Stabilization & Reconstruction – Page 11

I have long recommended that the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army offer its many publications on Amazon, and I am very glad to see that finally happening. SSI, to which I contribute when asked, is my single best source of free serious books, and a real national asset. The URL for their online version is in the comment, but I do recommend purchase as it will then reach you in book form.

This is a reader, the result of a conference held in February 2008. We are fortunate to have the published record so soon.

The most important contribution of the gathering, drawing from over 70 submitted “principles of peace,” was its final consensus on the following six:

1. Ensure rule of law
2. Seek security: civil, military, economic
3. Pursue legitimacy
4. Encourage development
5. Foster self-empowerment and self-sufficiency
6. Foster communications

Appendix II, nine individual submissions of distinct principles of peace, is alone worth the time and money for the book, and ample cause for reflection. Appendix III offering six break-out group distillations, and then Appendex IV offers the six principles above.

Appendix V offers 15 “Policies and Procedures,” and with apologies to those that hate lists, I believe I serve the group by listing them here in short form. I am impressed. This is useful good stuff.

1. Be ready for a fight after the fight
2. Enlist reconciliable groups
3. Control population
4. Advise, rather than force, when appropriate
5. Prevent disease and unrest
6. Be an honest broker
7. Punish egregious violators insofar as it promotes national healing
8. Reconstruct institutions so that abuses will not be repeated
9. Secure sacred places, relics, and cultural features
10. Empower a culturally-nuanced judiciary
11. Facilitate appropriate sustainable development
12. Facilitate coordinated efforts with lead agency (both national and international
13. Respect culture
14. Define a clear, concise national mission with associated objectives
15. Pursue bottom-up policies where applicable, thereby creating self-sufficiency through individual empowerment.

[It is natural for the reader to wonder why we don't do this at home.]

I found roughly half the pieces arresting enough to demand attention.

10 Questions Before You Go by Marc Tyrrell of Carlton University

Question 1: What is the Mission?
Question 2: What is the Ongoing Moral Justification of the Mission?
Question 3: What is the Source of Legitimacy for the Mission?
Question 4: What Social Institutions Have Failed and Why?
Question 5: What Social Institutions Does Mission Success Require and Desire?
Question 6: What Cultural Institutions Support *Required* Social Institutions?
Question 7: What Are the Basic Narratives of the Culture?
Question 8: What Are the Basics of the Culture?
Question 9: What are the Core Narratives of the Culture That Relate to the Mission?
Question 10: Not offered–the Socratic open-ended inquiry.

Dr. Dewey Browder from Austin Peay State University (host of the event)

Demilitarization
Denazification
Decentralization
Democratization

On the latter point, I was impressed by several contributors who pointed out that “democracy” for many is based on tribal and other network forms of consensus, not on majority voting (and of course we have our own tyranny of fraudulent parties disenfranchising two thirds of the public).

Dr. Albert Randall, also with the host university, got my attention on religion, after pointing out that our failure to take this into account cost us heavily in Iraq. [I was told directly by Civil Affairs officers that the first few years they were told to ignore the imams and the tribal leaders, now of course we know better.] Here are his truncated six points (the last two complete):

1. Religion adds a higher intensity…
2. Religion offers a stronger identity…
3. Religion can motivate the masses quickly and cheaply…
4. Religion offers an ideology or a platform for an ideology…
5. Religious leaders are often the last leaders left when states fail, and they offer a voice to the disempowered or oppressed.
6. Religious leaders are often the first to seek peace and reconciliation after conflict.

Other contributions earned my attention, but the last I want to mention here is the early intervention of Jordy Rocheleau, also from the host institution, “Ethical Principles for State-Building.” This one chapter of 14 pages could usefully be integrated “as is” into our concepts and doctrine. After discussion, he provided sentences, I will only list the key word here (get the PDF or buy the book):

1. Necessity
2. Human Rights
3. Peace and Security
4. National Self-Determination
5. Rule of Law
6. International Legality/Legitimacy
7. Beneficience/Non-exploitation
8. Limited Retribution
9. Restorative Justice
10.. Reconciliation

I put the book down at peace, pleased with this intellectual construct, disappointed that I missed the event itself, and most impressed with Austin Peay State University, proven to be world-class in this volume.

