Exploiting Untouched Nature? the Social Production of Nature As a Resource at Nakai-Nam Theun Npa (NNT), Lao PDR

The presentation argues that nature conservation is an external imposition on current socio-economic realities in Laos, and as such internal to the country’s social structures and dynamics: the state and its subjects have to make do with biodiversity conservation as a fact established internationally. Therefore, resource protection feeds into extraction with some systemic necessity. Nature reserves are an effect of power differentials, so the extraction it invites or necessitates one way or the other is ridden by inequities, as well.

But inequality defined merely by access to and use of the resources within a certain protected area (PA) is a very limited, and in fact ideological, notion of social inequality. The yardstick should rather be the distribution of the general social resources of the country and beyond. Otherwise, there is the risk of naturalizing “stakeholders” as stewards and custodians of biological diversity. Such essentialism, present in the everyday practice of sustainable development, largely misses locally lived realities and aspirations, and with these the systemic and productive relation between nature conservation and exploitation, in Laos at least. Instead, a view where nature reserves are not passive reservoirs but rather “factories” that produce biological and cultural diversity as a resource, in a process of socially structured practice, is more appropriate. This practice transcends, undermines, ignores or complies with the laws of a PA according to social differentiation. In this tangled and ambiguous way a PA and its productivity is realized.

These issues are discussed with regard mainly to NNT in Lao PDR. The presentation is based on the extensive research carried out by a variety of experts and scholars due to the involvement of the World Bank in the Nam Theun 2 dam project, as well as on my first-hand research in villages of the PA.