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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
... It endeavoured to overpower nature (including human nature) without taking cognisance of the historical, geographical and social dimensions in attaining development. It doctrinally adhered to the scientific and technical progress of Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. High modernism is, thus, a 'sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied-usually through the state in every field of human activity' (Scott, 1998). ...
... States execute the homogenization of their demography by imposing common language, time, religion, currencies and legal systems and by promoting the construction of transportation and communication systems. Scott's (1998) high modernism contextualises how the understanding of space pans out vis-à-vis the state. The tendency of centralised planning following a top-down approach is stateimposed social engineering, where a schematic structure of infrastructural development, social organization and production are carried out to create a 'successful' social order. ...
... Such an approach negates nuances such as characteristics and attributes of local identities and communities. Thus, the state simplifies rules to execute a broad social order, whereas Scott (1998) argues that such simplification can 'never generate a functioning community, city or economy'. For instance, Stalin's imposition of state simplifications forced collectivised and centralised agricultural practices, and China's 'Great Leap Forward' resulted in human-induced famine. ...
A state produces political space and uses this space as a privileged instrument to impose its rationality. A high-modernist state commences ‘prescribing’ and ‘imposing’ to establish a ‘new society’, thus adhering to a tabula rasa (blank slate) approach in policies and planning. It denounces the past as a model to ameliorate the present, disregarding local conditions and knowledge, and perpetuating visual images that promise an alchemised future. In a typical spatial understanding of the state, the standard marker of growth is perceivably developing infrastructure. The article intends to do a spatial and temporal reading of the Colombo Port City (CPC) project, deemed to perceivably transform the Sri Lankan urban economic landscape, as a case study. The article conducted an ethnographic study of the project, locating it in Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’, Scott’s High Modernism and Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle to comprehend the larger spatial politics that an infrastructure project exhibits. Considering Colombo as a case study, the article shall also examine infrastructure’s political affect and how spatial reconfigurations rearrange government institutions as the infrastructure impacts and alters the nature of power. It will critically examine the modality of the investments in infrastructure, its internal politics and its much fetishized economic feasibility.
... Moreover, they often also act as intermediaries opening and building networks with markets, corporations, and government agencies (Pratama and Brilliant 2022). In developing countries like Indonesia, agriculture field extension officers are part of the local institution (Scott 1985;Escobar 2011). ...
... Ferguson focuses on the failure of such practice in Lesotho (Ferguson 1994), meanwhile, Scott and Escobar were focusing on the power-relation dimensions of the development and forms of resistance from the farmers (Scott 1985;Escobar 2011). Marina Welker discusses smallholders' experience in participating in a training held by an NGO contracted by a mining corporation in Indonesia (Welker 2014). ...
... Scott emphasizes, "It [stories] aim to control by convincing" (1985,23). Stories are competing ideology that shapes behaviors and achieves the class purpose as well (Scott 1985). From a different perspective, Kirsch shows jokes stories as an expression of state development and the mining industry in Papua New Guinea, which is driven by state interest and capitalist morality (Kirsch 2014, 31). ...
This thesis examines smallholders' experience in agricultural extensions in the extractive region of Bengalon sub-regency, Kutai Timur Regency, Kalimantan Timur Province, Indonesia. Agricultural extension is a development intervention carried out by various actors. This research focuses on the form of expression of smallholders' experiences. Two main research questions to be answered are how smallholders experience agricultural extensions, and what are the narratives and meanings of their experience. This study is qualitative and was conducted by participant observation method from July to August 2023. Interviews were also conducted from September 2022 to August 2023. The main finding is smallholders are experiencing an ambivalent experience toward development as expressed in the agricultural extensions. The hope of progress and sustainability from development contradicts the experience of loss, pain, and uncertainty inflicted by the extractive industry. The ambiguity and the conflicting relation can not be resolved, instead navigated through everyday life relations in agricultural extensions. Smallholders' experience, thus, provides a deeper meaning and nuanced political dimension on how global “development” and the notion of “sustainability” should be defined and understood.
... Step 3: Simplification. The simplification of narrative structures into morphological analysis enhanced "readability" [80] and proposed a resident-centered micro-urban morphology. Applying Kropf's "control-use" morphological framework [57] enabled the recognition of spaces governed by residents, the identification of overlapping control and usage units, and the re-examination of the complex spatial rights and relationships embedded in everyday practices. ...
... Moreover, compared to studies of marginalized neighborhoods in Chinese and other cities, research on "the everyday" has become a central focus in Southern urban studies, which, rather than being defined by latitude, emphasizes areas marked by extreme informality [80] and distinctive social relations [8,30]. The everyday practice approach offers a vital framework for analyzing new or dissident forms of urban governance, expressed through both formal and informal actions and structures [14]. ...
While informal settlements have been extensively studied in the Global South, their counterparts in the Global North remain under-researched, despite their critical role in shaping urban morphology. This paper introduces “Resident-Centered Narrative Mapping”, a framework designed to uncover micro-morphological knowledge through the lived spatial experiences of marginalized residents. By examining the epistemological question “whose morphology?”, this study critiques conventional urban morphological methods, which often disregard spatial practices embedded in the everyday lives of marginalized communities. Focusing on a marginalized lilong settlement in downtown Shanghai, this research work integrates critical cartography with ethnographic fieldwork to develop a micro-morphological mapping process centered on resident narratives. This process, structured around the phases of finding, inscription, and simplification, demonstrates how residents’ daily practices actively shape and reconfigure their built environment. This study offers an alternative perspective to understand the dynamic processes of urban renewal in informal settlements and emphasizes the dialectical relationship between resident-driven spatial practices and the transformation of the urban form. By broadening urban morphology’s methodological framework, this research provides insights into how resident-driven mapping can inform localized regeneration strategies. The findings highlight the potential for marginalized communities to shape urban regeneration policies, advocating for inclusive, resident-centered development.
