Northern Scientific Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter features three planning proposals focused on the ideological friction between Northern scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge. Northern scientific knowledge has enabled and legitimized various territorialization projects since the establishment of the Lao PDR. Over the past decade, the application of such knowledge has diversified and expanded along with Laos’s increasing integration into the socio-economic geography of the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor. Unlike World Bank-funded green-neoliberal development that dominated Laos in the 1990s and 2000s, some China-funded projects are furthering the green neoliberal valuation of ecosystems in monetary terms and these ecosystems’ conservation by means of market dynamics. These ecosystem territories inevitably overlap with the country’s indigenous territories and their natural resource-dependent communities. The three planning proposals featured in this chapter foreground Laos’s remarkable human diversity and local communities’ valuable traditional ecological knowledge and practices. These planning proposals are situated in a diverse range of socio-ecological contexts, namely Nam Ha National Protected Area, a protected forest in Luang Prabang, and agricultural land within the capital Vientiane. Collectively, these proposals focus on agrarian populations influenced by old or new forms of land enclosure, investigating possible scenarios that may lead to more equal power relationships between the scientific and indigenous knowledge regimes.