Infrastructural Connectivity and Difference

Abstract

This chapter, Infrastructural connectivity and difference, presents two strategic planning proposals dealing with “direct” impacts of the construction of the China-Laos Railway. Practices of “sustainable” development, in those practices’ approaches, however genuine, to physically and economically connect communities to new markets and generate new economies, disrupt preexisting modes of connectivity, whether socioeconomic, cultural or ecological. One proposal offers strategies to mitigate the socioecological impacts of temporary access roads built tends of kilometers into rural landscape to construct the China-Laos Railway, while the other proposal offers physical and organizational strategies for impacted agricultural communities to mitigate the disruption of irrigation networks, fragmented farmlands, issues of development transparency and uncertainty in compensation timelines. Through these proposals’ analyses and strategic deployment of connectivity and emphasis of cultural and ecological difference, they may help reform discourse on the assessment of cumulative impacts in the development process.

1 Introduction

This chapter presents two strategic planning proposals dealing with “direct” impacts of the construction of the China-Laos Railway. It draws from discourse on “frontier resourcification” and the “promise of infrastructure” introduced in Chap. 4.

We earlier cited Gupta and Ferguson’s (1992) conception of connectivity, whereby “cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking difference through connection” (p. 8). Anthropologists Harvey and Knox in their 2015 book Roads: An Anthropology of infrastructure and expertise, in addition to similarly querying “previous histories of connectivity,” are also critical of the promise of integration and remind us to always question “who or what is being integrated” (p. 52). Practices of “sustainable” development, in those practices’ approaches, however genuine, to physically and economically connect communities to new markets and generate new economies, disrupt preexisting modes of connectivity, whether socioeconomic, cultural or ecological.

The two strategic planning proposals included in this chapter are: Curating rural connectivity: Strategic maintenance of temporary access roads of the China-Laos Railway; and Before the bulldozer: Strategic agricultural cooperation for an uncertain rail alignment. Importantly, in neither of the two proposals are we discussing the connectivity directly brought by the China-Laos Railway itself—its primary economic justification. Instead, the focus is on recognizing preexisting and tenuous forms of connectivity. For instance, in “Curating rural connectivity,” which deals with the temporary access roads built tens of kilometers into rural landscapes to construct the railway (Figs. 1 and 2), existing peoples, places and economic nodes, such as local markets, become bypassed and marginalized. In “Before the bulldozer,” agricultural irrigation networks are disrupted and farmlands fragmented by the construction of the railway. While these disruptions may under certain economic terms be deemed necessary, the years of uncertainty in planning transparency and mechanisms of compensation amplify and distort the process. As we described in Chap. 2, plans, even if unconstructed, have impacts years before groundbreaking, as people and economies reorganize in speculation and anticipation. Although neoliberal processes often create smooth connections and do bring economic growth potential (Figs. 3 and 4), the impacts of supporting infrastructures create new, sometimes ephemeral and often uneven connections. Geographers writing on Laos cited earlier help us understand impact as relational and to strive for more critical articulations of what “cumulative” impact is in the development process (Barney, 2009; Dwyer, 2020). Dwyer asserts that projects in the Belt and Road Initiative (and most global development campaigns for that matter), whether new or drawn into that framework post-hoc, are assemblages of existing projects and relations.

In Chap. 4, we also reference Dwyer’s (2020) contention that meaningful debates and reflections on the Belt and Road Initiative should not center on its similarities and differences with neoliberalism but instead on the recurring faults of regulatory protections, especially the environmental and social impact assessment (EIA or ESIA) processes promoted worldwide since the early 1990s. We also introduced the World Bank’s and environmental governance state’s “lexicon of impact” as described by Goldman (2005) and Dwyer (2020) in their respective writings on Laos. This discourse or lexicon of direct and indirect impacts (as well as induced, in-combination, or cumulative impacts) facilitates planners’ agency to deploy a “nuanced specification of complexity” that, because of these planners’ compromised positions in a project’s power structure, ultimately tends toward reductions in overall economic risk and the concomitant externalization of the true costs of development, displacing responsibility for socioenvironmental mitigation and adaptation onto local populations (Dwyer, 2020, p. 4). The planning proposals in this chapter redirect such nuanced specifications of complexity, primarily in social and ecological terms, to purposefully accentuate difference and heterogeneity and encourage structures that reproduce such qualities.

