The Geographical Journal, Vol. 175, No. 2, June 2009, pp

The Geographical Journal, Vol. 175, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 146–159 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2009.00323.x

Geographical Journal Vol. 175, No. 2, pp. 146–159, 2009 © 2009 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2009 The Royal Geographical Society

Blackwell Publishing Ltd Laos and the making of a ‘relational’ resource frontier

KEITH BARNEYDepartment of Geography, York University, N430 Ross Building,

4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3E-mail: [email protected]

This paper was accepted for publication in December 2008

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier,drawing on examples of nature’s commodification and enclosure under way in theperipheral Southeast Asian country of Laos. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones ofeconomy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of socialproperty relations and systems of legality are rapidly established in response to marketimperatives. Customary property rights on the resource frontier can be seized by powerfulactors in crucial political moments, preparing the territorial stage for more intensivephases of resource commodity production and accumulation. Relational frontier space isunderstood through the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, who views theproduction of space as ‘constituted though the practices of engagement and the power-geometries of relations’. In Laos, a twenty-first century resource frontier is being drivenby new corporate investments in natural resources, and a supporting array of land reformprogrammes. The paper focuses on both the material and representational aspects of theproduction of the resource frontier, through policy and discourse analysis, and village levelresearch in Laos’ Khammouane province. By rethinking a dualist and hierarchical-scaledimaginary of frontier places, both rural people and local ecologies are shown to be keyactors, in a complex, relational reproduction of frontier zones. An emerging Lao spatialand political assemblage – a form of ‘frontier-neoliberalism’ – is shown as producingdramatic changes in socio-natural landscapes, as well as new patterns of marginalisationand livelihood insecurity for a vulnerable rural population.

KEY WORDS: Laos, resource frontier, relational economic geography, social nature

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the process and theimplications of the deepening incorporation ofthe Southeast Asian country of Lao PDR into

global circuits of resource extraction and commodityproduction. This process is understood through thegeographical metaphor of a twenty-first century‘resource frontier’. In the last decade, natural resourcesof all kinds have shown major increases in demand,prices and rates of new capital investment, andresource sector firms are ‘hot commodities’ in majorfinancial markets. In Southeast Asia, the classicalresource frontiers of Burma, Papua New Guinea,Laos and Cambodia – the last remaining forestedlandscapes where natural resources have not yetbeen enclosed, extracted, and incorporated into

circuits of production and consumption – are beingreached (e.g. White et al. 2006). Rising demand forresources of all kinds, and the merging of agro-foodwith industrial bio-fuel energy markets, stronglysuggests that there will only be increased challengesto forest conservation and forest-agrarian livelihoodsin global South countries (Nilsson 2007). Thesetrends are also leading to a new form of resourcegeopolitics, and ‘locked-in’ strategies of corporateresource security and wealth extraction.

In geography and political economy, the formal,integrated ‘Turner–Webb’ frontier thesis has beenthoroughly critiqued (see e.g. Cleary 1993). However,the metaphor of frontier remains widely used, as away of referring to agricultural–forest transitionzones of various kinds (e.g. Jepson 2006), and as away of conceptualising boom and bust cycles of

Laos and the making of a ‘relational’ resource frontier 147

Geographical Journal Vol. 175, No. 2, pp. 146–159, 2009© 2009 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2009 The Royal Geographical Society

resource-based economic growth (Barbier 2005).Jepson (2006) reviews how frontiers have beenconceptualised in recent social and economictheory: as cultural or political boundaries; and assites characterised by social inequity, environmentaldegradation and conflict. The frontier has also servedas a conceptual marker for the expansion of statepower into peripheral upland areas (e.g. Hirsch1990) and in critiques of liberal-juridical propertyrights regimes (e.g. Blomley 2003). In SoutheastAsian political ecology research, the frontier metaphorhas been widely employed in explaining patternsof forest logging, cash crop expansion, and problemsof resource degradation and communal displacement(e.g. McCarthy 2006; Tsing 2005; Walker 2006). Arelated critical approach, adopted in this paper, isto understand the production of frontiers throughthe geographical extension of capitalist relations ofproduction (De Angelis 2004).

In the Southeast Asian country of Laos, specificiterations of frontier dynamics are taking form. Laoshas recently been portrayed by key developmentbanks, private sector actors and Lao state agencies asa ‘new frontier’ for natural resources and businessopportunities [Asian Development Bank (ADB)2004; Fortune 2007]. Companies and state enter-prises from ASEAN and East Asian countries areleading this wave of foreign direct investment intoLaos, with French and Australian corporations alsorepresented (ADB 2006). A neoliberal-inspireddiscourse of the Mekong as an untapped resourcefrontier serves as a legitimating ideology for aparticular strategy of large-scale resource develop-ment and regional integration, the kind of whichhas been the focus for oppositional civil societyand community-based social movements in South-east Asia over the last two decades. The unevenlyregulated, ‘land rush’ quality of many of these landinvestments is now leading to new and intensivepatterns of ecological degradation and socialmarginalisation in the Lao countryside (CPI UNDP2006; GTZ 2007b). A key question regarding the newfrontier investment regime in Laos involves to whatextent new forms of economic dependency and politicaldominance are being established, both betweenLaos and its neighbours, and regarding the internalperiphery within territorial Laos.

In outlining this interpretation of contemporaryLaos as a resource frontier, I acknowledge thatrepresentations of geographical space always proceedfrom a particular standpoint or set of interests(Demeritt 1994). A key question running throughthis paper is, therefore, what ideological work dovarious representations of Laos as a ‘resource frontier’perform? What are the consequences of theseimaginaries, and who imagines them? (cf. Massey1999; Castree 2004).

The main section of this paper begins with aconceptual discussion of resource frontiers, capital-ism, scale, and nature in political ecology andgeographical research, building on the work ofTsing (2005), Li (1999), and Massey (e.g. 1999),among others. The rhetoric of ‘frontiers’ can beunderstood as a legitimating ideological device,used by state agencies, companies and develop-ment banks, in the advertising and promotion ofLaos as a ‘new frontier for corporate investment’.From a conceptual perspective, however, the Laofrontier can also be understood as a contested andcomplex empirical ‘reality’. When integrated withrelational approaches to economic geography andpolitical ecology, I suggest that the frontier can beused to understand critically new forest–agrariantransformations and resource displacements. Thesecond part of this paper shows how both thediscourse and the materiality of these processescombine in the reproduction of Laos, and uplandsubregions within Laos, as marginal, relationalfrontier spaces.

