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Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and
Politics ‘All the Way Down’ in Vientiane, Laos
Bounnhong Pathammavong, Miles Kenney-Lazar
and Ek Vinay Sayaraj
ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of
‘Turning Land into Capital’ (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and
economic value from ‘state land’. The 450 Year Road Project built along the
periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with
the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the
side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than the
compensation provided to landowners. Prior to construction, however, most
of the land had already been purchased by external buyers, who impeded the
project’s development by refusing to concede their newly purchased plots.
This article contributes to the literature on political reactions ‘from below’ to
land grabbing by arguing that in order to understand the operational success
or failure of land development projects, it is imperative to analyse the politics
that pervade such investments ‘all the way down’ — the interrelated roles,
interests and relations of involved actors and groups in all positions of power
within society. The 450 Year Road project stalled due to its failure to take into
account the interests and politics of seemingly compliant actors, particularly
landowning farm households and speculative land buyers.
INTRODUCTION
In 2010, the municipal government of Vientiane — capital of the Lao Peo-
ple’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos) — completed construction of
the ‘450 Year Road’, a two-lane highway linking the Laos–Thailand border
with the national highway of Laos. The road was built to allow traffic to
We wish to gratefully acknowledge all who contributed to the development of this article. The
fieldwork was institutionally supported by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment
(MONRE) and funded by Village Focus International. Professor Sha Yongzhong of the Univer-
sity of Lanzhou provided valuable advice and support throughout the duration of the project. We
are deeply indebted to the MONRE research assistants who helped collect data and to all of the
research participants for their time and patience. Three anonymous reviewers provided helpful
and insightful comments on the paper. Any errors or omissions remain ours alone.
Development and Change 0(0): 1–22. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12339
C2017 International Institute of Social Studies.
2B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
bypass the increasingly congested downtown area and generate economic
growth in nearby peri-urban areas. Six years later, however, much of the
road corridor remains undeveloped and barren; hand-painted signs to the
side of the road advertise the sale of vacant land. The road has been poorly
maintained, exemplified by overgrown bushes in the median where trees
were originally planted. Basic infrastructure, such as municipal water and
overhead power lines, has yet to be installed beyond the first 3 km.
In this article, we examine why the 450 Year Road project failed to gen-
erate economic development and benefits for local people. We contend that
analyses of infrastructure projects and their economic failures must incorpo-
rate investigation of the political processes that shape their implementation.
The 450 Year Road faced oppositional political reactions from a range of
actors who took issue with the land expropriation model employed to fund
the road’s construction. Using the power of eminent domain, the municipal
government sought to acquire additional land to the side of the road from
farming landowners — land which would be sold at a much higher price
than the compensation provided to landowners, thus funding the costs of the
project. However, Lao elites who had learned of this plan purchased most
of the land alongside the road before expropriation took place in order to
profit from the anticipated increase in land values.1They then used their
political-economic power to refuse compensation and resist expropriation.
The impediments that the project faced reflect the hidden but dense politics
that pervade the implementation of large-scale land deals in Laos, which
often hamper plans of developers. In this article, we build upon the literature
on political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing to argue for analyses
of politics ‘all the way down’. With this concept, we refer to the political
reactions from actors in varying positions of power that interface with the
project. Such an analysis not only takes into account the resistance politics
of marginalized land users but also examines how they relate to the political
reactions of more powerful political-economic actors. We are interested in
how the politics of diverse actors intersect, conflict and ally with one another
to produce unexpected results. Complex and contradictory politics from the
top to the bottom of the political system do much to explain the barriers that
limit the contribution of infrastructure projects to economic development.
The 450 Year Road project was obstructed for almost a decade largely
because the interests of the state as an investor and developer did not align
with those of the original landholders and more recent land buyers.
These arguments are developed and supported as follows. First, we re-
view the theoretical literature on land dispossession and political reactions
‘from below’ to global land grabbing, and establish our own framework
for examining politics ‘all the way down’. We then review the literature
on the Turning Land into Capital (TLIC) policy, models of TLIC projects
1. Reported in GOL (2010) and by government interviewees at the municipal and district
levels, February 2013 to March 2015.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 3
and the politics of implementing land-based investments in Laos. In the two
subsequent sections, we discuss the methods used to collect data for this
research project, and examine the empirical details of how the 450 Year
Road project was developed. The concluding section reflects upon the im-
plications of politics ‘all the way down’ for investigating the development
of land investment projects in a variety of contexts.
