The Politics of Uncertainty

Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book's chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion. The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend deeply on political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new - more collective, mutualistic and convivial - politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle. Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.

Ian Scoones is a professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre. Andy Stirling is a professor at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex and is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre.

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface List of abbreviations Chapter 1: Uncertainty and the Politics of Transformation (Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling) Chapter 2: The Assault of Financial Futures on the Rest of Time (Timo Walter and Leon Wansleben) Chapter 3: Sharing Risks or Proliferating Uncertainties? Insurance, Disaster and Development (Leigh Johnson) Chapter 4: The Unravelling of Technocratic Orthodoxy? Contemporary Knowledge Politics in Technology Regulation (Patrick van Zwanenberg) Chapter 5: Control, Manage or Cope? A Politics for Risks, Uncertainties and Unknown-Unknowns (Emery Roe) Chapter 6: Expanding Cities: Living, Planning and Governing Uncertainty (Matthew Cook, Federico Cugurullo, James Evans, Sobia Ahmad Kaker and Saska Petrova) Chapter 7: Uncertainty in Modelling Climate Change: The Possibilities of Co-production Through Knowledge Pluralism (Lyla Mehta and Shilpi Srivastava) Chapter 8: Disease Outbreaks: Navigating Uncertainties in Preparedness and Response (Hayley MacGregor, Santiago Ripoll and Melissa Leach) Chapter 9: Disasters, Humanitarianism and Emergencies: A Politics of Uncertainty (Mark Pelling, Detlef Mueller-Mahn and John McCloskey) Chapter 10: Intertwining the Politics of Uncertainty, Mobility and Immobility (Dorte Thorsen) Chapter 11: Disputing Security and Risk: The Convoluted Politics of Uncertainty (Helena Farrand Carrapico, Narzanin Massoumi, William McGowan and Gabe Mythen) Chapter 12: Unsettling the Apocalypse: Uncertainty in Spirituality and Religion (Nathan Oxley) Index