OUTSTANDING.

Here are some other books to complement this one (other than Irregular War, which I am not ready to list yet).
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security
Faith- Based Diplomacy Trumping Realpolitik
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (This one is free online as well but color is best bought)
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future

See the slide (image) above, it is still valid and available as a model, the 1976 paper is at my web site (last portal page, under Early Papers).

2008/08/142009/10/30

Review: Losing the Golden Hour–An Insider’s View of Iraq’s Reconstruction

5 Star, Diplomacy, Iraq, Stabilization & Reconstruction

Unusual Primary Source on Stabilization & Reconstruction, April 14, 2008

James Stephenson

I heard the author speak at the Army War College Strategy Conference organized by the Strategic Studies Institute (8-10 April 2008) and was so impressed I ordered his book on the spot. As a person, this man strikes me as supremely professional, competent, worldly, down-to-earth, and above all, without ego. This is a courageous individual that has specialized–only a handful can say this–in delivering aid into combat environments.

The book is relatively short–under 150 pages–well written and easy to read. Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes:

1) 28 years experience in stabilization & reconstruction, seven failed states behind him that he tried to help

2) Foreword of the book is by Rich Armitage, a former Navy Seal that I have found to be a speaker of truth to power (one reason why the Bush Administration hated him)

3) Pentagon (Rumsfeld) blew it Part I. They closed the Department of State and the Agency for International Development (AID) out during the critical year before and year after the elective invasion and occupation of Iraq.

4) Pentagon (Rumsfeld) blew it Part II. They created a Pentagon version of AID run by a General that had no clue about the more nuanced community based assistance program, who blew his whole wad on heavy duty infrastructure projects instead of the community water, electricity, food, and sewage treatment and health security needed.

5) Pentagon (Rumsfeld) blew it Part III. Instead of embracing skilled experts from AID and elsewhere, the Pentagon staffed their program office with ideologically-pure puppies, enfants terrible whose only qualification was a resume at the Heritage Foundation and the ability to chant the mantra, “God Blesses Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney IS God.”

MOST IMPRESSIVE to me was the author's elegant discussion of how stabilization must be secured BEFORE reconstruction can begin.

The author points out that at 18 billion and up this was the largest RECONSTRUCTION project since the Marshall Plan (explicit throughout the book is the fact that the US Army, handicapped by Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz, never, ever, achieved sztabilization.

The author is kind to Wolfowitz. In his words, Wolfowitz was a decent man who fell sway to the “swan song” of Chalabi and the other knaves representing Iran and one slice of the Iraqi exiles.

The author is also careful to point out that he saw no villany, only incompetence and hubris, during his time in Iraq. [There is a superb recent memo, look for it at Earth Intelligence Network, on the utter incompetence of Foreign Service Officers and Pentagon “temp hires” to manage any kind of program.

Early on we learn that the Pentagon's program office for Iraq is totally dysfunctional, mockingly called the “Jonestown” of Iraq (where everyone drank the poisoned kool-aid).

The author slams Paul Bremmer as a good man who paid his dues in traditional diplomacy and had absolutely no clue how to manage an occupation presence. The author is careful to note that Bremer was an enigma, personable and competent but not right for the job, and to be faulted for allowing DoD to foist off on him an army of incompetent puppies, each a minor-league ideological hack.

The author is clearly a world-class expert in identifying stabilization first, then reconstruction, and in the latter, focusing on the urgency of domestic security, border control, and accommodating neighbors.

He is devastatingly critical of Admiral Nash (a Sea Bee) focusing on big engineering projects dealing with big infrastructure reconstruction, while completely missing out–not having a clue–on the importance of the less expensive but necessarily more pervasive and localized community reconstruction–rule of law, water, electricity, food, and don on.

He points out that because of ignorance at all levels of the Pentagon “chain of command” that completely excluded State and AID during the critical pre and post “Golden” years, agricultural reconstruction was not funded at all.

