The simulation of politics: Developmental natures in Lao hydropower

Contemporary politics of large dams in Southeast Asia has increasingly emphasized the production of uncertainty as a consequence of neoliberal, sustainable hydropower development. In part, newly liberalized strategies of transnational hydropower finance have decreased the role of developmental states in constructing and managing hydropower projects. Social and environmental impacts have subsequently taken on both a more salient and a more ambivalent status to the classically nationalist developmental technologies of hydropower. This is doubly so for projects which receive considerable attention from transnational activism, and these form the basis of this study.;My thesis investigates an export-oriented, public-private hydropower scheme in Laos with the hopes of understanding the kind of graduated sovereignty that allowed for an Anglophone elite---part activist and part corporate managerial---to have the greater say over the fates of resource-dependent peoples living along two watersheds stretched between the borders of Vietnam and Thailand. A sort of managerial, privatized governance had come to operate on villagers' environmental citizenship, with the result of a massive production and management of uncertainty that cut through distinctions between human and nonhuman political subjects. As Ulrich Beck indicates, managers, government and activists 'handle' political and environmental uncertainties 'after nature's end'.;I approached the problem through the anthropology of expertise and science and technology studies to understand the role of transnational activism and new managerial strategies vis-a-vis the political status of uncertainty. Socio-ecological uncertainty can be understood as a technological effect of what Fernando Coronil has called 'nature intensive capitalism,' but it is a function of specific codings and practices of grappling with uncertainty, not a simple expression of materiality. Given the extensive production of uncertainty, what has become relevant is not the hegemonic authority of expertise, as Timothy Mitchell has argued, so much as the management of uncertainty through an array of informal and semi-formal practices and managerial forms like audit and organizational techniques.;Over a period of eighteen months I worked in a variety of settings with Anglophone, expatriate hydropower managers and technocrats, government bureaucrats and Lao national NGO workers, farmers and fishers, and members of Vientiane's urban middle class to assess the stakes of hydropower to national development but in particular the demands placed on hydropower development from within Laos's global political ecology. By placing emphasis on the limits of expertise, the demands placed on powerful relations, and the ethical and political modes of evaluating power, I ask not what new critiques philosophy makes possible but rather what existing critical practices require of thinking.