In the third section, the scaled complexities of theresource frontier are drawn out through a nationalscale analysis of neoliberal inspired resource sectorinvestment processes in Laos. The notion of the‘patchworked frontier’ is introduced, which indicateshow new global resource sector investments in Laosinteract with previous spatial regimes of resourcegovernance, producing fragmented and overlappingmosaics of resource governance and territorialcontrol (MacLean 2008). A case study in the fourthsection explores the locally contingent and unexpectedoutcomes of tree crop plantation and hydropowerproject development in a rural Lao village, furthercontextualising relational frontier processes, andassociated livelihood changes, for a lowland Laocommunity in Khammouane’s Hinboun River valley.Fieldwork in Laos highlights that new frontier placesand landscapes are not simply the outcomes of globalpolitical-economic forces and elite state-bureaucraticdiscourses. Resource frontiers, as enacted in specificlocations, can be understood as relational spaces,produced through scaled interactions which aresimultaneously material and representational. Theeveryday practices of local people (Walker 2006),and the ‘agency’ of local natures are typicallyunacknowledged, but crucial actors in landscapetransformations (Tsing 2005; Raffles 2002).

The conclusion revisits how a de-centred, relationalapproach to resource frontiers can be useful formoving beyond a simple analysis of the changinglocation and ‘impact’ of extractive industries. Inrelational economic geography (Massey et al. 1999;Massey 2005; Bathelt and Gluckler 2003; Yeung2002 2005), analytical attention is placed upon theiterative relations between actors at various scales.

148 Laos and the making of a ‘relational’ resource frontier


Resource frontiers and peripheries can be viewedless through exclusive, spatial and scalar hierar-chies, or in Moore’s phrase, ‘hermetically sealedsites of autonomy’, but rather as intensely‘relational spaces of connection and articulation’(Moore 1998, 347). In this understanding, locality,communities and rural ecological landscapes emergewith a significant degree of agency, articulated andconstructed in relation to an assemblage of otheractors and processes (see Massey 2005, 100–1).Frontier sites are thus places which are shapedthrough the overdetermined, emergent effects ofscaled power geometries (Massey 1999). Such arelational-geographical approach may aid inlocating the complex, situated and cumulativenature of local social and environmental transfor-mations which reproduce frontier space, inequalityand marginality, sometimes in unexpected ways.Relational understandings of the social–nature andcentre–periphery dynamics associated with resourcefrontiers might also inform a more geographicallycomplex understanding of ongoing ‘structural’processes of accumulation through dispossession(De Angelis 2004; Glassman 2006; Hart 2006;MacLean 2008).

Resource frontiers in economic geography and political ecology

The frontier has been a recurring but contested conceptin political ecology and economic geography. Theclassical, Turnerian frontier thesis was forwarded asan interpretation of the historical experience ofcolonial settlement in the United States. Turner’sfrontier was conceived of as ‘the meeting pointbetween savagery and civilization’, where thechallenge of expansion across ‘wilderness’ acted toindividualise, masculinise, and democratise a whitesettler American society (Kristof 1959, 274). Thisidea of the frontier was inflected with the paternal-ist, racist ideology of its time, advancing a linearnarrative which acted to minimise the pre-European settlement history of the Americas.Turner’s frontier thesis was subject to a sustainedacademic critique in geography by Carl Sauer andothers, although the frontier often re-emerged as away of conceiving of political borderlands or zonesof transition of various kinds (Kristof 1959).

The emergence of political ecology as a field ofresearch engaging with the political economy ofecological degradation, poverty, and nature–societyinteractions in the 1980s provided the resourcefrontier with a new conceptual footing. The mostsustained engagement with the political ecology offrontier landscapes has arguably been in relation tothe Brazilian Amazon (e.g. Schmink and Wood1992; Hecht and Cockburn 1990). Another subset

of the political economy of Latin American resourcefrontiers literature focused on the link betweenresource frontiers and suboptimal economic patternsof overexploitation and boom and bust cycles,leading to Dutch disease cycles of low growth, andthe ‘resource curse’ (see Barbier 2005).

Cleary (1993), among other scholars (includingSchmink and Wood 1992), has critiqued frontiertheory as an inadequate explanatory framework forunderstanding the complexity of political economictransformations in the Amazon. In particular, theseauthors point to problematic understandings of thefrontier as a linear historical-geographical process,whereby the extension of forms of capital investmentis considered as synonymous with the expansion offull capitalism. Cleary (1993, 332, 345) considers thisas reflective of a deeper, recurring problem withthe classical frontier thesis applied to the Amazon:‘. . . theories of frontier development derived fromorthodox political economy have proved an unreli-able guide to economic, social and political trendsin the Brazilian Amazon . . . The broad analyticalcategories which characterise it – peasantry, modeof production, class, state – become blurred whenapplied to the region, conflating and radicallysimplifying a complex social reality’.

For Cleary and other critics, the Amazon actuallyposes more problems than opportunities for theadvancement of capitalism. Further, Cleary critiquesrepresentations of the peasantry in frontier politicaleconomic theory, as ‘. . . both omnipresent and absent,continually talked about but never actually appearing,subsumed into an ideological framework in whichwhat a peasantry is, and the range of possibilitiesopen to it, had already been decided’ (p. 338). Thiscritique of a linear understanding to frontier formsof cash crop expansion, and the problems with asimplified understanding of social actors, has alsobeen applied to studies of upland and forestedSoutheast Asia (e.g. Li 1999).

Yet, particularly in the post-Cold War phase ofglobal neoliberal capitalism (Harvey 2005), it wouldbe difficult to argue that new forms of capitalistexploitation – large-scale logging, plantations,mines, hydropower dams, and other resource-basedindustrial projects – have not had a transformativeeffect in many regions of the global South. Anuanced understanding, which maintains a criticalperspective on the existence of scalar configura-tions of power and a global capitalist politicaleconomy, but in which frontier space is also under-stood in a relational manner, as the product ofpractices, trajectories, and emergent inter-relations(Massey 1999; Bathelt and Gluckler 2003), mayaddress some of the limitations with frontier thinkingwhich Cleary and others identify. Indeed, for Marxistscholars, such as De Angelis, frontiers of various



kinds are viewed as an essential spatial form in thefunctioning of global capitalism:

Capital’s identification of a frontier implies theidentification of a space of social life that is stillrelatively uncolonised by capitalist relations ofproduction and modes of activity.

