Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to live from uncertainty?
Drawing on experiences from across the world, the chapters in this 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.
The book argues that we need to adjust our modernist, controlling view and to 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.
Author
Professor Ian Scoones, IDS Research Fellow. Ian is also co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project, PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Lessons From the Margins).
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Table of contents
- Chapter 1. Navigating Uncertainty
- Chapter 2. Finance: Real Markets as Complex Systems
- Chapter 3. Technology: What is Safe for Whom?
- Chapter 4. Critical Infrastructures: How to Keep the Lights On and the Animals Alive
- Chapter 5. Pandemics: Building Responses from Below
- Chapter 6. Disasters: Why Prediction and Planning are Not Enough
- Chapter 7. Climate Change: Multiple Knowledges, Diverse Actions
- Chapter 8. Looking Forward: From Fear to Hope, from Control to Care
Reviews
“Navigating uncertainty is indeed much more than just managing risk. This book lays out a compelling argument on how institutions can transform uncertainty from a threat into new opportunities.”
Achim Steiner, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme.
“Drawing on 40 years of experience with failures of prediction, Scoones delivers a powerful critique of modernity’s obsession with quantification and control. Uncertainty is inevitable, he argues, but robust social networks can help guard us against risks that we could not have foretold.”
Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University.
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