Introduction

Why have so many huge development schemes, designed to improve the human condition in poor countries, so tragically failed? In the course of addressing this question I have, I believe, stumbled across the rudiments of what might be called a “geography of trust.” Put crudely and briefly, authoritarian high-modernist development schemes replace thick, complex, quasi-autonomous social orders (and natural orders too) with thin, simplified, mechanical orders that function badly, even for the limited purposes for which they are designed. Such thin simplifications, if they survive at all, do so by virtue of their unacknowledged dependence on improvised “order” outside the scheme.

The sort of improvised order I have in mind has a lot to do with the “mutuality without hierarchy” celebrated by anarchist thinkers and practitioners. Such mutuality, I believe, rests on relations of trust analogous to those examined by the literature on democracy and trust, except for the fact that I will be examining it exclusively in its informal, nonorganizational forms.

Lest this description remain too cryptic, let me specify briefly the phenomenon I have in mind. It is captured in the labor tradition of the “work-to-rule” strike (grève du zèle). The premise of such a strike is that the formal rules and regulations governing work are never an adequate guide to the actual practice of work. To follow the rules mindlessly and to the letter is, in fact, to bring the work to a virtual standstill. formally.