7 February 2024. Change | Rewilding
Understanding patterns of change // The British fear of the wild boar [#540]
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1: Understanding patterns of change
I was helping to a facilitate a workshop looking at patterns of change in London on Monday—it wasn’t a client event, so I’m able to discuss it here. This is a version of the note that I wrote for participants in the workshop beforehand. I’ll summarise the findings in due course.
During 2023, I worked quite a lot with with Graham Molitor’s scanning framework. Molitor and the framework. “Molitor’s Model of Change” is credited by Jim Dator and others as the origin of the idea of “emerging issues”.
The framework was specifically developed to deal with scanning for policy change, and the detail (22 possible steps across the full S-curve, only some of which happen as a policy advances towards the mainstream) is probably too detailed for its own good.
However, the overarching framework has a lot to offer. Molitor suggests that the first quartile of the S-curve corresponds to a “framing” stage, the second quartile corresponds to an “advancing stage”, and the third and fourth quartiles correspond to a “resolving stage”.
It’s probably worth saying that although the idea of the S-curve is often associated with “growth”, especially when it is used to project market innovation and diffusion, here it is more similar to the idea on the left hand of the Three Horizons model, about “dominance of pattern”.
(Graham Molitor’s S-curve, slightly adapted by Andrew Curry)
Molitor’s language conveys the underlying idea:
“Framing the Issues. Intellectual development of ideas gives rise to innovations that cause events from which issues emerge.
“Advancing Issue Consideration. Institutions provide a framework for publicizing and promoting issues, thereby shaping public opinion.
“Resolving Issues. An array of informal and formal means to contend with or resolve issues, and to accommodate change.”
Having worked with this three part framework with clients, and in futures learning and development sessions, it is possible to develop this. Rather than just describing change, it might help to enable it. As a framework it connects to systems models such as Three Horizons, where the stages follow the evolution of the H3 curve from “pockets of the future in the present”, through to the new dominant future system in the Third Horizon.
You can see the roles of ‘visionaries’, ‘entrepreneurs’, and ‘maintainers’ at the different stages, although the Resolving process perhaps requires a richer repertoire on the part of the ‘maintainers’ than the usual 3H narrative suggests.
It also connects to models of change such as Battilana and Kimsey’s, which sees social change as resulting from the interplay between agitators, innovators, and orchestrators, corresponding respectively to Framing, Advancing, and Resolving.
In using this model to look at policy change, it becomes clear that there are different types of behaviour, and different types of actors, involved at each stage.
Framing can be thought of as a ‘pre-Cambrian’ stage of policy development, when there are multiple competing ideas and multiple versions of them. I use the idea of Universal Basic Income, advocated in multiple different versions for multiple different reasons by actors who have little in common with each other, and piloted in multiple ways that make it hard to compare outcomes.
By the time we get to Advancing, thinking has coalesced around versions of the same idea, although the differences can be quite wide. But there is a core idea that different actors recognise. The Advancing stage actors also tend to be promoters: they are outside of the mainstream, but they know how to speak mainstream language to actors in the Resolving stage.
When I discuss this, I use the idea of Universal Basic Service, where different groups involved in developing the thinking recognise the discourse of the others (I have discussed this here on Just Two Things before), and seek to build on it rather than challenge it.
In Resolving we are, effectively, talking to progressive elements of the mainstream. The range of methods here is quite wide: not everything has to become an Act of Parliament. Resolving can include regulation, self-regulation, agreed codes of conduct, accepted procurement rules, agreed industry sector rules, and so on.
Social shaping of technology
There is also a similar idea in the social shaping of technology literature. In Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs (1997), Wiebe Bijker writes about three different “configurations” of technological frames.
“In the first, no clearly dominant technological frame guides the interactions; in the second, one technological frame is dominant; and in the third, two or more technological frames are important for understanding interactions involving the artifact under study. Each of these configurations is characterized by different processes of technical change.” (Emphasis in original).
The order here does not match to Molitor, but the descriptions are similar enough: ‘no dominant frame’ corresponds to Framing, ‘one technological frame’ to Resolving, and ‘two or more’ frames corresponds, if less exactly, to Advancing.
As a technology develops, it consolidates around a dominant frame (in Britain we largely use AC technology, for example), and this frame then becomes locked in as a set of technical, regulatory, and social practices. (British AC is 240 volts; the electricity grid ‘balances’; our plugs are colour coded in certain ways; electricians need to have certain qualifications; electrical systems are certified in certain ways.)
Thinking about change
I am interested in this for three main reasons, and part of the workshop was designed to explore these.
Allowing for the fact that the S-curve is stylised model of change, is it a generally applicable model? Some research, for example, suggests that while there is an S-curve underlying pattern, in practice social change occurs through a set of punctuated equilibria. Would this make a difference to how we understand it?
What happens in the transitions? Can this be thought of as a “phase change” model, in which behaviours in each area are substantively different? For example, legal cases seem to mark the point at which an issue starts to move from ‘Advancing’ to ‘Resolving’. If we are aware of this, it may improve our understamding of change, but not necessarily our ability to influence it.
