Keith Barney

Australian National University | ANU

Environmental and social impact assessment is now a widely accepted tool in the Mekong Region for assessing the impacts of hydropower dams and large-scale industrial tree plantations. However, the cross-sectoral and cumulative effects of such projects have not been sufficiently addressed. Where cumulative impacts have been considered, studies have...

Lao PDR's push for large infrastructure-led economic growth has been delivered through a significant amount of financial leverage and a build-up of sovereign debt obligations. The government now finds itself in danger of a sovereign default. This article traces the roots of this debt crisis over the past decade, focusing particularly on the role of...

This article argues the Lao People's Democratic Republic, or Laos, draws upon three key types of "resources" in consolidating regime durability. Intentionally broad, our conception of resources encompasses not just natural resources managed by the state on behalf of the national community, but also the ideological and institutional resources that u...

We are currently seeing a global escalation in social and environmental disruption, yet concepts like the Anthropocene do not fully capture the intensity and generative scope of this crisis. ‘Rupture’ is being used as a term for specific and intense episodes of change, such as wildfires or toxic pollution releases. This is a useful addition to our...

The social impacts of industrial wood plantations (IWP) in Southeast Asia are extensively contested. Whilst productive, well-managed IWPs can offer a range of benefits to broader societies, they have also been criticised as driving community displacement and economic marginalisation. There is benefit to comparative case studies that identify the co...

Industrial timber plantations and their processing have been promoted by the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) government to generate rural employment and reduce economic reliance on the agriculture sector. Using a comparative case-study approach at two wood-processing factories , this paper seeks to understand the existing roles of women in w...

In our article, 'Rupture: Towards a Critical, Emplaced, and Experiential View of Nature-Society Crisis,' we advocated for contextually rich and critical understandings of environmental crises and their catalytic effects. This authors' reply responds to four commentaries whose authors raise helpful questions and insights. We first review the spatial...

Laos has rapidly expanded its hydraulic infrastructure, creating profound environmental, economic and social ruptures. We combine frameworks of environmental justice with political ecology to examine the multiple expressions of water injustice evident in three hydropower project case studies involving resettlement. We find that livelihood restorati...

While scholars and policy makers have increasingly focused on transnational labour migration (TLM) in Asia, few comparative studies have analysed how TLM shapes poverty, livelihoods, vulnerability, and agrarian-forest change across different rural contexts. Based on focused comparative fieldwork and a critical review of the secondary literature, th...

This article examines the plural and relational nature of what we call “Local Disaster Knowledge” (LDK) in the context of an agrarian volcanic landscape in Central Java, Indonesia, known as the Dieng Plateau. We describe how LDK incorporates complementary forms of knowledge gained through everyday livelihood practice, scientific information and cul...

Agroforestry has been promoted as a promising model of rural development in Lao PDR (Laos), where much upland land use is in transition. Relatively little is known about the contributions of agroforestry systems to Lao farmers’ livelihoods, how these systems compare to alternatives, or the extent to which they might contribute to the national polic...

In the original publication of the article Acknowledgements and Disclosures and declarations sections were not provided. These have been given with this Correction.

Four tree plantation models implemented in Lao PDR and a hypothetical model were compared in terms of the projected economic benefits and those realised by participating rural households, and households' attitudes to further plantation expansion. Models comprised two forms of land-sharing plantation concessions, and contract and independent tree gr...

The ACIAR Project ADP/2014/047, Improving policies for forest plantations to balance smallholder, industry and environmental needs in Lao PDR and Vietnam, was undertaken from January 2016 until December 2018 by Australian universities and research partners in Lao PDR and Vietnam. The aim was to provide policy options that contribute to national goa...

This essay introduces a Special Section on ‘Recent Developments in the Extractive Industries in the Asia-Pacific’. Though diverse in their approaches and objects of study, the five articles speak strongly to understandings of extractive industry as a socio-spatial and political-economic process of ‘disruption’. Taking the disruptive possibilities o...

ACIAR Working Paper 5.

Southeast Asian Studies journal

Forthcoming in "Southeast Asian Studies" journal.

Policies in Lao PDR encourage farmers to transition from shifting to sedentary agriculture, and the conversion of ‘degraded’ forest to agricultural and plantation concessions. As access to natural resources becomes increasingly contested in these contexts, it is helpful to better understand the economic value of environmental resources, including ‘...

The plantation sector in Lao PDR in undergoing transformation; it is being pushed and pulled by market forces, new policies, emerging governance models and development interventions. Together with the support of development partners and some industry participants, the Government is currently formulating a new strategy for forests and plantations. T...

