TA N I A M U R R AY L I

Beyond the State and Failed Schemes

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose five ways to move beyond the analytical scheme of James Scotts Seeing Like a State (1998). I
question the spatial optic that posits an up there, all-seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power, spread progressively
outward to nonstate spaces beyond its reach. I highlight the role of parties beyond the state that attempt to governsocial
reformers, scientists, and the so-called nongovernmental agencies, among others. I look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the
more general problematic of improvement emerging from a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations. I explore
the recourse to metis (contextualized, local knowledge and practice) situated beyond the purview of planning. Finally, I reframe the
question posed by Scottwhy have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?to examine the question posed
so provocatively by James Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, conjunctural effects? [Keywords:
state, governmentality, space, knowledge, planning]

L IKE A PLANNER CONSTITUTING a field of interven-

tion, an academic making an argument has to focus
his or her field of vision, be selective, and simplify. James
Scott is a master of focused vision, which is one reason why
his work is widely read and cited in anthropology and other
disciplines. His key concepts, phrases, and images are bold
and memorable. Perhaps this has something to do with dis-
ciplinary training: He was trained in political science, a field
that seeks to devise models about big topics (e.g., the state,
power, democracy, rebellion). Anthropologists tend to be
coy about turning complex, overdetermined conjunctures
into grist for generalizing schemes. We recognize the value
of ethnographic work that contributes to theory, but we
seldom produce a single message that can be readily trans-
ported and deployed in diverse settings. I believe both ap-
proaches have merit and that there are good reasons to con-
tinue the dialogue.
This article is a critical engagement with Scotts book,
Seeing Like a State (1998). As I understand it, this is the core of
Scotts argument: States construct simplified models of the
world that they would like to control and improve, yet im-
provement schemes fail in proportion to their effectiveness
at preventing people from applying the everyday knowl-
edge essential to human well-being. He illustrates his ar-
gument with rich empirical material from a range of sites.
He recognizes that grand schemes are contingent on a tan-
gled set of practices, processes, and relations, but like a state
planner, he keeps his eyes on the schemes themselves, leav-
ing the messiness inside or around them on the peripheries
of his field of vision. I propose to situate state optics and im-
provement schemes in relation to other attempts to theorize
how power works and to highlight some of the complexi-
ties that are mentioned or anticipated in Scotts account but
are consigned to the interstices and footnotes. I agree with
the main outlines of Scotts argument: Ruling regimes do
operate as he proposes, for the reasons and with the conse-
quences he observes. What I offer, then, is less a critique of
Scotts main argument than an amplification of some of the
points potentially lost or submerged in Scotts schematics.
My use of the word beyond in my title acknowledges the
value of Scotts work as a starting point and a provocation.
Rereading Seeing Like a State (1998) reminded me of how
much I have learned from this work; it further prompted
me to try to articulate what else needs to be said.
Scott is an engaged scholar who has consistently ad-
dressed issues with important political stakes. Out of respect
for his style of committed scholarship, I start with an ac-
count of the reasons why what I have to say might matter.
I argue that vast schemes to improve the human condi-
tion continue to be designed and implemented, but many
do not take the highly visible form Scott identifies as high
modern. Rather than etch their visions of improvement on
the landscape by constructing orderly cities, forests, farms,
and resettlement sites, these schemes work on and through
the practices and desires of their target populations. Their
proponents are not only the state apparatus but also an ar-
ray of authorities, including the so-called nongovernment
organizations (NGOs). They operate across multiple spatial

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384 American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005
scales. They seldom use coercion, aiming instead to reshape
the actions of subjects who retain the freedom to act other-
wise. Scotts binary categories statesociety, state space development intervention (1994:270). The World Bank
nonstate space, and powerresistance provide insuffi- scheme has an impressive record of delivering on its ma-
cient analytical traction to expose the logic of these schemes
or to examine their effects. One example will help orient the
reader to the detailed arguments I develop below.
Between 1998 and 2006, the World Bank in Indonesia
will spend $1 billion in loan funds on a scheme to reform
Indonesian society from the bottom up.1 The scheme fo-
cuses on village infrastructure planning decisions, seeking
to make them more accountable, transparent, and efficient.
It does this by allocating funds through a minutely speci-
fied and monitored process in which villages compete for
funds, making proposals adjudicated at the subdistrict level.
The small projects that are funded are conventional enough
(e.g., village roads, bridges, minor irrigation, credit). The
novelty of the program lies in the planning process itself,
carefully designed to root out corruption, collusion, and
waste. Social research experts have mapped every stage in
the project-planning and delivery process, detecting the
points at which funds leak and fine-tuning the project sys-
tem to foster compliance and increase the opportunitycost
of rule breaking. Villagers have a choice: If they wish to ac-
cess the funds, they must conform to the prescribed behav-
iors. The World Bank scheme does not coerce people; rather,
it attempts to act on their actions, guiding them in an im-
proved direction. The scale of the scheme is impressive: It
operates in one out of three Indonesian villages, affecting
tens of millions of people.
Deliberately reversing the past practice of dictating im-
provement from a distance, the World Bank scheme has
been designed by anthropologists, based on careful ethno-
graphic study of village lives and power relations. The plan-
ners use pilot tests and a stepwise approach. They attempt
to build on indigenous knowledge and practice and to em-
power villagers to take control of their own affairs. They
embrace the dynamic complexity of social and economic
life, and they describe their efforts frankly as experiments
that attempt to seed social change without controlling it
precisely. They do everything, in short, that Scott recom-
mends in his book as the antidote to the hubris of planning.
But there is a fundamental continuity between the World
Bank planners and high-modern planners Scott describes:
They position themselves as experts who know how oth-
ers should live, they collect and arrange data according to
simplified grids, they diagnose deficiencies, and they devise
elaborate interventions to bring about improvement.
