Abstract
This paper examines how new forms of ecological knowledge are produced and mobilised through a sustainability-oriented, commercial tree plantation project in Lao PDR. As Gavin Bridge has noted, the establishment of primary resource sector projects are often not simply based upon a discursive emptying and erasure of local social and environmental histories. More nuanced forms of selective re-encoding, and performance can occur, incorporating what Maureen Sioh has called a reconfiguration and imaginative recuperation of the physical landscape. In this case study, a commercial forestry company in Laos pays close attention to community environmental livelihood practices and local poverty indicators, and to the material remainders of the Second Indochina War embedded in the landscape. I argue that the production and circulation of new ecological knowledge through this project, and the interventions of new knowledge-actors in this area of the former Ho Chi Minh Trail zone of southern Laos, establishes a moral theatre of environmental sustainability and national development. The inscription and dissemination of new ecological and local knowledges can be understood as related to particular development-expert subjectivities in Laos. It is also connected to a competitive strategy employed by this company to gain access to concession land, within the broader context of non-scripted regulation and contested governance in Laos's plantation sector.
Highlights
The issue of large-scale land acquisitions in Southeast Asia has generated significant scholarly and policy attention in recent years
The development of plantation concessions in Laos and across Southeast Asia often involves a rapid conversion of available land and timber rents into capital, and such forms of capital accumulation generally occur through the dispossession of marginalised rural and upland communities who do not hold formal, legal land tenure rights (Hall et al 2011; Loehr 2012)
While the production of ecological knowledge is important for the company’s access to international certification systems, and potentially to financing support from multilateral institutions, this paper focuses on
Summary
The issue of large-scale land acquisitions in Southeast Asia has generated significant scholarly and policy attention in recent years. Whilst his own personal and ethical motivations for this sustainable forestry project are important (and no doubt genuinely held), his professional subject-position is that of a manager of a large, profit based agribusiness project that requires secure access to thousands of hectares of low-cost plantation land He plays a key role in brokering knowledge flows between local community sites, government agencies, and this global multinational firm that is seeking to establish productive agri-business assets in Laos, but that is concerned with maintaining high corporate social responsibility standards. I forward that the production and circulation of various forms of ecological knowledge has played a key role in each of these successive transformations in southeastern Laos, from the unruly and dangerous spaces of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to a remote post-war frontier site for building state socialism, to a new commodified and regulated, sustainability enclave
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