Seeing Like a State -- How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed ------James C Scott

 

Strong states have authoritarianism in their DNA and ruling elites -- political, administrative, technical and academic -- suffer from hubris. When this is combined with a ‘high modernistic ideology’— technical ‘experts’ know best and the masses and their experience and knowledge is largely irrelevant and obsolete -- and an incapacitated civil society, the stage is set for large grandiose schemes of socio-economic reengineering.

Such schemes often fail because they are ill conceived by ‘authoritarian high modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half baked) social theory’, formulated by experts with little knowledge of ground realities and their complexity and ruthlessly implemented by a ‘politicized authoritarian bureaucracy’. In effect ‘the progenitors of such plans regard themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really are and, at the same time, regard their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really are.”

But we have started with the conclusion and need to backpedal to get to the beginning.

Anthropologist and political scientist James Scott of Yale begins his remarkably disturbing book by establishing that as states gather the strength they need to expand their capacity for intervention in the socioeconomic entity that they govern. To create capacity, they have to make society and economy ‘legible’. They have to simplify, standardize and homogenize a complex, diverse reality to focus on the issues they want to tackle, and this necessitates a degree of ‘tunnel vision’. The author gives fascinating examples of how simplifications occur to facilitate ‘taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion’ -- the immediate requirements of a strong state seeking direct control over its people instead of indirect control via feudal intermediaries. Systems of land tenure, which are often unimaginably complex in long established agrarian societies, were simplified and standardized to enable stable and growing land revenues (the Permanent Settlement is a case in point here). People, too, had to be made legible: surnames enforced, censuses conducted, language standardized… the list goes on.

Once society and economy are legible, ‘high modernistic ideology’ provides the desire, an authoritarian state the determination and an ‘incapacitated civil society the level terrain’ on which to build newly conceived socio-economic structures. What is far too often left out of all calculations is the complex organic ground reality. And this omission usually proved fatal for the success of the grand centrally thought out plan.

Powerful examples of such disastrous social engineering  are spelled out in detail: Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Tanzanian  attempts to transform agriculture by relocating and reengineering villages, and most interestingly, the creation of ‘scientific forestry’ in  Germany.

In order to efficiently exploit forest resources for financial purposes (maximize timber yields) the German state apparently experimented with replacing organic diverse forest cover with mono cropped (most profitable tree species) strictly regimented forests that could be scientifically harvested. However, diverse forests are resilient while monocultures are vulnerable and fragile. The removal of undergrowth, dead trees and the whole ‘mess’ of an organic and diverse vegetation cover led to declining soil quality and timber yields. The environmental impact on animal and bird species and vegetation was also significant.

An interesting sidebar here -- the British colonial state used German experts to ‘manage‘ Indian forests for revenue maximization too. And in the tropics, diversity of vegetation is far more -- and more significant -- than in temperate climes. The rights of forest dwellers and other people living on the periphery in the forests and the products thereof were, of course, swept aside when scientific forestry became the norm.

Such top-down, expert driven development planning excludes local knowledge and expertise accumulated over generations. The experts are really not very knowledgeable at what they pretend they know and the end results are far from satisfactory.

This argument, when examined in the context of modern development planning is disturbing in the extreme. Economists are hailed when they shed light on how the processes of poverty work, but the irony is that the self-same economists are also charged with planning for poverty removal -- and they’ve been doing it long before they understood poverty. Of course, none of the experts have ever been poor themselves or even lived amongst them!

Administrative convenience, expert ignorance and political ambition-cum-arrogance determine the direction and details of development plans and perhaps account for their rather dismal progress in most post-colonial economies.  

The author does offer some commonsense rules for development planning:

Take small steps because consequences are not always clear

Ensure reversibility because irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences

Plan on surprises

and

Plan on human inventiveness at all levels

Do not plan for abstract citizens but real ones in a particular socio-economic -geographical context.

Develop institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse and adaptable.

I can imagine a senior administrator looking at such recommendations and setting them contemptuously aside. (He went to Harvard for a three- month course on development! Besides… Yalies …you know..)

Happy reading.