However well-meaningrecall that the planners of
high-modern schemes were also well-meaningthe World
Banks scheme is still an exercise of power. Not only
do experts direct peoples conduct without a democratic
mandate, they define what counts as development and
how it can be achieved. Focused on the improvement of
village-level planning, the scheme sets aside other causes
of poverty. Like the development programs in Lesotho ana-
lyzed by James Ferguson two decades ago, the World Banks
scheme reposes political questions of land, resources, jobs,
or wages as technical problems responsive to the technical
terial promises: good quality village infrastructure at low
cost. But if, as Ferguson recommends, we step away from
the World Banks way of seeing the problem of poverty (as
a matter of deficient planning), and away from the ques-
tion of the programs success or failure, different questions
come into view. Why, and for whom, is the fostering of
competition, the stimulation of entrepreneurship, and the
elimination of corruption in village planning a preeminent
goal? How does the World Bank reconcile its mandate to
relieve poverty with a strategy that withholds funds from
villages unable to meet the performance standards the
program demands? Are the World Banks neoliberal criteria
for distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor
to be accepted without debate? Why focus on correcting
the deficiencies of villagers while leaving the deficiencies of
senior officials, politicians, and army generals unexamined
and unimproved?
My article has five sections. First, I question the spa-
tial optic of Scotts account that posits an up there, all-
seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power
spread progressively and unproblematically across national
terrain, colonizing nonstate spaces and their unruly inhab-
itants. There is, I argue, no spatial beyond of the state, and
there are no subjects outside power. Second, I argue that we
need to look beyond the state to the range of parties that
attempt to govern. The state has seldom had a monopoly
on improvement: It shares this function with social reform-
ers, scientists, missionaries, the so-called nongovernmental
agencies, and, in the global south, donor agencies with their
teams of expert consultants. Third, I argue that we should
look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the more
general problematic of improvement, which emerged his-
torically when the purpose of rule was recast in terms of a
governmental rationality focused on the welfare of popula-
tions. Fourth, I propose a more complex rendering of the
relationship between simplification, control, and improve-
ment, and I examine the range of contexts in which metis
(contextualized, situated knowledge and practice) is nur-
tured both within and beyond the state apparatus. Metis, I
argue, is not the opposite of power; it is imbricated with
it. Finally, I suggest we need to go beyond the question
posed by Scottwhy have certain schemes designed to im-
prove the human condition failed?to examine the ques-
tion posed by Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What
are their messy, contradictory, multilayered, and conjunc-
tural effects? My presentation here is necessarily synoptic,
and I refer the reader to writings by anthropologists and
others who explore these issues in greater depth.
BEYOND THE STATE AND STATE SPACE: PRACTICES
AND POSITIONS
Scott does not define what he means by the state, but
talk of what the state sees or does suggests an image of the

state as a unified source of intention, a person writ large
(Mitchell 1991:83), capable of devising coherent policies
and plans. This image of the state serves Scotts purpose
well because he is interested in centrally planned schemes;
however, it has several limitations. The state, argues Philip
Abrams (1988), is not a fact but a claim. For him, the idea
of the state is at most a message of dominationan ide- cal control; specification and regulation were rather ends
ological artifact attributing unity, morality and indepen-
dence to the disunited, amoral and dependent workings
of the practice of government (Abrams 1988:81). Timothy
Mitchell draws our attention to the modern techniques
of governing that produce the apparent solidness of the
state and its separation from society. Rather than take the
presence of the state for granted, Mitchell recommends
that we examine the practices through which the un-
certain yet powerful distinction between state and soci-
ety is produced (1991:78). In this way, we can account
for the prominence of the state idea, without attributing
to the state a coherence, unity, and absolute autonomy
(Mitchell 1991:78) that it does not have.2 Several anthro-
pologists have pursued this line of inquiry to good effect,
examining not only how state officials produce plans but
also how practices of data collection, planning, and so
on produce the apparent autonomy and authority of the
state.3
The idea of the state is associated with an image of
power as a thingone that is spatially concentrated in the
bureaucratic apparatus and the top echelons of the ruling
regime, from which it spreads outward across the nation,
and downward into the lives of the populace. Critics of the
concept of an up there state with stored powers ready for
deployment argue for a decentering of our power geome-
tries, to examine how power works to constitute distinc-
tive spaces and how, conversely, the arrangement of space
generates the effect of power.4 The idea of the nation,
for example, is the effect of practices such as marking and
policing borders, mapping and dividing territory, issuing
passports, passing laws, and collecting statistics. Attending
to practices keeps the focus on how questions: how dif-
ferent locales are constituted as authoritative and powerful,
how different agents are assembled with specific powers,
and how different domains are constituted as governable
and administrable (Dean 1999:29).
In his account of indirect rule in colonial Fiji, Nicholas
Thomas provides an illustration of how practices produce
the effect of distinct spaces with uneven powers. The colo-
nial regime needed to support the authority of local chiefs
over villagers while simultaneously subordinating the chiefs
to colonial rule and imparting to the populace the sense of
being subject to an overarching power. These goals were
achieved by having the Native chiefs perform as petty offi-
cials. They were instructed by the governor to write every-
thing downletting no event, no birth, death, or alterca-
tion pass through the mesh of surveillanceand to submit
regular reports. This activity was significant, Thomas argues,
not so much for the substance of the information thus col-
lected, which was mostly trivial, but for the way the practice
Li Beyond the State and Failed Schemes 385
created the effect of overview, of government as a system,
and of preeminent powers revolving around the figure of
the governor, to whom all reports were submitted. The re-
markable array of regulations, ordinances, resolutions and
interventions . . . [were] essentially irrational and had little
impact on the health of the populations or even on politi-
in themselves, which constituted the ambit of state control
(Thomas 1994:123124).
Practices position people as subjects with variable ca-
pacities for action and critique. Thus, practices of planning
and management position people as experts, or as targets
of expertise; practices of mapping, census taking, and law
making position people as residents of villages, bearers of
rights, and members of groups; kinship practices position
people in gendered and generational hierarchies; and cul-
tural practices mark ethnic boundaries and territorial enti-
tlements. Resistance arises from within these matrices and
responds to multiple fields of power. Donald Moore (1998)
illustrates this point strikingly in his account of Angela, a
farmer in Zimbabwes Eastern Highlands who constructed
a solitary, bright blue house inside the linear grid of an of-
ficial resettlement scheme. Her action was, at once, a re-
sponse to official threats and coercion, a claim to the ben-
efits promised by her participation in the independence
struggle, a critique of an ineffective tribal chief, and an as-
sertion of the autonomy she gained by farming on land sit-
uated beyond the control of multiple male guardians and
instructors.
