THE ASEC SERVICES & VULNERABILITY PROJECT

We are pleased to present our project hereunder from its origin and conception until the final results as follows:

The ASEC Services & Vulnerability Project Described
The Events of September 11^, 2001 – The Linkage between Services & Vulnerability
Project Origins and Conception
Project Scope & Methodology
Project Findings & Results
And coming soon....Vulnerability – A Survey of Intellectual Capital 

The ASEC Services & Vulnerability Project Described

The ASEC Services and Vulnerability Project focuses on the concept of vulnerability, as distinct from related notions of risk, hazard and uncertainty, as a controlling concept for understanding our 21^st century world. At the core of the Applied Services Economic Centre lies a recognition of the need for fundamental rethinking of the role and function of services within modern economies and societies. We understand vulnerability to refer to inherent or circumstantial conditions which may result in an event/outcome occurring with causes or consequences unknown. In terms of Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous formulation, vulnerabilities are the missing category - the “unknown knowns” - where we know more or less what the problems and issues are but lack the requisite knowledge about their specific incidence and consequences to take appropriate actions.  

The September 11^th terrorist attacks in the US and their aftermath, along with a continuing series of natural catastrophes and emerging global threats, have created a much heightened awareness and sensitivity to the concept of vulnerability. In fact, these incidents strongly suggest how vulnerability might actually provide an alternative framework, distinct from the conventional notions of uncertainty, risk and hazard, for understanding many of the problems of our 21^st century world. The essential linkage between services and vulnerability became dramatically evident in the way numerous services sectors, not least of all the insurance sector, were affected by September 11^th.

 Since 2003, ASEC has been involved primarily in efforts to explore and understand this underlying concept of vulnerability as an essential feature of modern, global, services-based economies/societies and to proceed towards the development of a metrics, diagnostics and coping strategies for dealing with multiple and different types of vulnerabilities affecting the “global service economy”. Along with a number of other individuals and organizations, ASEC is making determined efforts to better understand the concept of vulnerability and to situate it in relation to often overlapping notions of uncertainty, risk and hazard, as well as to undertake related and studies on specific vulnerabilities affecting our 21^st century world.


The Events of September 11, 2001 -- the Linkage between Services & Vulnerability

Global cities in our 21^st century world serve as platforms for the infrastructures, networks and services which make up modern service economies/societies. The tragic events of September 11^th, 2001 demonstrate clearly how services and vulnerability were so closely interlinked in that particular event. 

*           Four separate regularly scheduled airline flights, hijacked in coordinated fashion after takeoff from different airports and undetected by air traffic control services until too late, were deliberately utilized to bring about significant mass destruction and loss of life in New York and Washington;

*           Local emergency response services – fire, police, medical – were called upon immediately to cope with the emergency and rescue effort and to deal with the mass disruption of urban infrastructure and services brought about especially by the World Trade Center attacks and many of these public services themselves became caught up in the disaster;

*           On a national security basis, the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon put US military forces immediately on full alert worldwide, land and other borders were temporarily closed, critical infrastructures like nuclear plants and transportation facilities were placed on heightened status, and the full range of governmental security, intelligence and diplomatic services were engaged;

*           Nationally and internationally, public communication systems and services of every media type – from CNN and national broadcasters around the world to increased traffic over global telecom networks to heavy usage and reliance on the Internet – were utilized to disseminated information and opinion about the unfolding events as people all over the world followed unfolding events;

*           Transportation systems and services – not only all air traffic which was totally grounded -- but also road and rail services as well within North America were seriously disrupted, with US borders with Canada and Mexico closed or crossings severely restricted both for individuals and commerce and while travel movement around the world was curtailed in their aftermath with global air travel severely affected for several days;

*           Financial systems and services, not only in the US but worldwide, shuddered but survived the initial disruptions: major financial services companies with WTC facilities and personnel suffered direct and devastating losses, US and other stock markets worldwide closed immediately and remained closed for up to four trading days, the banking system braced for a potential liquidity crisis which thankfully did not eventuate, business interruption and disaster recovery services were quickly put into play as business and governments operations got up and running again, while insurance firms began to face the prospect of substantial claims for life, property and business interruption losses as a result of attacks;

*           Integrated manufacturing systems, such as the crucial cross-border automotive  supply, assembly and distribution chain networks in North America, were seriously disrupted over the short-term, with production lines and plants sometimes brought to a halt over the next two weeks or so; individual automobile manufacturers and suppliers were forced to layoff some workers and to reconfigure their operations; as well, retail sales within much of the North American economy suffered an immediate drop and continuing weakness as America and the world sought to respond to the events of September 11^th. 