De Angelis (2004, 72)

Frontier formations in this sense become under-stood as a geographical expression of primitiveaccumulation and enclosure, a process: ‘. . . rootedin capital’s drive to continuous expansion’ (DeAngelis 2004, 72).

In research on the political ecology of SoutheastAsia’s forested and upland landscapes, the frontierconcept is often deployed as a malleable heuristicdevice [see e.g. Tsing (2005) on Kalimantan;and McCarthy (2006) on Sumatra]. Walker (2006)forwards the frontier as ‘. . . expanding borderlands(figuratively or literally) driven by economic cyclesof rapid investment with potential for dispropor-tionate return on investment’. Along similar lines,Tsing (2005, 28, 31) has recently described currentforest–agrarian dynamics in Kalimantan’s interior asa deregulated zone of ‘frontier capitalism’. Indone-sian frontiers are presented as an ‘out of control,interstitial capitalist expansion’ – a dystopian‘travelling theory’, marked by violent dispossession,high profits, and deep ecological degradation.Tsing’s interpretation of the Kalimantan frontiersituates to how local people, places and naturesbecome actively marginalised, and how customaryproperty regimes are erased or confused by theentrance of new actors who ‘change the rules’,through both legal and extra-legal means. The‘agency’ of nature and landscape is of key impor-tance in Tsing’s account of how the Kalimantanfrontier pushed forward in Suharto-era Indonesia.

In a manner aligned with Tsing’s description ofKalimantan, I understand the Lao resource frontier asunevenly produced, through both legal and illegalmeans. Highly damaging and extractive timbermining operations, thinly disguised as plantationconcessions and linked back to powerful politicalfigures, can be located nearby to the projects ofhighly capitalised global firms, claiming accreditationthrough eco-social certification. The resource frontierin Laos is composed of a heterogeneous assemblageof development actors and state interests. This uplandfrontier is also, to a significant degree, transnationaland corporate, centred upon large-scale hydropower,mining, forestry and agri-business – the export-oriented resource sectors considered by key Laoand international agencies to be the most importantfor the country’s development future [Governmentof Lao PDR (GoL) 2003]1.

In this section, I have argued that a relationalapproach to the political ecology of resourcefrontiers holds analytical potential as a ‘meso-scale’heuristic device for understanding the geographiesof resource extraction, displacement and marginalityunder global capitalism. In turning to the Laocontext, I show how the frontier is less being settled,as much as it is being emptied2; and resourcesector investments are being accompanied by asweeping programme of enclosure.

Imagining, producing and governing frontier space in Laos

Oxiana Ltd. geologist Tony Manini spent seven yearsof the last decade exploring jungle tracks on the HoChi Minh Trail in Laos, searching rocky outcrops forgold. The expedition paid off with a $4.29 billiongold and copper find, the first in Laos by an overseasmining company.

‘We were leading the push into new frontiers,’ saidManini, 40, who with a team of Soviet-trained Laotiancolleagues drilled 440 holes between 1993 and 1999in a jungle littered with unexploded Vietnam War-era bombs.

http://www. Bloomberg.com (16 August 2004)

The idea of Laos as a resource frontier has a long,and often problematic, historical provenance. From‘colonial backwater’, to ‘battle state’, ‘buffer state’,and more lately the ‘cross-roads state’ of the GreaterMekong Subregion, there have been numerous,external representations of Lao territorial space (seeJerndall and Rigg 1998; Pholsena and Banomyong2006). As Ivarsson (2008, 34) highlights, the idea ofLaos as an underpopulated territory, an ‘unsettledfrontier’, extends back to the colonial period, whenthe Siamese and French struggled over control ofthe lands east of the Mekong. After the Frenchcolonial state secured the boundary betweenIndochina and Siam as the Mekong River, the Laoterritories became the focus for attempts at roadand rail infrastructure development. The aim was to‘de-link’ Laos from the cultural and economic influenceof Siam (Ivarsson 2008). Such spatial imaginaries ofLaos as a frontier served as utilitarian tropes, linkedto issues of colonial, and neo-colonial, political-economic power.

The above quote from Australia-based OxianaMineral’s3 gold and copper project in the uplands atXepon district, in Savannakhet province, capturessomething of the current zeitgeist concerning theLao resource sector, updating the colonial idea ofLaos as an underpopulated frontier zone. Thecurrent iteration is a representation of Lao territorialspace as an available, untapped space, which has

http://www.Bloomberg.com



remained out of the reach of international capital,due to the Indochina wars and the post-conflictisolationism imposed by the Lao People’s Revolu-tionary Party (LPRP). Oxiana’s mining project, alongwith the World Bank and ADB’s backing for theNam Theun II hydropower megaproject, are particularlynotable, as they represent highly capital-intensivetransnational projects, sited in a socialist countrycarrying a high sovereign risk profile4. This is aclear reiteration of the idea of the frontier as a ‘lessexplored’ country that nevertheless holds theopportunity for significant risk and profit. It is also a‘smooth’, non-relational perspective of territorial Laos,a free, unbounded space available for commodityextraction and production (cf. Massey 1999).

Recent imaginings of Laos’ development futurehave become closely associated with variousbusiness-friendly representations of an untappedfrontier. The ADB, for instance, dubs the GreaterMekong Subregion as a ‘last frontier’ for intra-regional business opportunities and for environmentconservation programming (ADB 2004). The tropeof the frontier is also being deployed by Lao stateministries themselves, in seeking to boost investorinterest into the country. For instance, in a specialadvertising section of the high-profile Americanmagazine Fortune (2007, S1–S2), Deputy PrimeMinister and Minister of Foreign Affairs ThonglounSisoulith pitches Laos as a ‘New Frontier of Oppor-tunity’, highlighting Laos’ ASEAN and upcomingWTO membership; supportive, confidence-buildinginvestment policies; and an expanding volumeof intra-regional trade made possible throughinfrastructure upgrades. ‘We have been to signforeign direct investment memorandums of under-standing worth $2 billion,’ stated the Deputy PrimeMinister. This value of FDI is not insignificantwhen compared with Laos’ 2006 GDP of US$3.455billion (World Bank 2008).