He returns to the theme of hundreds of US advisors whose only qualification was ideological insanity, each capable of doing great harm as long as they were within Iraq.

I am VERY impressed by the author's recounting of the logic behind ensuring that AID personnel received hardened cement residences instead of trailers–the cement could be done faster, provided more protection, and was cheaper. The idiot general in charge of housing, on the other hand, went with trailers because he was not a combat general that understood the dangers of loose shrapnel in the night (in Viet-Nam, after each of 10 coups, I would pick shrapnel out of those wonderful French roll-down windows that could stop anything short of an RPG).

Kudos go from the author to, among others:

David Wall of International Resources Group

General Peter Chiarelli of 1st Cav gains huge face here, to the point that he could be a real star at the four-star level in the near term. This is a general that understood and demanded community-level assistance to prevent the need for deaths and bullets.

Fernando Cossich is described as heroic and clearly merits his own Wiki page at Wikipedia.

Ambassador Negroponte gets very high marks from this author, who describes Ambassador Negroponte as forceful in demanding everyone recognize that his arrival represented the END of the occupation, and the beginning of US representation to the Iraqi sovereign government. I was deeply impressed by this portion of the book.

In dealing with rumors and morale, the author found, based on his experience, that transparency and constant accountability was the best.

USAID kept 30,000 young men from insurgency by employing them via various means that did not cause them to be targets.

The military, up to and including General Abizaid, had no clue what AID did or was capable of doing. A Capt as permanent liaison to AID proved to be worth his weight in gold.

During the darkest days, the author discovered that the Pentagon has no evacuation plan, a mandated requirement.

The Pentagon was considerd so very blind, reliant on sources that told them what they wanted to hear, that the CIA Station challenged and mocked the “good news blinders”. The author elaborates that the Pentagon wanted to pretend everything was fine, and did not understand that security in a non-permissive environment was something to be managed, not pretended.

The author concludes that we missed the Golden Hour by persisting in occupation and allowing looting and then allowing contractors to spend on security that should have been the precondition for contractors entering the country at all.

The author is careful to praise the contractors. They did what they were asked to do, in a non-permissive environment that the Pentagon allowed to exist when General Shinseki, General Zinni, and so many others had warned in advance, as did Mr. White of the Department of State, of the insanity of going it at all, much less “Rumsfeld Lite.”

The author concludes that Iraq cannot remain whole. The Kurds and the Shi'ites have their act together and are already independent, while the Sunnis self-immolate in chaos aided and abetted by US incompetence.

The author himself recommends the following two books:
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)

I put this book down with a sense of reverence and admiration. I knew AID people in Southeast Asia, in Viet-Nam, in Thailand, and elsewhere, including AID people that died in the line of duty. I am now convinced we need a Vice President for Foreign Affairs with complete oversight of State, AID, a restored US Information Agency with the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the Open Source Agency as the two main divisions, and Defense as a reduced power.

Of all the books I have read on Iraq, this is the one that I take most seriously. It is a first-person account, focused on the good side of America. The author is clearly qualified to be director of AID under a sane president and a legal vice president, and I for one think he is one of the very best men in public service.

2008/06/012009/10/30

Review: Nordic Approaches to Peace Operations–a New Model In the Making

3 Star, Humanitarian Assistance, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Stabilization & Reconstruction, United Nations & NGOs

5 for Substance, Zero for Pricing, June 1, 2008

Peter Jakobsen

I am adding this book to my list of outrageously expensive books that will never become mainstream because the substance of the author has been overwhelmed by the greed of the publisher. This book cost less than a penny a page to produce and received no marketng to speak of.

As a publisher and author myself, I strongly recommend that all authors publish their word in PDF form free online, and also ensure their contract with any publisher includes a not-to-exceed price for a hard or soft cover copy for the publisher.

Amazon allows URLs in the comment section. I now search for books like this on the web rather than paying such an outrageous price. I have sent email to the author encouraging him to identify an online location for a PDF(not necessarily of the book, but of the core ideas). If I receive that, I will post the link as a comment.

