Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Author: James Scott

This important book dispenses with ideological posturing and tries to explain systematically why it is that states have so often failed in their ambitious projects to engineer society or the natural environment, leading to counterproductive if not disastrous outcomes. States want to simplify reality and fit it into their own administrative categories, inevitably discarding local knowledge that is often critical to managing the complexities of social life and the natural environment.

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