Two open access articles have just come out that take the theme of ‘uncertainty’ and explore how it encourages some fundamental rethinking. First, ‘development’ as conventionally understood and, second, ‘critical agrarian studies’. They are published as part of two series, one in the Development Insights series of articles in World Development and the other the Key Concepts series in the Journal of Peasant Studies. They’re short essays with some Zimbabwe focused case material, but hopefully of wider interest.
Both draw on my book, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World published by Polity in 2024. But they take the arguments further. Let me highlight some of the themes.
Why embracing uncertainty means rethinking development
Responding to our current age of uncertainty, the World Development essay asks whether ‘development’ (broadly understood) should be seen as a project of management and control, drawing on formal expertise and creating order through top-down intervention, or one of flexible, responsive, adaptive caring.
“A rethinking of development is necessary because the top-down, controlling version of development has not improved our capacities to address the major challenges of our time, including climate change. One consequence of the failures of liberal development has been that “populist – often authoritarian – voices take hold, offering to ‘take back control’ in the name of ‘the people.’ Presenting misinformation, sometimes conspiracy theories, to justify their positions, authoritarian politics can be imposed in the absence of an effective alternative from the liberal state-market-society consensus.”
The essay in turn asks, what should the response be given the failure of conventional liberal notions of development and the ascendancy of populist and authoritarian narratives? How can the political terrain be redefined? I argue that:
“The default is often to argue for the reconstruction of liberal democratic values and strong state-based, expert-led institutions with greater electoral appeal. A more effective, efficient liberal state, supported by markets and with strong evidence-based expertise, is supposed to come to the rescue. But we have to acknowledge that such approaches to statecraft and knowledge-making have failed, and in the face of accelerating, intersecting uncertainties – what some parse as ‘the polycrisis’ – are likely to fail more frequently….. A new approach is needed that is more humble and ultimately more effective, where diverse knowledges come into conversation and can deliberate on critical but uncertain questions such as climate change, co-constructing responses that are rooted, democratic and accountable…. Instead of returning to an idealised past, therefore, a new democratic politics is needed that engages with complexity and uncertainty… This requires us to go beyond narrow expert-led elite institutions that once defined liberal development towards new approaches, where adaptive improvisation and deliberation around uncertain futures is central.”
I conclude:
“If uncertainty is genuinely embraced – and alongside this, a more fundamental commitment to a radical, hopeful ethic of care – then development (and its politics) will look very different. And so will the state and expert and legal institutions that support democratic processes. Rather than relying on technical interventions, financial fixes or other top-down, authoritarian responses, a reimagined form of collective, deliberative democracy can emerge as an alternative, one that truly embraces complexity and uncertainty.”
Not easy for sure, but our current politics, bureaucracies and policymaking processes are not fit-for-purpose. A return to a technocratic, liberal ideal will not address the challenges. So new ways of thinking and acting politically are needed. Embracing uncertainty really does mean reinventing what we mean by ‘development’.
Uncertainty: a key concept for critical agrarian studies
Uncertainties – where we don’t know the likelihoods of future outcomes – suggest a politics of knowledge, where we interrogate how we know what we know, and what possible futures might look like. This is essential in any field of study, but in the Journal of Peasant Studies‘ Key Concepts piece, I ask how this should encourage an extension of debates within the field of critical agrarian studies.
“A politics of knowledge and so an appreciation of uncertainty have not been prominent in agrarian studies. This reflects the intellectual tradition of the field, rooted in materialist analyses of change based on frequently deterministic theories that suggest predictable outcomes. Simplistic interpretations of Marxist thinking for example often highlighted certain ‘paths’ of agrarian change that would emerge from particular conditions. Equally, patterns of accumulation and social differentiation would result in predictable class formations resulting in defined forms of struggle, with the ‘peasantry’, for example, doomed to extinction when confronted by relentless capitalist forces. Yet, as most empirical analyses quickly show, actual dynamics are more complex and outcomes less clear. There is often a mismatch between the grand theory of predictable process and the diversity of contingent, conjunctural outcomes seen on the ground.”
As discussed through several cases – contract farming in Zimbabwe and pastoralism in northern Kenya – an appreciation of knowledge uncertainties suggests a methodological stance that shifts between understanding ‘the multiple determinations’ of diverse, variable and uncertain livelihood contexts with an assessment of ‘the concrete’, the structural factures that condition local possibilities. This is what Karl Marx recommended in his treatise on method in political economy, the Grundrisse. Stuart Hall, the great cultural theory scholar argued strongly against a vulgar, deterministic Marxism too:
“The paradigm of perfectly closed, perfectly predictable, systems of thought is religion or astrology, not science…. No social practice or set of relations floats free of the determinate effects of the concrete relations in which they are located. However, ‘determination in the last instance’ has long been the repository of the lost dream or illusion of theoretical certainty. And this has been bought at considerable cost, since certainty stimulates orthodoxy, the frozen rituals and intonation of already witnessed truth…”
These lessons are crucial for critical agrarian studies, which must always connect detailed engagement with complex livelihoods with analysis of the structural features of class, intersecting with age, gender, ethnicity, and configured through diverse processes of accumulation in capitalism, much as I argued in my ‘small book’ on livelihoods from over a decade ago. I conclude the essay with a plea for methodological recasting in ways that take uncertainties seriously:
“As agrarian contexts change, so do the agrarian questions that need to be asked. In a turbulent world where non-linear connections and diverse relations matter, these are increasingly around responses to variable and uncertain conditions, where both contested knowledge politics and variegated responses to uncertain settings are central. Such perspectives centred on uncertainty… must be the cornerstone of a revitalised method for agrarian political economy; one that is centred on knowledge, complex relations and so multiple uncertainties. Embracing uncertainty and its politics, both through the framing of knowledges and the consequences for diverse people and places, must…inform critical agrarian studies more deeply in the future.”
Embracing uncertainty therefore requires fundamental shifts in methodological stance for research and analysis, and in turn generates new political imperatives as we encounter the challenges of climate change in an increasingly turbulent world.
Download the articles (and the uncertainty book):
World Development: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X25003420
Journal of Peasant Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2025.2591725