Specific services sectors, as well as the modern “global service economy” itself, were then directly impacted by the terrorist attacks, but also were very much a part of the way individuals, cities, national governments, economies and societies responded to those attacks. In the view of many, the September 11^th attacks ushered in our 21^st Century world where services and vulnerability are closely linked.

Foundation Paper # 1


Project Origins & Conception

Our 21^st Century world, and the lives we  all live each day, are a busy mix of continuing tasks and routines, synchronized to the many ‘limited certainties’ of modern life, and now and then punctuated by a few ‘deep uncertainties. For the most part, the vulnerabilities of modern life lie not in those depths of ‘deep uncertainty’ where there is little or no way of predicting what unknown events or outcomes might occur, whether it be the chance of an asteroid hitting the earth, a major change in the world’s climate, or the aftermath of a nuclear war – this is the realm of  the “unknown unknowns”. For most individuals in developed countries at least, modern life is lived predominantly in the realm of the “known knowns” – those many areas of continuing routine and ‘limited certainties’ which we come to expect and rely on implicitly, until an extreme event occurs which momentarily shakes our complacency and confidence.
 

Risk and hazard is how we have come to characterize these latter incidences, part and parcel of daily life and work in the kind of “global risk society” that we now live in. Risk is widely understood as the probability that an event or outcome will occur with specified causes/consequences, while hazard presumes knowledge of risk and may best be conceived as deliberate or unintended action in the face of risk with the expectation that some particular event/outcome can occur, including acceptance of its probability and its likely consequences. Both may (or not) lead individuals to adopt available risk management  or hazard avoidance strategies to cope with their individual exposure to risk or hazard, i.e. the “known unknowns” where a range of individual action based on knowledge is possible. But there remains still another realm as well - the “unknown knowns” of vulnerability - where we know that conditions may well exist which could lead to extreme events or adverse outcomes affecting large numbers of people and where collective action may be warranted to cope with causes or consequences of that vulnerability. Vulnerability analysis and assessment, we argue, differs substantially and fundamentally from traditional notions of uncertainty, risk or hazard and offers a unique perspective and understanding of our 21st Century world.


The quintessential problematic of our 21^st century world, we would argue, is vulnerability; it has become the crucial systemic feature of our 21^st Century world. How can the stunning events of September 11^th in the United States, treated in terms of a deliberate attack not only on life and property but also on the infrastructure, networks and services of a modern economy and society, be understood and explained? How can one make sense of the science, scope and complexities of climate change or the Asian tsunami, let alone prescribe how the relevant factors might be modeled and moderated? Why and how is it that the devaluation of a minor currency, the demise of a company, or modest movements in the supply/price of oil can trigger major changes in global markets and economies? How can major technological systems like power grids or the internet suddenly become subject to catastrophic accidents or system failures? In the case of SARS or avian flu, how can the instance of a small cluster of disease in one part of the world create the potential for the spread of epidemic disease worldwide? It is to an understanding of the essential concept of vulnerability, on which all of these questions turn and towards which the Services and Vulnerability Project is directed.