... Apprehending 'Nigeria's last rainforest' as colonial residue invites investigation into the ways that the forest landscape has been co-produced through practices and discourses of scientific forestry, a system of forest management mainly for timber originating in European and with a singular claim to scientific rationality by which it claims superiority to myriad other ways of managing and living with forests as practiced by indigenous peoples for millennia (cf. Bryant, 1997;Scott, 1998). Scientific forestry is a powerful form of 'environmental rule' by which projects of colonial forest conservation have also produced significant social impacts (cf. ...
... And the tendency to valorize singular aspects of the forest to the exclusion of all other aspects, as in the valorization of carbon in carbon forestry, has its root in scientific forestry logics first applied to timber (cf. Turnhout and Lynch, 2024;Scott, 1998). The invocation of 'Nigeria's last rainforest' under carbon forestry also conveys anxiety about deforestation and extinction, however (un)founded those anxieties might be. ...
The novelty claims in carbon forestry often obscure the complex histories
and the colonial entanglements of carbon forest socioecologies. This
paper argues that the conditions of possibility of carbon forestry in
‘Nigeria’s last rainforest’ are tightly linked to the uneven colonial production
of forests across Southern Nigeria. Drawing on archival research,
ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of program documents and academic
literature, the paper unsettles claims of novelty in Nigeria’s carbon
forestry by demonstrating the material continuity between colonial forestry
and carbon forestry. Focusing on the development of colonial forestry
in Southern Nigeria under British colonial rule, the paper traces the
coloniality of scientific forestry as a form of environmental rule, and its
entanglements with imperial capitalism and presumptions of racial hierarchy.
If the success of scientific forestry in Southern Nigeria meant the
draining of Nigeria’s forests as timber export, its failure in Cross River
paradoxically produced ‘Nigeria’s last rainforest,’ a literal ‘colonial residue’
. In colonial forestry, as in contemporary carbon forestry, a reductionist
knowledge of forests, capitalist interests and a racialized global division of
labor all interact in consequential ways. The paper concludes that decolonizing
Nigeria’s forestry is a precondition for saving its ‘last rainforest.’
... Zakat is a "religious obligation"; hence, it must be treated equally in the eyes of state regulation. However, state could not just accommodate this "obligation" because once zakat obligation legislates in the state-centric, it makes other obligations "invisible", as Scott (1998) argues the state-centric lens causes non-state activity "illegible" in daily practices. Thus, zakat is "voluntary under the state-centric gaze" of non-Muslim country or "outside the government law". ...
Purpose
This study aims to discuss literature of zakat collection, particularly to compare what Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), as the two most popular databases, provide to complete the pattern and the direction of future research of zakat collection using bibliometric analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
This study collected 266 manuscripts from the Scopus database and 106 manuscripts from the WoS database covering more than three decades from 1987 to the beginning of 2023.
Findings
This study identifies a wider horizon of future research of zakat collection literature. Where Scopus database mostly discusses the connection between the state, government and zakat, meanwhile the WoS database discusses smaller scope of zakat collection, which includes zakat institution and its governance along with behavioural and commitment of zakat payers.
Research limitations/implications
The results imply that future research agenda may include the discussion of state-government-zakat collection policy connection and behavioural and commitment of zakat payers.
Practical implications
The results also imply to widening and deepening the zakat collection. Further, it also implies to administratively to zakat agencies/zakat institution.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first study (or the first) that compare Scopus and WoS database in the zakat collection literature.
... As Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992) already argued over three decades ago, modern political rationalities are intrinsically linked to the powers of expertise that evince their own moral and epistemological forms. Indeed, central to modernist projects of government and planning have always been the different ways in which populations and lands have been made legible through census data, standardised weights and measures, and other administrative ordering (Scott 1998). Whether in projects of modern reason, expertise and knowledge that supported colonial rule (Mitchell 1991; or population statistics that assembled categories, data, numbers and ideas about those who counted (Cool 2022;Hacking 1990), these projects must be seen in the light of the moral and political interventions that they enabled. ...
This special issue examines the concept of ‘technomoral governance’, a framework that describes the intertwining of moral imperatives with technocratic and technological solutions in contemporary political governance. Building on Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma's (2016) notion of ‘technomoral politics’, which looked at how moral projects become intertwined with legal-technical interventions, we explore how political tactics increasingly rely on technical and technologically driven innovations to address fundamental societal challenges. Confronted with issues that range from climate change to rampant urban inequalities and humanitarian crises, actors across China, India, Ghana, Denmark, the UK and Mexico come to invoke the language of technomoral interventions to justify political decision-making. These approaches, executed under the guise of neutrality, mask existing inequalities while also offering opportunities for unexpected forms of resistance. We argue that the convergence of moral and technological strategies represents a significant development in contemporary governance, producing murky, contradictory and often highly unequal effects.
Résumé
Ce dossier examine le concept de gouvernance techno-morale, un cadre pour décrire les connexions entre des impératives morales et des solutions technocratiques et technologiques dans la gouvernance politique contemporaine. Nous nous appuyons sur la notion de ‘la politique techno-morale’, qui a été élaborée par Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma en 2016 pour étudier comment les projets morals deviennent entrelacés avec des interventions légal-techniques. Nous explorons comment les tactiques politiques dépendent de plus en plus sur les innovations techniques, propulsées par des technologies, afin de répondre aux défis fondamentaux de notre société. Face aux problématiques comme le changement climatique, les inégalités croissantes dans des territoires urbains, et les crises humanitaires, des acteurs en Chine, Inde, Ghana, Danemark, Royaume-Uni, et Mexique commencent à parler des interventions techno-morales afin de justifier les processus décisionnels en politique. Ces approches, qui sont mise en pratique sous une voile de neutralité, masquent des inégalités existantes. En parallèle, elles permettent des occasions pour des formes imprévues de résistance. Nous proposons que la convergence des stratégies morales et techniques représente un développement important dans la gouvernance contemporaine, qui produit des effets insoupçonnés, contradictoires, et souvent inégales.
