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

由专家领导的将自然资源商品的生产与地方扶贫计划结合起来的联合收割机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--以帮助管理复杂的自然和社会景观中潜在的竞争性优先事项。地图和绘图实践是决策者和发展专业人员的关键工具，帮助他们在未知的景观中规划和实施干预措施，并在高度政治化的国际发展空间中宣传他们的工作。在这方面，地图和绘图做法也为追踪和调查机构内和机构间关系以及将“技术”问题与实地影响联系起来提供了有用的研究对象。本项目将在沿着这两个综合资源开发项目的制图分工的不同点进行基于档案和访谈的研究，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。许多农村生计深深融入自然系统，而自然系统的异化产生了这些资源商品，目前为了资源出口而重新划分农村景观的企图造成了混乱、粮食不安全和环境问题，但也在参与发展决策的专家、贷款人、投资者和官员这一有限群体中引起了越来越多的反思和辩论。这种有限的政治竞技场突出了专家话语，特别是制度化的映射，作为一个关键网站的实证研究。研究将对两个案例进行比较：（1）双边援助的林业和高地农业项目（代表现有的农业/林业“核心”部门），（2）外国直接投资带动的水电项目（代表出口水电“迅速崛起”的增长部门）。通过比较项目之间和项目内部的时间，研究将研究对地理知识的特殊需求是如何出现的（或被边缘化）在项目周期的特定点上，更广泛地说，在特定的历史时刻;科学如何在制图和项目运作的交叉点上遇到政治;以及映射实践如何帮助在资源商品化和社会/环境缓解。通过检查单一分工内的绘图实践和开发实践，这项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所面临的机会和制约因素。通过在制度化映射过程中明确关注时间（持续时间和操作顺序），研究将表明熟悉的规划和实施概念模型不足以理解制度化复杂的资源开发项目。更一般地说，它将显示如何利用测绘的生产力来构建与当代和历史政治经济条件相匹配的发展选择，以及这一过程如何导致农村生计的重新地域化。

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.