We conceptualize specific instances of vulnerability as arising within a number of different contexts - technological, environmental, economic/financial, and organizational - where individual cases studies can be investigated and cross-cutting issues can be examined. Vulnerabilities of various and different sorts can then be understood in terms of the inherent or circumstantial conditions which allowed the terrorist attacks of September 11^th  - or any of a number of other possible vulnerability event/outcomes - to actually occur and to have the causes/consequences that they did. They can be inherent or circumstantial in that they are grounded in or contingent on both the common regularities and sometimes in the extreme events which are part of modern global economies and societies. Ex post facto, the event/outcome itself and its causes/consequences can be made subject to analysis in terms of a set of criteria - source and agency; scale, scope and intensity; mode of explanation; degree of interrelatedness; criticality; among other characteristics - and, on this basis, it is possible to develop a comparative “metrics of vulnerability’. The aim of the project, then, is to explore the concept of vulnerability in both its specific and general contexts and to evolve a methodology for analyzing and assessing vulnerability.

Such a “metrics of vulnerability” can be utilized to generate the “lessons learned” from any particular vulnerability incident and provide the underlying methodology by which we can compare among different vulnerability cases. In the future as well, it may be possible to move towards an ex ante ‘diagnostics of vulnerability” for assessing potential vulnerability incidents which may (or not) occur and critically evaluating possible “coping strategies” for dealing with identified vulnerabilities. Taken even a step further, a “logarithmics of vulnerability” might eventually be determined which could, in some though not all cases, allow individuals or governments to constantly assess the range of vulnerabilities they face and take programmed action which might reduce or eliminate them. This is the essential logic underlying vulnerability analysis and assessment and, we argue, that such a generalized methodology can be useful in understanding and acting upon many of the problems of the 21^st Century.


Project Scope and Methodology

Vulnerability is a most difficult concept to nail down. It is a term commonly used in popular parlance and increasingly in more specialized discourses, but without any common and agreed meaning. In popular parlance, vulnerability is often presented in terms of threat, peril or weakness – the threat of a bird flu pandemic, the peril of nuclear disaster, the weaknesses of the internet or of other critical infrastructures – but the essential character of the vulnerability is usually left unexplored. In the more specialized lexicon such as insurance, as well, vulnerability equates to the notion of “collective risks” or “emerging risks” but, we will argue, needs to be given more embedded meaning than simply a composite or open-ended list of subjects and issues which might pose liability problems. Our early 21^st century world is very much a world sensitive to vulnerability even though we have failed until now to pay much attention to the essential concept.

By vulnerability, we choose to mean an inherent or circumstantial condition which may result in an event/outcome occurring with causes or consequences unspecified:

·         First, it is an underlying or circumstantial condition, an “unknown known” if you wish, which arises out of some underlying structural condition or a confluence of forces about which we have considerable knowledge, though not necessarily the specific and relevant knowledge upon which to take action. The essential vulnerability might stem from several different sources and agencies: a knowledge gap, a design flaw, a coordination weakness, a deliberate attack, etc. Alternatively, the vulnerability may result from a confluence of forces: a convergence of different forces coming together at one time/place, a mutation which changes one organism into another, a deliberately created circumstance, or just sheer coincidence, etc. Vulnerability is not primarily about absence of knowledge nor about probability; rather, it is about the structures and circumstances to which imperfect knowledge and probability apply.

·         Second, the causes and consequences of vulnerability are sometimes unknowable and always difficult to measure. Different modes of explanation might be applicable to an understanding of any particular vulnerability: one single cause, and multi-causal analysis, mere correlation of factors, evolutionary or chaotic explanations, etc Likewise, the consequences of any particular vulnerability can be gauged in terms of different measures: its magnitude or scale, its scope of effects, its intensity, or other possible measures.

·         And finally, there is the matter of occurrence of a particular vulnerability event/outcome and at least two aspects are important to analyze. One aspect is identifying the criticality which triggers or exposes the vulnerability as this is crucial to understanding and acting on it. Another important aspect is the interrelatedness of the vulnerability to other vulnerabilities, risks and hazards which might likewise be affected. Only following from a clearer understanding of the concept of vulnerability is it then possible to proceed to consider diagnostics, measurement and coping strategies for dealing with vulnerability. 

