Seeing Like A State
This post aims to inspire friends and colleagues to read James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State.
The book's subtitle, "How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed," might catch your attention if you work to try to improve any small or large system.
Scott focuses on state-sponsored interventions aimed at changing agricultural practice, community organization, or both. While Scott starts with a story of scientific forestry in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of his book outlines intentions and failures in the 20th century: the influence of the architect Le Corbusier on urban planning, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, the post-colonial village program in Tanzania, and the general failure of 20th-century Western, temperate-climate agricultural practices to succeed in other parts of the world.
Scott does not oppose planning and scientific methods to improve systems, nor does he deny their success in certain applications. However, his cases and analyses point to damaging consequences of interventions that are narrowly rational and driven by people or groups with enough power to impose their idealized model on the reality lived by others. He argues for humility among people seeking to improve systems.
German Scientific Forestry
Scott describes an innovation in 18th-century Germany, the introduction of scientific forestry aimed at maximizing wood harvests. A monoculture of trees of uniform age, spaced uniformly in rows with no undergrowth, made it easy for inspectors to assess the current state of a forest plot and estimate harvest volume. This innovation destroyed the integrity of the prior complex ecosystem that promoted nutrient cycles and held pests and diseases in check; after initial success, the monoculture’s productivity could not be sustained.
"The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the danger of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new rudimentary forest was the razor-sharp interest in the production of a single commodity." (p. 21)
The forestry example reminds us to beware an unthinking focus on a single numerical goal that represents instrumental value.
Scott also points to a further risk: believing that our management models and accompanying measurements, buttressed by attractive tables and charts, capture all we need to know:
"No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification." (p. 22. emphasis in the original)
Lesson from Tanzania Village "Modernization" in the 1970s
"...like Soviet collectives, ujamaa villages [in Tanzania] were economic and ecological failures. For ideological reasons, the designers of the new society had paid virtually no attention to the local knowledge and practices of cultivators and pastoralists. They had also forgotten the most important fact about social engineering: its efficiency depends on the response and cooperation of real human subjects. If people find the new arrangement, however efficient in principle, to be hostile to their dignity, their plans, and their tastes, they can make it an inefficient arrangement ." (p. 255, emphasis in the original)
To align our work with this most important fact about social engineering, we should use human-centered design concepts and practices.
Scott’s Rules of Thumb for Designing Interventions in Human Communities
In the book's final chapter, Scott offers several design principles derived from his studies.
His advice serves people working to improve private-sector performance as well as those working to improve government services and programs.
"One might, on the basis of experience, derive a few rules of thumb that, if observed, could make development planning less prone to disaster. While my main goal is hardly a point-by-point reform of development practice, such rules would surely include something along the following lines.”
“Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: 'You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.'”
“Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences. Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required: 'The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.'”
“Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning housing, it would mean 'designing in' flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road.”
“Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design." (p. 345)