One example of this purposeful, indeed critical, nuance is in the recognition of plural publics and plural perceptions of environmental impacts. Fujita Lagerqvist et al. (2014) reason that villagers have complex responses to degradation (including both real degradation and the environmental governance state’s construction of the concept of degradation), whereby they often pursue livelihood diversification or resiliency and reorient their production and practices towards newly accessible markets. Strategic planning proposals in this chapter (as well as in Chap. 6) offer politically and ecologically tuned guidance to aid villagers’ responses to degradation, especially under uncertain development conditions and pathways. These strategic proposals capitalize on the shared uncertainties impacted communities face. Yet, where these strategic proposals suggest state-, NGO-, or developer-led interventions, such as the social responsibility schemes considered in “Before the bulldozer,” they do not assume or make their strategies contingent on such intervention. At most, such suggestions are included to help principled actors argue for such programs, supported by the contextually rich details and awareness-raising components of these bottom-up strategies.

Fig. 1

Temporary access roads built for constructing remote segments and 109 tunnel portals of the China-Laos Railway. Consisting of both new construction and upgrades of existing tracks, these roads potentially increase connectivity among remote villages, but their maintenance beyond the opening date of the railway remains uncertain. Photo by Xiaoxuan Lu (March, 2019)

Fig. 2

A tunnel portal of the China-Laos Railway under construction above the Nam Khan River south of Luang Prabang. Photo by Ashley Scott Kelly (March, 2018)

Fig. 3

At Nanla New Town Planning Exhibition Center in southern Yunnan province, an hour drive from the China-Laos border gate, one of the galleries is dedicated to “The Belt and Road” and features a simplified timeline of the vast trade network connecting Eurasia and North Africa via land and sea starting from the second century BCE and continuing into the future. This gallery also highlights Nanla’s strategic importance in Yunnan and globally, summarized in hyped-up titles such as “Opening up the Border Area to Build an Attractive Yunnan” and “Reviving the Historic Silk Road to Build a Better-Connected World.” Photo by Ashley Scott Kelly (March, 2019)

Fig. 4

Located near the China-Laos border in Southern Yunnan, Mengla city is undergoing rapid transformation given its strategic location along the southern corridor of the BRI. The city’s expansion on the east bank of the Nanla River is branded as Nanla New Town. This photograph shows the newly completed “Water Splashing Square” designed to host 6,000 people in the foreground, and a two-story Nanla New Town Planning Exhibition Center with its pitched roof was a replica of the traditional Dai-style architecture, only ten times the scale. Photo by Ashley Scott Kelly (March, 2019)

2 Curating Rural Connectivity: Strategic Maintenance of Temporary Access Roads of the China-Laos Railway

By early 2018, nearly all the China-Laos Railway’s 110 tunnel portals had started construction.¹ One-third of these are sited between Luang Prabang and Muang Xay along the most inaccessible portions of the China-Laos Railway corridor. Due to its remoteness and mountainous terrain, this 86 km segment required construction of new access roads, some extending up to 44 km in length to reach northern Laos’s primary north–south vehicular corridor, Route 13 (Fig. 5). Since beginning construction in 2016, these access roads have served not only building the railway but also communities along those access roads. Regardless of whether being composed of new construction or upgrading of existing tracks, when the China-Laos railway becomes operational in 2021, these “temporary” roads face future uncertainty when the construction companies that maintain them vacate. This is compounded by risk hazards, including floods, drought, and landslides prevalent across the study region (Fig. 6; Hearn, 2011; Hearn et al., 2008).

Given the insufficient government resources allocated to district and rural road development, this project reveals potentials of these access roads to aid social and economic development of remote rural communities. Laos’s road sector has been long plagued by underfunding, irregular targeting of priorities, and poor communication and collaboration between government departments (Fig. 7; Barma & Oksen, 2014). Established in 2001, the Road Maintenance Fund (RMF) is the primary agency charged with road maintenance nationally. 74% of the agency’s funding currently targets the maintenance of national roads, such as Route 13, and 18% goes to district and rural roads at a 1 to 1.5 ratio (Figs. 8 and 9; ADB, 2015). While funding has generally increased year-on-year, it does not meet current maintenance needs and generally deteriorating road conditions across the country (ADB, 2015). The government’s future upgrade plans are primarily surface improvements, including engineered natural surfaces and increased lanes (Fig. 10). Further, road safety audits in Laos focus within the right-of-way only; roadside conditions are not considered yet are key to road performance and longevity.