Scott is interested in locating pristine spaces outside
power, pure sites of resistance, and subjects whose geo-
graphical location on the margins of markets and states
enable them to retain their autonomy and practical knowl-
edge intact.5 A focus on positioning, I suggest, brings a more
complex field of meaning and action into view. It enables
us to distinguish and examine the relations between posi-
tions of different kinds: geographical location (margins or
centers), social standing (dominant or subaltern), and po-
litical stance (acquiescent or resistant). Resistance may be
found at the heart of the bureaucratic apparatus, where ex-
perts debate the merits of diverse plans or argue against
excessive intervention in peoples lives. Populations ex-
cluded from official maps and invisible in the national cen-
sus may be more deeply taken by the idea of the state
than savvy, urban skeptics; therefore, they devise strategies
to position themselves closer to what they imagine to be the
center.6
BEYOND STATE SCHEMES: MULTIPLE AUTHORITIES
DEVISING IMPROVEMENTS
Scott recognizes the potential anachronism of his focus on
the state as the singular source of grand schemes, and he
situates state-driven, high-modern planning from roughly
1830 to World War I (1998:89). He explains that only states
have the material and coercive resources to move peo-
ple around and build cities and settlements. Furthermore,
386 American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005
only states have an interest in mapping and listing popu-
lations for the purpose of taxation and control. Less visi-
ble in Scotts account are the missionaries, social reform-
ers, scientists, political activists, ethnographers, and other
experts who routinely diagnose deficiencies in the popu-
lation or some segment of it, and who propose calculated
schemes of improvement. These parties were active in colo-
nial situations, sometimes aligning with and other times
contesting the priorities of the ruling regime.7 Today they
are joined by the misnamed nongovernmental organiza-
tions, both national and transnational, which are involved
in arenas such as public health, welfare, agricultural exten-
sion, conservation, human rights, good governance, and,
increasingly, peace buildingall elements of the hydra-
headed endeavor we have come to know as development.
The extent to which improvement schemes are concen-
trated inor coordinated bythe official state apparatus
is a matter for empirical investigation at specific sites and
conjunctures.
Rather than emerging fully formed from a single source,
many improvement schemes are formed through an as-
semblage of objectives, knowledges, techniques, and prac-
tices of diverse provenance. In the words of Nikolas Rose
(1999:276), a scheme often starts out as a contingent lash-
up with less coherence than we might assume. He gives the
example of 19th-century working-class pedagogy in Britain
that
arose out of a multitude of attempts by churchmen, phi-
lanthropists and organizations of working people them-
selves, seeking to educate their children and to campaign
for the extension of their own experiments in pedagogy
on a wider scale: only later were these diverse and often
radical lines of development to be captured, reorganized
and rationalized within a programme of universal educa-
tion which combined these aspirations with others to do
with order, civility and domestication. [Rose 1999:276]
Marc DuBois (1991:1018) describes a similar trajectory in
the field of birth control. Women in the late 19th cen-
tury demanded contraception in the name of reproductive
health and autonomy. Their demand generated a new do-
main of intervention for medical professionals who devised
technologies, regulated access, and dictated morality. Con-
traceptive techniques were later taken up for quite different
purposes by social engineers concerned with the eugenic
improvement of populations. These techniques traveled
to the global south under the label population control,
where the concern was with impoverished masses making
demands on the worlds resources. Invasive, top-down pop-
ulation control was subjected to critique and reframed, iron-
ically enough, as a measure to secure womens reproductive
health and autonomy.
It is important to note that each point in the trajectories
Rose and DuBois describe involved a different assemblage
of interests, experts, techniques, and discourses; further, the
shift from one conjuncture to the next was the outcome of
agency and struggle rather than a master plan. There was no
single state vision. Different government departments were
involved, pursuing various agendas that meshed with pop-
ular demand in contingent ways. When an assemblage be-
comes stabilized as a discursive formation, it supplies a com-
plex of knowledge and practice in terms of which certain
kinds of problems and solutions become thinkable whereas
others are submerged, at least for a time. The goals and de-
sires of particular social groups contribute to the emergence
of a discursive formation, but such a formation is not the
preserve of one social group, and it does not necessarily
serve the interests of a dominant class. It is formed within
relations of power, but it is not conjured up ex nihilo by a
sovereign will. Assemblage is itself an ongoing process, and
a discursive formation is never complete or finished. In fact,
neither is it really singular: It is always subject to contesta-
tion and reformulation by a range of pressures and forces it
cannot contain.8
The stability of a discursive formation is demonstrated
when elements that are pragmatically lashed up become
systematized, their discrepant origins submerged. Another
indicator is its transferability, when problems remote in
time, space, or substance from the original problematic
come to be thought about in a similar way (Rose 1999:27
30). It may crystallize into institutions. Most significantly,
it is stabilized when it comes to inform individual be-
havior and to act as a grid for perception and evaluation
(Foucault 1991b:81). An example of a discursive forma-
tion that has remained remarkably stable as it has been
revised and reworked in terms of new concerns is the prob-
lem of shifting cultivation in Zambia, described by Hen-
rietta Moore and Megan Vaughan (1994). They show how
a body of (selective) knowledge about this problem was
produced at one period, circulated, archived, dredged up,
and redeployed not once but repeatedly, obsessively, for
more than a centuryeach time in a changed context
but with many of the constituent elements (e.g., terms,
images, rationales, proposed solutions) intact. Moreover,
it was not simply imposed from outside: Zambian in-
siders, including farmers, contributed to this discursive
formation.
