Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene

Chester, Mikhail; Miller, Thaddeus R.; Muñoz‐Erickson, Tischa A.

doi:10.1525/elementa.2020.078

Cited by 12 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Infrastructure are a product of the historical context inside which they were structured, and the operating goals rooted in that context. This includes the historical normalized goals, cultures, and preferences (Joerges 1988, Sovacool et al 2018, as well as perception of the environment (Chester et al 2020a. When an infrastructure system was created (such as a transportation or water agency) these goals and perceptions became institutionalized and the technologies to support the service became the backbones of system functionality.…”

Section: Only Variety Can Absorb Varietymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consider that infrastructure management (as management and operations) must interact not only with the physical infrastructure but also governance systems and environments consisting of natural systems and non-governmental human systems (figure 2). Management is not designed to make sense of Environment and Infrastructure complexity (Chester et al 2020a); if it did it would be overwhelmed (Beer 1985). As such, it relies on its operational capabilities, which have been explicitly designed to interact with these systems.…”

Section: Infrastructure Sensemaking Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But when governance as knowledge processes is introduced into the infrastructure as a system then we contend that autopoiesis becomes possible. In the Anthropocene, infrastructure must be primarily thought of as knowledge enterprises, and secondarily amalgamations of hardware (Chester et al 2020a). Sensemaking is an organizational process that underlies infrastructure cognition, the ability to acquire knowledge about changing conditions, what your systems are and can do, and how to pivot in response to change (Miller and Muñoz-Erickson 2018).…”

Section: Infrastructure Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is because to avoid chaos organizational sub-systems must accelerate interactions and restructuring (akin to near-decomposability, discussed later). Infrastructure systems appear to exhibit structures and interactions that assume long-term stability and are poorly suited for increasing complexity (Chester et al 2020a). The threat of and flirtation with chaos produces self-organizing criticality (Bak 1996), organizations that are able to reflect on how change is occurring and what they need to do to remain viable.…”

Section: Infrastructure Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Adaptation appears to be heavily rooted in climate preparedness efforts, and for infrastructure conventional riskbased strategies including rebound and robustness are still emphasized (Bassett andFogelman 2013, Woods andHollnagel 2017) and strategies such as safe-to-fail, design-making under deep uncertainty, and socialecological-technological capacity planning are just emerging (Kim et al 2019, Helmrich and Chester 2020, McPhearson et al 2021. There appears to be a disconnect in infrastructure planning between adaptation strategies and the fundamental capabilities of infrastructure organizers (Chester et al 2020a). Adaptation is a set of actions that are predicated on the organization being able to make sense of changing environments (Miller and Muñoz-Erickson 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

Chester

Allenby

2022

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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Infrastructure systems must change to match the growing complexity of the environments they operate in. Yet the models of governance and the core technologies they rely on are structured around models of relative long-term stability that appear increasingly insufficient and even problematic. As the environments in which infrastructure function become more complex, infrastructure systems must adapt to develop a repertoire of responses sufficient to respond to the increasing variety of conditions and challenges. Whereas in the past infrastructure leadership and system design has emphasized organization strategies that primarily focus on exploitation (e.g., efficiency and production, amenable to conditions of stability), in the future they must create space for exploration, the innovation of what the organization is and does. They will need to create the abilities to maintain themselves in the face of growing complexity by creating the knowledge, processes, and technologies necessary to engage environment complexity. We refer to this capacity as infrastructure autopoiesis. In doing so infrastructure organizations should focus on four key tenets. First, a shift to sustained adaptation – perpetual change in the face of destabilizing conditions often marked by uncertainty – and away from rigid processes and technologies is necessary. Second, infrastructure organizations should pursue restructuring their bureaucracies to distribute more resources and decisionmaking capacity horizontally, across the organization’s hierarchy. Third, they should build capacity for horizon scanning, the process of systematically searching the environment for opportunities and threats. Fourth, they should emphasize loose fit design, the flexibility of assets to pivot function as the environment changes. The inability to engage with complexity can be expected to result in a decoupling between what our infrastructure systems can do and what we need them to do, and autopoietic capabilities may help close this gap by creating the conditions for a sufficient repertoire to emerge.

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Section: Only Variety Can Absorb Varietymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Infrastructure Sensemaking Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Infrastructure Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Infrastructure Autopoiesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

Chester

Allenby

2022

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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Institutional Dynamics Impact the Response of Urban Socio‐Hydrologic Systems to Supply Challenges

Wiechman,

Alonso Vicario,

Anderies

et al. 2024

Water Resources Research

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Designing urban water systems to respond to the accelerating and unpredictable changes of the Anthropocene will require changes not only to built infrastructure and operating rules, but also to the governance arrangements responsible for investing in them. Yet, inclusion of this political‐economic feedback in dynamic models of infrastructure systems and socio‐hydrology has lagged behind operational feedback concerns. We address this gap through a dynamical systems application of the Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework, which provides the conceptual building blocks for analyzing social‐ecological systems through various classes of infrastructure and the flows of material and information among them. In the model, political‐economic feedback involves three decisions—infrastructure investment, rate‐setting, and short‐term demand curtailment—and each decision is constrained by institutional friction, the aggregation of decision and transaction costs associated with taking action. We apply the model to three cities in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area to compare how institutional friction interacts with a city's water resource portfolio and financial position to determine its sensitivity, or the degree to which its performance (e.g., providing sufficient supply to meet demand) changes given reductions in Colorado River water availability. We find that the slowing effect of institutional friction on investment and rate‐setting decisions can increase the sensitivity of a city's supply, but it can also promote objectives that compete with over‐response (e.g., rate burden). The effect is dependent on the initial operating capacity of the CIS and flexibility within the institutions, highlighting the need to consider political‐economic and operational feedback together when evaluating infrastructure systems.

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Sensemaking for entangled urban social, ecological, and technological systems in the Anthropocene

et al. 2023

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Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS.

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Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene

Cited by 12 publications

References 44 publications

Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

Institutional Dynamics Impact the Response of Urban Socio‐Hydrologic Systems to Supply Challenges

Sensemaking for entangled urban social, ecological, and technological systems in the Anthropocene

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