... 14 'Statistics' means «regarding the art of administering the state». See also: Scott (1998 22 Green/Salvi del Pero/Verhagen (2023). ...
... Until the mid-1990s, when the asbestos crisis redefined occupational risk management as a public health mandate, occupational health issues remained primarily a matter of social negotiation. Yet research in the sociology of the state has shown how public policy implementation initially requires the creation of quantification devices that provide a cross-cutting view of the issues to be addressed [Desrosières 1993;Scott 1998]. Thus, tax systems, for example, could only be deployed once the state had a relatively clear picture of both the population, and the wealth produced on its territory. ...
Rather than leading to the emergence of a problem, some processes contribute to limiting their scope and impeding agenda-setting. These “nonproblems” are situations that could have led to social mobilizations or public intervention but end up neither being publicized nor subject to strong policy. We use occupational health in France to illustrate these mechanisms. The social invisibility of work-related ill-health is linked to the joint contribution of two processes. Firstly, from the perspective of research on ignorance and undone science, scientific knowledge is under-developed compared to other public health issues. And even available knowledge is rarely used by policy-makers. Secondly, policies use underestimated numbers from the occupational diseases compensation system. This specific configuration of knowledge/ignorance and official counting plays a central role in the production of occupational health issues as a nonproblem. Their invisibility contributes to the production of inertia and public inaction that characterize public policy in this field.
... Laudato Si' calls for a slower and more thoughtful approach to development (Francis, 2015), while projects like IKN are often pursued at high speed and large scale. Scott (1998) has criticized large-scale development projects that fail to consider local knowledge and social-ecological complexity. In the context of IKN, the challenge is balancing the need for rapid development with careful ecological and social considerations. ...
This study examines the gap between the ecological vision in the Laudato Si' encyclical and the development practices of Indonesia's new capital city (IKN) Nusan-tara, focusing on the application of the concept of ecological conversion in large-scale development. Through critical analysis of relevant literature and documents, the study identifies six main gaps, including the approach to economic growth, community participation , the relationship with nature, the role of technology, the scale of development, and the integration of spiritual values. The study also explores the challenges of implementing ecological conversion on a large scale and how to balance economic and environmental needs. The results show a significant difference between the holistic vision of Laudato Si' and conventional development practices, concluding that the implementation of ecological conversion requires a fundamental transformation in the understanding of development, progress, and humanity's relationship with nature. Ecological conversion, Laudato Si', Sustainable development, IKN.
... Finally, Scott highlights the relevance of the 'practical skills' and the 'acquired intelligence', what he called metis, to tackle the uncertainties. For that, most of the top-down projects fail because they ignore the local knowledge, traditions, preferences, and necessities by imposing the high modernist approach (Scott, 1998). In relocation projects, they are more often incompatible with the necessities and local complexities. ...
This study examines the limitations and opportunities of planned relocation on people’s lives in the context of climate change. It will do by using the pathways approach to sustainability of Melissa Leach to analyze the relocation process of Belén community to 15km away from their current location, in the rainforest of Peru.
This study provides evidence of the different perspectives and pathways that intertwine in the relocation of Belén. On the one hand, the dominant perspective one stems from the government that has a narrow focus on risk and promotes the relocation as a solution. In doing so, there are more limitations than opportunities that have impacted on the livelihoods, the cultural identity, and the social relations of the affected population. This often exercises power while ignoring local dynamics, necessities, and perceptions. On the other hand, the alternative perspective, which mostly comes from the affected community that is against the relocation. These different perspectives are in tension and contradict each other. This evidence shows that a participatory process needs to incorporate the more marginalized perspectives and pathways in the decision-making.
... The understanding of a purposive 'digital transition' process speaks not only from literal statements of purposes. 'Purposive transition' understandings are also expressed through references to intended, planned, desirable consequences -and through assumptions of known, controllable and 'legible' (Scott 1998) transition processes. A prominent example is precision agriculture. ...
An important precondition for responsible innovation is the awareness of directionality: Dynamic innovation processes can take different, more or less favorable, turns. The ongoing wave of digital innovations exemplifies how this directionality challenges societal actors to develop new strategic dispositions. This paper critically examines the ‘digital transition’ as a rather paradoxical ‘knowing of governance’. It appears to refer simultaneously to digital instruments and directed automated futures and to rather spontaneously occurring digitalization. The analysis explores this apparent ‘syntax error’ through academic scholarship, gray literature, as well as newspaper sources. Critical discourse analysis demonstrates how directionality is obscured through various ideological representations of directed transitions but also disclosed through an increasingly rich vocabulary on emergent digitalization issues. Calling attention to the partly purposive, partly emergent nature of the transformation process, the ‘digital transition’ notion can help to express directionality.
... Alaska Native villages face micropolitical barriers to successfully engaging federal programs even when those programs (e.g., those within the Bureau of Indian Affairs) are specifically designed to render aid to Indigenous communities. Often, these barriers are technological, cultural, or pragmatic in ways that are not legible (Scott 2008) to agency staff in cities in the Lower 48. These barriers are micropolitical because they are not readily visible to policymakers but nevertheless pose major challenges in the practice of policy execution and service delivery. ...