Using the Laos’s 2015 census (Lao Statistics Bureau, 2016), a comparison between communities along highly accessible Route 13 and those extremely remote along the rail corridor shows that average literacy rates, unemployment rates, electricity access, poverty incidence, and length of the “longest route to school” are similar (Fig. 11). This suggests that physical accessibility may not be the dominant factor affecting living standards and thus the need to focus on service provision.

This project develops scenarios and designs for six prototypical locations (Figs. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17), including their five nearest settlements so that livelihood opportunities and impacts can in part shape the proposed mitigation methods. Site and material preparation, implementation, and maintenance strategies are suggested for each scenario. Key criteria for each approach include: Local material sourcing, technical knowledge and on-the-ground capacity, short-term economic and ecological incentives (including roadside ecology enhancement), short- and long-term labor costs, and phase durations of each strategy. Roadside conditions were sampled and categorized into farmland, rubber plantation, degraded slopes, bare ground, and close proximity to perennial and non-perennial streams. Staged implementation (Fig. 18) first prioritizes those road segments (1) with the highest geotechnical risk and (2) most critical for the school-market networks. Stage three focuses on remaining routes necessary to secure livelihood and education. Stage four focuses on remaining villages that rely primarily on river transport.

This project further focuses on the potential of maintaining access roads, long after the railway’s construction is complete, to increase education access and efficacy in rural areas. According to the UN Special Rapporteur’s assessment of Laos in March 2019, education is key to poverty alleviation and future development in Laos. A key suggestion from those recommendations is the need for primary school education to be conducted in pupils’ native languages, not just in Lao language as currently mandated by the national government (Fig. 19). Based on ethnolinguistic groups and possibilities resulting from the new access roads’ increased connectivity, a modified network of schools is proposed to cater to the Lao, Palaungic, and Tai-Thai speaking communities in the study region (Figs. 20, 21 and 22). This proposal redistributes 352 schools, assuming an anticipated future primary school-going population of 47,000, which was derived from statistic in the census.

As a byproduct of the China-Laos Railway, temporary access roads could create new potential for resilient livelihoods, improved market and school networks and service provision. Villages previously isolated, or at least disconnected due to poor road conditions during the monsoon, have new viability of commercial agriculture, inter-village trade, processing, and contract farming, if the access roads could be maintained strategically as this project demonstrates.

Landscape planning for development, especially development such as roads that are driven ideologically, economically and physically engineered by and for connectivity, must be done assuming preexisting connections. Likewise, one must also assume that development happens upon preexisting development, including past implemented projects, past planned projects, supporting infrastructures, and current planned projects.

The design proposal “Curating rural connectivity: Strategic maintenance of temporary access roads of the China-Laos Railway” and accompanying illustrations were developed by Heather Lam Hoilok during the course Studio Laos: Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong.

Fig. 5

Between Luang Prabang and Muany Xay in northern Laos, this 86 km segment of the China-Laos Railway route contains seven planned stations and 38 tunnels totaling 59 km

Fig. 6

Preliminary geotechnical risk assessment showing spatial distribution of flood, drought, and landscape risk to roads, including temporary access roads built for the construction of the China-Laos Railway, in the study region

Fig. 7

Institutional structure for road maintenance showing proportion of government road budget allocated to national versus district and local roads

Fig. 8

Timeline of key events in road, railway, and school development in the study region

Fig. 9

Road maintenance costs and budget for district and rural roads

Fig. 10

Rural road typologies include Class III, local, paved, and engineered natural surface roads

Fig. 11

Demographics of communities between Luang Prabang and Muang Xay comparing (1) communities along northern Laos’s primary highway Route 13 and (2) remote communities along the China-Laos Railway route

Fig. 12

Strategy 1: For temporary access roads near Ban Pounglian village, brush layering on degraded fill slopes and slopes with gradients less than 1:1.5 is proposed

Fig. 13

Strategy 2: For temporary access roads near Ban Vanggnan village, retention ponds and live check dams on degraded slopes near settlements are proposed

Fig. 14

Strategy 3: For temporary access roads near Ban Houaymok village, grassed waterways and contour strip farming on 2° to 10° slopes are proposed. Crops and grass species are suggested that complement existing farming practices and promote a more diverse crop mixture

