Author:
Kelly Ashley Scott,Lu Xiaoxuan
Abstract
AbstractThis chapter, Locating discourses and narratives for intervention, argues that planners and designers engaging in “critical” landscape planning need a proactive, rigorous and reflective approach to assembling the discourses in their projects. Drawing from a selection of articles on the recent political economy and ecology of Laos from post-development theory, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, political geography, and political ecology, we survey four areas that function as conceptual drivers of the strategic planning proposals featured in Part Two of this book. These areas are (1) The politics of land-use planning and its deployment in the state’s territorial strategies; (2) A brief recounting of origins, since the 1980s, of the paradigm of sustainable development as it was imposed on regulatory institutions of the Global South; (3) The ways large-scale resource extraction is reproduced at capitalism’s frontiers via complex and overlapping patchworks of relations between large-scale infrastructures, state land concessions, and their administration at various scales; and (4) Discourse on “infrastructure” as a concept and our capacity to plan and assess it. These sections are held together by their constructivist and critical theory approaches, focus on the means and ends of neoliberalism, and undercurrents of authority, expertise and the politics of intervention.
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