A seminal resource, so just pulling together the links here.

The wikipedia is quite good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

There are a number of good references on the old model.report (now no longer supported, so all the activity has moved here to syscoi.com): https://model.report/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22seeing+like+a+state%22&what=all&order=relevance

You will find lots of rich references in Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer’s ‘Gently Serious’ Medium publication, e.g.: https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/03/01/healing-the-metabolic-rift-gentlyserious-medium/

Relevant:
https://stream.syscoi.com/2018/05/01/improvement-legibility-ecosystems-and-change/

https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/11/21/the-efficiency-destroying-magic-of-tidying-up-florent-crivello/