1 Introduction

Building enough awareness of local discourse to make effective change is difficult. In the Introduction, we conveyed anthropologist Li’s (2007) sentiments that when asked by officials to provide a “bridge,” between her critical, anthropological research and their “world of projects,” she could not (p. 3). The reason that bridge was “elusive” is partly explained by the difficulty of holding cultural-technological positions—to be critical and simultaneously to intervene technically, which were introduced in Chapter Two.

For planners untrained in ethnographic methods and critical social theory, particularly that targeting the Global South since the emergence of the sustainable development paradigm in the 1980s, research approaches (i.e., for doing planning) must be cultivated in ways that are proactive, efficient, rigorous and, on some level, a blunt force pushing those planners up an undeniably steep learning curve. Put in simpler terms, they must be untrained as planners. This chapter assembles a cache of recent critical discourse on development in Laos. The selected references are field studies undertaken by political scientists and critical geographers, anthropologists and sociologists that: (1) provide for these planners’ socialization in foreign, critical disciplines; (2) engender an awareness of local discourse; and (3) provide positioning, narratives and conceptual materials capable of giving inspiration and momentum to a planning and design process.

Importantly, the assembled discourse in this chapter must be considered a highly oblique entry into critical development studies, as it circumvents more canonical literature in development theory in favor of a Laos-centric survey. These field studies critically theorize and describe development projects and their contexts, including land-use planning cum resettlement projects, hydropower construction and watershed management, corporate social responsibility programs for large gold and copper mines, and regional economic corridors structured around road-upgrading projects. Theoretical genealogies are traced where necessary, and this chapter is admittedly heavier in its citations, offering both discipline- and actor-specific discourse for designers and planners.

The literature reviewed here offers a diverse and sometimes conflicting tapestry of theories and concepts from development studies, including sections: (1) The politics of land-use planning and its deployment in the state’s territorial strategies; (2) A brief recounting of origins, since the 1980s, of the paradigm of sustainable development as it was imposed on regulatory institutions of the Global South; (3) The ways large-scale resource extraction is reproduced at capitalism’s frontiers via complex and overlapping patchworks of relations between large-scale infrastructures, state land concessions, and their administration at various scales; and (4) Discourse on “infrastructure” as a concept and our capacity to plan and assess it. These sections are held together by their constructivist and critical theory approaches, focus on the means and ends of neoliberalism, and undercurrents of authority, expertise and the politics of intervention found throughout this book.

2 The Politics of Land-Use Planning

A 2012 article on the politics of land-use planning in Laos by geographers Lestrelin et al. opened with a detailed examination of how land-use planning is defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Guidelines. According to the FAO (1993), “Land-use planning is the systematic assessment of land and water potential, alternatives for land use and economic and social conditions in order to select and adopt the best land‐use options… Its purpose is to select and put into practice those land uses that will best meet the needs of the people while safeguarding resources for the future.” Lestrelin et al. (2012) argue that land-use planning, rather than being a straightforward technical exercise undertaken by well‐intentioned experts as framed by FAO, is in fact highly political and involves “the territorial projection of particular socioenvironmental perspectives and values” (p. 3). To better understand Lestrelin et al.’s assertion that land-use planning is an important instrument of territorialization, as well as to understand its central position in political debates over society and the environment, our investigation embraces two interrelated scholarly discussions, firstly the “politics of space” and secondly the “state’s territorial strategies.”

The disciplinary shift towards the theorization of space across many geographical and social sciences has progressed through several manifestations, mostly responding to the increasing mathematization, abstraction and formalization of space and time in everyday life (Peters & Kessl, 2009). Positing space as socially constructed, historically produced, and politically active, neo-Marxist researchers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja have been highly influential in “spatial” disciplines such as architecture, urban planning, and geography. In particular, Lefebvre’s seminal work The Production of Space (1991, first published 1974) provides a platform for understanding the modern complexities of form, structure, organization and experience. His assertion of the “politics of space” challenges planners and designers of the built environment to navigate the complexity of “the production of space.”

In various works on space, the city, and modernity including The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1971, 1977, 1987, 1995, 2003, 2009) repeatedly asserts that space is not a scientific object separated from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic. Challenging the objectivity and “purity” of space planning as a science, Lefebvre argues, “If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be ‘purely’ formal, the essence of rational abstraction, it is precisely because this space has already been occupied and planned, already the focus of past strategies… Space has been fashioned and molded from historical and natural elements, but in a political way” (2009, p. 170). Lefebvre defines space as a social construct and demands a critical analysis of how any given space is produced and the strategic objectives that dictate its design.

Lefebvre (1991) recognized three dimensions of the production of space, namely social practices (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and spaces of representation (lived space) (pp. 33, 38–39). Of these, he identified the representations of space (conceived space) as the most influential, the “space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic sub-dividers and social engineers… the dominant space of any society (or mode of production)” (pp. 38–39). According to Lefebvre, representations of space are deeply entwined with their ideological history. The professionals’ conception of space, as conceived and represented through maps, models, drawings, plans, etc., merely reflects how power molds the dominant discourses, which in turn determine how space is surveyed, controlled, delimited, delineated and organized to meet particular ends. He states that “any representation is ideological… Ideology is therefore inseparable from practice” (Lefebvre, 1977, p. 29), and “it is the role of ideologies to secure the assent of the oppressed and exploited” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 76).

Lefebvre argues that in order to grasp how modern environments are created, change and impact the lived experience of their populations, it is important to understand how space is produced, who produces it, who it is designed for, and what functions, purposes, and ends it is intended to serve. Space is the subject of conflicts over ownership, meaning, values, and uses—a crucial battleground where social justice and equality are routinely contested. Lefebvre points out that current spatial forms and configurations are not spontaneous; they are products of history. Dominant spatial forms are imposed, not by competing ideas and values in modernity, but by those who wield power and seek to control it in their own interests. Their ownership and regulation of space permits some actions and activities while limiting or prescribing others. “Spatial and temporal practices are never neutral in social affairs. They always express some kind of class or other social content and are more often than not the focus of intense social struggle” (Harvey, 1990, p. 239).

Lefebvre and other neo-Marxist writers on the politics of space pay particular attention to how the representations of space dominant under capitalism are enabled by processes of abstraction, including the quantification of space (alienation) and the elimination of differences (homogenization) (See, for example, Lefebvre, 1977, 1991; Harvey, 1978, 2001; Soja, 1989, 1996). Given the power to organize, regulate, delimit and delineate space according to functional priorities, these representations of space (conceived space) help create capitalist and neo-capitalist spaces that are quantified and increasingly homogenous and which facilitate production, consumption, reproduction and circulation in ways organized and structured to meet the requirements of capital. All the elements of such commodified space are exchangeable and thus interchangeable; it is also a policed space where no resistance or obstacles are tolerated by the state. “Economic space and political space,” Lefebvre (2009) argues, “converge toward the elimination of all differences” (p. 192).

While theories of the production of space enable geographers and social scientists to analyze ideas and values in modernity, a range of other authors are calling for more rigorous recognition of how Lefebvre’s spatial theory and analyses can be adapted, i.e., put to use, for more humane and just approaches to the planning and design of urban and rural environments (See, for example, Coleman, 2015; Fraser, 2011; Stanek, 2011; Zieleniec, 2018). Planners and designers, with their analytical preoccupation with abstract space, should actively respond to and engage with Lefebvre’s critical analyses of the processes of alienation and homogenization, particularly the spatial dimensions of his lifelong multifaceted critique of “the devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived, by abstraction” (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 10 as quoted in Wilson, 2013, p. 366).