The grandiose, high-modern, state-driven projects of
rural and urban planning described by Scott were utopian
attempts to remake the world according to criteria of ratio-
nality and aesthetics, with spaces neatly divided, and pop-
ulations listed and classified. Finding the world refractory,
they often retreated into miniaturism, as Scott observes, mi-
cromanaging confined spaces and producing visual effects
that were all the more striking because of their spatial con-
centration. Less visible, but directed to similar ends, are the
formal techniques and grids of calculationthe surnames,
maps, and censuses designed to know and manage popula-
tions. Less visible still are the countless, often competing,
local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, man-
agement, incitement, motivation, encouragement (Dillon
1995) in fields such as public schooling, health, and rural
development. Such tactics typically operate at a distance,
relying on processes of translation that instrumentalize
existing forms of authority, invoke a range of expertise,

and adapt the projects devised by one party to the language
and concerns of another (Rose 1999). Whether visible and
grandiose, or subtle and discreteand whether initiated by
a centralized state apparatus or by other expertsall of these
schemes attempt to improve the human condition. To
better understand the origins and contours of the will to
improve, and the range of schemes it has spawned and le-
gitimized, we can usefully turn to Michel Foucaults theo-
rization of governmental power.
BEYOND HIGH MODERNISM: THEORIZING
GOVERNMENTALITY
Foucaults work on governmentality traces the history of
the emergence in Europe of a novel concern among rulers
and philosophers: how to optimize the well-being of the
population. This concern arose gradually during the 16th
century in the context of changing views about statecraft,
but it came sharply into view in the 18th century when the
new science of statistics revealed that populations have pat-
terns of health, fertility, mobility, and prosperity that can
be examined and managed for the benefit of one and all. Se-
curing the well-being of the population required attention
to the
complex composed of men and things . . . men in their
relations, their links, their imbrication with those other
things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence,
the territory with all its specific qualities, climate, irriga-
tion, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to . . . customs,
habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in
their relation to . . . accidents and misfortunes such as
famine, epidemics, death, etc. [Foucault 1991a:93]
Determining when to intervene in these relations, and to
what ends, came to constitute a new art of government.
This art required a governmental rationalitya new way of
thinking about government as the right manner of dispos-
ing things in pursuit not of one dogmatic goal but rather
a whole series of specific finalities to be achieved through
multiform tactics (Foucault 1991a:95).9
Intrinsic to the art of government applied at the level
of the population is respect for the complexity of the rela-
tions on which the populations well-being depends, and
recognition that the processes intrinsic to populations can-
not be managed in micro detail. Government entails (1)
setting conditions so that people will be inclined to be-
have as they should, (2) acting on actions, yet (3) not at-
tempting to dictate actions or coerce the population. Gov-
ernmentalitys principal form of knowledge, observes Fou-
cault, is political economy: a reference to Adam Smiths
discovery of the invisible hand of the market, the hugely
complex and largely self-regulating way that economic pro-
cesses unfold and coordinate the infinite range and vari-
ability of individual wills. Just as governing authorities
should tread lightly in attempting to regulate the econ-
omy, the art of government directed toward the popula-
tion recognizes the delicate balance of its vital processes.
It devises projects of improvement while respecting the
Li Beyond the State and Failed Schemes 387
integrity and autonomous dynamics of the social body
(Hannah 2000:24).
The elaboration of government as a liberal art late in
the 18th century was a reaction to earlier attempts to use
new technologies of surveillancetechnologies such as the
standardized names, measures, maps, lists, permits, and
censuses described by Scottto govern through exhaus-
tive regulation (Burchell 1991:126). The liberal argument
was that attempts at detailed management were despotic,
futile, and harmful. As Graham Burchell explains the cri-
tique was not against despotism in the name of citizens
rights (You must not do this, you do not have the right);
rather, it focused on the hollowness of the claim to om-
niscience and totalizing direction (You must not do this
because you do not and cannot know what you are doing
[1991:137]).
Foucaults examination of the liberal arts of govern-
ment throws the specificity of the high-modern schemes
described by Scott into sharp relief. These schemes shared
a governmental concern with securing, sustaining, and en-
hancing life. But they ignored the lessons of political econ-
omy, attempting to fix social and economic processes into a
perfected model that brooked no movement. These schemes
deliberately removed people from the relations in which
their lives were embedded to build on a clean slate. They
were planned without humility. They were imposed coer-
cively by authoritarian regimes without democratic checks
and balances. They permitted no critique from liberal voices
within or outside the regime arguing against governing too
much. They were, as Scott observes, exceptional schemes
that flourished at particular conjunctures in which it be-
came thinkable and, for some, acceptable to attempt to
direct life in more depth and detail than liberal doctrines
advise. Finally, these schemes failed for the reasons liberal
critics of the late 18th century had already identified: Their
designers claimed an omniscience they did not have, and
they did notindeed, could notknow what they were
doing.
Bringing together the insights from Foucault and Scott
enables us to situate schemes to improve the human con-
dition on a continuum that ranges from the more to the
less coercive, and that encompasses a range of tactics and
techniques. The World Bank scheme that I outlined ear-
lier attempts to direct conduct through the tactic of entice-
ment: Rational actors who wish to access project funds will
chose to conform to project rules. The urban and rural plan-
ning schemes described by Scott coercively destroyed exist-
ing spatial arrangements and introduced new ones, with
the expectation that from the novel spatial arrangements
improved conduct would follow. More authoritarian forms
of government are often reserved for sections of a popu-
lation deemed especially deficient and unable to exercise
the responsibility of freedom. Indeed, liberalism is replete
with contradictions, as the freedom of some is predicated
on the unfreedom of others.10 In 19th-century Europe, as
Giovanna Procacci (1991) explains, social experts separated
paupers from the general category the poor and deprived
388 American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005
paupers of rights on the grounds of chronic, cultural inca-
pacity. Excluded from full citizenship, they were the target
of schemes for heightened surveillance, extending at times
to enforced discipline in pauper colonies and penal institu-
tions. The normal poor, in contrast, were largely unana-
lyzed and unadministered.