The idea of Laos as a resource frontier (and uplandLaos, in particular, as a sub-national resourceperiphery) is not simply an ideological spatialimaginary forwarded by the elite. In another sense,the resource frontier also captures an importantempirical ‘reality’ concerning the political economyof rapid and uneven development in the country.Market reforms and large-scale foreign direct invest-ment (FDI) from China, Vietnam, Thailand5, andelsewhere, have become synonymous with the Laopath to socialism, and now represent the primarymeans by which the Lao state engages with questionsof development and rural poverty. Peripheral,‘post-socialist’ Laos has become one of the lastnation-states to become functionally integrated withglobal capital flows and investment, a classic exampleof the geographical extension and deepening ofcapitalist relations. Natural resources are the most

crucial components of this development and regionalintegration project.

New announcements of large foreign directinvestment deals into Laos are now regular featuresin the state-controlled Vientiane Times newspaper. Inthe hydropower sector, nine projects are currentlyin operation in Laos which together generateapproximately US$20 million per year in exportrevenues. The total number of hydropower projectsites in Laos, holding at least a ‘Memorandum ofUnderstanding’ agreement with the GoL, has reached75 (LNCE 2008). In mining, some 96 companies areoperating 156 mining concessions in Laos (Depart-ment of Geology and Mines 2007).

For commercial tree plantations, 2007 data fromthe Lao Committee for Planning and Investment(CPI) indicate that concessions covering a minimumof 150 000 ha have been granted to six internationalcompanies, representing a projected investment ofUS$500 million as of early 2007 (CPI 2007).Included in the current list of Lao plantation investorsare the world’s second largest forestry and papercompany (Stora-Enso), Asia’s largest paper producer(Oji, from Japan), a major multinational from India(Aditya-Birla), and Vietnam’s Dak Lak RubberCompany. A key governance issue in the plantationsector is that many of the external plantation investorshave signed deals directly with provincial or evenlocal administrations, without the knowledge orapproval of the relevant central ministries. Thereverse also holds, with central actors at timesapproving investment deals without the knowledgeof provincial levels of government (e.g. GTZ 2006,Annex 11). The official record documenting theactual state of the plantation investment regime inLaos therefore remains incomplete (but see Dwyer2007 for a review of available data).

Undoubtedly, there remain significant limitationsin the ability for international capital to investprofitably in Laos. Laos remains near the bottom ofregional good governance, transparency and ‘easeof doing business’ surveys. Announced FDI projectscan be delayed, and then later abandoned, due tobureaucratic hurdles and rent seeking, a generallyweak regulatory environment, and indeed due tothe underlying, speculative objectives of particularinvestors (see e.g. GTZ 2006; Dwyer 2007). But thesteady progression of the Lao state, and their devel-opment bank patrons, in recasting the country as anew frontier for capital intensive resource sectorinvestment is striking. Regional integration andinvestment, set back significantly by the Asian financialcrisis of 1997–2001 (Pholsena and Banomyong2006, 93), is a project now firmly back on track(see also Glassman 2007). While the country’sexternal debt load remains high, at approximately80% of GDP, from a macroeconomic perspective



the World Bank (2006, 2) argues that ‘. . . withprudent fiscal management this [external debt] andother vulnerabilities are expected to ease alongsidethe increases in FDI [foreign direct investment] dueto large projects’.

But there are clear omissions and simplificationsinvolved in this imagining of rural and upland Laosas an available frontier space for transnationalinvestment into hydropower dams, plantations andmining. The particular notion that the Lao uplandsare underpopulated has been reiterated by theADB, in recent assertions that there are abundanttracts of ‘degraded land’, without claimants, availablefor tree plantations development (ADB 2005). Thisis despite years of documented research – some ofit sponsored by the ADB itself – on the importanceof local claims and access to natural resources,including long-term rotational fallows in swiddenagriculture, for livelihoods in the upland country-side (see Chamberlain 2001 2007). Similarly, theWorld Bank and the ADB have provided loanguarantees for the Nam Theun II project, despitethe fact that the dam will undermine the liveli-hoods of over 120 000 downstream persons, andthere are only limited plans to deal with thiseventuality (see e.g. International Rivers 2008).One could argue that such omissions are not anaccidental oversight – they are a crucial method ofexternalising the true costs of resource develop-ment mega-projects, and shifting the damages andthe responsibility onto local populations.

Understandings of Laos as a resource frontier, onthe one hand, serve a useful ideological function forresource capital, as this taps into popular under-standings of frontiers as ‘empty’ or under-populatedwilderness, which hold the promise for high rates ofreturn on investment. A more critical understandingof frontiers, however, identifies a crucial truism ofcapitalist globalisation – that capital actively seeksout and establishes new resource peripheries,thereby reproducing uneven development andmarginalisation. De Angelis writes:

It is capital that identifies a frontier, and the identifica-tion of this frontier implies the creation of a space ofenclosures, a horizon within which policies and practicespromoting further separation between people andmeans of production in new spheres of life.


As Tsing (2005) points to in Kalimantan, theambiguity and manipulation of legality and illegal-ity in the Lao resource sector, and the existence ofboth simple extractive and governing-developmentalistresource project types should not be understood asan aberration from more normal or ‘rational’ patternsof development. Rather, rapid processes of primitive

accumulation and the continuous colonisation ofnew geographic spaces are inherent features ofcapitalist dynamics. Kelly and Kaplan, drawing onWeber, point to the ‘functional’ aspects of such adynamic instability:

Markets in general, and markets in capital in particular,have great use for the calculability that comes withpowerful legal regulation, not least to protect greatand risk-laden investments. But nevertheless they havealso an even greater use for schemes that lead togrowth via exploitation, manipulation and otherovercoming of legal limitations.

Kelly and Kaplan (2001, 424)

Lao state planners and their multilateral develop-ment bank backers face a crucial problem area inthis sense, precisely because the uplands are mostemphatically not an ‘empty wilderness’, or freelyavailable for market development. The freely availablefrontier land of the development programmer’simagination must be created; produced where it didnot exist before. Thus, in order to capitalise fully uponthe revenue-generating potential of the Lao landscape,to provide investment capital with above averagerates of profit (i.e. resource rents), and to providethe state with a revenue base to maintain its (oftenclientalist, neo-patrimonial) functions, widespreadupland enclosures must be engineered.