Climate adaptation for Indigenous communities is not as simple as making good policy; it is equally about how policy is implemented and how collaboration unfolds between settler governments and Indigenous stakeholders. Rural Alaska Native villages are among the most environmentally threatened communities in the United States. Their ability to effectively manage environmental change and preserve sovereignty depends upon successful collaboration with a range of stakeholders, especially federal agencies. For more than two decades, academics and government agencies have documented a consistent pattern of failures, particularly by federal actors, to effectively manage adaptation challenges. These obstacles are sometimes misrepresented as policy failures. While poor policy is certainly involved in these poor outcomes, this paper highlights a set of barriers to successful collaboration that are not policy issues, per se, but rather micropolitical issues; that is, they pertain to the conduct of government in the context of Tribal relationships. Unaddressed, these micropolitical issues have created obstacles to Alaska Native communities’ self-determination as they adapt to a changing landscape. These barriers are explored in a case study drawn from Typhoon Merbok, which struck Western Alaska in 2022, and empirically grounded in a series of interviews and participant observation with experts, elders, elected officials, and Tribal staff. This article concludes with several concrete recommendations to improve the practice of domestic diplomacy between Indigenous communities and colonial governments.
... Applying rules from micro-cosmos to extended order will destroy it via corruption and nepotism. But applying the rules from extender order to micro-cosmos will also damage the basic fabric of society, as was the case with the totalitarian grand project (Scott, 1998). Some of Hayek's insights in fact mimic the latter arguments of proponents of dual process theory -for example, Hayek (1988) argues that market economy in general and financial markets in particular are not intuitive at all, and should not be approached instinctively -it requires effort and learning to comprehend how free markets work. ...
This paper reviews the history of the dual-mode information processing idea in philosophy , psychology, and cognitive science. It tracks how the concept that human thinking works through two separate but interconnected systems has developed from ancient times to now. The review looks at early philosophical ideas that suggested two processes in human thought. It points out Plato's separation of reason and appetite , and Aristotle's division of the soul into rational and irrational parts. Moving to modern times, the paper discusses how dual-process theories emerged in 20th-century psychology. It covers William James's ideas of associative and true reasoning , and Freud's theories of conscious and unconscious mental processes. The review then focuses on formal dual-process theories in cognitive and moral psychology from the 1970s onwards. During this time frame, researchers began to systematically study and test these theories. By following this historical path, the paper aims to show how the idea of dual-mode information processing has grown and become important in our understanding of human thinking across different fields and time periods.
... A narrative of progress gives priority to uninterrupted movement over social interactions on the streets, and to mobilities that are less conducive to productive frictions than motorbike mobility. Cars and mass transit are associated with modernity, as defined by Scott (1998), that is, a socio-spatial order characterized by legibility. Furthermore, under Vietnam's dominant system of production -an open economy under communist rule -the car industry recently became a centerpiece of the country's economic development strategy (Mattioli et al., 2020;Small, 2022). ...
... Sahelian pastoralists have over a long span complained about a continued loss of access to dry season pastures and livestock corridors, which has been facilitated by a general negative policy discourse surrounding Sahelian pastoralism among governments and aid organisations (Pedersen & Benjaminsen, 2008;Thébaud & Batterbury, 2001). As famously pointed out by Scott (1998), modern governments have a tendency to view mobile use of resources as messy and illegible, because 4 Famously identified by Marx in Volume 1 of 'Capital' as a key component in the development of capitalism. 5 There is a substantial literature linking primitive accumulation with violent resistance in Latin America (Tausig, 1987;Smolski, 2021). ...
... Dass die Datenproduktion vor allem ein soziokulturelles Phänomen mit einer langen Traditionsgeschichte ist, wird dabei ausgeblendet (vgl. Porter 1995;Scott 1998 An dieser Stelle setzt die Verschränkung von Psychoanalyse und digitalen Medien an, wie sie beispielsweise durch Jacob Johanssens Konzept der ›Data Perversion‹ vorangetrieben wird (Johanssen 2021). Seine Forschung zielt darauf ab, das komplexe Zusammenspiel von User_innen und Plattformen zwischen Affirmation, Attraktion und Exploitation differenzierter zu beschreiben als in einer Linearität von Täter_innen zu Opfern. ...
Die Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung von Körperlichkeit und Körperbildern erfährt durch digitale Technologien einen weitreichenden Wandel, der auch in die Techniken ihrer Produktion hineinreicht. Die Beiträger*innen kartographieren diese Entwicklungen und fragen nach ihren Voraussetzungen, Folgen sowie Möglichkeiten der Kritik. Im zweiten Band des »Atlas der Datenkörper« beschreiben sie den digitalen Körper am historischen und rezenten Bauhaus, analysieren das Phänomen seiner Mystifizierung und dekonstruieren den Datenkörper als politischen Gegenstand. Aus sowohl der Perspektive künstlerischer und gestalterischer Forschung als auch der Kunst-, Kultur- und Medienwissenschaft entsteht so ein umfassender, transdisziplinärer Querschnitt zum Verhältnis Mensch-Technik im digitalen Zeitalter.
... Their interest was first initiated by earlier studies in the area of geography, which involved researches into global and regional distribution of the labour force and activities of multinational corporations. It is especially important to point out that, regions as sources of comparative advantages in the globalised economy, have been particularly extensively studied (Porter, 1990;Saxenian, 1994;Scott, 1998). ...