In Europes colonies, rule was based on conquest. As
Achille Mbembe (2001) reminds us, there was no colonial
contract and no regime of rights to limit the greed or de-
struction wrought by extractive regimes. Discipline could
be imposed without the interjection of liberal scruples. Yet
the liberal arts of government were not absent from the
colonies: They coemerged in the colonies roughly in par-
allel with their emergence in Europe, although for rather
different reasons. Like the paupers of Europe, colonial pop-
ulations were racialized and pathologized: Entire popula-
tions were regarded as both different and deficient. But the
response to this pathology could not be the same. Whereas
Europes paupers could be separated from the general popu-
lation and subjected to intense disciplinary tutelage, it was
often not feasible, militarily or economically, to subject en-
tire colonial populations to the same treatment. The req-
uisite apparatus of surveillance was not in place. Thus, the
search was on for means to govern colonial populations
through existing social forces, a prime example being sys-
tems for indirect rule that enrolled the authority of chiefs
and deployed it to new purposes. Another tactic was to di-
vide the colonized on ethnic or spatial linesleaving some
segments of the population to find their way in a regime
of liberal freedoms, subjecting others to detailed programs
designed to inculcate new habits and values, and designat-
ing still others as static bearers of tradition.11 In contexts
in which their extractive endeavors were modest, it was
generally in the interest of colonial authorities to desist
from interventions that might provoke resistance or upset
the balance of economic, social, and ecological processes
unnecessarily. Countering the reticence to intervene was
the will to improve, a notion emphasizing the right and
the responsibility of the colonial power to develop natures
bounty and bring Native welfare and productivity up to new
standards.12
The concept of governmentality offers a useful theo-
rization of the distinctive mode of power focused on popu-
lations and their improvement. But like all theories, it must
be judged by its yield: the questions it enables us to ask
and the light it sheds on particular conjunctures, with their
own histories, spatialities, and practices of rule. A focus on
governmentality provokes us to ask how particular govern-
mental programs are devised, the techniques they assem-
ble, and how they are transformed or fall apart. It is consis-
tent with a differentiated view of ruling regimes, engaged in
their own debates over the appropriate forms and limits of
intervention, and variably responsive to input from experts
and other publics. It enables us to understand why, for ex-
ample, there was no consensus about how to rule colonial
Indonesia in the 19th century. Far from a singular state vi-
sion, there were multiple experts and authorities. Some ad-
vocated the drastic reconstitution of Native society to ren-
der it modern, others proposed only to adjust and optimize
traditional Native wayseven though to optimize tradi-
tion also meant to transform it, and sometimes to invent
it anew.13
BEYOND SIMPLIFICATION: EMBRACING COMPLEXITY
AND METIS
Scott is surely correct to observe that experts devising im-
provement schemes generate only the type and density
of data required to constitute a field of intervention and
to meet specific objectives.14 Less solid, I would suggest,
is Scotts argument that the elimination of local knowl-
edge and control are preconditions for administrative or-
der, taxation, worker discipline, and profit (Scott 1998:335
336). To refine the inquiry initiated by Scott about the
relationship between simplification, control, and improve-
ment, it is useful to identify conjunctures at which com-
plexity and local knowledge are sustained and to tease out
the reasons why. Here, I consider four such conjunctures: (1)
when systematic data is ignored in favor of local knowledge,
(2) when adjusting local knowledge and practice is the pur-
pose of the intervention, (3) when local knowledge sustains
bureaucratic and profit-making schemes that would other-
wise collapse, and (4) when local knowledge and practice
is embraced because experts recognize it to be intrinsically
sound.
I begin with instances in which ruling regimes and
other authorities collect very detailed data they do not ac-
tually use. I have already drawn on Nicholas Thomass ac-
count of excessive data gathering in colonial Fiji. In colo-
nial Java, in the context of the so-called Ethical Policy that
recognized Dutch responsibility for Native well-being, a
Diminished Welfare Inquiry was initiated in 1902 cover-
ing 533 topics (Husken 1994:215). It aimed at a complete
survey of Native life: food, land tenure, methods of culti-
vation, irrigation and indebtedness; the state of the fish-
eries, and of industry and commerce; and the influence
of European enterprise and Foreign Orientals on Native
life and welfare (Furnivall 1944:393). The report, which
took a decade to compile, came to no overall conclusions
about the causes of diminished welfare, and it did not
provide a clear direction for policy. Such clarity, argues
Frans Husken, was impossible in view of the contradic-
tory interests at work in colonial society. Business inter-
ests concerned to promote commercial development in the
home country saw increased Native welfare as a boon to
the newly emerging Dutch industrial export sector; for en-
trepreneurs in the colonial plantation sector, cheap labor
was key (Husken 1994:217). In practice, comprehensive in-
formation was not really needed for policy formulation,
which proceeded on the basis of existing diagnoses of the
Native problem. Foremost was the problem of population
increase, to be compensated by improved irrigation, educa-
tion, credit, and agricultural extensionsolutions already
proposed by senior officials before the survey was conducted

(see van Deventer 1961:256261). Neither did all this infor-
mation clarify whether making the Javanese more industri-
ous would suffice to solve the problem of Native poverty,
a solution that retained faith in market forces, or whether
poverty was the outcome of Native culture and hence diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to change. The desire for totalizing
information, with its prospect of making policy on a scien-
tific basis, was not matched by the political or administra-
tive utility of that information.
Also in Java, decades earlier, there had been attempts to
map land and collect data on its productivity to standardize
taxes; much of the data, however, was never used. A land
rent ordinance of 1872 that required officials to use this
data produced tax assessments that, according to the Resi-
dents (senior Dutch officials), bore no relation to reality
(Hugenholtz 1994:163). The Residents advocated a return
to the old system of routine tax bargaining between Dutch
officials and village heads. This system, known as admodi-
atie, had permitted ad hoc but fine-grained calibrations of
peasants capacity to pay. It was irregular, but not unfair and new powers.15
(Hugenholtz 1994:166). It seems the Residents recognized
that the subtle adjustments they could make when the expe-
rience, wisdom, and local knowledge of Dutch officials was
combined with that of village heads was more adept. It also
caused less resistance and disruption. Nevertheless, under
the Ethical Policy, the attempt to produce comprehensive
maps and codifications was revived. These examples suggest
that the will to know exceeds the requirements of orderly
rule and may actually hinder it.
