Conclusion
The Politics of Spatial Transparency
A FEW months after my fieldwork ended in 2008, a striking image appeared on a widely read discussion forum in Laos. Clipped from satellite data and projected into landscape view, it showed thousands of identical rubber trees, planted in neatly contoured rows that stretched from foreground to horizon. Its title was “GoogleEarth screen capture, looking toward the Chinese border, January 2007,” and it seemed to locate the viewer in northern Laos’s Luang Namtha province, facing north and overlooking a vast rubber plantation.1
Despite sitting astride historical trade routes, Luang Namtha had long been better known for its splendid isolation: its dense forests, its abundant wildlife, its colorful “hill tribes.” But times had changed. Since the early 2000s, the events recounted in chapter 1 had brought rubber to the area as the most visible example of a Chinese investment boom that extended from agribusiness and mining to tourism and casinos. The results were being written into the landscape one project at a time, as the image seemed to show. Echoing a narrative that has only continued to grow with the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, the screen capture resonated with emerging foreign and domestic concerns about growing Chinese influence in the country, and with growing global concerns—newly announced at the time—about the new global land grab. Part of the image’s raw power was that it exemplified the trope of the “authority gap,” as one journalist put it at the time, “in a growing number of areas in the country where Vientiane has effectively ceded sovereignty to Beijing.”2 Showing the Lao-China border as a mere formality, a thin line draped unconvincingly across the horizon as Chinese state plantations expanded southward, it seemed to confirm that northern Laos was indeed turning into Chinese territory.
The image turned out to be entirely false; the plantations were in Yunnan, located inside China’s state-run rubber farms. (The error was the result of Google’s satellite imagery being more precise than its international boundary data.) But the image was not entirely meaningless. Despite its unreality, its plausibility was perhaps even more important. Western journalists had worried since at least 2006 that Laos was “being pulled into Beijing’s orbit,” and since 2007 development professionals in Laos had begun to participate in the ritual of concession-area estimates that would figure centrally in the emerging global land-grab narrative.3 The numbers were indeed growing: in the weeks after the screen capture’s circulation, an estimate from the previous year of one million hectares “signed away” as concessions was increased to “between two and three million hectares—as much as 15 percent of Lao territory” in a prominent Guardian article.4 Even if the landscape it showed was wrong, in evoking what one worried UNDP economist at the time called the “sovereignty implications” of Laos’s concession boom,5 it threw down a challenge to understand how transnational land deals were actually taking place and what their actual effects were on the ground.
In Laos’s northwestern uplands, the literal transformation of “battlefields into marketplaces” helps explain how transnational land deals have overcome protective opposition to foreign land control. Until 1975, the “hot” grounding of the Cold War made the Lao uplands both a key geostrategic and human landscape for American imperialism. During the 1980s, tools of “population management work” were developed for postwar industrial forestry; these were subsequently mobilized and recombined as methods for the management of enclosure and dispossession during the concession boom of the 2000s. Yet much of this remained difficult to see, even for observers familiar with the local landscape. Obscured by internal struggles over land within the complex entity that is the Lao state, locally managed land grabs remained intertwined with the politics of ongoing state formation, and thus even more difficult to regulate effectively.
A decade or more after many of the events recounted above, this landscape continues to demand our attention. In one sense, the concession boom is more or less over. The recent update to Laos’s national concession inventory, a collaboration between the University of Bern and four Lao ministries that continues the inventory effort begun almost a decade and a half earlier, has both added extensive detail and pushed the analysis of land deals’ local contexts to a new level of sophistication.6 But within this deepening knowledge, the overall numbers have roughly plateaued: the 2012 study’s 1.1 million hectares, which had themselves been a downward revision from the earlier estimates cited above, remained essentially constant, while the additional research into the area “actually developed” shrank the estimate even further: “The land granted for development account[s] for 1,521 deals covering 1,008,884 ha (4 percent of Lao PDR’s territory). Only 54 percent or 549,248 hectares of total areas granted for development were implemented up to the time when the inventory was conducted.”7 These are still very big numbers. But the inventory echoes a similar tapering off of the “literature rush” that occurred around the global land grab in the early 2010s.8 Land deals and land grabs are still being investigated, but the flurry is hardly what it was.