This presents an expansive new technical problemarea for state governance in Laos. Coercive enclosuresare being achieved through a state apparatus that iswilling and able to implement programmes ofresettlement and focal site development (see Bairdand Shoemaker 2007). But in Laos, as elsewhere,developments on the resource frontier are usuallynot simply a story of domination and expropriation.As the Lao state moves towards governing andimproving, rather than simply expropriation andextraction, rural and upland resource developmenthas also become a complex field of politicalnegotiation, involving the promise of social develop-ment and community improvement, in exchange forrelinquished communal claims to ‘state’ land. Thisexchange of land for development can be, andindeed typically is, a very unequal bargain. But theresolution of this new governmental question inLaos hinges around how ‘successfully’ such anupland transition can be engineered. A range ofmore or less sophisticated development programmeshas emerged, at times involving cooperative arrange-ments between private sector resource firms andsocio-environmental NGOs, in which the provisionof development ‘goods’ (access to extensionservices, new technologies, market access, tenuresecurity and so forth) are extended to affectedcommunities, in an attempt to counteract negative



outcomes of resource development. These develop-ment interventions are aimed at moving ruralpeople towards producing saleable commodities,but from a smaller space of land. In these ways, thedisplacement and enclosure effects from large-scaleresource development projects come to be viewedas ‘reasonable, if difficult decisions’ by a wide numberof mainstream development and conservationistactors. De Angelis (2004, 82) also points to thecomplex and contradictory nature of resource frontiersand the capitalism’s enclosures:

The discourse of enclosures . . . must present itself notas a negative force, one that separates, brutalises, anddisempowers; but, on the contrary, it also has to wear themantle of rationality, and project a vision of the futurethat makes sense to a multiplicity of concrete subjects.


It is important to recognise this productive, ‘positive’side to producing and governing frontier space inLaos in accounting for the enduring power, and thepolitical legitimacy, of what can be quite radicalprogrammes of rural dispossession. A comprehensiveanalysis of the Lao frontier would also incorporatenot just the technical, material development inter-ventions, but also how poverty alleviation programmesare involved in a remaking of rural subjectivities,towards the goal of producing modern, productive,market-oriented farmers. The ‘soft’ power of devel-opment – outside of extreme cases of military–authoritarian coercion – lies in the extent to whichthese external governmentalising objectives overlapwith the desires of rural people themselves forbetter lives and increased opportunities for theirchildren. This can be the case even as rural peopleare dispossessed from their historical territories,and as entire landscapes of the Lao countryside areradically transformed.

The next section grounds this approach to thepolitical ecology of resource frontiers in Laos, withan example of resource sector development andlandscape transformation from Hinboun district inKhammouane province. I propose a conceptualapproach to Laos’ rural and upland zones as hybrid,relational frontier spaces, by focusing on the emergentinteractions between land tenure reform, the politicaleconomy of resource sector investments, andcentre–periphery and social–nature dynamics.

Patchworked frontiers, resource investment and land reform in Laos

Many of the contemporary resource projects andpolicies under way in Laos, especially those whichare linked to corporate social standards and neweco-certification regulatory mechanisms, can be

understood as closely linked to neoliberal forms ofdevelopment. It bears recalling, however, that Laoscontinues to be the site for alternate regimes ofinvestment, extraction and accumulation, not all ofthem liberal-capitalist in orientation. Actors otherthan multinational resource firms continue to beactive on the Lao frontier, such as extractivelogging interests with ties to the military or provin-cial governor-patrons (Anonymous 2000; Hodgdon2008). There are thus distinct frontiers at work inLaos, associated with different, elite fractions andpower configurations, and different state agencies.These competing political-economic blocs are alsoin tension with each other, producing a spatially‘patchworked’ frontier landscape involving differentand, at times, overlapping modes of resource regula-tion and population governance, and a hybrid statestructure in Laos (see MacLean 2008).

A ‘first frontier’, or the programmes associated withFrench colonial, war-era and subsequent decentralisedpolitical structures in Laos, continues to have adeep transformative effect upon the Lao landscape.These frontier formations have resulted in localisedecological degradation, and sharp declines in forestcover and ecosystem integrity in many rurallocations. Lao state policies of upland resettlementalso continue to combine with the interests andoutcomes of these forms of state-led resourcedevelopments. New resource towns linked tocommercial extraction, such as the French tinmining town of Ban Phon Tiou in Khammouaneprovince (subsequently taken over by North Koreanand Russian investors), or the town of Lak Xao inBorikhamxai province (associated with BPKP – or theLao Mountainous Areas Development Company),were developed through this period. In the loggingsector, the first frontier was often established inassociation with Vietnamese, Thai and Chineseactors, through partnerships with the Lao military,provincial governors and central Party officials(Walker 1999; Anonymous 2000; Hodgdon 2008).On the ground, these extractions took the form ofselective timber mining. While much of thesetimber resources were (and continue to be)exported and streamed into global supply chains, itwould be difficult to locate this process primarilyas one of capitalist exploitation. Clientalist powerpolitics and institutional arrangements within Laostate agencies could be considered just as crucialto its functioning (Hodgdon 2006 2008).

The additional layering of a ‘second’ frontier in Laos,through more recent patterns of capital-intensive,neoliberal inspired resource investment, including newland reform policies, overlaps with the processesand outcomes of the first frontier, producingcomplex, ‘striated and patchworked’ landscapes.Various historical and contemporary land reform



policies, including upland resettlement and landand forest allocation, are in some areas supportingthese new export-oriented, resource investmentregimes through the freeing up of land and forestresources for capitalisation (Baird and Shoemaker2007; Lestrelin and Giordano 2007).