Fig. 15

Strategy 4: For temporary access roads near Ban Tongtounoy and Houaylan villages, revegetation for livestock on slopes with at least 30% soil content is proposed. Because these two villages have a relatively larger livestock sector, suitable forage grass species are suggested

Fig. 16

Strategy 5: For temporary access roads near Ban Hongthougnai village, stabilization of rubber plantation monocultures is proposed. Suitable fruit tree species are suggested to complement the villages existing plantations practices and to complement the lifespan of the existing rubber plantations

Fig. 17

Strategy 6: Bio-embankment is proposed for slopes of temporary access roads adjacent to rivers but far from villages. Suitable tree, shrub and grass species are suggested

Fig. 18

Proposed road improvement and maintenance phasing strategy that prioritizes access, education, and trade on networks enabled by access roads constructed for building the China-Laos Railway

Fig. 19

Ethnolinguistic groups in the study region. Primary school children learn best when taught in their native language

Fig. 20

Existing and proposed networks of markets enabled by new temporary access roads constructed for the China-Laos Railway

Fig. 21

Existing and proposed networks of schools, combining new temporary access roads constructed for the China-Laos Railway with existing ethnolinguistic clusters

Fig. 22

Service areas for education and trade, with existing and proposed markets, schools, and road connections

3 Before the Bulldozer: Strategic Agricultural Cooperation for an Uncertain Rail Alignment

Laos and China signed a memorandum of understanding for construction of the China-Laos Railway in April 2010 (AFP, 2010). By July 2017, Lao provincial task force committees reported estimates that 4,411 families must be relocated along the 420 km China-Laos Railway route (Radio Free Asia, 2017, July 12). However, no official alignment plan at a scale or with sufficient resolution had ever been released that would allow local communities, or any level of civil society for that matter, to know if they would be directly displaced or impacted in other ways by the project. Uncertain development timelines, i.e., when land clearance and construction would begin, are common, and targets are often missed even when dates for project components and stages are formally set. The China-Laos Railway is, at least in terms of construction, an exception in this regard, and although the project has greatly lacked transparency in its design, impact assessment, and construction processes, it has generally kept at or ahead of its construction schedule (after a few false starts) since its ground-breaking in 2016.

Also in 2016, the Lao government introduced Decree 84 on “Compensation and Resettlement Management in Development Projects,” which replaced the 2005 Decree 192 and removed the previously existing legal requirement for land-for-land compensation. Although not without significant planning and implementation issues, a predominantly monetary form of compensation introduces a host of additional issues for people highly dependent on the land. Compensation calculations in Laos, especially when compared with World Bank standards, often neglect significant intangible costs, such as valuing agricultural investments, transportation, administrative costs, and market access. For the China-Laos Railway, delays, including those of more than two years from when households are displaced for the railway’s construction until they receive compensation, were persistently reported in media such as the U.S. government-backed outlet Radio Free Asia (2019, July 16). Besides direct loss of land, railway construction has fragmented the irrigation patterns of agricultural land, and such indirect or other diffuse socio-economic impacts of the railway have not been formally accounted for.

The following proposal offers strategies that vulnerable groups could use to help plan for and direct their household’s and communities’ futures, given the significant uncertainty and often impossibility of knowing when or where the rail alignment and right-of-way are to be developed. A site for brainstorming various scenarios was selected near the planned Ban Phonsavang Station on the China-Laos Railway route in the northernmost part of Vientiane Prefecture (Figs. 23 and 24). In March 2018, University of Hong Kong researchers georeferenced a national-scale map and elevation profile of the China-Laos Railway of entire the 400 km route from Boten to Vientiane and documented segments under construction (Fig. 25). The red line representing the railway, while no more than a few millimeters on the original map, spans a width of nearly a kilometer in real space (Fig. 26). The selected site of study and scenario-building is an approximately 10 km-wide stretch of land between the Nam Souang Reservoir and Nam Ngum River, where both the rail corridor and northern Laos’s major north–south highway Route 13 run parallel. Based on a coarse analysis of satellite imagery,² approximately two-thirds of agricultural land in the study area is assumed to be wet rice production, and there is wide variation in the land areas of farmed parcels.

A constellation of stakeholder- and context-specific development pathways is sketched out that can increase both stakeholders’ awareness of risks and their capacity to cope with change (Fig. 27). Such pathways are structured to increase resilience against the uncertain rail alignment, undefined compensation timetables, and potential direct and indirect impacts on land and water supply by balancing an increase in targeted redundancy with intensified agricultural production and returns. Several variables are considered, some based on secondary research and others necessary assumptions in order to construct sufficiently detailed scenarios that will foreground a range of livelihood and other strategic challenges.

