often a tendency to ‘close down’ towards risk (Stirling 2008), pretending to know the probabilities. Yet this is often not realistic in practice, as models and estimates are confounded by uncertainties. In cases where systems are complex, interacting and non-linear, a narrow engineering risk-based approach is inappropriate.

A number of other dimensions of incertitude also arise. These include ambiguities – where there are ongoing disputes about possible outcomes between different groups, reflecting contending social and political worlds (Stirling 1999). Here, for instance, it may be that debates do not mainly concern how likely different outcomes may be, but are about more fundamentally divergent notions of ‘benefit’ or ‘harm’, or their distribution across society, or what the alternative options for action may be. There is also the predicament of ignorance, where fundamental indeterminacies of the world and ‘non-knowledge’ mean we ‘don’t know what we don’t know’ (Wynne 1992). And here it is important to remember that surprises can of course be positive as well as negative, depending on who is affected.

Under routine conditions, narrow notions of risk can remain useful in the engineering of closed systems, or where high-frequency, unchanging processes generate long-run comparable statistics. Here, there is no need to throw away the baby with the bathwater. But even where all parameters are well-known, most conditions in the world are uncertain, with specific probabilities and/or outcomes remaining not known or unknowable. And where there is even the possibility of unknown parameters, then ignorance is unavoidable. All these cumulative dilemmas have profound consequences, as the chapters in this book explore. The bottom line, in many circumstances, is that the assumptions of a risk-based approach can be inappropriate, misleading – and even dangerous.

Uncertainties therefore are conditions of knowledge itself – how we understand, frame and construct possible futures – and are not just hard-wired into ‘objective’ situations. But uncertainties also have other features, beyond these epistemological and ontological implications. Across the chapters of this book, four additional dimensions are discussed:

•Uncertainties have concrete, material features. They are produced from complex, non-linear unpredictable systems (Driebe and McDaniel 2005). They have material origins and effects. For example, the environmental variability of rangelands may be a source of productive advantage for pastoralists as they move across landscapes harvesting nutrients – living with and from uncertainty (Krätli and Schareika 2010). In complex systems, surprises – sudden ‘black swan’ events – may arise that were never expected (Taleb 2007). Taming and controlling such systems is impossible, but understanding and responding to unpredictable variability is vital (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990), requiring invention of new forms of science, regulation and management (van Zwanenberg, Chapter 4; Roe, Chapter 5).

•Uncertainties are not experienced in the same way by different people. Knowledges about the present and perspectives on the future are all constructed in particular contexts. Depending on one’s situation, uncertainties may be embraced as an opportunity or encountered as a source of dread, fear and anxiety. An experiential, affective stance on uncertainty is therefore unavoidable. Emotions and feelings matter, as they affect understanding and action. Religious and spiritual beliefs about – and enactment of – relationships between humans and the world may also impinge (Skrimshire 2014; Oxley, Chapter 12), as in Samkhya Hindu philosophy, which offers a plural perspective on understanding, influenced by consciousness, perception and experience.² And, in turn, uncertainties are influenced by histories, cultures and identities, as social worlds and historical experiences filter perspectives and condition action (Da Col and Humphrey 2012). Thus, marginalised communities in the global South will experience climate shocks in very different ways to privileged groups in the North, as histories of colonialism and dispossession influence what is possible and how pasts, presents and futures are viewed (Watts and Bohle 1993).

•Perspectives on uncertainties are also embodied, becoming part of who we are, as well as how we think and feel (Csordas and Harwod 1994). Sometimes this is physically reflected in our bodies. For example, men and women, and young and old people, may respond to the uncertainties of climatic or other disasters quite differently, as a result of the consequences of events in their day-to-day lives (Sword-Daniels et al. 2018). School children may find debates about climate change unsettling and anxiety-inducing, especially when ‘facts’ are unclear,³ while living with a chronic illness may result in a very different outlook to those of medical professionals and even family members, as both the condition and its treatment are enacted through the body (Mol and Law 2004). Drawing on feminist and queer theory, Wendy Harcourt (2013) argues that the body plays an important – often hidden and contested – role in the ways we encounter the world, and conduct ‘development’. As with ‘tacit knowledge’, embodied uncertainties remain entirely undocumented and even not consciously apprehended by those most intimately affected, making them especially significant when addressing responses to incertitude.

•Finally, our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations/acronyms
• 1 Uncertainty and the politics of transformation
• 2 The assault of FINANCIAL FUTURES on the rest of time
• 3 Sharing risks or proliferating uncertainties?: Insurance, disaster and development
• 4 The unravelling of technocratic orthodoxy?: Contemporary knowledge politics in technology regulation
• 5 Control, manage or cope?: A politics for risks, uncertainties and unknown-unknowns
• 6 Expanding cities: Living, planning and governing uncertainty
• 7 Uncertainty in modelling climate change: The possibilities of co-production through knowledge pluralism
• 8 Disease outbreaks: Navigating uncertainties in preparedness and response
• 9 Disasters, humanitarianism and emergencies: A politics of uncertainty
• 10 Intertwining the politics of uncertainty, mobility and immobility
• 11 Disputing security and risk: The convoluted politics of uncertainty
• 12 Unsettling the apocalypse: Uncertainty in spirituality and religion
• Index