In the past 10 years, new land tenure policieshave been extended into the uplands in the form ofLand and Forest Allocation (LFA), participatory landuse planning and land allocation (LUPLA), uplandresettlement and focal site development. Thusfar, the implementation of new upland tenurepolicies has not typically served as a basis by whichcommunities receive full, official recognition ofcustomary lands (see e.g. Ducourtieux et al. 2005).Indeed, as field research has shown, the implemen-tation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’sLand and Forest Allocation programme has at timesrepresented the very mechanism whereby villagerslose customary access to land and resources toplantation firms (Barney 2008). In other cases, theswidden eradication goals of the programme haveundermined local livelihood practices (for a review,see Ducourtieux et al. 2005). The creation of theNational Land Management Agency, and recentreforms to the forestry law, among other legislationand decrees, can be understood in part as a stateresponse to recognised problems with previousprogrammes in land and forest allocation and landregistration. The strategic focus for a number ofinstitutions with a mandate to address land and forestryissues, both Lao state and donor, is now securingmore complete recognition of customary and commonproperty rights for upland communities through animproved approach to LFA-LUPLA; experimentswith collective land titling; or through improvingthe understanding and recognition of the existinglegal rights to customary land and property asenshrined in the Lao Constitution, and the Forestryand Land Laws (e.g. Village Focus 2005; GTZ 2007a).

The patchworked frontier can produce strikinglandscape transformations. In my primary fieldworksites in central-southern Laos, the most egregiousforms of elite-sponsored tropical timber mining (inthe guise of plantation concessions, for example ofcoconut or oil palm; see GTZ 2007b, 22), can besituated not far from closely surveyed and mappedspaces of the World Bank certified-sustainable villageforestry programme, or co-managed IUCN protectedareas aimed at a conservationist and eco-touristclientele. These spaces, in turn, are not far removedfrom surveyed land reform areas, which haveexcised areas of so-called ‘degraded forest’ fromcommunal control for the creation of industrialplantations of eucalyptus and rubber (Shoemaker et al.2001; Barney 2007). There is no singular political-economic rationality or intentionality at work in the

Lao uplands: neoliberal, clientalist, bureaucraticand extractive-accumulation logics interact withprovincial and district levels of the state, and withlocal livelihood practices, to produce a complex andrelational reworking of the upland frontier in Laos.

The contemporary Lao uplands can be under-stood as a hybrid authoritarian–neoliberal frontierspace, established through processes of new mappingand expanded forms of state territorialisation (throughland registration and LUPLA, for example), as wellas through ‘unmapping’ or unhinged customaryproperty rights (for example, through resettlement,or concessions development; Tsing 2005). To date,however, the major cumulative effects of statedevelopment have been to undermine local ecologies,and restrict customary claims of upland communities,and to shift livelihood practices into increasinglyrestricted and ecologically marginal sites. Becausestate agricultural extension and marketisation servicestypically remain weak and only partially effective,many upland communities have been forced intoshort-term exploitation of their remaining resourceassets to maintain levels of food security (NSC ADB2006). As examined below, another common responsein upland Laos is out-migration.

The relational frontier and livelihoods in Khammouane province

The following case further situates and explainsthese relational dynamics, detailing the centre–periphery and social–natural transformations in astudy village in Laos’ Khammouane province,affected by both hydropower and industrial planta-tion development. The cumulative and emergenteffects of these projects and state policies areresulting in complex changes to the Hinbounwatershed, and in the relationship of local commu-nities to their surrounding natural resource base.The local environment in the village of Ban PakVeng is itself a social landscape, the result of acomplex history of human settlement and modification(see Raffles 2002). In a further relational explanation,I show how local people become closely involvedin the reproduction of frontier spaces, in this casethrough engagements with commercialised small-holder agriculture. Between large-scale hydropowerand plantations, land reforms, migrations and newfarmer cropping systems, the Hinboun Valley is apertinent example of both the planned and theunexpected trajectories of development under wayin the Lao countryside.

Hinboun District is the location of two ofLaos’ major resource development projects: theTheun-Hinboun hydropower project (THPC) andthe Oji-Laos Plantation Forestry Ltd (Oji-LPFL). Thepresence of North Korean and Russian mining



companies at the historic town of Ban Phon Tiou,on a tributary of the lower Hinboun River (the NamPathen), adds the externalities of the mining sectorinto the fray of the Hinboun watershed. Researchwas conducted between 2006 and 2007 on thepolitical ecology of property rights and locallivelihoods, through ethnographic research in thevillage of Ban Pak Veng. This village in the lowerHinboun valley is experiencing the overlapping andcascading effects of hydropower dam and industrialplantation development (see also Barney 2007).

Briefly, Ban Pak Veng is a central Lao village ofapproximately 65 households, with a total popula-tion of 270 persons. Traditionally, livelihoods inthis village have been heavily reliant upon accessto customary resources found within the villageterritory and surrounding areas. In the period priorto the 1998 initiated THPC project, people in BanPak Veng were primarily wet rice farmers and fishers,planting the rich alluvial soil on the Hinboun floodplainand accessing the river’s aquatic resources. Accessto the surrounding upland forests also provided anarray of non-timber forest products and wildlife,which formed an important part of local foodsecurity. Village elders recall that in the 1960s,farmers in Ban Pak Veng were exclusively reliantupon upland swidden in the hills located to thewest of the village for rice production, as at thattime they had not learned how to practice lowlandwet rice agriculture, and most could not afforddraught livestock. Aerial photos from 1992 confirmthat, by that time, wet rice had become thepredominant form of agriculture. In addition, thiscommunity had a history of engagements throughthe 1980s with the institutions of the post-warsocialist economy, particularly in terms of tradingfish and other local resources for access to essentialcommodities. The community traded goods throughthe 1980s with the state-run district markets duringthe post-war socialist economy, exchanging fishand other local resources for access to essentialcommodities. After the economic reforms of thelate 1980s and early 1990s, villagers began thecash sale of local resources, especially fish, livestockand bamboo shoots.

The Theun-Hinboun hydropower project, completedin 1998 with ADB support, was the third majorhydropower project in the country, coming onlineafter the 1971 Nam Ngum dam near Vientiane andthe Houay Ho hydropower project in Champassak.The design of the THPC project was based upon aninter-basin transfer of water from the Theun-Kadingriver system into the neighbouring Hinboun watershed.The THPC project has been the focus of an intensivedebate regarding the adequacy and transparency ofADB and GoL social and environmental safeguardsand the rights of local communities to receive full

compensation and mitigation for economic lossesdue to resource development (Shoemaker 1998;International Rivers Network 1999). Given the politicalrestrictions upon local civil society in Laos, theBerkeley-based International Rivers, along withregional and international environmental organisa-tions such as TERRA and FIVAS, have been at theforefront in pressuring the ADB and THPC (in partvia their Norwegian financial backers) to increase theircommitment to compensating for the significantdownstream losses resulting from the diversion project,in both the Hinboun and the Kading watersheds.