Let us start by explaining and extrapolating from our matrix presented earlier as to what are the particular characteristics of a concept of vulnerability. Based upon both common and more specialized usages of the term, two different meanings of the term vulnerability are now widespread in the literature and need to be distinguished one from the other. What we will refer to as Type I Vulnerability (V_I) bears on the key question of Vulnerability From What, i.e how can we analyze where any vulnerability comes from and  use information and knowledge to diagnose, measure and design coping strategies to deal with that vulnerability. In addition, there is another Type II Vulnerability (V_II) which bears more on the question of Vulnerability For Whom, i.e. how different individuals, groups or populations tend to be affected by any particular vulnerability. This line of analysis is certainly important and is particularly prominent in the geographical, sociological and economic literatures of vulnerability, but is of less interest to Services and Vulnerability Project. Both Type I and Type II Vulnerability are integral and legitimate components of any comprehensive concept of vulnerability and need to be factored into any overall understanding. Therefore, Type I Vulnerability is the particular interest and focus of our Geneva Association Project on Services and Vulnerability.

Essentially, vulnerability (V) is a function of the degree and quality of knowledge that we have about a particular event/outcome (Kn), the choice and range of actions which might be taken to cope with that issue (Ac), as well as the specifics of time and place related to any incidence (T/P) where time and place may also be dependent on each other. Thus, in the abstract, vulnerability can be presented as

                                              V_{TYPE I}  =  f(Kn_x Ac_x T/P_x )

These are the essential elements of our generalized model of vulnerability and they differ markedly from, but do not necessarily contradict, more common models used specifically in relation to technological, environmental or financial vulnerability.

Three broad conditions apply to our model of vulnerability. Vulnerability must be understood very much as a complex and reflexive concept, not necessarily subject to straightforward causal explanation and constantly being acted upon by external factors while at the same time acting upon itself. Complexity theory would suggest that any understanding of Type I Vulnerability must look to evolutionary processes and feedback mechanisms - not mere causality or correlation - to analyze how vulnerability plays out in particular instances. Very seldom is it that simple linear models or straightforward causal explanation can yield a satisfactory understanding of vulnerabilities in our 21^st century world. Likewise, reflexity between knowledge and action must also continually be acknowledged in dealing with Type I Vulnerability. “Windows of vulnerability” may open and close as actions, circumstances and conditions change in time and place. And thirdly, vulnerability needs also to be assessed in terms of proportionality: not every minor threat or danger is ultimately important, only those instances where major consequences and costs are involved. And vulnerability analysis needs to be expressly comparative, allowing different cases of vulnerability to be compared with each other and lessons drawn therefrom.

Project Findings and Results


Findings and results from the ASEC Services and Vulnerability Project are now being disseminated on an ongoing basis through

1)       a series of Foundation Papers exploring dimensions of the concept of vulnerability,

2)       commissioned Themes and Issues Papers dealing with broad areas of vulnerability or cross-cutting issues,

3)       contributed Case Studies and Notes, dealing with specific case studies and comments on aspects of the project,

4)    Powerpoint Presentations on the concept of vulnerability and its application

Among our accomplishments to date:

• A provisional methodology for analyzing and assessing vulnerability has now been developed and ASEC is beginning to apply that methodology to different 21^st century events and issues. Foundation Paper #1, Foundation Paper #2 (more)

• Initial research studies are being completed on four distinct clusters of vulnerabilities; technological, environmental, economic/financial and institutional/organizational. (more)

• Soon, ASEC will be posting a comprehensive examination of current understandings of the concept of vulnerability - a Survey of Intellectual Capital - including an inventory of individuals and organizations presently working within the vulnerability paradigm. (more)

• As new instances and examples of vulnerabilities seem constantly to arise and as new developments occur in how vulnerability analysis and assessment can be applied, brief treatments will be posted on our Notes and Case Studies facility. (more)

Vulnerability – A Survey of Intellectual Capital

We welcome your comments and suggestions regarding the ASEC Services and Vulnerability Project. In particular, we solicit and encourage any contributions you might wish to make for the Notes and Case Studies section of our project. An overall monograph summarizing and synthesizing the findings and results of the project, and tentatively entitled Ensuring Against Risk and Hazard: Coping With Vulnerability in a 21^st Century World, is expected to be published in 2009.