The Politics of Uncertainty

'The Politics of Uncertainty. Challenges of Transformation' is a multi-authors book edited by Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling, and published in 2020 by Routledge.

Synopsis
Written by several authors, the volume explores issues and challenges linked to uncertainty and its treatment in a variety of policy issues such as finance and banking, insurance, and the regulation of technology. The book also explore dimensions of uncertainty linked to climate change, disease outbreaks, critical infrastructures, migration, natural disasters, crime, security, and religion.

Main
The book takes issue against singular notions of modernity and progress as a hard- wired ‘one- track’ ‘race to the future'. For the authors, the suppression of uncertainty can lead to narrow and simplified narratives about what constitutes progress, and prematurely foreclose policy options.

Examples where sustainability is seen framed around pre-selected direction of innovation and progress, with neglect of technical and political dimensions of uncertainty, can be found in relation to:

"‘smart cities’, ‘climate- smart agriculture’, ‘clean development’, ‘geo- engineering’, ‘green growth’ or ‘zero- carbon economies’."

Moving from the classic distinctions between risk and uncertainty of Frank Knight and that between uncertainty and indeterminacy of Brian Wynne the authors explore with examples material, cultural, contextual and practical dimensions of uncertainty and how these play out in public affairs.

The volume takes issue with reductionism, defined as a tendency to reduce complex socio-political dilemmas to choices driven by straightforward metrics, suppressing uncertainty and ambiguity. It offers examples of compression of uncertainty in policy evaluations via technologies of quantification, arguing that the modern apparatus of computation does away with uncertainty and ambiguity, aiming to reduce them to risk. An example is the case of financial mathematics that colonizes the future by transforming it into an occasion for profit in the present.

One chapter specific to EU policymaking suggests a reductionist tendency in EU policy assessment, and explains it with institutional features of the EU: the single market needs a centralized, hence standardized, risk assessment approach, and the EU has a generally pro-industry (e.g. biotech) growth agenda. Another institutional concern is the fear of opening the road to endless deconstruction of planned policies and to regulations that are more expensive.

Reception
For this volume illuminates how governments and private actors (e.g. insurances) may attempt to deal with non-knowledge by formulating uncertainty as risk. This is a reference to the Knightian distinction between quantifiable risk and unquantifiable uncertainty. For by transforming the lack of knowledge in a calculable risk favours forms of decisionism and reductionism. A discussion of the book in podcast has been produced by the Institute of Development Studies. The book is cited in debates about sustainability transition and transformation.

For the book illustrates political use of uncertainty: "…the politics of the marginalised urban majority across the global south is most often framed towards confronting uncertainty (Scoones & Stirling, 2020, p. 2) or what can be understood as ‘politics of uncertainty’. The inability to embrace and foreground uncertainty [forecloses] possible futures (Scoones & Stirling, 2020, p. 2)."

The same author notes the 'closing down' operated by a political use of uncertainty in commodification, financialisation and bureaucratisation, and how this forecloses possible alternative futures:

"While forms of micro-exploitation and competing interests are continuously negotiated and managed under uncertainty, interrogating everyday experiences of uncertainty can […] thus resist the ‘closing down’ effects of commodification, financialisation and bureaucratisation (Scoones & Stirling, 2020, p. 21). Crucially, opening up to the ‘politics of uncertainty’ offers an opportunity to confront the contradictions of modernity, development and progress with a politics of hope, especially in how we understand, frame and construct possible futures (Scoones & Stirling, 2020, pp. 2, 4)."