Next, let us consider instances in which local wisdom
and knowledge is itself the subject of detailed research and
planned improvement. The premise of the World Bank
project I outlined earlier is that the customary practices of
association, trust, mediation, and mutual surveillance al-
ready existing in Indonesian villages have been undermined
by clumsy top-down regulations and blueprints. Restored,
optimized, and adapted to new purposes, these customary
practices, glossed as social capital, can be an important de-
velopment resource. To document this local wisdom, and to
devise the necessary improvements, the World Bank project
has generated thousands of pages of detailed ethnographic
descriptions, case studies, and field reports as well as exten-
sive surveys subject to statistical analysis.
What does this data do? Planning data, as James
Ferguson (1994) demonstrated, is sui generis: It identifies
only those problems for which a technical remedy within
the competence of the planners can be supplied. In this
case, because the anticipated remedy to the problem of
poor planning requires tinkering with village practices and
institutions, justification for the intervention must be de-
rived from the details of what goes on inside Indonesias vil-
lages. More substantively, in order to design interventions
to change behavior, the planners need to know why vil-
lagers act as they do. Only then can they devise appropriate
rules and set conditions to bring about improvement.
Ethnographic data of the kind collected by the World
Bank cannot be used in its raw form. One could say that it
Li Beyond the State and Failed Schemes 389
needs to be simplified, but the operation performed by the
World Banks social experts is more accurately described as
rendering technical the domain to be governed. Render-
ing technical means to represent the arena of intervention
as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particu-
lar characteristics . . . whose component parts are linked to-
gether in some more or less systematic manner by forces,
attractions and coexistences (Rose 1999:33). In this case,
it was the concept of social capital that enabled World
Bank experts to represent Indonesian village life in tech-
nical terms, organizing the potentially overwhelming di-
versity of practices into a set of diagnoses (too little social
capital, the wrong kind of social capital, or exemplary social
capital) and make plausible connections between the inter-
ventions proposed and the outcomes anticipated. These op-
erations of classification, interpretation, and connection do
simplify, but they also generate something newnew ways
of seeing oneself and others, new problems to be addressed,
new modes of calculation and evaluation, new knowledge,
A third type of intersection between local knowledge,
simplification, and control arises when local knowledge is
tacitly tolerated or actively sustained because it supports
both rule and profit. Scotts emphasis on state simplification
as a precondition of administrative order sits uneasily with
his recognition that planning encounters nearly endless
and shifting sets of implicit understandings, tacit coordina-
tions, and practical mutualities that could never be success-
fully captured in a written code (1998:255256). Indeed,
Scott speculates, The greater the pretense of and insistence
on officially decreed micro-order, the greater the volume of
non-conforming practices necessary to sustain that fiction
(1998:261). The obvious gap between official rules and on-
the-ground practices, and Scotts observation that they are
mutually constitutive and parasitic, offers an insight into
how power works that could well be extended.
Scott highlights communities that are marginal to
markets and to the state (1998:335) where direct reliance
on natural resources and covillagers fosters observation, ex-
perimentation, and learning-by-doing. Yet practical knowl-
edge of the kind he identifies is at work everywhere, at all
times. It is not concentrated in remote rural areas, and it
is not associated with the past or tradition. The knowl-
edge a person needs to negotiate the bureaucracy or find
a moments peace on an assembly line, a factory farm, or
in a prison is just as localized, often collective, transmit-
ted informally, and continuously revised. It is not the case
that an up there, all-seeing, systematizing state both pro-
mulgates and observes rules, which a down there popu-
lace tries to resist. Officials and other parties that seek to
govern need to be every bit as creative in negotiating their
own work regimes, and devising practices to translate shaky
numbers into solid ones or failed projects into plausible ver-
sions of success. Scott recognizes this when he describes
Tanzanian officials coming up with notional villages and
inflated numbers of households resettled (1998:244). How
bureaucrats fix facts routinely become public secrets, part
390 American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005
of a knowledge base that enables people to manage their
relations to the state apparatus. The gaps between plans,
claims, and facts on the ground compromise the author-
ity of the ruling regime and its ability to exert control.16
Attempts to close gaps result only in the proliferation of un-
derground practices both within and outside the state appa-
ratus. Gaps are inevitable, and they are necessary not only
for surviving or resisting rule but also for maintaining it.
If we recognize that rule depends not on the elimina-
tion of local knowledge but on an uneasy set of compro-
mises, what of Scotts second claimthat the elimination of
local knowledge is a precondition for profit? No doubt there
are conjunctures where that is the case: The expulsion of in-
digenous populations from their land producing empty
spaces ripe for exploitation and laborers deprived of access
to the means of production is a radical simplification of this
kind; the Taylorization of factory work is another. But there
are counterexamples that are more complex. I am thinking
of peasant agriculture and the informal economy in both
city and countryside. Scott argues that peasant agriculture
has endured because of its flexibility and capacity to adapt
to changing ecological, economic, and social conditions as
well as farmer preference for autonomy. Yet a significant
literature in the 1970s explored how large-scale capitalist
enterprise profited from the retention of peasant and petty
commodity production as well as womens unpaid domestic
labor.17 People who produce their own subsistence are able
to supply goods to the market at prices that do not cover
the costs of their own reproduction. This reduces the wage
that must be paid to laborers in capitalist enterprises.
Employers do not need to know the details of how peas-
ants, informal sector workers, or women laboring at home
provide cheap goods and services, and they do not necessar-
ily need to regulate or improve their techniques. They only
need to set the conditions so that this kind of production
continues to subsidize their own ventures. In the case of
apartheid South Africa, these conditions were set coercively,
by forcibly relocating people to homelands in which they
had somehow to sustain themselves. Often, however, the
relationship between sectors is more organic. It would be
difficult for a planner to conjure peasant production or the
urban informal sector into being simply because it is func-
tional to capital. Petty producers maintain this form of ac-
tivity for their own reasons. But corporations and ruling
regimes can recognize the profitability of this set of relations
arising naturally in the population and conclude that it
should be sustained rather than closed down or redirected.
Finally, we can consider the relation between local
knowledge, control, and improvement when local knowl-
edge is recognized and embraced. Scott advocates this posi-
tion. He recommends that experts pay attention to the com-
plexities of peasant agricultural techniques and learn from
them. Embracing does not mean doing nothing: It means
that experts should study, document, and perhaps propose
improvements, so long as these are finely attuned to local
conditions. In Southeast Asia there has been two decades
of research on indigenous agroforestry systems, dissecting
their nutrient cycling processes, canopy features, and so on.