I take the Nordics very seriously, both in peace operations and in peace intelligence. They taught me (in Sweden) the importance of what they call Multinational Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS). In the comment below I provide two links, one to the new book on Peace Intelligence that is being edited by Col Jan-Inge Svensson, the other to the one page portal to Open Source Intelligence which now gives way to Public Intelligence.

2008/04/272009/10/30

Review: How We Missed the Story–Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan

4 Star, Diplomacy, Information Operations, Stabilization & Reconstruction, United Nations & NGOs

Important Contribution with Some Errors and Omissions, April 27, 2008

Roy Gutman

I cannot second-guess the author's findings based on his extraordinary direct research, but I do question some of what he was told (Madeline Albright, for example, misled this author), and I also have some issues with how the book's findings over-state, under-state, and ignore other credible sources I have reviewed here at Amazon.

Up front, seven excellent insights from this book:

1. The U.S. in the 1990's had no idea that Information Operations (IO) was going to be important, and that the dissemination of deadly knowledge (e.g. from the Afghanistan wars, on how to create Improvised Explosive Devices, etcetera) was going to become a global threat. Tracking “dangerous knowledge” has now become one of my top “indicator & warning” elements. See my review of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography

2. Small wars cannot be ignored, power vacuums cannot be allowed or they will be filled negatively. Non-state actors can hijack a state and we need to notice when they do. It is at this point I begin to feel the author is over-stating Bin Laden's reach, especially when compared to criminal states around the world. See my review of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

3. Successive administrations, from Bush Senior to Clinton to Bush Jr, had no clue about the importance of the “cultural roots” that Bin Laden was spreading with his financing of madrasses across Afghanistan (it is at this point I grow concerned that the author is ignoring the Saudi government's financing of both Bin Laden and the madrasses all over the world and especially in Indonesia). I have scheduled a book on CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Beliefs, Faiths, Ideologies, and the Five Minds for 2009. This is clearly an area where the US Intelligence Community and the foreign policy/national communities know nothing.

4. If journalists are not on the scene in every clime and place, then it is easier for the US Government to ignore problems that will inevitably ignore borders and come home to America. See A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The author ignores the fact that with the exception of The Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, virtually every newspaper and journal is a paid huckster for their corporate owners.

5. IMPORTANT: Administration must not only HAVE a grand strategy, but within that strategy must craft BOTH a domestic message for the US public and an inter-agency foreign policy campaign plan for achieving OUTCOMES, not just “messages.” This was the book's strongest point.

6. American indifference reinforces instability enablers and formentors. I know for a fact that Madeline Albright repressed INR reporting on terrorism becoming a real problem. She chose to accept Iran's attack on Khobar Towers and the Al Qaeda attacks on two embassies and the USS Cole as “acceptable losses.” That alone disqualifies her from advising Hillary Clinton on anything.

7. UN and UN negotiated for the Soviet pull-out but not for a stable follow-on regime. Deja vu in Iraq. Over-all the author does an excellent job of depicting a generally blase, sometimes naive, and often inattentive US foreign policy establishment across all three administrations. See my review of Running The World: the Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power for a sense of the clowns our Presidents tend to appoint for lack of a stronger TRANSPARTISAN bench.

Without regard to how the author may have been led by those telling their story as they would have it come out, there are a number of “dots” that I found worthy of note:

+ Bin Laden is reported to have forecast Iraq's attack on Kuwait and eventually on Saudi Arabia.

+ Over-emphasis on Bin Laden's anti-Americanism and I have noted, “a hit job of Clarke and Scheuer.” It was the US keeping bases in Saudi Arabia that set Bin Laden off, together with the Saudi refusal to allow him to attack Hussein directly.

+ US reliance on Pakistan and failing to deal direct with the Afghan regimes and principal tribes was a fatal error

+ Author avoids any mention of the fact that it was the Saudi regime that funded Bin Laden and global spread of virulent Wahabbism from 1988 onwards.

