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ID:
110043
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article seeks to draw connections between a political ecology of global investment in resource sector development and a culturally informed understanding of rural out-migration across the Lao-Thai border. The author highlights how the departures of rural youth for wage labor in Thailand and the remittances they return to sending villages are becoming important for understanding agrarian transformations in Laos today. In the first section the author introduces the contemporary context of cross-border migrations across the Lao-Thai Mekong border. The second section shifts focus to a village in Laos's central Khammouane Province, where extended field research was conducted between 2006 and 2009. In this village, youth out-migration to Thailand has become a widespread phenomenon, with nearly every household involved. The segmented cultural and gendered features of this migration and its salience for understanding contemporary transformations in this locale invite a broadening of agrarian studies analysis. The final section expands upon how political ecology can provide such a broader analysis by drawing attention to how extractive resource projects affect local tenure rights and livelihoods, with significant rents captured by the state and resource firms. By making these connections, the author argues there are coercive underpinnings to contemporary Mekong migrations, which may be linked to governance problems in the Lao resource sector.
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| 2 |
ID:
147458
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| Summary/Abstract |
One of the unexpected outcomes of increased regional integration in southern Laos has been a boom in household production and roadside sale of wood charcoal. This paper develops an ethnographically informed analysis of charcoal as a socially embedded market, providing insights into the sociopolitical relations of access, legal and extra-legal regulations, and the distribution of rents that characterise this trade. Contrary to some assumptions about charcoal as a necessarily exploitative commodity, this paper points to some of the advantageous income smoothing opportunities that charcoal presents for many rural Lao households and detail the complex ways in which charcoal production can relate to forest sustainability and degradation. The paper elaborates a perspective of entrepreneurial Lao charcoal communities, energetically utilising locally available natural resources, for direct cash income. Charcoal production networks also connect everyday household livelihoods in Laos to large-scale extractive industry, in ways that have been arguably underemphasised previously. At the same time, the charcoal trade highlights the structural limits to notions of smallholder agency and local participation in commodified market relations, within broader political-economic contexts decidedly shaped through uneven development, and accumulation through dispossession.
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