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

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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.