Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. Uncertainties are everywhere. But how can we navigate them successfully?
As Helga Nowotny described in her book, such “uncertainties are written into the script of life.” Bruno Latour argued that “The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”. But what if the world is dominated by uncertainty and complexity, not risk and stability. What if the modernist systems – of formalised planning, risk management, control systems and so on – just don’t work?
In my new book – Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World – recently published by Polity Books I argue that this is the case. But I also argue that not all is lost; that there are some people who have long grappled with uncertainty, and we should all learn from them.
If we put uncertainty at the centre of thinking and practices, this means a fundamental rethinking of society, economy and politics as we know it. For a variety of reasons, we are stuck in a linear, mechanistic, technocratic risk-based paradigm that fails to address the dynamic complexity of today’s turbulent world. This is problematic, and sometimes dangerous.
The reflections in the book draw on diverse case material, but in particular I share lessons from my ERC Advanced grant project – PASTRES: pastoralism, uncertainty, resilience: global lessons from the margins – and my on-going work in Zimbabwe. The premise of the book is that learning from those who must navigate uncertainties continuously – climate, markets, diseases, conflicts, political conditions and so on – can help us all in confronting uncertainties.
Understanding uncertainty
How should we understand uncertainty, and distinguish it from risk? A core framework for our work comes from my colleague Andy Stirling based at SPRU at Sussex, and who was a co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre with me over many years. The framework explores two axes – knowledge about the likelihoods of outcomes, and knowledge about outcomes themselves. It results in four dimensions of incertitude.
Risk is therefore where the probabilities of both outcomes and their likelihoods are known, or can be predicted. Uncertainty by contrast is where likelihoods are unknown, even if knowledge know the potential outcomes. Ambiguities are where outcomes are contested, so here questions of fairness, justice, distribution – who wins, who loses, whose values count come to the fore. And finally, there’s ignorance, where we don’t know what we don’t know’.
Conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity and indeed ignorance – not risk – are by far the most common situations we encounter in our day-to-day lives as well as policy and practice. They are not amenable to simple risk management. The problem is that most approaches close down to risk (the top left-hand corner of the diagram).
This is conditioned by politics and power (what Michel Foucault called governmentality). Plans, models, insurance products, goals, targets, metrics, indicators, for example, all seek closure, pushing us dangerously into zones where knowledge/outcomes are assumed to be known, or at least thought to be able to be estimated, predicted or calculated.
The chapters of the 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.
Radical rethinking: lessons from the margins
Across the chapters we meet many different people: from electricity supply engineers in California to pastoralists in Kenya, Ethiopia and China; from epidemiological and climate modellers in the UK to small farmers and fishers in Zimbabwe and India. And many more. Of course, the conditions through which uncertainties arise are deeply affected by contrasting histories, experiences of colonialism, policy cultures and so on.
But despite these different contexts, similar challenges are faced. In each case, we observe a contrast between closing down to risk (often through calculative modelling approaches) and opening up to uncertainty (through flexible learning and adaption in the everyday). It’s a universal challenge, even if there are particular experiences and solutions.
The book therefore argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and 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.
The following blogs give a taste of the different chapters, but you will have to read the book to get the full picture, as well as find all the references and footnotes! You can buy the book (or download it for free) through this link: Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (politybooks.com). Use 20% off discount code SCO20 to buy. And if you are in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland or France, do come along to the first launches in October, see: https://pastres.org/book-navigating-uncertainty/ (or join online at the IDS event on October 3, sign up here: Navigating uncertainty: Radical rethinking for a turbulent World – Institute of Development Studies (ids.ac.uk)).