WHEN IN MANCHESTER
Why Governments Fail
Book reflection: Seeing like a State by James Scott (1998)
A book I wish I found and read sooner. I was recommended this book, Seeing like a State by James Scott, by my supervisor and suddenly all makes sense! No, not really. It’s not one of those sudden breakthrough epiphanies but it really does its job in putting some pieces of knowledge together — on why governments try so hard to bring progress but usually fail.
Criticizing the works of Le Corbusier and Lenin, the book talks about how planning more specifically has always been a monolithic and almost Orwellian concept (I mean, look at the cover). I’ll only talk about some insights from a few chapters here but I’d say the points in these chapters take up a general idea of what the book aims to deliver.
A Blank Canvas?
Governments fail because essentially they know nothing about their people. Who blames them? Unless your country is the size of Singapore, complete with their human capacity and strong benevolent state, most likely even you’d see your government as quite screwed up. Even then, being a country as advanced as Singapore has had its share of riots and chaos. Moving on.
With their lack of legibility, societies become the target of forced rationalisation of the state through standardisation, despite local practices being so diverse. Scott talks about how this is done through 1) the fixed relationship of nature and society, 2) a high-modernist ideology that prizes science and technology above all others proposed by state-capitalist relations, 3) the presence of an authoritarian state and 3) a weak civil society that is incapable to resist ‘development’.
Through means of standardisation, the illegible becomes legible and thus susceptible to manipulation — allowing for the creation of a ‘selective reality’ or a version of society the state wants to govern.
What kind of society? Who are the people that the state tries to govern?
Scott talks about the lack of dimension to the people and societies being planned by the likes of Le Corbusier. Society with no gender, no race, no opinions, no values, no history — just needs. Again, these needs are conditioned with the presence of what Foucault calls disciplinary power, such as hospitals, schools, prisons, that reconstruct the behaviour of people.
Though it is fair to say that these forced ideals of the state may not actually lead to failure. Some countries may have even succeeded as developmental state theorists argue. What Scott is trying to point out that while these ideals may work, their nature of being a monolithic conception of development hinders and even negates local wisdom is the reason why such state interventions fail.
What I guess you can relate this concept of top-down state intervention is in land reform — how many countries usually take for granted the Enlightenment movements all around the world but disregard their own cultural and indigenous heritage that have weaved the lives of their ancestors in the land they sow.
From Nature to Natural Resources
The chapter starts off by looking into early European states. I guess this is the birthplace for development ideals to come.
During that time, timber was gold. It was significant for cooking at home as it was for ship-making and building state offices. Additionally, the state believed nature was something that bought them wealth from it being a ‘natural resource’ that the government could tax and generate a steady revenue.
But this in itself does not make forests legible. The state still had a lot of things they did not know about forests, heck, they even took it for granted. Only when the state started to realise that forests were finite and that they were growing scarce, did they actually take up measures to make timber and its processing more efficient. Measures to sample forest volume was conducted, enabling a ‘reality’ of what the state wants to see in forests: a simplified plot of resources bearing a uniform value of property rights.
In doing so, the simplification of luxurious variety of customary land tenure allowed for the manipulation of revenues for the state. Well at least, it is simplified for the state who have their own surveyors marking individual land to particular property rights that allow them to see a ‘simplified version’ of land. But its simplification is lost when the value of land goes beyond the state as the perpetrators of formal land rights. Just as the simple value of customary land is lost when it goes beyond the community that inherits them.
I wouldn’t say that this is merely a matter of perspective, to which is more simple. No, but with scarcity, hence transformation of nature into natural resources, the overall goal becomes to manipulate and make profit from a single, simplified and forced framework that benefits a small group of people.
Reflections
I would say the book makes a fair argument on the deliberate simplification of society in the eyes of the state. But I would also say that it remains a very abstract concept: so how is simplification sustained? Is there a possibility that simplification might be a good thing, surely it is never black or white? Even when the state implies a simplified version of society, can varied identities still coexist?
Though overall, I think, the writing is quite straightforward, unlike many pieces with complex words. I actually did not expect the book to talk about planning, because usually state and development literature usually talk about things on a conceptual, macro level analysis of society. Which the book does also. But it also does highlight how such ideas also manifest in cities, contrary to popular planning beliefs, and interestingly that city planning also can be linked to more abstract concept of the state’s perception of natural resources.
Now let’s see how this will add to my thesis.
