DECENTRALISATION AND THE PLANNING PRINCIPLE 43 governance. These weaknesses are of many kinds. First, the system presumes that central planners have adequate access to the wide and enormous range of information required to execute their implicit brief. This "informational inadequacy55 arises only partly because of the difficulties involved in creating a framework which allows for the collection, collation and transmission of the required information at a fast enough pace. It also results from the fact that agents at lower levels of implementation and governance may choose to hold back and not transmit crucial information or even find incentives for transmitting partial or incorrect information, which puts the whole mechanism in threat. This leads up to the second inadequacy, which is the belief that either the objectives and goals of agents at all levels of decision-making or implementation (including shop-floor workers or workers in agricultural co-operatives or state-owned farms) are common or that all agents can be made to adopt the objectives considered appropriate by the central planners. This problem has always been recognised in the traditional discourse on planning, which considered politics to be key to realising this prerequisite. Consensus among the majority around the political agenda, seen as a requirement to put in place the system of central planning itself, and the ability to use that consensus to enforce non-financial penalties for deviance, were seen as adequate to ensure commonality in objectives pursued by different agents. In practice, it is clear, that the extreme difficulty in keeping in place a consensus, created in the course of transiting to a system of central planning, for long periods of time, and of detecting deviance and enforcing penalties, was substantially underestimated. Thirdly, even though a system of centralised investment-decision making has the potential to overcome the problem of secondary uncertainty, it had to face the problem of "primary uncertainty" to the same degree as any system of atomistic decision-making. Needless to say, uncertainty of a kind described euphemistically as "acts of god" such as vagaries of the monsoon, floods or earthquakes can never be fully predicted and planned for. But theoretically at least, a centrally controlled system with a strong state should be more capable of dealing with such emergencies, despite claims to the contrary based on doubtful evidence. However, there are other aspects of primary uncertainty such as uncertainty regarding the directions of development of science and technology and of the evolution of tastes and lifestyles, which even if not correctly predicted, should be accommodated with a more flexible environment aimed at fostering