Confounded but Complacent: Accounting for How the State Sees Responses to Its Housing Intervention in Johannesburg
研究了南非国家通过免费住房改善穷人生活的努力，因后续未经授权的住房使用和改造而受阻，国家官员虽有了解却仍谴责这些行为，缺乏深入分析其动因。
The South African state’s ‘will to improve’ poor people’s lives through free home-ownership is unsettled by subsequent unauthorised housing usage and adaptions. Despite insight into and empathy for these non-compliant activities amongst some state housing practitioners, the dominant state position is to denounce them without analysing their drivers and significance. This position is enabled by the state’s selective use of knowledge, confidence in the housing project as is, and avoidance of discomforting signals. The ‘will to improve’ is not matched by a deep ‘will to know’, in part because the capacity to act under difficult circumstances is argued to depend on a form of ‘not knowing’.