Navigating uncertainty is crucial in today's world, where challenges like climate change, financial instability, and pandemics abound. This book examines how to live with uncertainty beyond merely managing risk, contrasting rigid approaches with more flexible, responsive strategies. Drawing on global experiences, it discusses various sectors, including finance and technology, advocating for a shift from modernist views to innovative practices inspired by historical and cultural insights. A radical rethinking of policies and institutions is necessary to thrive amidst unpredictability.
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.
The Tragedy of Social Democracy is about the rise, fall and future of social democracy as a politico-ideological force, a force that was believed would democratically transform capitalism into socialism. Instead of democratizing capitalism, social democracy was itself liberalized by capitalism. Why has social democracy gravitated into the magnetic field of neoliberalism? Who can be blamed for such a tragedy? Can social democracy reverse its political and ideological eclipse?Numerous books and articles have been written on social democracy, and its political viability has continued to be the subject of debate among left-wing intellectuals. In The Tragedy of Social Democracy, Srivan Karimi sheds light on the innate structural vulnerability of social democracy to progressive degeneration. Karimi theorizes the transformation of social democracy and establishes a structural linkage between its rise, ascendancy and subsequent decline since the theoretical raid of neoliberalism on Keynesianism in the 1980s and highlights certain public policy measures that are indispensable to the social democratic renewal that is being debated among socialists and social democrats.
Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development looks at the role of social institutions and the politics of policy, as well as issues of identity, gender and generation. The relationships between sustainability and livelihoods are examined, and livelihoods analysis situated within a wider political economy of environmental and agrarian change.
