Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Through the practices of tree planting, new power relations and ideologies of state
development are established and re-worked through different scales and institutions
(Hart 1989; White 1999). In the example I present below, the ADB ITPP project
can provide an analytical window into the nature and exercise of state power, donor
influence, and the politics of agrarian transformation in globalizing Laos.
13.2
Forestry and Agrarian Policy in Post-socialist Laos
Contemporary forestry and agricultural policy in Laos needs to be understood in
relation to the historical and political-economic context of post-socialist Lao PDR.
From 1975, political power and decision making control in Laos has been central-
ized into the Politburo of the Lao Communist Party. There is a very low tolerance
for political dissent, and no independent domestic media. On the other hand, due to
a national infrastructure destroyed by war time bombing, inaccessible terrain, and
historically autonomous provincial principalities, until recently central level authori-
ties in Vientiane have held only a tenuous ability to implement state building projects
in the countryside (Stuart-Fox 2004). These contradictory aspects of political and
institutional culture in Laos continue to frame the ways in which development policy
interventions have been implemented in the 'post-socialist' era (Evans 1995). Added
to this are other features characteristic of political arrangements in Laos, including:
low levels of institutional capacity and inter-bureaucratic coordination; inaccurate or
missing information on investment flows and budget expenditures; poor skills train-
ing and education for lower level state authorities, inadequate salaries for civil serv-
ants; and significant governance issues. These problems are not unrelated to a long
history of conflict precipitated by more powerful military powers. This mixture of
history and politics in Laos, which is to a degree distinctive, lends itself to a prolif-
eration of central target-driven agrarian planning, which then experiences a high rate
of implementation failure and rural avoidance (e.g. see Evans 2005 on the experi-
ence with socialist-era agricultural collectives in Laos).
The World Bank (2006: 36-39) has identified further problem areas in the Lao
agriculture and natural resources sector. Together, they represent a severe structural
challenge to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) in implementing sus-
tainable forest management and rural development policy.
2
These identified issues
include: (i) shortfalls in actual central budgets allocations to provincial and district
authorities, leading to the adoption of autonomous revenue generation strategies by
2
An analysis of these structural political-economic factors assist in moving the debate beyond one
of rent seeking in the Lao forestry sector, although there remain significant problems with forest
governance in Laos. See Hodgdon (2007) for one account of how provincial level authorities in
Sekong province actively undermined a successful donor-funded village participatory sustainable
forest management initiative. Other interpretations of forest policy failure focus on personalized
and family-based networks of political patronage (e.g. Singh 2007).
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