Doctoral Dissertation Research: Orienting the Resource Landscape: Institutionalized Mapping and Upland Development in Laos

在专家的领导下，将国家发展所需的自然资源商品的生产与地方扶贫项目结合起来的尝试，越来越多地转向制图实践——地理数据的生产、分析和使用——以帮助管理自然和社会复杂景观中潜在的竞争优先事项。地图和制图实践是决策者和发展专业人员的关键工具，帮助他们在未知的领域规划和实施干预措施，并在高度政治化的国际发展领域交流他们的工作。在这方面，地图和制图做法也为追踪和调查机构内和机构间关系以及将“技术”问题与外地一级的影响联系起来提供了有用的研究对象。该项目将在当代老挝的两个综合资源开发项目的不同地点进行档案和访谈研究。老挝中央政府目前正试图通过加强水电、采矿、农业和林业部门的资源出口来取代对官方发展援助的依赖。许多农村生计深深地融入了自然系统，自然系统的异化产生了这些资源商品，而为了资源出口而重新划定农村景观的持续尝试已经产生了混乱、粮食不安全和环境问题，但也越来越多地在参与发展决策的专家、贷款人、投资者和官员组成的有限社区内进行反思和辩论。这个有限的政治舞台突出了专家话语，特别是制度化的地图，作为实证调查的关键场所。该研究将对两个案例研究进行比较：(1)双边援助林业和旱地农业项目（代表现有的农业/林业“核心”部门）和(2)外国直接投资主导的水电项目（代表“快速崛起”的出口水电增长部门）。通过比较项目之间和项目内部随着时间的推移，研究将检查在项目周期的特定点，更广泛地说，在特定的历史时刻，对地理知识的特定需求是如何出现的（或被边缘化的）；科学如何在制图和项目操作的交叉点与政治相遇；以及制图实践如何帮助判断资源商品化和社会/环境缓解之间的关系。通过检查单一分工内的制图实践和开发实践，本研究将突出利用地理知识可视化作为社会和环境缓解工具的战略中的机会和制约因素。通过将明确的注意力引向制度化制图过程中的时间（持续时间和操作顺序），研究将表明，熟悉的规划和执行概念模型如何不足以理解体制上复杂的资源开发项目。更一般地说，它将显示如何利用绘图的生产力来构建符合当代和历史政治经济条件的发展选择，以及这一过程如何导致农村生计的重新领土化。

Expert-led attempts to combine the production of natural resource commodities for national development with local poverty alleviation programs are increasingly turning to cartographic practice -the production, analysis, and use of geographic data - to help manage potentially competing priorities within physically and socially complex landscapes. Maps and mapping practices are key tools for decision-makers and development professionals, helping them both plan and carry out interventions in unknown landscapes, and communicate about their work in the heavily politicized space of international development. In this context, maps and mapping practices also provide useful research objects for tracing and investigating intra- and inter-institutional relationships, and for connecting "technical" issues to field-level effects. This project will conduct archival and interview-based research at different points along this division of cartographic labor in two integrated resource development projects in contemporary Laos, where the central government is currently attempting to replace its dependence on Official Development Assistance with intensified resource exports in the hydropower, mining, agriculture and forestry sectors. Many rural livelihoods are deeply integrated into the natural systems whose alienation produces these resource commodities, and ongoing attempts to re-territorialize rural landscapes in the interest of resource exports have generated dislocation, food insecurity and environmental problems, but also increasingly reflection and debate within the albeit limited community of experts, lenders, investors, and officials involved in decision-making about development. This limited political arena highlights expert discourse, and institutionalized mapping in particular, as a key site for empirical investigation. The research will undertake a comparison between two case studies: (1) a bilateral-aid forestry and upland agriculture project (representing the existing "core" sector of agriculture/forestry), and (2) a foreign-direct-investment-led hydropower project (representing the "rapidly-emerging" growth sector of export hydropower). By comparing both between projects and within projects over time, the research will examine how particular needs for geographic knowledge emerge (or are marginalized) at particular points in project cycles, and more broadly at particular historical moments; how science meets politics at the intersection of cartography and project operations; and how mapping practices help adjudicate between resource commodification and social/environmental mitigation.By examining mapping practices and development practices within a single division of labor, this research will highlight opportunities within and constraints to the strategy of using visualization of geographic knowledge as a tool for social and environmental mitigation. By directing explicit attention toward time (both duration and order of operations) in the process of institutionalized mapping, the research will show how the familiar conceptual model of planning and implementation is inadequate for understanding institutionally complex resource development projects. More generally, it will show how the productive power of mapping is used to construct development options that match with contemporary and historical political economic conditions, and how this process entails a re-territorialization of rural livelihoods.