This article develops a framework for conceptualising authoritarian governance and rule in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. After introducing the national and academic context, which go a significant way towards understanding the paucity of comparative political work on Laos, we propose an approach to studying post-socialist authoritarian and...

Large areas of the rural Lao landscape are being rapidly transformed by infrastructure development projects. Arguably, it is hydraulic development that is contributing most significantly to rural socio-ecological change, due to the profound socio-political ruptures dams precipitate. The nationally iconic Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project, commission...

The Government of Laos (GoL) views commercial plantation forestry as a key sector for promoting economic development in rural areas, particularly in upland and priority poor districts. Commercial timber plantations have been implemented through different investment 'models', such as company-led concessions, agroforestry systems, contract farming ar...

This paper explores the effects and contributions to local livelihoods from industrial tree plantations and discusses policy recommendations for the promotion of a sustainable commercial tree plantation sector in Lao PDR. It is based on analysis of the literature and preliminary results from household surveys and farmer interviews at case study sit...

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 regul...

Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand. By Tomas Larsson. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012. xii, 208 pp. ISBN 9780801450815 (cloth). - Volume 75 Issue 1 - Keith Barney

This paper examines how new forms of ecological knowledge are produced and mobilised through a sustainability-oriented, commercial tree plantation project in Lao PDR. As Gavin Bridge has noted, the establishment of primary resource sector projects are often not simply based upon a discursive emptying and erasure of local social and environmental hi...

Across the tropics, high rates of forest degradation and deforestation have resulted not only in the loss of large areas of natural forest cover but also in increasing fragmentation of the forests that remain. This chapter examines the underlying governance drivers of forest fragmentation through five key analytical approaches: (i) understanding of...

I n contemporary Lao PDR (Laos), rural areas and communities are experiencing relatively rapid socioeconomic and ecological transformations. As part of my postdoctoral fellowship at Kyoto University, in April 2012, I made a return visit to a number of research locations in southern Laos. In these locations, new foreign investments in agri-business,...

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 b...

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. T...

This Action is funded by the European Union and the governments of Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union. www.euflegt.efi.int FLEGT Asia Background The European Commission (EC) published a Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Tr...

Background The European Commission (EC) published a Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan in 2003. FLEGT aims not simply to reduce illegal deforestation, but in promoting good forest governance, aims to contribute to poverty eradi-cation and sustainable management of natural resources.

Bounding the Mekong' is a slim monograph that nevertheless packs a big conceptual punch. Geographer Jim Glassman presents an innovative approach to understanding a geographical area that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has promoted as the 'Greater Mekong Subre-gion' (GMS). While scholars of environmental governance have previously critiqued the ma...

1,109 words) (1,077 including references) Plantations are assemblages of trees, shrubs or plants, established on an area of land. Plantations can also be understood as a system of agro-economic production. Plantations represent a dominant mode of industrial organization and social-ecological production in modern agriculture and forestry. As an orga...

In this response to an article by Holly High, “The Implications of Aspirations: Reconsidering Resettlement in Laos,” published in Critical Asian Studies in December 2008 (vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 531–50), the authors do not dispute the notion that many people in Laos have aspirations for modernity and development. However, they are at odds with High in...

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier, drawing on examples of nature's commodification and enclosure under way in the peripheral Southeast Asian country of Laos. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of social property...

It is widely acknowledged that Southeast Asia stands at a fork in the road. The ratification and adoption of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Charter in 2008 has given the regional body new found legal status, and the proposed establishment of an ASEAN Political-Security Community, Economic Community, Socio-Cultural Community and...

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 su...

The World Bank (2003) notes that the failure to integrate and adapt legal forms of land and resource tenure with the reality of local livelihood practices almost invariably leads to conflict. At times open hostilities and violence can result. The task of mapping social and communal conflicts over access to resources associated with forestry and lan...

Forest Trends (http://www.forest-trends.org): Forest Trends is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization advocating market-based approaches to conserving forests outside of protected areas. In addition to promoting markets for some of the ecosystem services, Forest Trends also supports markets for sustainably-produced forest products and mark...

 The emergence of social and environmental movements against plantation forestry in Southeast Asia positions rural development against local displacement and environmental degradation. Multi-scaled NGO networks have been active in promoting the notion that rural people in Southeast Asia uniformly oppose plantation development. There are potential p...

Over 70 % of China's timber product imports are supplied by countries in the Asia Pacific region, and China is the dominant forest product market for many of these countries. Unsustainable harvesting practices, illegal logging, and negative impacts on community livelihoods plague many of these supplying countries. The countries may be divided into...