Potentially impacted farmers were classified into six categories based on agricultural seasonal calendars, parcel size and livelihood sources. For instance, large holders’ generally have both larger labor resources and greater access to diverse forms of capital, including land and water access, financial, and technological, while smallholders and those with subsistence livelihoods have a weaker capacity to adapt to change or to diversify their modes of production (Fig. 28).

This strategy counts forward hypothetically from 2012 after the first public release of low-resolution maps of the railway’s general alignment. In an alternative past, over the next several years, agricultural cooperatives capable of capitalizing on the community’s shared uncertainties are established (Figs. 29 and 30). New field preparation works carried out (Figs. 31, 32, 33 and 34) and agricultural intensification strategies are suggested that generally raise the value of land while targeting a range of potential compensation outcomes, including those that purposefully raise awareness of international standards and Laos’s legacy of compensation lapses (Fig. 35) (See, for example, Stuart-Fox, 2009). For small holders, less labor-intensive crops allow time for vocational training. When official land surveys are finally carried out and villagers are informed of the precise location of the 50-m railway right-of-way, agricultural cooperatives must go through a reorganization process, prompted by the new information about whether their lands are to the east, west, fragmented by and/or directly within the requisition area. When required to leave, residual lands can be sold, if arable but not necessarily productive in isolation, into management by the cooperative.

While this strategic plan turns uncertainty into valuable time for preparation, it is necessary to gauge community solidarity and social choice when tested by rapidly changing development circumstances. The eventual distribution of compensation, as well as its imminent or always-present promise, will map unevenly against this agricultural cooperation. Engendering community building, management and local leadership is necessary for assessing risks and distributing knowledge of those risks, for incentivizing change, and for implementing improvement works. These cooperative structures may yield unexpected benefits, such as potentially facilitating communities’ direct input into the any social responsibility schemes the developer may consider implementing. For large-scale developments such as the China-Laos railway, it is necessary to understand transparency as a process—to consider what is known, what will be known, and what can be known—as strategic considerations that can lead to more resilient futures.

The design proposal “Before the bulldozer: Strategic agricultural cooperation for an uncertain rail alignment” and accompanying illustrations were developed by May Zou Wenyao during the course Studio Laos: Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong.

Fig. 23

The selected study site is located at the northern boundary of Vientiane Prefecture near the planned Ban Phonsavang station of the China-Laos Railway

Fig. 24

This proposal’s approximately 10 km-wide study site (black dotted line) includes agricultural fields fed by irrigation systems interrupted by the construction of the China-Laos Railway (red double line)

Fig. 25

A national-scale map and elevation profile of the China-Laos Railway planned route was released in 2016. While accurate, the low resolution of the route means that its precise location on the ground is only knowable within an approximately one-kilometer-wide span (blue shaded area)

Fig. 26

Within the study area, significant amounts of both large- and smallholder agricultural land is at risk from either (1) direct land loss due to railway construction or (2) disruption of irrigation water supply

Fig. 27

Stakeholder- and context-specific development pathways and cooperation strategies are suggested that take into account landowner resources, agricultural practices and risk resiliency

Fig. 28

Landowner cooperation strategies consider the level of development uncertainty (i.e., how much is known about the railway’s direct impact on land and irrigation systems) and could be supplemented by social responsibility schemes and vocational training programs

Fig. 29

Aerial perspective sampling a range of circumstances within the study site and suggested agricultural cooperation strategies to mitigate impacts of railway development

Fig. 30

Various agricultural intensification strategies, including relay intercropping and integrated agriculture, are considered for different community economic groups and impacts of future land loss due to railway construction

Fig. 31

Sampling of existing agricultural land uses (background) and suggested agricultural intensification strategies in-situ (circles in foreground)

Fig. 32

Agricultural cooperative subgroups within the study area and their reorganization between 2012 to 2016 depending on level of uncertainty of the railway’s potential, planned, and constructed impacts

Fig. 33

Agricultural cooperation and intensification strategies for subgroup A within the study area

Fig. 34

Agricultural cooperation and intensification strategies for subgroup B within the study area

Fig. 35

Agricultural cooperation and intensification strategies for subgroup C within the study area