Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

James C. Scott examines why ambitious state programs designed to reorder agriculture, cities, and rural life often fail. Drawing on cases such as scientific forestry, collective farming, and planned cities, he argues that schemes based on simplified, standardized knowledge can disregard local practices and practical knowledge. The book explores how authoritarian high-modernist planning interacts with state power and why locally adapted arrangements may prove more durable.

by James C. Scott