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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.
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