Grounding Global Forest Economies: Resource Governance and Commodity Power in Rural Laos

This dissertation represents an investigation into global and East Asian forest resource commodity networks, state policies, institutions of resource governance, and political ecological transformations in property and livelihood. It presents an analysis of the political-economic dynamics that are restructuring the forest and paper sector on a global and Asian regional basis, and explains how commodity production becomes connected to the production of state power, and new projects of rule in a rural community in Lao PDR (Laos). Three key literatures are drawn upon: economic geography and global production networks; political ecology; and governmentality studies. Methodologically, the research uses policy studies, interviews with key governance actors, discursive analysis, and extended ethnographic fieldwork in a rural community setting. The dissertation employs the research data to show how global commodity networks are formed through forces of industrial restructuring, inter-firm competition, and firm-state strategic couplings. Forest commodity networks in turn become territorially embedded through state institutions and land tenure policies, and incorporated into the production of nature and place-based processes of socio-environmental change. The dissertation argues that neoliberal restructuring in the global forestry and paper sector involving firms in Japan and China is situating Laos as a regional wood plantation supply platform. The creation and capture of resource rents is argued as a core driver of this process. This is shown as producing an uneven resource landscape in central Laos, as plantation concessions interact with hydropower development to transform local ecologies and communities. In the study community of Ban Sivilay, nature's commodification has introduced local processes of displacement, environmental degradation and impoverishment, as well as new corporate compensation programs that seek to integrate households into market-based agricultural production. This dissertation thus develops a critical economic geography and political ecology of the resource landscape, and an ethnographic analysis of the creation of governable spaces, and 'productive' or modern communities and market subjects in Lao PDR.