Following intensified scholarly interest in the geographies of state space since the late 1990s, social scientists and political geographers, such as Agnew (1994, 2005), Sassen (1996, 2006), Brenner (1997, 2004) and Elden (2004, 2009), have further developed the territorial dimensions of Lefebvre’s thinking on state space. Although Lefebvre did not systematically conceptualize territory, his reflexive attention to the relationship between territory and modern state power supports territory as an essential feature of modern state space (Brenner & Elden, 2009). Brenner and Elden (2009) highlight three key dimensions of Lefebvre’s approach to “state space as territory,” namely the production of territory, state territorial strategies, and the “territory effect;” the latter refers to the state’s tendency to normalize its transformative effects on socio-spatial relations by means of its territorial form.

As socially constructed spaces, territories are recognizable as “discrete, distinctive, bounded, measurable, communicable spaces that are deliberately created in an effort to achieve certain social goals” (Murphy, 2012, p. 164). Territory is both a relation and an outcome of territoriality, a process defined by Robert Sack (1986) as the “attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area” (p. 19). According to Sack, territoriality involves the dual processes of classification and communication (pp. 21–22). Classification refers to theoretically eliminating or altering the need to regulate specific resources or individuals within a territorial zone, and communication refers to visually or textually conveying both the territorial boundaries and the restrictions on activities within the territory. Specific territorial projects where territorial strategies (territoriality) are deployed by various actors to produce bounded and controlled spaces (territory) to achieve certain effects is defined as territorialization, a common goal of which is to govern people and resources located within and around the territory (Scott, 1998).

In their influential analysis on the ways state power is territorialized within the borders of a politically defined space, political ecologist Vandergeest and sociologist Peluso (1995) identify territory as a practical facet of state control and the state’s territorial strategies as tools to control people and their access to land-based resources. When analyzing forms of classification and communication, they argue that the territoriality of the modern state is based on abstract space, which “can be cut up into discrete units… and measured” (p. 388). Echoing Lefebvre’s critical analysis of alienation and homogenization, Vandergeest and Peluso point out that abstract space is homogeneous in that, firstly, “any unit can be compared and rendered equivalent to another unit by spatial categories” and, secondly, imposing seemingly equivalent and comparable grids onto space “permits the location or nesting of an area in a larger abstract space” (p. 388). Maps and land codes (land laws) are highlighted by Vandergeest and Peluso as tools to classify and communicate abstract space. Maps do not simply represent reality, they “are instruments by which state agencies draw boundaries, create territories, and make claims enforced by their courts of law” (p. 389). Being “textually mediated” (p. 388), land codes insulate the state’s territorialization from earlier regimes of rule and production.

Echoing Lefebvre’s critique of the conquest of the lived by the conceived through abstraction, Vandergeest and Peluso (1995) assert that, firstly, the creation of an abstract space implies the annihilation of lived space and, secondly, the incompatibility between lived space and abstract space is at the root of the instability of modern states’ territorial strategies. They describe territorial land-use planning as “a utopian fiction unachievable in practice,” given that it often overlooks and contradicts “peoples’ lived social relationships and the histories of their interactions with the land” (p. 389). The mismatch between lived space and abstract space makes the enforcement of the state’s territorial claims a necessity, one attained through “their recognition by a relevant audience, by social pressure, and by the threat and use of violence” (p. 389). In their analysis of enforcement institutions, Vandergeest and Peluso note that where there are overlapping and conflicting claims by different legitimating authorities, “the one that is the most enforceable in practice (de facto) will have a greater influence on behavior and resource use that de jure controls” (p. 389). They also point out that more often than not, more powerful states and international non-state groups offer economic and military assistance to poorer or strategically important states facilitating such territorial control.

It is important to understand the motivations behind territorialization. Contrary to many theorists, Vandergeest and Peluso argue that global forces typically reinforce state-based claims over space instead of disrupting them; the authors foreground the importance and sophistication of territorialization as a strategy of state control of resources. In the modern world-system, which primarily legitimates territorial claims, states must make claims on territory to secure access to people and income from taxation and exploitation of natural resources. Moreover, in the context of global competition, territorialization is increasingly dependent on commercialization. Territorialization facilitates the state’s ability to collect taxes, thereby providing a regular source of financial support for government investments to sustain local production. In addition to the need to make territorial claims, protect resources, and collect taxes, Vandergeest and Peluso (1995) also surmise that given their large mobile populations of highland peasants, Southeast Asian states use territorial administration to “organize surveillance, gather information about the population, force them to settle down… and organize close control over people’s everyday activities” (p. 390).

Land-use planning must be understood through the politics of space and the state’s territorial strategies. Many development scholars link the practice of land-use planning to the realities of social organization (See, for example, Whatmore & Boucher, 1993; Whatmore, 1994; Hillier, 1999; Perry, 2003). Perry (2003) identifies land-use planning as part of the production and reproduction of social relationships with power, given that “the plans produced serve the dominant political economy as much as they challenge and reshape existing social configurations” and “planning is always remaking itself as it is embedded in and responds to a world that itself is always in the process of being remade” (p. 151). Geographers Whatmore and Boucher (1993) see land-use planning as a key regulator of environmental boundaries and transitions, representing “an institutional terrain which is deeply implicated in policing the ontological divide between society and nature” (p. 176). In other words, by representing nature as a series of discrete parcels and elements instead of as an integrative system of relationships, land-use planning “formalizes the separation between nature and abstract space” (p. 169) and the spatial narratives of land-use planning “can be seen to constitute strategic representations of natural and social relations, both in the sense that they are unavoidably partial, and that they are frequently a focus of deliberate political action” (p. 168).

Building on these critical analyses of land-use planning and focusing specifically on Laos, Lestrelin et al. (2012) identify three concurrent territorialization projects that have driven diverse land-use planning exercises across the country. With the goal of national integration, immediately following the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) establishment in 1975, Laos’s first territorialization project was characterized by an extensive internal resettlement program and nationwide agro-ecological assessments conducted with the assistance of development “partners” such as the World Bank, the United Nations and various bilateral aid agencies. In the context of growing environmental concerns, the increasing involvement and power of foreign experts and the rapid expansion of what was termed “sustainable development” globally, Laos’s land-use planning efforts intensified in the 1990s under a the second territorialization project effected by scientific expertise. This project was characterized by land cover classification, land‐use zoning and land allocation programs that, developed with the assistance of major multilateral and bilateral development agencies, attempted to rationalize land‐uses and limit environmental degradation. The increasing influence of neoliberal ideas introduced by international donors further transformed the land-use planning arena leading to a third territorialization project ushered in by the National Land Titling Programme in 1997. With market forces as the key land-use planning instrument, this territorialization project was (and remains today) characterized by new concession‐based land policies and large‐scale land‐use plans for the purpose of facilitating the development of private land and large capital-intensive development.

3 Sustainable Development Paradigm

In his 2001 article on the remaking of Laos as an environmental state, sociologist Michael Goldman opened with a description of a hand-drawn map of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic prepared by US-based environmental NGO Wildlife Conservation Society for the World Bank. “This map does not demarcate the nation’s capital, its towns or villages; the only cartographic markings are round, oblong, and kidney shapes, each labeled with initials such as WB, SIDA, WCS, and IUCN” (p. 499). According to Goldman, the map illustrates an important political story about “new efforts to classify, colonize, and transnationalize territory in the name of environmentally sustainable development” (p. 499). Amorphous bubbles depict the zoning of nearly one-fifth of Laos’s land area for conservation with abbreviations standing for the World Bank, Swedish International Development Agency, Wildlife Conservation Society, and the IUCN-World Conservation Union. Situated within a broader investigation of the role of the World Bank in development and the role of development in the world system, Goldman’s article argues that the introduction of standardized models of environmental governance imposes a hegemonic and neoliberal “eco-governmentality” on developing countries. Our reading of Goldman’s thesis focuses on two aspects, firstly Green-Neoliberal Development and secondly Environmental States in the Global South.