The research explores the need of introducing geography courses into the university studies of economics, particularly into management studies, and proposes a model for the implementation of geography courses into the undergraduate and graduate study programs of management in the Department of Economics at the University of Zadar, Croatia. The paper presents a detailed description of the two proposed courses-Economic Geography and Political Geography-including the course goals and learning outcomes, as well as factual insights, theoretical knowledge, social and cognitive skills, independence, responsibility, and other competences that the students will acquire in both courses. The syllabi containing these data are in line with the Bologna process and Croatian qualifications framework whose implementation into the educational system was accepted by Croatia when signing the Bologna declaration principles. The paper deals with a number of essential research issues: How to carry out the modelled implementation and introduce a necessary level of multidisciplinary quality to the economics study programs? What are the obstacles and constraints that may arise in the process? In what way are the post-transition countries specific in this regard? How may these changes affect the learning outcomes and competencies that management students have to acquire in the field of geography? Is the significance of the described implementation even greater-and to what extent-with regard to the forthcoming accession of Croatia to the European Union? The methodology that was used in the research is related to successful cases of similar implementation of geography courses into economics study programs in the world, but also to the observation during teaching in the Department of Economics at the University of Zadar. The information collected by the observation revealed that the students' knowledge and competencies in this area were insufficient. The results gathered over the first two years of the implementation of the two geography courses-Economic Geography and Political Geography-proved that the students entirely satisfied the criteria set by the syllabi of the respective courses and that they successfully met the course requirements, thereby acquiring the desired competencies. This leads to the conclusion that the thesis set forth in this paper proved to be correct, and that this paper's model for the implementation of geography courses in the area of management studies produced first good and promising results.
... Land resources and enclosure itself are also greened in integrated schema linking carbon credit afforestation projects to greenbelt tourism parks, and new ecological industries and spaces to the embodiment of new talents and urban civilities. These practices demonstrate an emphasis on enviromnental rationalities that systematically produce and address mral land and people as objects and subjects of governmental action (see Scott 1998). ...
... En la misma línea, Castres, citado en Barros (2013), argumenta los mecanismos que ciertas sociedades 'primitivas' -como la amazónica-usan para evitar la concentración del poder y, con ello, la aparición del estado en sus territorios y su resistencia a la dominación por parte del poder central. Este mismo actor central, con los planes de desarrollo nacionales, en particular en los países pobres, perpetúa los problemas sociales y el subdesarrollo que se pretende erradicar (Scott, 1998). ...
El presente artículo aborda la reflexión de James Scott en su libro publicado en 1998 ‘Seeing like State’ sobre ¿por qué los grandes planes de desarrollo generados por el estado terminan fracasando? Para Scott, la característica principal es que son proyectos modernistas y tecnológicos occidentales; recalca que no está en contra de tecnología ni la modernidad sino en la manera en la que el estado central lo implementa en sociedades con nociones diferentes al occidentalismo y con un desprecio al conocimiento local, por lo que la organización comunitaria crea resistencia y estos planes fallan. Finalmente, se hace una analogía de esta reflexión con los grandes proyectos petroleros extractivistas en la Amazonía ecuatoriana que se implantan en pro del desarrollo occidental, pero fallan debido a que generan mayor despojo, protesta, desterritorialización y pérdida de la cultura local. Una forma de resistencia a estos proyectos extractivos se plasma en el voto favorable para la consulta popular sobre la explotación al Yasuní ITT, el pasado octubre del 2023.
... 49 According to Scott, the 'legibility' of a person within modern state-building projects depends on the proliferation of identity documents. 50 Documents such as census reports, gazettes and maps have been generated by the state in its endeavour to identify, define and distinguish specific categories of persons. 51 In this process, numerous forms of legal documentation, in the shape of unique identification cards, passports, identity certificates and permits, are issued by the state in order to recognise persons for purposes of welfare and security. ...
This study focuses on the entangled layers of marginalisation faced by Brihannalas, a gender non-confirming community in Tripura at the backdrop of COVID-19 pandemic. We examine the everyday precariousness that emerges from their characteristic migration patterns, their experiences of fuzzy spaces at the Indo-Bangladesh border.
... According to critics of developmental state, one has to be seen by the state in order to benefit from it (Parnell & Pieterse, 2014;Scott, 1998). Consequently, reclaiming strategies adopted by NGOs begin by making communities' visible through data-collection-and by quantifying their needs in accordance with government criteria. ...
Informal settlement livelihoods in South Africa are characterized by a structural waiting for housing improvements. Participatory mapping and enumeration (PME) are a key tool for Capetonians NGOs to tackle urban injustice and improve livelihoods. Unfortunately, PME evaluation and empowerment dynamics are often linked and reduced to the PME final output (data, cartographic artefact, etc.). Based on an action-research PME project implemented by a Capetonian local NGO and by S section informal settlement’s community (Khayelitsha), this paper explores PME as an empowering strategy for activating the waiting phase for housing. Drawing on postcolonial approach, this paper frames empowerment as “topological resonances” enabled during PME through the dual dynamics of “translation” and “connectedness.” Translation and connectedness are applied to the case study of S Section and allow for the capture of interstitial yet critical empowerment dynamics that go beyond PME outcomes alone.
... Thus, it is important to interrogate the factors that produce different kinds of policy outcomes. Ever since James C. Scott's (1998) now classic book Seeing Like a State, we understand that states may fail to impose certain society-building or organizing visions on their citizens. States in today's neoliberal order may also experience uncertainty and precarity-some more than others-which is something to consider in the analysis of refugee resettlement. ...
In his brief ministerial career, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, undertook a project to remake how the king's ministers would perform. Eschewing the personal power accorded to ministers like William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle under George II, Bute and the young King George III attempted to reform the cabinet into a place of debate, unity, and resolution where administration was shared by all ministers equally. In this they were following the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the age into a new form of political arrangements, adapting the 1688 settlement into a structure capable of administering territorial empire so long as one did not look too closely at issues of sovereignty or representation. The seemingly small and inconsistently applied shift nonetheless had enormous consequences as it shaped the hemisphere-defining policies of Bute's ministry: the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that followed close on its heels. While historical accounts of Britain's 1763–83 imperial crisis tend to focus on the revenue schemes of 1764–65 as the primary origin point for conflict, Bute's “cabinet revolution” played a larger role than has generally been acknowledged in setting the stage for grander visions of imperial power and the larger protests over that power.