Much of this research has been funded by donor agencies,
evidence of the expectation that description will eventu-
ally lead to prescription of improved techniques and best
practices suitable for replication in new venues. Often, the
proposition is that scientists will learn from farmers and
also teach them something useful. Also, it is expected that
one set of farmers will learn from another. I find something
quite contradictory about this endeavor. If the premise is
that indigenous knowledge is derived from decades, if not
centuries, of farmer observation and experimentation with
cultigens and cultivation practices adapted to specific mi-
croenvironments, social habits, family labor, inheritance
patterns, and market niche, what can scientists add? Why
should the practices of one group of farmers be of interest
to another group, who have presumably devised their own,
equally adaptive farming system?18
Contradictions of this kind quickly emerge when inter-
ventions are designed to improve on complex indigenous
farming systems. In a part of Indonesia I know quite well,
an NGO is promoting Low External Input Sustainable Agri-
culture (LEISA) combined with Participatory Technology
Development (PTD). With this combination, the NGO in-
tends to blend science and local knowledge to arrive at
improved and integrated farming systems that yield sta-
ble and sustainable production levels, mimicking nature
and maintaining diversity, living soil, and cyclic flows of
nutrients (CARE 2002:15). The project proponents describe
LEISA as a principle rather than a fixed technology, and
they consider it especially suited to bring together the goals
of small farmers and conservationists, because it increases
on-farm biodiversity while also improving livelihoods. The
LEISA approach and goals meet Scotts criteria for planned
improvements very wellstart small, proceed stepwise, rely
on local knowledge, and expect farmers to have objectives
other than short-run profit. But an evaluation of the NGO
project found that the farmers had little interest in biodi-
versity; instead, they were mainly interested maximizing
incomes from the current boom cropcocoa. The expert
agronomists were not able to devise any interventions that
would increase livelihoods significantly: Whatever could be
done, farmers were already doing it. In relation to their pre-
ferred crop, the farmers understood full well that shade-
grown cocoa lives longer and requires fewer chemical in-
puts, but they still opted to grow their cocoa in full sun to
commence harvest as soon as possible.19
In another example, also from Indonesia, Patrice
Levang (1997) recounts the troubled trajectory and rapid
demise of an agroforestry project that was planned as a
direct response to criticism that Indonesian resettlement
schemes promoted agricultural techniques and monocrop
systems unsuited to upland environments. Experts devised
a system to combine several varieties of food crops with
the cash crop rubber in a package carefully tailored to pro-
mote farmer self-sufficiency. They offered intensive advice
and training to the resettled farmers. But the farmers found
the proposed biodiverse farming system with its many

operations and inputs far too expensive and labor inten-
sive. They soon switched to monocrop rubber combined
with wage labor, a combination they found more profitable
and more secure. Farmer metis, that is to say, included a
short-run, market orientation.
Scott advocates the retention of complex, biodiverse,
farm-and-forest systems with multigenerational time hori-
zons for very sound, ecological reasons, but these are not
necessarily the systems preferred by farmerseven farm-
ers in the physically remote highland areas he imagines to
be marginal to markets and states. There are contexts in
which biodiversity can be protected simply by recognizing
and valuing farmer practices and knowledge. In other con-
texts, to promote ecological values over short-run cash in-
comes is to claim an expert knowledge about how farmers
should live and to seek to direct their conduct.
BEYOND FAILURE: WHAT SCHEMES DO
The subtitle to Scotts Seeing Like a State (1998) is How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed; this phrase captures his principal interest and the
driving argument. Yet the question of failure can be use-
fully turned around in the manner proposed by Ferguson
in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994): What do schemes do?
What are their contradictory, messy, and refractory effects?
Scotts book offers many insights into this question, as he
describes what happened to the various schemes he ex-
plores, but more could be said if effects became the principal
focus. To draw on my previous discussion, the emergence
of practices of compromise and collusion to fill the gap be-
tween project plans and on-the-ground realities is an effect.
It jeopardizes, or at least compromises, the authority of of-
ficials and the position of those who claim expertise. Scott
reports that high-modern schemes were routinely resisted.
Resistance involves not simply rejection but the creation
of something new, as people articulate their critiques, find
allies, and reposition themselves in relation to the various
powers they must confront. Although Scott is correct that
we should not assume local practice conforms to official de-
sign, it is nevertheless shaped and affected by that design,
often in unexpected ways. It is not the case, as I argued
earlier, that we can separate power and resistance: They are
intertwined.
Scotts attempt to generalize about the effects of high-
modern schemes yields an unresolved contradiction. He ar-
gues that high-modernist designs for life and production
tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and morale of
their intended beneficiaries (1998:349). But he soon quotes
a woman from Novosibirsk, scolding experts for thinking
Soviet collectivization had destroyed peasant skills and ini-
tiative. The woman points out that without skill and initia-
tive, members of collective farms could never have survived
(Scott 1998:350). If this kind of initiative was exercised in
and around a collectivization project imposed by a regime
without checks to its coercive powers, one can safely assume
it is exercised everywhere. Thus, improvement schemes are
Li Beyond the State and Failed Schemes 391
simultaneously destructive and productive of new forms of
local knowledge and practice. Rather than attempt to gener-
alize, the effects of planned interventions have to be exam-
ined empirically, in the various sites where they unfold
families, villages, towns, and inside the bureaucracy, among
others.
High-modern planners, according to Scott, prefer to
construct new landscapes on a blank slate so that every-
thing can be designed and implemented without reference
to what went before. Scott makes a convincing case that
farmers who are resettled in ecological zones where none of
their previous farming practices are relevant lose their previ-
ous stock of knowledge and the associated seeds, tools, and
so on, and they must devise new ones. People can never be
entirely blank, but Scott argues that removing them from
their lands, communities, kin, and traditions can radically
disorient them and make them more vulnerable to official
command (1998:235, 251). He is surely correct to remind
us of the dreadful consequences of change imposed in this
manner. In Canada, the practice of tearing Native children
from their families and sending them to residential schools
was deliberately designed to undo them and then remake
them, minus the presumed pathologies of their Native-
ness. It had a devastating effect on individuals and com-
munities, damage that continues to affect new generations
who never attended these schools.