Contemporary development literature, however diverse, can generally be pooled into two broad camps, namely pro-development scholarship rooted in modernization theory and post-development scholarship characterized by critiques of modernization, including critical social theory. Both approaches, however, largely assume few if any alternatives to Western-style capitalist development, whether for or critical of it (See, for example, Hoselitz, 1960; Rostow, 1971; Dasgupta, 1998; Dollar, 2002). The supposition that development must always unfold naturally in accordance with the laws of capital has left development scholars increasingly obsessed with the question, “Why does development fail?” or “What is the best model of development?” and then pursue solutions and modifications deemed required to “improve” the development process. These quests for improvement, however, as Goldman (2005) points out, only serve to legitimize and promote development projects, “justifying it as a necessary if flawed uniform project of modernity and progress for the South” (p. 13).

The emergence of green neoliberalism, the most recent development regime of the World Bank, is reflected in how dominant rationales of “no alternative to development” and a “better model of development” drive the World Bank’s reform process, giving rise to a capital-driven green hegemony since the 1980s. Stemming from growing transnational social movements critical of its capital-intensive development practices, Goldman describes a “reform or die” situation whereby the World Bank began to “green” itself. In the decade leading up to this reform, the Keynesian economic worldview emphasizing government economic intervention diminished in the 1970s in favor of a neoliberalism advocating deregulation of flows of international finance capital. Tapping into this surfeit of capital, World Bank president Robert McNamara (1968–1981) rapidly expanded the Bank’s project lending across the world. After this decade of the “McNamara revolution,” however, the World Bank’s large-scale developments in the Global South had resulted in significant deforestation, river contamination and the displacement and subjection of forest-dwelling indigenous peoples resulting from Bank-financed infrastructure development and neocolonial timber, mining, and agricultural schemes.

Worldwide strikes, rallies and mass demonstrations protesting against World Bank and IMF policies and projects ensued, exposing the World Bank to a crisis of legitimacy and forcing it to either “green” its global development policies or cease its dominant role in global development. Reductive arguments would claim this greening as largely a public relations strategy; however, Goldman (2005) describes it as “the Bank’s latest and most profound discursive framework, producing a power-knowledge regime of green neoliberalism” (p. 5). This green neoliberalism, Goldman (2001) argues, not only enables the World Bank to “aggressively incorporate lessons from its worst critics” (p. 191) but also to “expand into more places and insinuate its worldview into more life-worlds than ever before” (Goldman, 2005, p. 6). The World Bank simultaneously does improvement, improves its development practices, and sets the terms by which its interventions are rationalized. It actively builds on “new global problems as well as on its own global expertise, new mechanisms for intervention as well as new reasons for countries to borrow, new development subjects and subjectivities as well as new forms of its own legitimation” (p. 34).

As Goldman (2005) pointed out, the “failures” of development generate new actors and networks (p. 37). The production and distribution of information and power in the field of green neoliberalism are not limited to the World Bank’s ambit; these extend as “a series of events and practices centered on professionals working in government, firms, NGOs, and the scientific community” (p. 33). In the 1990s, the World Bank embarked on a quest to re-establish its legitimacy by conducting scientific assessments of environmental and social repercussions, developing additional projects or project components in order to mitigate adverse impacts; these became known as environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Through this process, the World Bank turned previously combative relationships with NGOs into development-oriented alliances for generating “green project assessments, projects and regulatory reforms” (Goldman, 2001, p. 193). New NGOs were cultivated. Instead of occupying a “civil society” middle ground between the “state” and the “market,” the positions and roles of NGOs have become increasingly disparate in the world of development where “individuals often wear multiple hats and move across agencies and structural locations” (Goldman, 2005, p. 37). NGOs engaged by the World Bank and other international development institutions as consultants to conduct project-related research and help implement and improve development have become increasingly invested in expanding the business of development (Nelson, 1995).

Goldman’s (2005) scrutiny of the World Bank’s production of information and power, its green neoliberalism deployed to buoy its faltering global legitimacy, led him to assert that “the realms of knowledge production and political economics are mutually constitutive and codependent” (p. 33). The greening and neoliberalization of the Bank’s development agenda allow it to accommodate both “the critics’ demand for democratization and the investors’ call for privatization” (Goldman, 2001, p. 191) while simultaneously reinventing itself as a global “knowledge bank” (p. 208). Goldman (2001) uses the term “authoritative green knowledge,” defined as “the particular set of facts that are produced to differentiate, classify and categorize populations and their natural environments,” to describe the World Bank’s flavor of environmentalism and approach to environmentally sustainable development (p. 194). The science of environmental and social needs assessment becomes crucial to justifying the intervention, generating green knowledge that enables the World Bank to “reinvent itself, tame its critics, and intervene in an ever-growing number of institutions, terrains, and social bodies” (Goldman, 2005, p. 5). Green neoliberal development logic serves the needs of transnational capital and permeates throughout transnational professional-class networks such that, today, it is near impossible to practice development outside the parameters of environmentally sustainable development and green neoliberalism (p. 7).

As just detailed in the preceding section, the significance of the World Bank’s “remaking” and co-option of environmentalism since the 1990s is not limited to legitimating the organization itself; it has far-reaching repercussions for borrowing states’ institutions and their resource-dependent populations. By introducing standardized models of environmental governance to its borrowing countries, the World Bank generates new national and international administrative structures, i.e., environmental states for the Global South. Goldman (2005) challenges the dominant narrative that the emergence of environmental authorities in Southern countries is motivated by the inexorable Western rational of environmental sustainability by arguing that these authorities primarily serve “the specific needs of transnational capital” (p. 183). Deploying Foucault’s “art of government,” which questions framing the state as the nexus of modern societal power, Goldman establishes a concept of “eco-governmentality,” central to political ecology discourse for the past two decades, that describes the political rational “compelling states and citizens to improve their care of nature and their care of each other for the greater good of the economy” (p. 184).

Green neoliberalism is the dominant force pushing sweeping reform and configuring eco-rationalities in the Global South. These reforms purport to improve the “art of government” not for the sake of nurturing and strengthening states themselves but to privilege the demands of the economy. According to the World Bank’s brand of environmentalism, it is through the nourishment of markets and economy that we provide “sustenance, development, human rights and justice, and environmental sustainability” (Goldman, 2005, p. 184). Based on consultation with Western environmental organizations, academics, in 1992 reports, the World Bank argued that economic valuation of the environment was requisite for “sustainable development” (Goldman, 2005, p. 10 citing World Bank, 1992, 2003). Through aid, incentives and its dominant lexicon, the World Bank coerces social institutions that otherwise regulate the environment according to non-capitalist principles to follow their economic-environmental rationale.

By declaring Southern countries’ common-pool resources such as river basins, forests, wetlands, and aquifers as undervalued, the World Bank frames these reforms as a precondition for conserving and efficiently using natural resources; these reforms are “the catalyst to integrate countries into the global economy and to move out of debt” (Goldman, 2005, p. 39). There is no alternative to development, and “the only question is how to make it more sustainable” (p. 7). Both World Bank experts and academic elites focused on sustainable development blame “underdeveloped” Southern administrations and their populations for destroying local environments and impairing global interests and “globally shared prosperity” (p. 10). This justifies green prerequisites for the approval of loans, with borrowers required “to restructure state agencies, to write national legislation that creates new commercial land and resource markets, and to adopt new scientific protocols that result in the shaping of knowledge and expertise on the causes and solutions of ecological destruction and halted development” (p. 11). Given that many Southern countries, particularly the most indebted, depend on external development grants and loans for their operating budgets, the threat of loan denial compels these states to surrender to the preconditions of sustainable development.