We, the two interlocutors in this discussion, Mark Antaki and Richard Janda, have for the past number of years had periodic exchanges about the theoretical underpinnings and possible critique of a project that Janda has been leading, which seeks to signal to individuals the impacts of their choices upon collective environmental, health and social goods and to orient these individuals to make better choices. Antaki has sought to probe a number of paradoxes and challenges for legal normativity involved in using new forms of technology to address the accumulating and devastating externalities produced by our use of technology. A mutual fascination with the project and its critique led us to conclude that the discussion might have some broader saliency. This dialogue allowed us to share our preoccupations concerning the pervasive quality of technology in our lives and to explore how our efforts to redress the dominion of technology over nature might cede to the temptation to call upon new forms of technology in aid. Is this temptation to be resisted?
This paper explores the role of World Health Organization (WHO) medical experts in ambitious projects for substance control during the Cold War in Thailand and India. The circumstances surrounding opium production in these two nations were very different, as were the reasons for requesting expert assistance from the United Nations. Whereas the Thai military regime was concerned with controlling illicit traffic to secure its borders, the Indian government wanted to direct its opium raw materials towards domestic pharmaceutical production. Overlapping and sometimes competing agendas of country governments and international agencies converged upon each project, complicating the consultants’ work and requiring careful navigation. In both cases, medicine as a science concerned with human health and well-being was subordinated to more pressing agendas. At the same time, the article argues that WHO consultants left an important impact, though not necessarily due to their skills and training in medicine. Instead, they provided exemplars of sound governance and delivery of public health in a politically stable and economically developed country.
The public interest suggests a singular approach to a social good, but lessons from history illustrate the nuances of sharing open space, transportation networks, and policy mandates. Serving the public exists across a spectrum of possibilities. In this essay, we consider how the emerging field of public interest technology could learn from previous assumptions about who counts as the public and how benefits or harms can be overly concentrated in certain populations. We situate public interest technology as a growing capability of government public service, an institutionalized professional practice like public interest law, as well as a site of critical inquiry. Our definition of the public interest is motivated by a theory of change that recognizes the strength of inclusion. Punctuated with historic and contemporary examples, this essay argues that by acknowledging conflicts of interest and embracing the marginal, public interest technology could build ethical infrastructures to serve all.
Current approaches to engaging First Nations peoples in urban policy and planning are placing an unreasonable and unsustainable burden, especially on Traditional Custodians, new AHURI research finds. A change of relationship with Traditional Custodians and a rethinking of current engagement approaches could create a more responsible process.The research, ‘Voicing First Nations Country, culture and community in urban policy’, undertaken for AHURI by researchers from University of Sydney, RMIT University and University of NSW, examines the relationship of First Nations peoples in Australia to urban policy, and is designed to centre First Nations sovereignty, authority, knowledge, governance and agency as the starting point toward a more responsible relationship.Urban places, from large metropolitan areas to small towns in regional areas, are sites of intensive dispossession at the same time as being dense networks of community and ongoing cultural practice and connection. Nevertheless, urbanisation and the density of population settlement, private property and the miasma of legislation, policy and regulation imposed on Country hasn’t destroyed First Nations Traditional Custodians connection to ancestral lands or their cultural obligations and rights to lands and waters.Governments are asking local planners and developers to consult with First Nation Traditional Custodians with some level of engagement. This has the effect of intensifying pressure on Custodians, with short timeframes and often unrealistic expectations imposed upon First Nations communities.Urban policy planning can be a tool for healing and repair between First Nations people and the broader Australian community. Engagement can be used to create new opportunities—but current engagement approaches require rethinking and need to include building longer term relationships, long before a project requires engagement. Building and sustaining relationships and creating new processes and models must be supported with resources structures that are secure, ongoing and transcend piecemeal project-by-project funding.
In urban informal settlements, the state's material presence is often thought to be marginal or even absent. However, the state can be very much present in different forms even when its material presence might be seemingly absent. Examining the ways governing rationalities of the state may circulate and get reproduced in spaces of informality can thus offer a nuanced understanding of how the informal is governed in the everyday at the urban grassroots. Using Foucauldian notions of governmentality as an analytical lens, this paper examines the governing rationalities and subjectivities of urban citizenship that residents of an informal settlement reproduce in their everyday expressions and spatial practices of self and neighbourhood management. Drawing on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, the paper reveals how by reproducing the logics of the state at the urban grassroots, the settlement residents in effect reproduce state control within conditions of informality.
assistant à Bamako. Expert des recherches sur la gouvernance foncière en Afrique, Dr. Doumbia a fait ici une analyse holistique (empiriques, historiques, socio-anthropolo-giques...) de la question foncière et de la consolidation de la paix durable au Mali.
