Local Vulnerability, Project Risk, and Intractable Debt: The Politics of Smallholder Eucalyptus Promotion in Salavane Province, Southern Laos - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 251

Chapter 13
Local Vulnerability, Project Risk,
and Intractable Debt: The Politics
of Smallholder Eucalyptus Promotion
in Salavane Province, Southern Laos
K. Barney *
Abstract This paper analyses the ideology, implementation and outcomes of a
donor-based smallholder tree planting project in Lao PDR. Drawing on project
documents and local level fieldwork in southern Laos, an analysis of the failure of
this project to promote viable smallholder eucalyptus plantations is forwarded. The
donor vision of producing new rural subjectivities, transforming subsistence ori-
ented peasants into smallholder arboreal entrepreneurs was spectacularly unsuc-
cessful. A series of unintended consequences resulted, which undermined both the
livelihoods of enrolled farmers and the financial position of the key institutional
partner, the Lao Agricultural Promotion Bank. This paper provides an analysis of
this failure, emphasizing differing conceptions of and responses to vulnerability
and risk between rural farmers in Salavane province and the project proponents.
While maintaining interpretations which centre upon project mismanagement and
corruption, this paper also argues for a perspective in which even failed donor tree
planting projects are constitutive of broader patterns of political power, through
which new ideologies of development are formulated and deployed. Drawing on the
work of James Ferguson, David Mosse, and Gillian Hart, this paper argues that
the ADB Industrial Tree Plantation Project provides an analytical window into the
nature and exercise of state power, donor influence, and the politics of agrarian
transformation in globalizing Laos.
Keywords Asian Development Bank, Laos, project failure, rural debt, smallholder
eucalyptus