To achieve the World Bank’s version of sustainable development, states are obliged to restructure, resulting in what Goldman (2005) describes as “unevenly transnationalized” environmental states (p. 183). By following the Bank’s doctrine of economically valuing the environment, borrowing states’ restructuring processes considerably narrow the ideological and practical separation between financial and environmental ministries. In the effort to support large capital projects, some state functions are empowered while others are neglected. For example, ministries of environment, forests, agriculture, mining, land management, and water in the Southern states are increasingly involved in the receipt and management of foreign capital inflows and their staff integrated into the transnational professional class of experts. As Goldman (2005) points out, many Southern countries experience increasing “disparity between public expenditures on health, education, and public services and expenditures on the increasingly transnational energy, forestry, construction, and transport sectors” (p. 207). Such uneven transnationalization results in the deprivation of social sectors in favor of newly capitalized sectors and the prioritization of large-scale investment projects that resource-related agencies are now obliged to finance, implement and regulate.

Environmental states are effectively restructured to “make sites and populations more compatible with these large-scale capital investments” (Goldman, 2005, p. 200). Goldman emphasizes the material impacts of newly imported environmental concepts (e.g., conservation, biodiversity, sustainable development and watershed management) when actualized as new regulatory regimes, reformed state agencies, and large-scale capital investments (e.g., dams, tree plantations, and biodiversity and conservation parks). These imported concepts supersede or subjugate traditional ways of valuing nature and accessing land and natural resources, replacing them with transnationally managed eco-territories. A hegemonic discourse rooted in neoliberal market ideology has emerged which reinterprets the ecological qualities of different parts of state territory, “defining some ‘qualities of territory’ as degraded and others as appropriate for commodification, and hence for improvement” (p. 184). This new classification system constitutes a knowledge regime for land relations and a mechanism for political-economic calculation, which declares “socially diverse, semi-nomadic, shifting, kinship-based, interdependent relations of production are ‘out’ in the new framework, while biodiversity conservation, sustainable timber production, and watershed management are ‘in’” (p. 203). This categorization and reduction of ecological differences facilitates and legitimizes these normalizing practices that transnationalize resource access in the Global South in the service of neoliberal goals of “improving” the conditions of environments and populations for the benefit of international markets.

Goldman’s insights on green-neoliberal development and environmental states in the Global South reveal sustainable development as a global technology of governance expanding over the past three decades. In the name of sustainable development, new types of knowledge and institutional norms are created by “neoliberal discourse and its rights-based orientation, on the one hand, and new disciplinary mechanisms of globalized environmentalism, on the other” (Goldman, 2001, p. 193). Although Goldman’s reading of sustainable development and eco-governance echoes Foucault’s concept of the “art of government,” Goldman focusses on nature, qualities of territory, and the political-epistemic rationales that were undifferentiated by Foucault and his adherents. Environmentally sustainable development as a “technology of government” can be understood as a system of “mundane forms of violence perpetuated in the name of development” (Goldman, 2005, p. 12). Mundane violence differs from the gross violence of development projects well-documented by others and refers to “the everyday forms of building up hegemony that influence and pressure people to participate in the formation and stabilization of the World Bank’s green-neoliberal agenda” (p. 12).

Based on his critical reading of how sustainable development has reshaped Laos, Goldman (2005) reveals how the World Bank’s simultaneous offer of “better” models of development and suppression of any possibility for alternatives through its dominant discourse actively legitimized a new Lao environmental state, resulting in the subsequent reclassification of the country’s territory into various eco-zones since the early 1990s. Given that the Lao government was fiscally poor to prioritize protecting its environment, the World Bank and its partners argued that only large-scale capital projects could finance protection of the country’s precious ecosystems (p. 194). Restructuring and policy reorientation of state “software” became a precondition in order to qualify for the Bank’s loan for developmental “hardware” (p. 200). In the 1990s, with the help of foreign fiscal advisors, natural resource planners and lawyers, the Lao prime minister’s office passed a number of important decrees relating to property rights and natural resource use, especially forests, water, and land (p. 201). This process paralleled new data collection on ecological resources, especially in terms of these resources’ degradation and recovery rates, with the expanding market demands for natural goods and services (e.g., hardwoods, hydropower, eco-tourists, biodiversity aesthetics). These decrees and laws facilitate the redrawing of administrative and cultural boundaries into new eco-zones delineated based on “scientifically” valued natural resources and projected demands of different groups of resource users.

4 Frontier Resourcification

In a 2009 article, geographer Keith Barney recounted the exploration process of Australian multinational Oxiana Ltd.’s gold and copper mines in the uplands of Laos’s Savannakhet province, where the company spent nearly a decade roaming the jungle tracks of the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. On finding a USD $4.29 billion gold and copper deposit, the first such discovery in Laos by an overseas mining company, the team’s geologist remarked, “We were leading the push into new frontiers” (Bloomberg, 2004 as quoted in Barney, 2009, p. 149). According to Barney (2009), this quote captures the shift in perception of Laos as a frontier, from the colonial conception of “Laos as an underpopulated frontier zone” (p. 149) to today’s capitalist conception of “Laos as a ‘last frontier’… an available site for transnational resource sector investment” (p. 156). In his analysis of the contemporary geographies of enclosure in Laos, Barney deploys a relational perspective on nature, economy and livelihood to foreground the historical and relational complexity of frontier “resourcification,” a process whereby “Laos, and territories within Laos, are being actively ‘peripheralized’ in a globalized economy” (p. 156). In this section, we contextualize Barney’s thesis within discourse on “the production of frontiers” and “patchworked frontier.”

Frontier theory, as originally advanced by American historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1894, 1920), follows a spatiotemporally linear, colonist- and colonizer-centered approach. Extending and often challenging Turner’s theories, the metaphor of “frontier” is frequently used by geography and political economics fields to refer to the absorption of peripheral regions into capitalism and is closely related to the concept of resource commodification, such as in “resource frontiers” (Barney, 2009; Fujita Lagerqvist, 2013), “commodity frontiers” (Kelly & Peluso, 2015; Moore, 2000), “extraction frontiers” (de Jong et al., 2017; Temper et al., 2015), “capitalist frontiers” (Tsing, 2003, 2005) and “neoliberal frontiers” (Brannstrom, 2009; Carmody & Owusu, 2016; Sims, 2015). In contrast to the Turnerian perception of the frontier as an empty, unoccupied wilderness, these positions acknowledge the frontier as “a zone of destruction of property systems, political structures, social relations, and life-worlds to make way for new ways of resource extraction” (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018, p. 389).

A frontier does not exist naturally; rather, it is a discursive and physical construct. Following his analyses of various forms of capitalist enclosure, political economist Massimo de Angelis suggests the production of frontiers can be understood through the geographical extension of capitalist means of production. De Angelis (2004) argues, “it is capital that identifies a frontier, and the identification of this frontier implies the creation of a space of enclosures, a horizon within which policies and practices promoting further separation between people and means of production in new spheres of life” (p. 73). In this case, a frontier, rather than being space itself, “happens in and to space” (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018, p. 388). The production of frontiers begins as moments where capital recognizes a frontier, which “implies the identification of a space of social life that is still relatively uncolonized by capitalist relations of production and modes of activity” (de Angelis, 2004, p. 73). These moments are succeeded by new property regimes and forms of authority that legitimize their power through defining proper uses and users, setting enclosure in motion. As De Angelis argues, “the identification of a space of enclosure implies the attempt to overcome necessary resistance by what capital regards as ‘enclosable’ subjects. All classical examples of enclosures…fall in this category” (p. 73).