+ Although Cheney appears in the Index several times, the book and the author, rather astonishingly, fail to to report:

– Cheney was given the mandate for terrorism from day one under Bush Junior, and it was Cheney who first, failed to take terrorism seriously, and then allowed it happen in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. See, among MANY other books, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition among many other works.

– Both the Clinton and Bush Junior Administrations were actively negotiating with the Taliban over oil and natural gas pipelines. See Crossing the Rubicon, The Long Emergency, and many other works along these lines.

+ Senator Jesse Helms not only destroyed the US Information Agency, the only US agency with a clue on foreign cultures and belief systems, but he also castrated the Agency for International Development (AID) at precisely the time it was most needed.

+ Karzai flagged the Taliban as a group worthy of supporting.

+ US Intelligence had astronomical sums for “getting” Bin Laden but almost nothing for fostering stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, including support to nationalists like Moussaud.

+ In 1999 Pakistan and Iran cut a deal–THAT IS THE SECOND STORY WE MISSED. [We know have a great deal of reporting in the open on Iranian funding of Pakistani nuclear program, and in my view, likelihood that the quid pro quo was an Islamic nuclear warhead for the Russian Sunburn missiles (carrier killers, 3.0 mach straight, 2.2 mach zig-zag).

+ The author is naive or poorly informed or duplicitous in his stating that Bin Laden was outraged at the illegitimate Arab rules, stating it in such as way as to question Bin Laden's sanity. Michael Scheur and I are agreed on this point: Bin Laden has had good cause to condemn US presence in the Middle East. See my review of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 as well as Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

+ He reminds us that Ambassador Bill Richardson accomplished nothing in his mission to Afghanistan.

+ He reminds us that Khalizad, the darling of Bush Juniors regime, was part of the problem within the Clinton Administration.

+ He tells a very good story over-all of how conflicted the Department of State was in on the one hand, considering the Taliban not bad over all (what does not come out is the oil and gas deals in the background) and their record on human rights, which included mass murders and atrocities against women and children.

+ The THIRD BIG STORY WE MISSED was the Arabization of the Taliban, to include their changing to the Arabic calendar, the Arabization of libraries (which is to say the burning of most books), and the destruction of Hindu and other religious antiquities, something Pakistan tried to stop. This is new to me, I have not seen reference to it before, and I consider Bin Laden's influence over the Taliban to be seriously over-stated, but I accept this as useful perspective and certainly a good example of how the US simply does not “do” cultural intelligence.

The book ends with a focused chronology (focused instead of incomplete–the author did not set out to do a global review on this missed story, one is still needed) and a generally good index.

I put this book down thinking once again how desperately we need a private sector or public ABLE DANGER able to connect all the dots across all the books. I have tried for years to get Jeff Bezos to realize he can monetize micro-text for micro-cash and also sense-making across literatures, but he is in denial on World Brain possibilities, at least for now.

This is a solid four-star book, certainly worthy of buying and reading if you are responsible for South Asia, Central Asia, terrorism, or understanding why US foreign and national security policy continue to be managed by cronies with little deep knowledge of the real world and no holistic strategic model for addressing threats, policies, and state and non-state partners in a coherent sustainable manner.

My final three links:
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Security Studies for the 21st Century
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

2008/04/122014/04/20

Review: Fixing Failed States–A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World

5 Star, Stabilization & Reconstruction

Ashraf Ghani, Claire Lockhart

5.0 out of 5.0 Stars Utterly brilliant on the half the author's understand best, April 12, 2008

This is an utterly brilliant book that has held my attention all morning. Although the authors do not integrate the thinking in the ten books below, I am totally, deeply, impressed by their intelligence, knowledge, and good intention.

They set out to develop understanding in five areas:

1. What State needs to do
2. How international community can help
3. How timelines and interdependencies should define sequencing
4. Why one size does NOT fit all
5. Why we must accept our shared responsibility and recognize the need for both proactive intervention, and coproduction (and sharing) of wealth.