Yet as Tania Li reminds us in a recent and powerful piece on life “after the land grab” in Indonesia’s palm oil landscape, the end of the concession boom is in no way the end of the concession. Land concessions are, after all, multidecade allocations whose impacts only continue to accumulate upon one another as projects develop infrastructures of extraction, labor, and their own internal forms of (in her telling, mafia-style) governance.9 In some ways, even, the current moment demands even more; land deals that were sensationally announced during the boom decade of the 2000s have largely gone quiet, and while some of this is due to the “great expectations” that have been unmet,10 another source of difficulty is gaining access to the field now that the boostering has quieted down. In Cambodia, for instance, many struggles over rural land access have transitioned from fights over the initial granting of “economic land concessions” to struggles—some of which have been quite successful—against the development of the massive polygons they laid down on paper.11 Marc Edelman makes a similar point in his 2013 critique of land-deal inventories in noting that even while concessions on paper create state-sanctioned openings for enclosure, enclosure itself requires capital, resources, and political struggle: “The almost obsessive focus on hectares,” he writes, “while no doubt effective in attracting the attention of major media, foundations, policymakers and civil society organizations,” leaves out a great deal: “Questions of scale do not only involve extensions of land, but also the application of capital to that land, the availability of water, and the types of accumulation and social reproduction that these factors facilitate or impede.”12
My efforts to unpack the landscape of Chinese rubber investment in northwestern Laos probe some of the contingencies behind what Edelman calls the “messy hectares” that constitute land deals on the ground. This messiness needs to be understood not in contrast to what is written on paper, but in relation to it—and indeed as part of the process of geographic formalization that enables it. The ways that decades-old imperialism and geopolitical conflict continue to shape the uneven enclosure process should be the least surprising piece of the story. Such continuities, even if the details differ by case and context, are well established in the literature on colonial and racial capitalism, as well as the transition to the era of neoliberal globalization (and beyond) across the global South. Equally if not more important is the nexus of enclosure and legibility, that political space in which the legacies that Ann Stoler calls “imperial debris” get either (re)mobilized for political work or relegated to the past.13 In the Lao case, the control over selective formalization and the circulation of the resulting documents allowed for a significant degree of autonomy—especially vis-à-vis regulatory oversight—even within the larger context of political-economic constraints. It thus illustrates the sort of limited power over effective sovereignty that Aihwa Ong has described as the “graduated” sovereignty exercised by weak states confronting the global economy.14 But it shows this not through the agency of a singular state. Rather, the plans, policies, and agreements of multiple actors articulate with contingent and often only quasi-legible territorial politics to facilitate land-finding and other forms of population management at particular moments in space and time.
While the “land grab” has slowed, land-deal governance is as important as ever, and the internal struggle over land and resource rents continues. In Laos’s concession-inventory update, even as the numbers have stabilized and the degree of legibility over land deals has increased, indications of ongoing state formation remain starkly on display. The authors of the inventory update discussed above repeatedly reference “a lack of clarity” in various aspects of land-deal regulation, and note both the ongoing resistance of some ministries to participate in the inventory process and “a general lack of communication between the [country’s] administrative levels.” This results in “information delay, if not loss” and “missing information on land deals.”15 Their call to develop a vertically integrated information management system “which is continuously fed current data by the responsible and mandated GoL agencies at different levels”16 is, in essence, a digital-age version of the 1996 instruction to “then make land maps” and send them upward to the central level. The persistence of the same problem over the span of almost three decades illustrates the continued relevance of ongoing state formation to land-deal politics, and highlights the ongoing importance of the nexus where legibility and enclosure intersect.