Nicobarese is a horticultural tribe and depends on both terrestrial and aquatic resources for their survival in the geographically isolated Nicobar Islands. Copra-making, pig rearing, fishing and hunting are some of the traditional livelihoods of the Nicobarese. Traditional knowledge of the Nicobarese made them self-reliant by maintaining close harmony with Island ecology. But the advent of tsunami and earthquake on 26 th December 2004 affected this symbiosis and livelihoods. Soon after the tragedy, many islands such as Chowra, Trinket, Little Nicobar, Kondul, Pilomilow, and Bampuka were evacuated and rehabilitated in temporary shelters. Later on, Nicobarese planned to go back to their native villages but the administration insisted them to stay in temporary tin shelters promising permanent shelters in place of traditional ones. Unfortunately, the pucca house construction took more than seven years and accordingly they were shifted. Instead of creating sustainable livelihoods, cash compensation was given to Nicobarese in lieu of loss of life and resources. With the rise of sea levels, they face land scarcity for the arrangement of houses, piggery, and plantations. Prolonged stay in temporary shelters and dependence on government doles made serious dents on Nicobarese culture and livelihoods. While recovering from the tsunami travails, another blow hit the indigenous people in the form of Niti Aayog's mega developmental plans in 2019 for the generation of revenue for the government. This move has had mixed repercussions on the fragile Island's ecology and the livelihoods of the Nicobarese and Shompen. With this backdrop, the present paper focuses on how natural and man-made disasters promote unsustainable development in the islands which eventually affects ecological conservation.
Att utveckla en förvaltning av Sveriges hav, med dess långsträckta kust och varierande ekosystem såväl i havet som på land är en utmaning. I antologin ger erfarna praktiker och akademiker inom olika samhälleliga discipliner sina bilder av förvaltningen i 16 artiklar. Fokus riktas på hur nationella förvaltningen fungerar utifrån ambitionen att arbeta med ekosystembaserad förvaltning. Avslutningsvis finns sammanfattande reflektioner och rekommendationer.
Archival aerial photographs are a unique but underused and potentially game-changing source to study twentieth-century environmental and climate change dynamics. While satellite imagery with comparable high resolution appeared only in the early twenty-first century, archival aerial imagery with native sub-1-meter resolution became ubiquitous in the 1940s. Archival aerial photography therefore quadruples the time depth of high-resolution analysis to eighty years, allowing for a more reliable identification of structural trends. Moreover, the greater time-depth brings into focus the Great Acceleration that started in the 1940s, and virtually in real time. The article uses a human manual analysis of a sample from two time series (1943 and 1971) of archival photographs of the Oshikango area of Namibia (see Figure 1) to demonstrate how aerial photography complements conventional datasets. Namibia was one of the first places in colonial Africa where what subsequently became the standard protocol for “aerial mapping” was used and for which the imagery and the “flight plans” have survived. The standard protocol makes the imagery compatible with any archival aerial photography from the 1940s to 1990s and the flight plans contain key information to identify, interpret, and combine the individual photographs into orthomosaics. Although the use of manual analysis of aerial photography is not new, unlocking the full explanatory potential of high-resolution mass data requires machine reading and analysis. Current machine reading methods, however, are based on the pixel method, which identifies such features as farms, water holes, and trees only as low-resolution pixel aggregates. In contrast, the object method of machine analysis, combined with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to unlock the sub-1-meter native resolution of historical aerial photography, renders visible individual trees and other features, including their precise location and size, allowing for the dimensions of trees and other features to be measured between different time series of images. The interrelationships between different features in the environment can thus be assessed more precisely in space and over time, for example comparing tree growth and surface water sources. A major challenge is that the object method used for high resolution geospatial imagery cannot be easily applied to monochromatic archival aerial photography because it has been designed for analyzing multispectral satellite imagery. As discussed in the article, using the manual sample as a training data set for an experimental machine-learning protocol demonstrates proof of concept for automatically extracting such features as farms, water holes and trees as individual objects from archival aerial photography. This increases the time depth of available high-resolution land use, environmental, and climate data from 2000 back to the 1940s and provides a base line for the Great Acceleration and brings the massive changes from the 1940s through the 1990s in focus as captured in aerial photography.
This article identifies two main perspectives on flood control: the traditional and the modern hydrological. The objective here is to look at the contest between them from the point of view of the politics of knowledge. The traditional perspective views floods as a part of life and focuses on people's wisdom or local knowledge of flood control. The hydrological approach, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with taming a river and views floods as a disaster that ought to be controlled and possibly eliminated. This perspective dominates the policy of the post-colonial state in India. There are five vantage points, such as historical context, state policy, political economy, collective action and epis-temology, to understand the politics of knowledge around floods. In the first section, through history we discuss the transition from the colonial to post-colonial India on the issues of floods, dams and embankments. The second section of this article describes the flood policy and politics around it, from Patna Flood Conference (1937) to Disaster Management Act, 2005. In Political Economy section the article explores the link between land-holdings, tenancy and floods and also observes how agriculture has changed due to floods. The fourth section, Forms of Collective Action, explores the politics of collective action. Epistemology section presents the debate of lokvidyavs versus rajyavidya or living with floods versus hydrological knowledge. Keywords Floods, flood management, politics of knowledge, hydrology, Disaster Management Act This article offers a fresh perspective on a vigorously debated issue of development in India-the solutions offered to deal with floods. This article aims to create communication among the different writings on the issue (Latour, 1987; Mishra, 2001; Mukherjee, 2010; Nandy, 1989, 2012). It identifies two main knowledge systems on flood control, the modern hydrological and the traditional, attempting to understand the contestation between them from the analytical framework of the politics of knowledge. The Studies in Indian Politics 1-14
Este trabalho analisa as consequências da "nova era do desenvolvimentismo" introduzida pelo governo brasileiro de centro-esquerda (2003-2016) nos povos indígenas e comunidades tradicionais. Destaca-se que a re-primatização da economia, ainda que no contexto da redemocratização e governança ambiental, levou ao aumento dos conflitos fundiários e reforçou o papel subalterno do Brasil na divisão global do trabalho. Chama-se a atenção para visões eurocêntricos sobre o desenvolvimento permeiam não apenas posições conservadoras mas também estratégias progressistas que percebem as comunidades tradicionais como meros pobres rurais a serem integrados nos mercados de trabalho urbanos. Dada a luta desses grupos pela autonomia e pelas respostas políticas que ameaçam seus direitos constitucionais e a sociobiodiversidade brasileira, os autores desenvolvem uma complexa "questão territorial" entre os metabolismos territoriais urbano-capitalistas e não-urbanos que desafiam as visões de uma luta de classe unida.