I started with the endnotes and index, which is where I begin the most intelligent books in my reading program. I immediately detected the gaps that I address with the ten annotated links, but I was also immediately won over in seeing their appreciation for the report of the High Level Threat Panel of the UN, for Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew, for the balanced score card approach (some call for a triple bottom line), for Paul Collier's focus on the bottom billion, for Paul Hawkin's et al on natural capitalism.

Within the notes, I was shocked to learn that it has been reported that the United Nations deprived Afghanistan of the first two and a half years of all donor contribution, “by agreement” with US Government and World Bank. Since one of the author's has served as Finance Minister in Afghanistan, not only do I believe this–it must never happen again.

I find in this book one of the most original, refreshing, relevant, and therefore essential reviews on the matter of the State. Although the author's do not cite McIver, the original master on the origins and functions of the state, I consider them to be the new thought leaders and essential to any discussion of how to improve the inter-relationships among the eight tribes of governance: states, militaries, law enforcement authorities, academics, businesses, media, non-governmental organizations, and civil society including labor unions and religions. They are wrong-headed in thinking that “only sovereign states…will allow human progress to continue,” and that “illegitimate networks will not be conquered except through hierarchical organizations,” but in no way does this diminish the extreme importance of their deep thinking on the role of the state and the need to change both our concepts of sovereignty and our rules of the road for international organizations.

A useful early idea is that of the “double compact” between the country leadership and the international community on the one hand, and with the citizens on the other. It becomes obvious very quickly that corruption in government service is the single cancer that must be removed before states can achieve legitimacy and efficacy.

The authors have many gifted turns of phrase to include “harnessing our collective energies and readjusting to emerging patterns.”

The authors recognize early on that legitimacy comes from below, from citizens, and must be earned.

I am not going to summarize each chapter, but I want to point readers toward the Army War College Strategy Conference, just concluded, on “Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power.” I have posted both 29 pages of notes and an 8-page draft article for the Joint Forces Quarterly. Singapore got it early and is the world's first “smart nation.” They understood early on that education powers economics, economics powers security, and so on.

Today, the authors document ably, stewardship of the environment, respect for social entrepreneurship, fair trade, and innovation in applying information technology to create wealth are all coming to the fore with honest leaders.

They identify five aspects of the networked world that are of note:

1. Framework for balancing activities of diverse stakeholders
2. Rule of law at a strategic level, with freedom of action at a tactical level (not quite true in the USA where the corrupt federal Congress establishes federal CEILINGS for regulatory action).
3. Massive investment–one reads repeatedly of the glut of money available for emerging markets (and I would add, the absence of both commercial intelligence and co-investment planning with charitable foundations)
4. World is evolving according to open systems (super point, see my keytone briefing to Gnomedex 2008, “Open Everything.”
5. World is finally starting to evolve past rote memorization and toward recognizing patterns (the adaptive complex system and panarchy literature covers this well).

In the middle of the book they have six themes, each developed in a manner that makes this book quite valuable for any library, personal or organizational.

1. Conflict causes polarization of identities *and* ungovernability of aid subject to black market rules.
2. Peacemaking has been geared to compromise rather than strategic planning for a long-term outcome
3. This means that state dysfunctionality is highest immediately after the peace accord.
4. Even if civil war does not break out, cost of failed politics and poor policies is immense.
5. Lack of money is not the driver for poverty, but rather corrupt politics that enrich the few at the expense of the many.
6. Dysfunctional states spawn the rise and spread of networks of criminality and wealth confiscation instead of networks of social wealth creation and sharing.

The book concludes with “A New Agenda for State Building”

1. International compacts
2. Sovereignty strategy
3. Shared rules of the game
4. Mobilization of resources (this would be better titled harmonization of resources–we need Global Range of Gifts Tables for every country down to the village hut level, online, updated by national call centers
4. New leadership styles–this is a superb overview of what it takes to migrate from industrial era pyramidal leadership to Epoch B swarm leadership (see the image I am loading above).
5. Reflexive monitoring at every step of the implementation process
6. Double compact in practice

The final two chapters focus on national programs, and in conclusion, on “Collective Power.”

I put the book down feeling GREAT. This book is a seminal reference.