If we understand the model better, does it help us to accelerate change towards preferred futures (notably lower carbon futures)? Or does change broadly take the time it takes because unlocking a dominant set of frames and replacing them with another is a fundamentally complex process?
2: The fear of the wild
The environmental newsletter Inkcap Journal has had a short publishing break, but it was back this week with an extract from Chantal Lyons’ new book, Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar. The book was published last week. From my reading of the extract, it comes with an interesting perspective: that one of the issues we’re having with re-wilding these days is that humans have a disproportionate sense of risk and danger:
Why are we so resistant to bringing back the species we know we need? I think it is because too many of us are trapped in the mindset that nothing matters more in life than eliminating all risk to it – even at the cost of happiness.
She suggests that a lot of the history of humanity has been about reducing risk by being increasingly assertive about managing the environment we live in, using technologies to help us to do this. But this comes with consequences: Britain, for example, is now “among the most nature-deprived of nations”.
(Wild boar on South Sutor is Scotland. Photo: Julian Paren via Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0)
There’s an irony to this. The British are quite generous when it comes to protecting wild animals from poaching in other places that are a long way away. They just don’t like them close to home.
(It’s) as if our minds possess a shadow-immune system, and when confronted with something unfamiliar like a wild boar, it goes into overdrive as it tries to protect us.
In theory, at least, this should just be a matter of familiarisation. As we get used to wild boars, in places such as the Forest of Dean where they were re-introduced several decades ago, we ought to become less worried about them. They should become less strange. But Lyons has talked to people for whom the wild boar became a monstrous part of their imagined world:
Rose, who invited me into her terror-soaked memories, who said she feared being eaten by them if she broke her leg and couldn’t get away, now feels … okay. ‘I’ve had so many close encounters, and I always scream at them to make them move on, and they do. So now I don’t think they would attack me,’ she says as we sit in the house that I first sat in eight years ago.
The thing is, the data should be on the side of the boar. In the three decades since they were re-introduced to Britain, there have been two incidents involving humans and wild boar. Neither was life-threatening:
the dog walker who had the pad of his fingertip bitten off in the Forest of Dean in 2018, and another dog walker in Argyll in 2022 (who clutched on to her dog’s lead, putting herself in the sow’s path and ending up with a bad bruise on her thigh). When I interviewed Dean residents in 2014, nearly all of the so-called anti-boar people said, ‘It’s only a matter of time before a child gets hurt.’
I might observe at this point that the notion that bad hypothetical things might happen to children is a strong driver of poor public policy. Yet at the same time, we do very little about the actual bad things that involve actual danger that actually happen to children, which mostly involve the dominance of the car in our transport system. (Close to 1,800 children are killed or seriously injured in road collisions each year).
I digress. In contrast, anyway, there were on average 24 incidents worldwide involving wild boar and humans between 2000 and 2012. Lyons was able to find one report in Europe of a child being injured by a wild boar, in Spain in 2022.
So some of this is about how we perceive risk. In Britain, on average, three people a year get killed by pet dogs—a figure that seems to be increasing at the moment. But we accept these risks because we have social norms that say keeping pet dogs is acceptable behaviour.
Lyons has found in her research that people are
likely to rail against a risk if they feel it has been imposed on them by individuals or groups who hold power over them. While Forestry England had nothing to do with the releases in the Forest of Dean, over and over I’ve heard the phrase, ‘We weren’t consulted’. Because Forestry England has permitted the boar to remain, the agency is seen as culpable in their existence.
She also observes that because the Forest of Dean is the only place where boar live in and around people, local people think they have in some way been singled out. Lyons’ proposal on that is to re-introduce boar in more places.
That does have consequences. There will be some agricultural and other property damage. There may be more collisions between vehicles and boars. We probably need better compensation schemes to cover some of the losses.
And the boar does have an image problem: it’s definitely wild; and it’s definitely not cute, unlike beavers, who have both been re-introduced successfully and now benefit from extensive legal protections. And although it does bring environmental benefits, they’re less obvious than woodland maintenance and dam-building.
It’s a hard sell, far harder than cuddly beavers or the demure, neither-seen-nor-heard lynx. It will require spending money, ceding space, and the mental effort of changing how we behave outdoors. We’re not used to feeling afraid of wild animals. Neither are we used to imposing limits on ourselves for the benefit of wildlife.
There’s maybe something inconsistent about being happy for other people in other countries to live in proximity with wild animals, while not being willing to do it ourselves. It says something about our sense of self. And it also comes with costs, even if those costs are less visible and more subtle:
I believe some of us embrace the wild boar because we’re aware that we need to experience fear of the wild... (W)e do need a space in our minds for the unknown – or that which can only be known through other, different beings. As Jay Griffiths argues in Why Rebel, ‘To be happy, the senses need to be stimulated and, through animals, our senses grow: we can extend ourselves out through their senses into sensory worlds of unquenchable richness.’
One of the recurring themes of this newsletter is about modernity reaching its limits, and the costs that have been imposed on us by modernity. One of the curiosities of modernity is that the only risks we seem to tolerate are the risks we impose on ourselves. But this is also a deep story, for man will have
“dominion over … all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
j2t#540
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