Over the past two decades, resource frontiers have proliferated throughout the Global South, with dramatic increases in demand, consumption, prices and rates of new capital investment across resource extraction sectors. Political ecologists carrying out research on Southeast Asia have used the resource frontier metaphor to analyze forest transitions, including logging and cash crop expansion, resource degradation and community displacement (See, for example, Tsing, 2005; McCarthy, 2006; Walker, 2006; Barney, 2009). Keith Barney (2009) uses the term “frontier-neoliberalism” to explain the strong connection in the twenty-first century between global market demands, intensive resource extraction and new state or private land enclosures in Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Laos and Cambodia. Driven primarily by capital, the production of resource frontiers in these countries is in part made possible by a process described by anthropologist Holly High as “resourcification.” High (2010) pointed out that natural features that were previously seen as physical obstacles to investment capital have been “framed within a language of resources” in recent decades. Resourcification occurs as “natural features are judged as useful in relation to human wants,” and the drive to turn natural resources into capital derives from the ways political actors judge or appraise resource values and benefits (p. 156).

The metaphor of the “last frontier” is being widely deployed as the global machinery of resource extraction and commodity production encroach on the few remaining landscapes where natural resources have not yet been enclosed, extracted, and processed (Barney, 2009, p. 146). Focusing on the production of frontiers in Laos, Barney argues that state agencies and multilateral development banks such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) strategically deployed “last frontier” as discourse to attract transnational investment and legitimize the conversion of upland areas into capital-intensive resource extraction zones. The “last frontier” metaphor implies that the Lao uplands are vacant, un-governed and uninhabited (or underpopulated), in other words enclosable for large-scale logging, plantations, mines, hydropower dams, and other resource-based industrial projects. Omitting rural peoples and their livelihoods, on the one hand, serves “a useful ideological function for resource capital” as it reproduces popular conceptions of the rural as empty, thus promising higher rates of return on investment, and on the other hand, is part of “a crucial method of externalizing the true costs of resource development mega-projects, and shifting the damages and the responsibility onto local populations” (Barney, 2009, p. 151). The deliberate denial that various groups of largely ethnic minorities, whose livelihoods are intimately linked to the land, do indeed inhabit Laos’s uplands reveals the close correlation between enclosure and exclusion (or dispossession) inherent in the establishment of resource frontiers. This phenomenon results in “dramatic changes in socio-natural landscapes” and “new patterns of marginalization and livelihood insecurity for a vulnerable rural population” (p. 146).

Critical geographers identify the close linkage between enclosure and expropriation of land and resources in line with Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation (Baird, 2011; Fujita Lagerqvist et al., 2014; Lund, 2011; Neef, 2016). According to Perelman (2007), as significant populations in the Global South have not yet fully integrated into the wage-labor economy, primitive accumulation persists and “involves the direct expropriation of people’s conditions of production, the purposeful forcing of people into wage labor, and the intentional manipulation of the social division of labor” (p. 59). For example, regarding state land concessions for plantations in Laos, geographer Ian Baird (2011) reveals that the system of issuing large-scale concessions not only involves the enclosure and expropriation of land and resources but also forcibly integrates subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers into the labor market. In Baird’s words, the national policy “to ‘turn land into capital’ is crucially intertwined with … ‘turning people into labor’” (p. 12). He further describes how the transition of Laos’s labor force into the market economy is a primary part of the state’s rhetoric justifying the current land concession system. For many state officials, the dispossession of the rural population’s existing means of subsistence is “a necessary evil … needed to propel Laos into the modern world and eventually out of poverty,” and the violent primitive accumulation is “a necessary step in the direction of fuller human development” (p. 12).

Many geographers investigating the broad implication of large-scale natural resource concessions in Global South countries foreground the co-existence at multiple scales of various actors, both state and private, whose everyday practices reshape people’s relationship with land and resources and transform the rural landscape (See, for example, Hardin, 2002; MacLean, 2008; Barney, 2008, 2009; Fujita Lagerqvist et al., 2014). They argue that new frontier places and landscapes are not exclusively the outcomes of either global political-economic or elite state-bureaucratic forces. Instead, these are landscapes where “alternate regimes of investment, extraction and accumulation” aggregate and aggravate each other (Barney, 2009, p. 152). In Laos, while political processes determine how natural resources are valued, the party-state is not a hegemonic force determining development outcomes and multinational capital-intensive development projects often overlap with other resource-extraction interests often tied to military or provincial authorities (Barney, 2009; Fujita Lagerqvist et al., 2014). Acknowledging these processes as situated and contingent further requires that local people and local landscapes feature as crucial players in the production and reproduction of frontier spaces (Raffles, 2002; Tsing, 2005; Walker, 2006).

As agents compete for access and control over land and resources, their authority and interests overlap and are in tension, producing “fragmented and overlapping mosaics of resource governance and territorial control” (MacLean, 2008 as quoted in Barney, 2009, p. 147). Resources are valued in different ways by different actors; for example, tourism agencies place aesthetic value on the landscape, which is in direct opposition to the material value imposed by mining, hydropower, and tree plantations. Following MacLean, Barney (2009) deployed the phrase “patchworked frontiers” to describe distinct frontiers in Laos that are “associated with different, elite fractions [sic] and power configurations, and different state agencies” (p. 152). Land concessions of divergent sizes granted under various authorities at different times create a patchwork of overlapping governance regimes, where new multinational resource sector investments “interact with previous spatial regimes of resource governance” (p. 147), and various political-economic blocs compete against each other. As Fujita Lagerqvist et al. (2014) demonstrate, a further lack of coordination and effective regulation across various resource-related sectors in Laos has cumulative as well as project-specific repercussions.

In a “striated and patchworked landscape” (Barney, 2009, p. 152), new resource enclosures interact with the socio-environmental impacts of previous land reforms, with concession-induced migrations overlaid on Laos’s long legacy of internal and international migrations. Laos’s 1953–1975 civil war and the government’s long-standing policy, since the establishment of the Lao PDR in 1975, to eradicate upland swidden farming are major factors contributing to contemporary migrations. At the local level, many long-established communities have witnessed several waves of migration since the 1950s, including those caused by the creation of large-scale resource concessions over the past two decades; these migrations have exacerbated resource competition and subsequent resource scarcity. For example, in Feuang District, part of the 16,000-square-kilometer Nam Ngum River basin, Fujita Lagerqvist et al. reveal the complexities of intense resource competition. The lower Nam Lik valley, a rural area that first received wartime refugees from northeastern Laos, was designated to accept a large influx of migrants displaced by the construction of a large-scale hydropower dam in another district in the basin. The resulting intensification of local resource competition in Feuang District led to a surge in land prices and rising tensions between the resettled community and existing villages (Fujita Lagerqvist et al., 2014).