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
The book is organised in five parts: the first provides a historical backdrop for the book’s detailed case studies, focusing on environmental and conservation policy and legislation; the second investigates post-Independence approaches to conservation; the third focuses on ‘Etosha-Kunene’ ecologies and related management issues; the fourth explores how historical circumstances shape present conservation and cultural landscapes; and the fifth addresses contemporary complexities of lion conservation and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM).
By offering a comprehensive overview of evolving conservation boundaries, policies and practices in the region, this timely volume paves the way for the future design of conservation initiatives that more fully consider and integrate historical and cultural knowledge and diversity. Essential reading for conservation practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers alike, this volume also serves as a valuable resource for university students interested in conservation studies and histories of conservation.
Philanthrocapitalism is an extraordinary ideological force, but how do we understand it? Expanding on the legacies of U.S. philanthropic foundations’ power to develop and frame legitimate policy-relevant knowledge and act in the interest of U.S. foreign policy (Parmar, 2012), philanthrocapitalist actors have become instrumental in building hegemonic consensus and shaping global and internal governance, policies, and regulations—public, corporate, and non-profit. While philanthro-policymaking (Rogers, 2011) and the turn to market fixes (McGoey, 2012) and technological fixes, received academic attention (Haydon et al., 2021), the reshaping of global crime governance by philanthrocapitalism has been neglected. I argue that the pluralization and privatization of crime fighting is the reverse side of the philanthrocapitalist ‘business for good’ coin. To understand this, we must interrogate the nature of what I term ‘regulatory and compliance fixes’ that proponents of philanthrocapitalism and their allies advocate and that spring from ‘anti-policies’ around which they unite (Perkowski and Squire, 2019; Walters, 2008)—e.g., anti-corruption, anti-trafficking, anti-money laundering. This entails integrating the reverse side of the philanthrocapitalist coin into our conceptualization of philanthrocapitalism by teasing out its intersection with ‘regulatory capitalism’ (Levi-Faur, 2017) and ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). And, most importantly, analysing the growing power of intermediaries, knowledge, norm and data brokers, within the ‘compliance-industrial complex’ (Kuldova, 2022).
This philosophical essay explores the idea of the world as allegory in cartography, drawing on the works of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Nelson Goodman. It argues existentially that maps are not only representations of measurable objects, but also of aesthetic experiences. It analyses epistemologically how maps use symbols and allegories as representations to determine meanings or reveal truths. And finally, it shows how digital maps today, like works of art, reflect and shape world views and how, as a medium, they are interwoven with the perception, cognition and (inter)action.
The text focuses primarily on the peasant food and culinary culture that takes place inside the stoves and kitchens of the municipality of Bello - Antioquia - Colombia, in order to make the rural kitchen visible as an essential element in the constitution of the municipality’s identity. To this end, it starts from a bibliographic analysis that supports and structures the axes through which the project circulates: food and culinary culture, as well as the kitchen, understood as a feature of identity.
The research was approached using a qualitative and ethnographic methodology, in which participant observation was applied, in-depth interviews with inhabitants and tradition bearers of the villages of the municipality of Bello, in addition to tools such as field diaries and photographs. In general, this article provides an overview of the peasant cuisine of the municipality of Bello, its continuities and changes, promoting the knowledge and dissemination of the traditional cuisines of the territory.
Every year about thirty billion dollars are spent on aid across Africa, yet recurrent crises followed by a blame game amongst different actors, and a poor understanding of the failures encountered, result in ambiguous assessments and unclear paths for reforms. Through the extended case study of the village of Lojom, this article examines the historical unfolding of a failing aid system in the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda. The article traces a nexus between the agrarian crisis, the protracted humanitarian regime and social protection, in a regional context of structural underdevelopment. It argues that at the core of failing aid in Karamoja lies a manufactured agrarian crisis that dates back to colonial times. The article concludes that if aid policies and programmes remain inscribed in an enduring agrarian crisis, they will only continue to exacerbate exploitative dynamics of patronage, clientelism and subversion that characterize what is called here “the failing aid complex”.
We need citizens and leaders who are knowledgeable and skilled at the challenges of daily life, the value-institutions that structure society, and the policy process to realize human dignity in healthy environments. Our present human and environmental situation requires that we possess the capacity and agency to address individual, institutional, and process challenges. The skill to analyze value-institutions and policy processes is key to improvements. High self-awareness is also important along with essential knowledge and broad skills. Individuals face many personal challenges. A sample of these is offered with how to understand them and overcome limitations. Ultimately, our dignity and environmental goals can only be approximated if we attend successfully to these considerations.
In the early modern Ottoman Empire, social identity was closely tied to a hierarchical structure, with the sultanate occupying the highest tier and ordinary subjects positioned at the lower end. Empire’s inhabitants were divided into groups based on the style and color of their clothes. By dressing in clothing from a different gender, socioeconomic class, or ethnoreligious group, one could disguise their true identity and social status. This article endeavors to unveil the motivations that compelled ordinary people to employ clothing as a means to conceal their involvement in criminal activities. Furthermore, it investigates the constraints associated with common identity-altering practices, particularly from the vantage points of religion, gender, and intersectionality. Drawing from an array of archival sources such as mühimme records, chronicles, manuscripts, and qadi court registers, the article scrutinizes the consequences of these practices.
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