In practice, THPC project has not providedadequate compensation for downstream affectedcommunities6. Evidence points to extended anddeepened episodes of downstream flooding alongthe Hinboun channel, beyond what was the caseprevious to the inter-basin diversion project (Barney2007; FIVAS 2007). The Nam Kadding system hasin turn experienced significantly reduced flows,undermining river fisheries (Shoemaker 1998; Inter-national Rivers Network 1999). In Ban Pak Veng onthe Hinboun this has caused the loss of access toall of the village’s riverside wet rice paddy fields,starting from approximately 2001, 3 years after theinitiation of THPC. The project has also negativelyaffected local fisheries, as well as the riversidegardens which were an important dietary sourceprior to the project (Barney 2007).

As a result of these changes, the post-2001responses by villagers in Ban Pak Veng to the new,project-induced flooding regime included shiftingmore fully back into planting rice in upland areas,through swidden cultivation. However, in 2001, 600of the 1832 ha of the village’s swidden space,which in fact represents diverse communal, agro-forestry production systems (see Cramb 2007,xii), providing rice and a wide range of crucialnon-timber forest products, were zoned by the LaoLand and Forest Allocation (LFA) programme forcommercial eucalyptus development. These 600 harepresent the majority of the upland locations inwhich dry, swidden rice production is possible inthe village. Only minor compensation was guaranteedto the villagers by the plantation company, amountingto US$1 per ha per year. The fact that BGA Forestry(the original concession holder, which was purchasedby Oji Paper in 2005) organised and subsidised theimplementation of the LFA process in Ban PakVeng, as well as the other villages, in their 150 000ha concession zone in Hinboun and Pakkadingdistricts, means that a direct conflict of interest wasintroduced into the zoning process.

Villagers now faced a ‘double displacement’,from the cascading externalities of both hydro-power and industrial tree plantation development.In Ban Pak Veng, the Oji-LPFL began bulldozing



these local ‘degraded’ agro-forests in 2005, and byAugust 2007, approximately 120 ha had beenplanted with fast growing eucalyptus pulpwoodspecies. Villagers are able to plant upland ricebetween the rows of the company’s trees only forthe first year, after which time the eucalyptus canopybegins to close, and these sites can no longer beintercropped. If the full extent (600 ha) of thecompany’s plantation programme is implementedin this village, there will be repercussions for localfood security. Even if only a partial enclosure isenacted, the overall availability of upland forest forrice production, and natural forests for food production,will be squeezed. The likely result will be anintensification of swidden, with correspondingdeclines in soil fertility and rice yields (Ducourtieuxet al. 2005; Lestrelin and Giordano 2007), andhigher swidden labour demands for weeding (a taskwhich is borne largely by women). Such localscenarios and probable outcomes are not discussedin the plantation company’s public documents orimpact assessments. Indeed, the conversion of swiddenland into plantations for the production of exportcommodities, is an explicit state target and fullyconsistent with the overall Lao forestry sector strategiesand policies (GoL 2005). This is a strategy of socialisinglosses and privatising gains, which ultimatelyserves to increase the rate of profit for private sectorand corporate investors in Laos, while exposingalready vulnerable local communities to increasedrisks of impoverishment.

In Ban Pak Veng, the outcome to date of thesetransformations for villagers has been a significantundermining of livelihood stability. A primary set ofresponses from families in the village can beunderstood through an intensifying shift of youngpeople towards internal and cross-border migration,and new wage labour opportunities. Interviews inBan Pak Veng conducted in July 2006 and February2007 show that 26 young women and femaleteenagers, and nine male teenagers, were workingin Thailand or Vientiane. Out of a village of 48households and some 260 residents, this is a majorproportion of the village young people7. The migra-tion process is a multifaceted and often personalissue for village young people, and structuraldescriptions of underlying ecological ‘drivers’ ofmigration can sit uneasily with the specific series ofevents and decisions that lead young people toleave the countryside (Bouahom et al. 2004). PakVeng does, however, show significantly higher ratesof outmigration than neighbouring villages, whichwere less affected by the externalities of THPC andOji LPFL (Barney 2007). As the majority of thesemigrants from Pak Veng lack official documentationor passports, they are illegals in Thailand and arethus working under very vulnerable circumstances.

The emergent, relational interactions betweenhistorically mediated resource management practicesin this village, and external programmes of landreform, hydropower and plantations development,are thus reshaping both the local environment andvillager’s responses. A further way of understandingrelational frontier processes emerges when oneincludes the role of remittances in shaping newagricultural practices and a local process ofcommons privatisation in Ban Pak Veng. Villageresearch showed that the remittances sent back toPak Veng village from young people working inThailand are being used by their parents for small-holder investments in a new agricultural boom crop– nyang phala, or rubber trees. 2006 representedthe first year of smallholder investment in rubber forBan Pak Veng, with five village farmers beginningexperimentation with planting rubber seedlings intheir upland rice fields. A foreseeable problem isthat, as these seedlings mature, the former systemof communal upland land management will beprivatised along household lines. These new rubbergardens thus represent locally driven removals ofland from the common property forest–land system,and the first farmers in the village to make this movewill clearly be in an advantageous position overother Pak Veng residents who make the transitionto intensive agriculture at a later date, or not at all.While shouldering a degree of risk, the earlypioneers in this process have their selection of thebest remaining land (i.e. land which has notalready been planted by Oji-LPFL), or land situatedclosest to the village.

Such new agricultural investments, includingperennial rubber and fruit tree plantations, arehappening at the same time as the local resourcebase is being rapidly transformed and degraded,and the available resource base is being quickly‘squeezed’ by two powerful corporate actors. Thetrend towards smallholder rubber, if it accelerates,may then complete the dismantling of the Ban PakVeng upland swidden land use system based oncommon property ownership. This agrarian-frontiertransition is occurring in an unequal fashion, wherethe most advanced and asset-rich villagers will bethe first to benefit from agricultural commercialisation.At the same time, the process of large externalagricultural investments comes at a cost, of separatedfamilies and increased vulnerabilities for youngpeople negotiating through the migration process(Shoemaker et al. 2001).