COERCION AS COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE?
It is increasingly clear that the global land rush, even if triggered by a confluence of crises and opportunities specific to the mid-to-late 2000s, is part of a larger conjuncture surrounding the destabilization of the Western-led Washington Consensus and neoliberal development era of the 1990s and early 2000s. This has significant implications for international development cooperation. Development assistance is usefully understood within the distinction between ongoing capitalist development and intentional interventions explicitly aimed at countering the worst of capitalism’s social ills.17 One problem, now widely noted, with the neoliberal policy prescriptions of the 1990s and 2000s was that they promised solutions they could not deliver—in particular, promising that global economic integration would provide not just growth, but also jobs on a large scale to citizens of the global South. As anthropologist James Ferguson notes, in response to the realization that they have effectively little to no comparative advantage in today’s global economy, a number of states have begun to quietly move away from Washington Consensus–style policies of austerity and deregulation toward new types of welfarism that, even if couched in the language of neoliberalism, in fact represent experiments in social protection that are far more ambiguous, and in some cases are forthrightly progressive.18 However, one key feature of these efforts is that they have been largely limited to countries (Mexico, Brazil, and the southern African cone, for example) where middle-income status and democratic governance coincide.
The failures of neoliberalism have been no less pronounced in the countries that have embraced transnational land deals. One way to think more broadly about the case examined in this book is that transnational land deals can be read as another type of attempted solution to the wider crisis of economic development and international aid that increasingly confronts the global South. Land deals, like neo-welfarism, also represent efforts to wrestle with what Ferguson calls “the new politics of distribution” in today’s global economy, albeit in very different ways and on very different political terrains. A key difference is citizenship-in-practice—the ways social entitlements work, the limits they impose on dispossession, the claims they forge on state-managed resources in the name of social belonging and well-being. It is no coincidence, I think, that the global land rush and neo-welfarist experiments are happening at the same time but largely in different places, and that the former depends on suppressed and anemic forms of citizenship while the latter depends on active citizenship and socially supported notions of entitlement.19 Both are wrestling with what to do at the end of the Washington Consensus, when the state is increasingly stepping back in to manage the project of economic development. But their differences are clearly stark. In examining how larger questions of national development, agrarian transition, and transnational cooperation are being addressed in one grounded case, this book contributes to a wider field of scholarship aimed at making sense of international development cooperation, whether under a “Beijing Consensus” or a model yet to be named, in the early twenty-first century.20
Another dimension of this concerns comparative advantage. Even if the uneven geography of enclosure is unsurprising in its rootedness in local histories of geopolitical conflict, its function requires clarification. Coercion, as Marxian scholars widely note, figures centrally in processes of enclosure and dispossession like those on display in Laos.21 Mechanisms and degrees, however, are highly contextual; a “taking” under eminent domain is no less coercive than a state land concession, but the processes involved, including the types of compensation or restitution provided, depend heavily on the regulatory institutions within which land deals are embedded. In the transition from protective regulation to the emergence of “4 + 1” company plantations, coercion replaces regulatory pushback in a semifunctional way: it provides a very different but also effective way to manage the relationship between rural communities on the one hand, and the state and corporate actors on the other that seek to enroll them and (especially) their land into development schemes. In this sense, coercion facilitates the exploitation of social and territorial difference to navigate the challenges and openings of an increasingly difficult global economy. While there is certainly a moral critique to be made of instrumentalizing the past to facilitate coercive enclosures, there is also a historical dimension that requires us to look beyond the Lao state and to include the numerous public actors, both foreign governments and multilateral institutions, whose decisions profoundly influence Laos’s room to maneuver in today’s global economy. The history of the Lao uplands, and in particular the mechanisms of upland population management that span the postwar period and the concession boom of the 2000s, are especially relevant. So while we might find it reprehensible that land deals capitalize on the conflicts of the past to facilitate the enclosures of the present, we should find equally reprehensible the earlier histories (both colonial and Cold War) that gave these upland differences lasting traction. Laos’s comparative advantage in the world of plantation development may be available land, but we must remember that this availability is of the social variety.