While some communities such as those in Feuang District have experienced several rounds of immigration, others underwent repeated displacements. In the village of Ban Pak Veng in the lower Hinboun valley, Barney examines a case of “double displacement,” whereby village livelihoods were threatened by the combined externalities of a major hydropower project and industrial tree plantations, projects from two of Laos’s leading extractive sectors. Serious upstream riverbank erosion caused by the hydropower dam altered the flooding regime of the middle and lower Hinboun valley, rendering existing lowland wet rice cultivation impossible and resulting in acute food insecurity. Villagers who lost their lowland rice paddies switched to swidden cultivation in nearby upland forests, and soon afterwards, a third of these villagers’ swidden agriculture land was designated under the Land and Forest Allocation program as “degraded forest land” and expropriated for commercial eucalyptus plantations with minimal compensation. The lack of compensation and ineffective mitigation measures provided within the hydropower and plantation projects led to villagers’ intensified, short-term exploitation of their remaining resources and to village youth emigrating for job opportunities within and outside Laos (Barney, 2009).

In their analyses of the socio-environmental impacts of resource development in Laos, both Fujita Lagerqvist et al. (2014) and Barney (2009) emphasize that farmers are not unresponsive to the drastic changes of their rural landscapes and those landscapes’ degradation. Land reform programs and capital-intensive resource projects entangle with legacies of local resource management practices, transforming the local environment and mediating villagers’ responses. In their struggle to respond to this degradation, villagers adopt a variety of strategies, including livelihood diversification and reorientation toward newly accessible markets, which in Feuang District and Hinboun valley involved villagers planting cash crops such as cassava, rubber, and agarwood. However, these smallholder investments take place amidst the privatization of land and common-pool resources, a process that is often highly uneven and unequal. Well-off households, including some receiving remittance from migrated youth, can readily diversify their livelihoods by undertaking new agricultural practices and can make substantive claim to previously communal agricultural lands. Poorer households also diversify their livelihood activities when adapting to change. However, given their lack of basic means of production and reduced access to capital, they are disadvantaged in the competition for local resources. By observing how villagers respond to fast-changing circumstances and how such responses feed further changes in land tenure and landscape dynamics, geographers such as Fujita Lagerqvist et al. and Barney reveal both planned and unexpected trajectories of development projects in the rural Laos.

Geographers have shown today’s resource frontiers to be a product of capitalism and how new frontier places and landscapes have become patchworks where diverse regimes of investment, extraction and accumulation contend for influence. In Laos, large-scale resource concessions have been detrimental to upland communities in a country where upland areas account for nearly 80% of the territory (Hodgdon, 2010). The Lao uplands are imagined as an empty frontier space, by and for transnational investment, despite being the means of subsistence for ethnic minorities who make up over 40% of Laos’s total population (Hodgdon, 2010). These people are heavily reliant on mixed subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture and obtain most of their food from family farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering non-timber forest products (Baird, 2011; Fujita Lagerqvist et al., 2014). While the wage-labor economy is becoming increasingly important in rural Laos, geographers highlight the degree of spatial and demographic unevenness in which it incorporates the population. Upland ethnic minorities are disproportionately less reliant on wage-labor than the overall population (Baird, 2011; Rigg, 2005). Land managers should neither romanticize nor undervalue subsistence agriculture where a large segment of the population’s livelihoods have historically been and remain intimately tied to the land (Baird, 2011).

In his analysis of the complex reworking of Laos’s upland frontier, Barney (2009) emphasizes that decades of development and land policies continue to have “a deep transformative effect upon the Lao landscape” (p. 148) and that “there is no singular political-economic rationality or intentionality at work in the Lao uplands” (p. 153). He conceptualizes frontier resourcification in Laos within a longer history of resource development in two interrelated phases. Referring to “programmes associated with French colonial, war-era and subsequent decentralised political structures in Laos,” a “first frontier” was created when Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese businesses, particularly in the logging sector, engaged the Lao military, provincial governors and central Party officials (p. 152). More recent projects associated with “capital-intensive, neoliberal inspired resource investment, including new land reform policies” contributed to the formation of a “second frontier” that “overlaps with the processes and outcomes of the first frontier” (p. 152). Barney (2009) highlights how, in this second frontier phase, historical and contemporary land reform policies, including Laos’s Land and Forest Allocation (LFA) and Participatory Land Use Planning and Land Allocation (LUPLA), upland resettlement and “focal site” rural development have deployed a reductive area‐based approach to development that facilitated “the freeing up of land and forest resources for capitalization” (p. 153). In many cases, customary lands did not receive full legal recognition during the implementation of new upland tenure policies, and policies such as LFA became the very mechanisms by which villagers would lose customary lands and resources to plantation firms (Barney, 2008, 2009). The severe livelihood insecurity induced by these past and recent policies has prompted alternative approaches to land development, reallocation and regularization, including an overhaul of LFA and LUPLA and collective land titling. However, a more effective system that recognizes customary and common property rights for upland communities is still needed.

5 The Promise of Infrastructure

In his 2020 article on the politics of infrastructure development in northwest Laos, geographer Michael Dwyer cited Chinese Academy of Sciences academics describing the BRI as “a model in which the hand of the state accompanies the hand of the market … to deliver not simply net gains as in the neoliberal case but win–win outcomes” (Liu & Dunford, 2016, p. 325 as quoted in Dwyer, 2020, p. 1). Dwyer challenges this claim and the discrepancies between the “BRI-as-idea” and “BRI-in-practice” through revealing the tensions between BRI investments and earlier development plans and projects. He provides a detailed examination of Laos’s Northern Economic Corridor (NEC), a highway-centered regional trade corridor launched in Laos’s rubber boom years of the mid-2000s that was later retroactively labelled part of the BRI. Dwyer (2020) argues that since the BRI-in-practice is largely an assemblage of existing projects “firmly planted, at least in part, in the world of neoliberal development,” the real debate must shift from BRI versus neoliberalism to considering that “the same questions of regulatory protection that have plagued neoliberal development projects continue to confront the BRI” (p. 10). Wider scholarship firstly on the discourse of “infrastructure” and secondly on the discourse of “planning and assessment” will help theorize Dwyer’s contention.

According to economist Batt (1984), the earliest documented use of the term “infrastructure” in English was in 1927 when it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary under an entry for a French rail line, noting “the tunnels, bridges, culverts and ‘infrastructure’ work generally … have been completed” (p. 2). Despite the term being credited to civil engineers during the nineteenth century boom in railway construction, the discourse surrounding infrastructure today only emerged from its use in military and economic jargon of the mid-twentieth century.

During the Cold War, the term was used by defense experts to describe the “fixed installations which are necessary for the effective deployment and operations of modern armed forces” (Ismay, 1954, p. 10 as quoted in Batt, 1984, p. 2). The term also entered postwar economic development and national-building efforts, particularly those targeting low-income countries (Batt, 1984, p. 2). In contrast to nineteenth-century railway development largely supported by private capital and deliberately non-public, the appropriation of the term by military and postwar development planners in the mid-twentieth century led to its close association with state policy, investment and public spending (Batt, 1984). Immense capital investment became a precondition both for modern war mobilization under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other alliances and for lifting underdeveloped nations out of poverty. The phrase “infrastructure development” was increasingly used to describe these capital investments seen as prerequisite for efficient development of heavy industry, trade, and nation-building, all efforts readily understood as necessarily state-led (Batt, 1984, p. 2). Given the high initial costs and long payoff periods of these investments, new planning processes were deployed by military and development planners, replacing nineteenth-century patronage systems and facilitating more “responsible” public spending (p. 2).

During the 1970s, infrastructure discourse further expanded, and its focus shifted away from military defense towards economic development with the mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas advocating deregulation of international financing and the rebranding of development as international aid (Dwyer, 2020, p. 3). Development lending broadened from focusing on material elements such as roads, airports, and water supply systems, which are often the subjects of market-rate loans, to social services such as health care, education, and social organization financed by grants or soft loans (Rankin, 2009, p. 69). Accordingly, “infrastructure” became both modern society’s industrial capital base and the human capital, the training and education, that support it (Batt, 1984, pp. 2–3). Acknowledging this, in 1984, Batt defined the term as “that element of capital overhead which is supportive of all other economic investment in a society, necessary to its further development” (p. 1).