Creative villager responses to, and engagementswith, a fast-changing set of circumstances of landscapetransformation and resource degradation highlightthe specifically relational production of frontier spacein Laos. To locate the various aspects and implica-tions of community and ecological transformation



in this village, one must focus on the interactionsand dynamics occurring between actors andresource sectors – hydropower dams and the river,plantations and forest land, land reform andvillager practices. Villagers themselves are alsobecoming actively engaged in new modes of cashcrop production which then feed back intofurther changes to land tenure and landscapedynamics.

The enclosures which are being produced throughcapital-intensive resource development are alteringlandscapes which were already the result of signifi-cant histories of human interactions. As the case ofBan Pak Veng shows, there is little which is essentialor timeless about subsistence-oriented forms oflivelihood in rural Laos. Indeed, the primary formof rice agriculture in this community has shiftedquite dramatically, from upland swidden in the1960s, to wet rice between the 1970s and the1990s, and then back again towards hill rice post2001. The full displacement effects of the Oji LPFLforestry project on upland swidden rice farmingand livelihoods have become evident only in relationto the community responses to the initial set ofwet rice enclosures resulting from the THPC hydro-power project. This, in turn, has resulted in changesfrom migrations, and subsequently, autonomousvillager engagements with new cash crops, andnew transformations in village property rights.

Local changes from resource sector frontierdevelopment in Laos can thus be best understoodas a ‘co-production of socio-nature’ (Bakker andBridge 2006) in which the agency of marginalisedlocal people, as well as river water, soil, and trees,are crucial aspects of frontier formation. This alsoimplies that there is no original resource-basedlivelihood to return to in Laos, or which can serveas an independent baseline for isolating the efectsof development interventions. Relational frontierprocesses and actors, both central and local, producenew landscapes of commodity production andextraction, as well as unexpected transformationsand displacement effects for a vulnerable uplandand rural population.

Conclusion: rethinking the resource frontier and development futures in Laos

This paper has presented a series of key pointsconcerning development on the resource frontier inLaos. Drawing upon recent work on relationalapproaches in economic geography (Massey 1999;Bathelt and Gluckler 2003; Yeung 2002 2005), thepaper first discussed how the discourse of Laos as a‘last frontier’ is being deployed in an imaging ofthe Lao uplands as an empty, available site fortransnational resource sector investment. Such

discourses can, in turn, translate into very ‘material’outcomes in terms of boosting foreign direct invest-ment into Laos. Second, drawing upon scholarssuch as De Angelis, I have argued that a more criticalapproach to the ‘frontiers of capitalism’ can be auseful concept for understanding the contemporarygeographies of enclosure, and the continuousimperative behind accumulation by dispossessionin the global economy. Third, drawing upon politicalecologists such as Tsing, Raffles, and Walker, andincorporating the critiques of Cleary, I have groundedand de-centred a critical political-economic analysisof the Lao resource frontier by incorporatingrelational concepts of social–nature and centre–periphery. The Lao village of Ban Pak Veng inHinboun District shows how the ecosystem changes,resulting from the externalities of developmentmega-projects and state land reform policies, combineand overlap in a complex reworking of frontierlandscapes. The vulnerabilities introduced by theseresource transformations and displacements, in turn,result in further transformations, by the actions oflocal people, for example, entering into cross-border wage labour markets and developing newagricultural strategies of rubber crop production. Inthis way, changes in property rights, landscape andlivelihood on the Lao frontier through corporateinvestment also become tied in with the actions oflocal people and communities engaging withtheir environment.

A key argument in this paper is that a relationalperspective on nature, economy and livelihood isnot simply a theoretical concern. Such accounts ofthe inter-connectedness and historical complexityof local social-natures and local livelihoods haveoften been lacking in accounts of the ‘impacts’ ofparticular resource sector development interventionsin Laos. This can lead to a failure to appreciate thecumulative nature of contemporary changes occur-ring in Laos, while leaving the environmentalimpact assessment process and other developmentinterventions (including mitigation and compensationprogrammes from corporate investors) inadequatelyconceptualised overly compartmentalised and ultimatelyunder-capitalised. Relational approaches to social-nature and political ecology hold out the possibilityof more accurate perspectives regarding how Laovillagers are adapting and shifting their livelihoodstrategies in relation to changing environments andstate policies. Relational approaches to frontiertransformations recognise how Laos, and territorieswithin Laos, are being actively ‘peripheralised’ in aglobalised economy (Hayter et al. 2003). Relationalunderstandings of economy, nature and society canthus help to inform agrarian questions. In Laos,such approaches could be used to interrogate thepower politics through which resource frontiers,



displacements and marginalisations are produced,and to locate what forms of locally beneficialenvironmental and economic organisations are possibleand feasible for Lao upland and rural communities.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks lan Baird, Mike Dwyer, KevinWoods, Phil Hirsch, Niels Fold and an anonymousreviewer for helpful comments on earlier versionsof this paper.

Notes

1 Tourism and garments being the other key sectors of the Laoeconomy. Agriculture, mostly oriented around smallholderfarming, still accounts for some 40% of Laos’ GDP.

2 There are some exceptions, for example, the settlement ofthe coffee frontier on the southern Bolaven Plateau in the1980s involved a coercive state programme of relocation. Ithank Ian Baird for pointing out this history. Some of thesesmallholder coffee plots on the Bolaven Plateau are nowbeing repossessed and cleared in favour of large-scaleVietnamese rubber concessions.

3 In mid 2008 Oxiana Minerals merged with another mid-tierAustralian mining multinational, Zinifex, to create a newconglomerate, OZ Minerals. The OZ project at Sepon is stilltermed Lan Xang Minerals Limited (LXML).

4 Indeed a crucial role of multilateral development bank projectfinancing is the provision of financial guarantee facilities against‘perceived political risks in Lao PDR’ (ADB 2005, 33).

5 Although the GoL has historically sought to reduce theireconomic dependence upon Thailand; and China and Vietnamtend to be the favoured investor countries. See Pholsena andBanomyong (2006, 49–70) for a discussion of Laos’ bilateralrelations with Vietnam and Thailand.

6 No compensation by THPC has been provided to localcommunities for reduced fisheries on the Nam Kadding system.

7 These rates of outmigration are also not untypical for many ruralvillages in Laos. However, the forests, rivers and surroundingenvirons are also comparatively rich in natural resources inthis area of Hinboun District, which could be the basis formore ‘viable’ rural communities in these locations.

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Documents

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