Notes for session 9 : Planning and Policy

Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys, Elusive promises: planning in the contemporary world - an introduction. In Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World, edited by Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys (New York: Berghahn, 2013), pp 1-33.

                The necessity of looking at the anthropology of planning is undertaken in the text as ethnography, a tool of anthropology provides a critical insight by putting in a larger framework and how interactions of state and non-state actors can be understood locally and theorized. Planning is said to be a conceptualization of time and space which involves a lot of tactics, technologies and institutions to pass into the future so desired. It is to order society through a variety of techniques. But the future always is elusive and the real outcome is flawed as can be seen in the case of large dams in India where the real inevitably overshoot the ideal in terms of cost and time taken. This volume moves away from the Foucauldian outlook which has emphasized on the spatial dimensions and created a rationalistic sense of planning where failure is not integrated into the practice of planning. The authors stress on the idea of promise of a planned future and the interplay which occurs in the contemporary planning contexts. Planning is said to have emerged because of multiple reasons but all of them are in sync with the necessity to build an idea of state. The actions which entail a promise being made is understood from the angle of linguistic philosophy and anthropology with certain limitations. Nonetheless, the studies demonstrate how the promises of planning can take different pathways into being institutionalized. The promise of planning is then looked in the context of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has brought about the changes in how boundaries are viewed which has implications in the older planning methods. The intervention of multinationals at the farm levels with legal implications, the audit nature of planning and the transformation of the public servants are some of the many effects of neoliberalism.

-Rinan

Seeing like a State

James C Scott

Using examples from scientific forestry, measurement and land tenure, and mapping, documentation and record keeping, James Scott elaborates on the ‘simplification’ that is inherent in state craft which makes an attempt to make things legible, standardized, and therefore more controllable. The lens that the state imposes onto the resources also changes the vocabulary or the descriptors of what is looked at to create a fictional reality and obfuscates all other realities in this bid. He suggests that the state took recourse to these measures as it required the knowledge of what it governed – at times for egalitarian and at times for repressive reasons – ‘the state is the ground for both our freedom and unfreedom’. He also elaborates that although the state objective is to make the resources more uniform and amenable to management, the resource itself may not (nature or society) align to these plans.

He then, identifies four elements that together make state simplification a disastrous process for society. These include – administrative ordering of nature and society, high-modernist state that puts uncritical confidence in scientific processes, an authoritarian state that uses its power to align to the society to the ideals of the high modernism, and a civil society that does not have a capacity to resist this authority.

Overall, he makes an argument for the role of mutuality between state and society, laying emphasis on ‘practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in face of unpredictability’. 

- Anuja