The anticipation of this further development, the promise of a “future perfect,” along with its accompanying risks, led in the 1980s and 1990s to the World Bank and other multilaterals’ institutionalization of formal safeguards in infrastructure planning practices, most notably the introduction of environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) and mitigation planning. As explained earlier in this chapter’s section on the sustainable development paradigm, significant socio-environmental impacts, the consequence of a decade of rapid development lending in large infrastructure projects by McNamara’s World Bank, led, during the 1980s and 1990s, to the creation of formal safeguards. Often resultant from conflicts between development banks and civil society (See, for example, Rich, 2013; Wade, 1997, 2016; Dwyer, 2020), these safeguards’ main objective was the mitigation of development risk, effectively institutionalizing assessment and planning methods that would “more adequately anticipate the impact zones and their associated effects before projects were actually approved” (Dwyer, 2020, p. 3). Acknowledging that safeguards are intrinsically political and spatial, with each infrastructure sector having unique impacts, geographer Dwyer argues that formal safeguards turbocharge the “politics of valuation at multiple scales” (p. 3). Assessment questions such as “whether, how, where and when various types of impacts should be counted” are politically entwined with questions such as “which projects would be funded, how they would be designed and supervised, who would receive and not receive various types of project-financed mitigation” (p. 3).

Over the past three decades, while the meaning of “infrastructure” expanded, new ideas for its financing were limited due to neoliberalization. Geographer Furlong (2020), in her analysis of economies of infrastructure, draws from Brine and Poovey’s (2013) work on the history of capital where they recognize capital not as “stock” but instead as “expectation.” Here, Furlong emphasizes the importance of the “time element” in infrastructure financialization, “whereby the capital ‘stock’ must yield a ‘flow’ of income ‘in the form of the incremental payments of interest it would return over time’” (Furlong, 2020, p. 576). Like Furlong, many have pointed out that, regardless of whether development is underwritten by debt or more recently by financialization, it often takes the form of wealth extraction. Analyzing the recent origins of infrastructure in development economics, post-development theorist Escobar (1995) highlights that built infrastructures are expected to generate sufficient returns to repay any associated debt, interest and fees. In her investigation of the “infrastructures of austerity” including outdated technologies and degraded infrastructure, anthropologist Laura Bear (2015) argues that sovereign debt provides the political rationale for austerity, which “leads to an intensified extraction of value from public infrastructures” (p. 4). In this way, infrastructure investment has increasingly become a spillway for over-accumulated capital in the global economy. Where Furlong and Escobar assert the expectation, or promise, of infrastructure giving it momentum, Bear describes the simultaneous glut of financing producing infrastructures that too often result in massive maintenance, refurbishment and adaptation shortfalls and mistrust between communities, local governments and investors (See, for example, Pieterse & Hyman, 2014; Harvey, 2017; Furlong, 2020).

Economic geographers Flyvbjerg et al. (2009), in their analysis of the conditions whereby “across the globe, large infrastructure projects almost invariably arrive late, over-budget, and fail to perform up to expectations,” argue that the sheer number of unsuccessful projects is too significant to be explained by chance alone (p. 172). While project executives frequently attribute the discrepancy between project expectations and performance to unforeseen circumstances, Flyvbjerg et al. argue that proponents often succumb to “delusion and deception” and that psychological and governance issues are the underlying reasons for such discrepancy. Delusions, including honest mistakes, result from psychological biases influenced by “planning fallacy,” whereby executives make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than a rational weighing of gains, losses, and probabilities (p. 172). In contrast, deceptions, including the strategic manipulation of information or processes, result from poor governance influenced by “principal-agent problems,” whereby executives deliberately overestimate benefits and underestimate costs such that their projects have a better chance in the competition to gain approval and funding (p. 173). Flyvbjerg et al. (2014) argue that delusion and deception, rather than being alternative explanations for why large infrastructure projects fail, are complementary and difficult to disentangle in practice.

Dwyer (2020) builds on Flyvbjerg et al.’s insightful analysis of development planning’s “delusion and deception,” which undermine estimates of the anticipated benefits and costs of large infrastructure projects, by examining how developers (and their consultants) use a complex lexicon on impact prediction to discursively make a given infrastructure project appear financeable, often by externalizing its true costs. As mentioned above, the institutionalization of environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) and mitigation planning during the 1980s and 1990s was born out of conflicts between development banks and civil society actors. While initially oppositional, much of today’s civil society has succumbed to the hegemony of the World Bank’s development discourse on mitigation (Goldman, 2005). In particular, the development banks’ lexicon of project-related impacts, such as “direct,” “indirect,” “induced,” “regional” and “in-combination” impacts, enabled development experts and planners to counter critics and discredit claims of these experts’ “planning fallacy” or irrational optimism by making the outcomes of large-scale interventions seemingly foreseeable and quantifiable. According to Dwyer (2020), however, these impact assessment and mitigation planning frameworks frequently exaggerate pre-project estimates of both benefits and profitability. Dwyer argues that the lexicon of direct and indirect impacts “allows for the nuanced specification of complexity, such as the cascading effects that infrastructure projects regularly induce beyond the immediate physical (‘direct’) impacts of, say, losing one’s land to a new road” (p. 4). Here, financers and planners have latitude to define impacts in order to mitigate complexity and, at the same time, discretion in how thoroughly these impacts are to be investigated and addressed.

Dwyer uses the case of Laos’s Northern Economic Corridor (NEC), a road-upgrading project connecting China with Thailand via Laos and co-financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the governments of China and Thailand, to exemplify how developers mold the project’s discursive and financial terrain via its “project area of influence” (PAI). Defined by the World Bank as “[t]he area likely to be affected by the project, including all its ancillary aspects” (World Bank, 1999, p. 2), a PAI enables planners, in Dwyer’s words, to “cast the net of impact assessment widely, while also allowing for flexibility in whether an anticipated effect is formally labeled an ‘impact’” (Dwyer, 2020, p. 4). For the NEC, a two-fold compromise enabled by the PAI kept certain anticipated effects outside the zone of mitigation, thereby creating a leaner loan package while boosting the estimated profitability. The first part of the compromise was to finance the georeferenced documentation of any permanent agriculture or other improved land uses within the immediate 50 m from the highway’s centerline; this allowed planners to explicitly define a zone of mitigation (Dwyer, 2020). The second part of the compromise was effective in transferring the developer’s responsibility of the larger NEC, their societal obligation for managing the acute tenure insecurity that existed beyond that zone of mitigation, into a separate poverty-reduction project, thus enabling the ADB and three governments to proceed with construction (Dwyer, 2020). This displacement of responsibility further suppressed mitigation costs to a level entirely insufficient to address the major socio-environmental issues identified during the ESIA process.

Frameworks for community participation developed and deployed by multilateral development banks (MDB) are also theorized within Flyvbjerg et al.’s “delusion and deception” (See, for example, Guttal & Shoemaker, 2004; Lawrence, 2009; Hatcher, 2006, 2015). In the 1990s, mechanisms for local community participation became central to a new set of approaches devised by MDBs such as the World Bank and ADB for managing expectations around the societal benefits of development and for managing, or rather containing, opposition to large capital projects. In their 2005 report on Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development, the World Bank (2005) had acknowledged that large capital projects may “aggravate or cause serious environmental, health, and social problems, including conflict and war” (p. 1); however, they insisted that negative impacts are not inevitable if proper mitigation measures are taken. The World Bank soon replaced its recommended policy framework with one adopting a strong social-economic development narrative that advocated the involvement of local communities in risk mitigation (Hatcher, 2015). While the World Bank describes its social-development model (SDM) as centered on poverty reduction and environmental sustainability, Pascale Hatcher (2015), a political economist writing on Laos’s transnational mining sector, argues that these new development models such as SDM are effectively management tools offering “a depoliticized path to vent … local opposition,” thereby limiting the socio-political risks faced by capital and multilateral institutions (p. 340).