FORMALITY AND CONTESTATION
A second way of thinking more broadly about the case of northwestern Laos concerns the imbrication of transnational land deals in long-standing internal resource politics. While this book focused on Laos’s particular history of local authority problems (forestry decentralization, LFA, and its continuity with more recent land deals), I suspect that these sorts of dynamics are widespread. The literature on the “resource curse,” while thin and reductive in many ways, testifies to the problem of regulation and rent distribution within—and at the often blurry edges of—the state.22 Similarly, research on transnational land access that has succeeded in interviewing state regulators has found that they themselves are often underresourced.23 Corruption, while dominant in much of the literature, is only one dimension of the issue, and an often fuzzy one at that.24 As important as the boundary between public and private may be, there is much at stake within the arena of intrastate politics alone. This has a few implications.
At the most basic level, approaching land deals through a lens of formality and legibility politics adds analytical depth to what many who have worked in or with government already know: that the state exists as a uniform entity only to the extent that it is strategically essentialized as such.25 In Laos, references to “the GoL” (Government of Laos) are widespread among development practitioners, but they frequently refer to an idealized version of the state—the central government as it appears in the political theory of democratic centralism, for example, or the unified front that officials try to conjure when writing policy framed in terms of planning and implementation. “Distance” within the state, however, can be substantial, both spatially and temporally. Central-level officials pursued their quest for legibility via the LFA program but found that formalization was no fix, technical or otherwise, for addressing local authorities’ reliance on land allocation for various “development projects.” This situation has persisted into the present and is likely to be occurring elsewhere in corners of the global South that, like Laos, are seen to be especially “land-rich.” To the extent that transnational investors are able to “forum shop” for regulatory systems and property regimes that fit their needs,26 it is worth hypothesizing that the hinterlands of the global South that will be most sought out are not simply those with the most potentially arable land and water, but those with the most flexible options for manipulating legal land access while still working within the realm of formality. To the extent that formal landscapes remain largely illegible (whether to the public or concerned regulatory authorities), formalization politics are likely to be manipulated to instrumental ends.
Northwestern Laos’s rubber boom shows that it is not formality or legibility per se that enables successful land-finding but rather the mix of flexibility, authority, and technical capacity that allows for the strategic creation or dissolving of formality when it matters. These are highly political issues, as the debates about land titling—both before and after the concession boom—have shown.27 In his book The Mystery of Capital, the economist Hernando de Soto lauds the benefits of property formalization as a way to help the poor of the global South capitalize on the wealth that lies between their feet but to which they frequently lack legal rights. Such a recommendation has appeared with increasingly regularity in the wake of the global land rush.28 But while de Soto insightfully describes formalization’s ability to make capital “mind-friendly” by “boiling down the essentials” of property to representations “that we can easily combine, divide and mobilize,”29 all too often, state-managed processes of formalization, like the LFA and Bolisat Ldt. maps discussed in chapter 5, are aimed at not just simplification but enclosure and dispossession.30
Today, as the interlocking crises of climate change, food insecurity, and deforestation dominate the global agenda, many continue to ask how much potentially “available” farmland exists within the hinterlands of the global South. While efforts have been made to quantify this “reserve” in biophysical terms, they include major caveats about the social dimensions of “suitable” or “available” land.31 Formal geographies will likely provide the terrain upon which these types of questions will be answered, although given the asymmetrical control over the data, it is not at all obvious that they will be answered fairly or adequately. As they attempt to convince faraway planners that various land-hungry development schemes “will not be a problem,” formal geographies will remain highly contestable in the landscapes where they were produced. Whether they remain shuttered away in government offices, or emerge as terrains of struggle before the next boom crop is in the ground, remains to be seen.