Now for ten books (and my reviews) that round out this one book:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/03/082011/10/22

Review: Panarchy–Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Democracy, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Mixed Feelings–Mix of Brilliance and Gobbly-Gook, March 8, 2008

Lance H. Gunderson

On balance, Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) Series) is the better book but this one is the thicker heavier more math-laden pretender–the problem is they have their own citation cabal, and while the bibliography is much broader and deeper than the above recommended book, there are too many gaps and an excessive reliance on obscure formulas that I have learned over time tend to be smoke for “I don't really know but if I did, this is the formula.

Also published in 2002, also with 20 contributors, this book lost me on the math. As someone who watched political science self-destruct in the 1970's when “comparative statistics” replaced field work, foreign language competency, and actual historical and cultural understanding, and a real-world intelligence professional, I'd listen to these folks, but I would never, ever let them actually manage the totality.

The book is the outcome of a three year effort, the Resilience Network as they called themselves, and there are some definite gems in this book, but it is a rough beginning. Among other things, it tries to model simplicity instead of complexity, and continue to miss the important of true cost transparency as the product and service end-user point of sale level, and real-time science that cannot be manipulated by any one country or organization (Exxon did NOT make $40 billion in profit this year–that is a fraction of the externalized costs, roughly $12 against the future for every $3 paid at the pump–that level of public intelligence in the public interest in missing from this book).

Page 7, “Observation: In every example of crisis and regional development we have studied, both the natural system and the economic components can be explained by a small set of variables and critical processes.” This rang all of my alarm bells. If I did not have total respect for what the authors and funders are trying to do, that sentence alone would have put this book firmly into my idiocy pile.

I just do not see in this book the kind of understanding of the ten high-level threats to humanity interaction with one another, such as can be seen free online or bought via Amazon, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, nor do these distinguished practitioners of their own little “club” see the strategic coherence of identifying ten core policies from Agriculture to Water that must be harmonized at every budget level, nor the irrelevance of anything we do unless we can persuade the ten demographic challengers with an EarthGame online that delivers real-time science and near-real-time cost-benefit analysis.

I find several of the authors to be a bit too cavalier in their dismissal of the contributions of economists, ecologists, and others.

Theories of change and next cycles are useful. Concepts of cascading change and collapsing panarchies are good. Log number of people in Figure 4.1 is very good.

In discussing adaptive response to change these learned scholars appear to have no clue of what is possible in delivering neighborhood level granularity of data for online social deliberation and models for gaming. There are early light references to deliberative democracy, but right now these folks have models in search of data in search of players. I did like the discussion of the larger model for levels of discourse, but WikiCalc and EarthGame are a decade ahead of this book's contents (which I hasten to add, was started in 1998 and published in 2002).

Table 11-1 on page 310 was so useful I list its row descriptors here, Factors and Adaptation and Possible Effect on Resilience (the latter not replicated here.

Factors:
Biota
Diversity-spacial
Diversity-production strategies
Energy sources
External resources
Mental models
Population structure
Savings
Scale
Technology

This is no where near the 10-12-8 model at Earth Intelligence Network, but I see real value here, and the need for a cross-fertilization. The fatal flaw in this book is that they confuse the failure of expertise with the failure of democracy–if we can achieve electoral reform and eliminate the corruption inherent in most governments, and certainly that of the US government which is broken and “running on empty” while every incumbent sells their constituents out to their party or special interests, it would be possible to connect data, change detection, alternative scenario depiction, and deliberative democracy at the zip code level.

Gilberto Gallopin, Planning for Resilience, is alone worth the price of the book, in combination with above and the closing summary, which is also a real value. My final note: too much gobbly-gook (to which I would add, “and no clue how intelligence-policy-budget connections are made and broken.

The key to eradicating the ten high level threats to humanity, among which environmental degradation is number three after poverty and infectious disease, is not better science–it is better democracy, participatory democracy, combined with moral capitalism. Below are a few titles to help make this point.

These 20 contributors are all part of a future solution, but they cannot be allowed to drive the bus.