One reason for the attempt to relocate and remake pop-
ulations, according to Scott, is to thwart collective protest
(1998:253). Again, whether or not this is actually the effect
is an empirical question. In my research on resettled high-
landers in Sulawesi, Indonesia, the effect has been quite the
opposite. People moved under state schemes were made
promises about improved lives and livelihoods that have
not been met. Rather than accept the discrepancy between
promise and outcome, they have begun to challenge ex-
perts and officials, and organize themselves to claim their
due. Resettlement did not render them quiescent and ab-
ject, it radicalized them in ways no one would have pre-
dicted. In Paris in the mid19th century, as Scott notes, the
people dislocated by Haussmans city planning reassembled
and struck back with the revolutionary claims of the Paris
Commune (1998:5963).
Some effects take years, perhaps decades, to emerge,
and they, too, are conjunctural: Overt protest against reset-
tlement was rare in Indonesia under Suharto where the level
of coercion was high, but it has emerged with a vengeance
in the reform period since 1998. Sadly, protests are not al-
ways directed at the bureaucratic apparatus that promoted
resettlement schemes, or at the donors who funded them,
but instead toward ethnic others in what have become het-
erogeneous spaces. Indigenous people are now attempting
to reclaim land appropriated by the government for reset-
tlement schemes. They run up against the resettled popula-
tions that generally want to stay in the places to which they
were sentplaces where they have formed communities, at-
tracted further spontaneous migrants, and produced a new
generation. There is an urgent need for peaceful processes
392 American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005
to settle claims and reach agreementsprocesses required
to sort out the tangled thicket of tenure relations left behind
by official attempts to map and divide territory and to shift
people around. There can be no return to the status quo
ante, except through violent processes of ethnic cleansing.
Some of the downstream effects of improvement schemes
are very serious indeed, and they will be felt for a long time
to come.20 Scott has done much to bring these schemes to
our attention. Anthropologists have plenty of work ahead
as we investigate the beyond of grand plans at particular
sites and conjunctures.
T ANIA M URRAY L I Department of Anthropology, University
of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada
NOTES
Acknowledgments. Thanks to K. Sivaramakrishnan for inviting me
to participate in this project and for seeing it through. Thanks
to James Scott for encouraging debate and for his patience and
generosity as an interlocutor. Since 1989, the Canadian Social Sci-
ence and Humanities Research Council has supported my research
in Indonesia. A writing grant from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Program on Global Security and Sustain-
ability 200103 enabled me to develop the ideas reflected here.
1. For descriptions of this project and its premises, see Guggenheim
2004; Woodhouse 2001; and World Bank 2001a, 2002a, 2002b. To
understand how it fits within the World Banks larger neoliberal
program for improving Indonesia, see World Bank 2001b and 2004.
2. Abrams recommends avoiding use of the term the state in ways
that reinforce the state idea. Instead, he suggests replacing it with
more specific terms: the ruling regime, the bureaucratic apparatus, gov-
ernment policy, officials in the forest department, and so on.
3. See Escobar (1995), Ferguson (1994), Gupta (1995), and Hansen
and Stepputat (2001).
4. See Allen (1999, 2003), Ferguson and Gupta (2002), Li (1999b),
Massey (1993), Mitchell (1988), and Moore (1998).
5. Scott describes marginal and nonstate spaces in Seeing Like a State
(1998:185189, 335). For a critical engagement with the concept of
nonstate space in the context of the Sulawesi highlands, see Li
(2001). Mitchell (1990) uses a close reading of Weapons of the Weak
(1985) to argue that Scott seeks to discover autonomous, authentic
subjects and private, offstage places unpenetrated by power. See
also Moore (1998).
6. See Hansen (2001), Joseph and Nugent (1994), Li (2001), Nugent
(1994), Peluso (1995), Rosaldo (2003), and Tsing (1993).
7. See, for example, Schrauwerss account of the relationship be-
tween government officials and missionaries in colonial Indonesia
(2000).
8. OMalley et al. (1997:513) discuss the exaggerated closure of
expert schemes.
9. For helpful definitions and discussions of governmentality, see
Dean (1999) and Gordon (1991).
10. This argument is made by Dean (2001), Hindess (2001), Mehta
(1997), Parekh (1995), and Valverde (1996).
11. On colonial governmentality and its variations, see Comaroff
and Comaroff (1991), Cooper (1994), Mamdani (1996), Pels (1997),
Scott (1995), Stoler (1992), Stoler and Cooper (1997), and Thomas
(1994). The division of colonial populations and their differential
treatment is especially well described in Hindess (2001).
12. On the connection between improvement and the colonial
right to rule, see Drayton (2000).
13. On the invention of tradition, see Ranger (1993). For debates
about how to rule late colonial Indonesia, see Burns (2004), Cribb
(1994), Furnivall (1944), Kahn (1993), Lev (1985), Robinson (1995),
and Wertheim (1961); for an examination of the governmental
rationality embedded in the coercive Cultivation System in the
1830s, see Schrauwers (2001).
14. See Scott (1998:77, 80, 184).
15. See also Mitchells discussions of enframing as the set of tech-
niques and practices that produce an apparently exterior object
world susceptible to management (1991, 2002).
16. I have written about compromise in the context of improve-
ment schemes in Li (1999a). See also Herzfeld (1997).
17. See Bradby (1975), Bromley (1979), Foster-Carter (1979), Scott
(1979), and Whitehead (1981, 1990).
18. See the resource book on shifting cultivation produced by
a set of international research agencies (IFAD et al. 2001); also
Crasswell (1998) and Garrity and Amoroso (1998).
19. On LEISA and problems in implementation, see CARE (2002).
On farmer interest in monocrop, market-oriented production, see
Belsky and Siebert (2003) and Li (2002b).
20. I have discussed some of these problems in Li (2002a, 2003).
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