Hatcher reveals the extreme disparities between the SDM’s narrative and experiences on the ground by closely examining Laos’s Sepon gold and copper mine and Nam Theun II hydropower dam, two of the World Bank’s largest resource extraction projects in Laos. Hatcher challenges the Bank’s self-proclaimed “neutral position” (World Bank, 2010) by juxtaposing the World Bank Group’s highly political and duplicitous roles in Laos, from direct credit provider to leading the country’s structural reform or “liberalization” process, including promoting SDM as the dominant strategy for developing Laos’s large capital projects (Hatcher, 2015, p. 325). SDM’s participatory mechanisms are defined by Hatcher (2015) as “neoliberal modes of participation,” strategies employed by pro-market interests with “a clear attempt to mitigate political risk in order to facilitate capital accumulation” (p. 323). Despite the World Bank’s awareness of Laos’s challenging political landscape characterized by “a one-party regime, …clear conflicts of interest in regulatory bodies, and institutional capacity deficits” (p. 340), Hatcher argues that there is a certain hypocrisy in the Bank’s simultaneous promotion of socio-environmental standards, on the one hand, and rapid liberalization and opening of the natural resource sectors to foreign investment on the other. Just as Dwyer observed in the NEC case, Hatcher (2015) notes that ESIA and mitigation planning have often been superficial, “alluding to further studies and further elaboration of details later,” and that participatory processes have been limited to an information dissemination process, “which mainly consisted of providing information and not having discussions” (p. 333).

The discourse of infrastructure has been closely associated with state policy and investment since the mid-twentieth century. Critical geographers, critical anthropologists and political scientists argue that it is the conceptual plasticity and materiality of infrastructure that made this once (French) engineering term dominant in postwar military and economic knowledge-power systems (Carse, 2017; Dwyer, 2020). This plurality of “infrastructure” persists, as evidenced in the growing body of scholarship and recent “infrastructural turn” in anthropology, the social sciences and broader humanities fields, where social relations, political forms and environmental concerns are increasingly analyzed through the lens of infrastructure. Critical academics approach infrastructure as a set of “dense social, material, aesthetics, and political formations” (Anand et al., 2018, p. 3) often oscillating between “the modernist move to standardize and the anthropological move to pluralize” in their infrastructure studies (Carse, 2017, p. 36). They focus their ethnographic and historical scrutiny on sites of tension and discrepancy, revealing infrastructure as a discursive assemblage that can act “both as a foundation for economic development and social inclusion and as an instrument of wealth extraction, enhanced inequality and potential crisis” (Furlong, 2020, p. 572; Harvey & Knox, 2012; Howe et al., 2016).

In northwest Laos, geographer Michael Dwyer (2020) describes China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as embedding these contradictions in its projects “as-ideas” and “in-practice.” BRI-as-idea offers “the promise and possibility of more inclusive development via the presence of a stronger regulatory state” (p. 10). BRI-in-practice, however, will still need to contend with the complex development legacies of Laos’s Northern Economic Corridor (NEC). Development of the NEC has been a widely uneven process where “state power has come down largely on the side of enclosure and extraction rather than of social protection of poor and vulnerable sub-populations in the corridor’s impact zone” (p. 2). Similarly, while neoliberalism-as-idea is often framed as “the elimination of state ‘barriers’ to ‘the market’,” neoliberalism-in-practice is actually “predicated on active (if often disguised or downplayed) state interventions” (p. 10). Dwyer concludes that to achieve genuine social inclusivity and equity in infrastructure development, it is the process of development that matters and not the financing, vision or states’ involvement. He offers three suggestions to facilitate more inclusive development: First, he calls for reassessment of how responsibility is allocated, particularly in the ways development banks’ existing practices mandate mitigating “direct” impacts while leaving responsibility for mitigating “indirect” impacts to borrowers. Second, he suggests rethinking the ways that geographies of influence and impact are mapped, critically, to shift focus onto issues of equity and blunt planners’ formal spatial practices, projects, and preoccupations with making infrastructure. Lastly, he recognizes that inclusive development will require devoting far higher levels of financing and institutional resources toward regulatory protection, particularly for proactive mitigation efforts carried out on behalf of the most vulnerable stakeholders.

6 Conclusion

In this chapter, we reviewed: (1) the politics of land-use planning in Laos, covering the politics of space and the state’s territorial strategies; (2) the sustainable development paradigm, green-neoliberal development approaches and the emergence of a Lao environmental governance; (3) frontier resourcification, enabled by capital’s construction of frontiers as patchworks, assemblages or mosaics of development plans, projects, programs and policies; and (4) the discursive origins of “infrastructure” and the analytical arms race of the environmental impact assessment process since the 1990s. Importantly, this is not a literature survey or review so much as a purpose-built, efficient and rigorous assembling of theory and field studies meant to simultaneously untrain planners and engender ways of actioning critical landscape planning.

Land-use planning is a social process that reproduces dominant power relations and formalizes the divide between society and nature. While presented episodically, Laos’s territorialization projects over the past four decades, including national agro-ecological assessments, land reallocation and resettlement programs, and concession-based land policies for capital-intensive development, have followed the similar global currents producing environmental governance states across Southeast Asia. Recurrent themes on the importance of land use and land cover classification are echoed throughout upwards of three-quarters of this chapter, in the sections on the Politics of land-use planning, the Sustainable development paradigm, and Frontier resourcification. Together with the anthropological reflections on standards in the final section, the Promise of infrastructure, we have a very clear portrayal of Li’s “rendering technical” of social and ecological issues and the immense challenges of holding principled cultural-technological positions in Laos and similar contexts.

The cache of literature by political scientists and critical geographers reviewed in this chapter, while not offering a comprehensive survey of relevant planning and development literature given its predominant focus on Laos, it does demonstrate that such literature can be surveyed in a relatively short time for the education of landscape planners and its deployment conceptually in their strategic proposals. The literature assembled in this chapter is indeed the literature by which we engage our landscape architecture students as they learn “development.” This engagement occurs through seminar-style discussion and through students’ visualization of critical theory in space, over time, and via representing the landscape through drawing. This provides for these landscape architects’ socialization in very foreign disciplines and critical social theory while building an awareness of local, situated discourse on Laos’s development.

Each of the four chapters in Part Two, which together contain a series of nine strategic planning proposals for Laos, make explicit references to the discourses and histories outlined in this chapter—i.e., they put them to use. The wide range of development project types and sectors reviewed, including resettlement projects, dam-building and watershed management, social development models in large-scale resource extraction, and regional road-building schemes, are tackled simultaneously by individual students in the same university course. Most of these featured strategic planning proposals presented in Part Two assume highly imperfect development contexts where most development impacts will not be addressed by any of the formal planning or implementation processes discussed in this chapter. In that sense, they are critical and reactionary. These proposals assume many of infrastructure’s “promises” will be broken. To do critical landscape planning requires longer-term studies, the construction of new rigorous and authoritative histories, and the forecasting and backcasting of models where past and future events and impacts are uncertain or unknown. They require a deeper understanding of development and discourse.