LAND GRABBING AND POLITICS ‘ALL THE WAY DOWN’
A political analysis of how infrastructure projects fail in their implementation
can best be understood through the lens of the politics ‘all the way down’
that accompany processes of land grabbing. By this, we mean the ways
in which a wide range of societal actors, with varying degrees of power,
politically react to land deals and shape the ways in which those deals are
implemented. We focus especially on the relations between different actors,
such as marginalized land users and political-economic elite land buyers.
We show that the literature on land grabbing coheres around the theme of
accumulation by dispossession, that infrastructural and urban projects are an
important but little-researched dimension of land grabbing, and that work on
the political reactions ‘from below’ to land grabbing should accommodate
understandings of politics ‘all the way down’.
Many types of global, land-based development projects have been labelled
as ‘land grabbing’, including agricultural and tree plantations, mining, car-
bon sequestration and land speculation (Zoomers, 2010). The rise of global-
ized, financial interest in land has been attributed to the effect of global crises
of food, energy, climate and finance, that intersected around 2007–08 and
led to increases in resource commodity prices, particularly for oil, minerals,
food, biofuels and other industrial inputs such as natural rubber (McMichael,
2012). Such a framing, however, can become a problematic ‘meta-narrative’
(Baird, 2014b), in that it fails to capture the localized causes of land grabbing
that do not reflect broader global processes, such as the role of local elites
and regional powers (Borras et al., 2013). Thus, instead of viewing land
grabbing as a unified global phenomenon, it can be lent clearer conceptual
coherence as a process characterized by the use of force and coercion to
expropriate land from marginalized peoples, upending their resource access
and livelihoods (Borras and Franco, 2013). Land grabbing projects are com-
parable at a conceptual level to primitive accumulation (Marx, 1867/1976)
or accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003), whereby capital accumu-
lation is facilitated by the extra-economic acquisition of property and assets
(Glassman, 2006).
Much of the land grabbing research focuses on the acquisition of land
for the extraction of natural resources (White et al., 2012) or for environ-
mental and conservation purposes, referred to as ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead
et al., 2012). There are, however, other globally important types of land
4B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
grabbing that occur in and around urban areas, such as the acquisition of
agricultural land for conversion to industrial sites, special economic zones
(SEZs), urban real estate or infrastructure (see Holt-Gim´
enez et al., 2011;
Levien, 2011). Such processes of rural to urban land conversion are often
accompanied by speculation on rising land values and involve familiar forms
of dispossession, coercion and unequal power relations (Goldman, 2011),
processes present in the development of urban projects in Laos such as new
airports (Sims, 2015) and SEZs (Laungaramsri, 2015).
In China and Vietnam, dispossession accompanies urban expansion as
municipal governments expropriate agricultural land through force, com-
pensate farmers at below-market rates and resell the land at inflated prices
to generate municipal revenue (Lin and Zhang, 2015; Wells-Dang et al.,
2015). This land-based financing approach — the model used for the 450
Year Road — is a type of neoliberal entrepreneurial governance whereby
municipal governments are responsible for acting competitively to attract in-
vestment, create economic growth and generate revenue (Harvey, 1989). In
Bangalore, Goldman (2011) frames these processes as ‘speculative’ govern-
ment, in which the business of government is to catalyse a rural to urban
transformation via land dispossession and speculation.
The literature on land grabbing has evolved to caution against assumptions
concerning the development of land investment projects and the role of dif-
ferent political-economic actors. One assumption that has been overturned is
that the land granted to investors is actually controlled and used at the local
level, an assumption often based upon initial information from news media
or government announcements of land projects. However, many projects
fail, stall or are implemented differently than initially planned, with unex-
pected impacts upon peasants, thus skewing the initial scholarship on land
grabbing (Edelman, 2013; Oya, 2013; Scoones et al., 2013). For example,
Br¨
autigam and Zhang (2013) show that the role of the Chinese government
and firms in acquiring agricultural land in Africa is actually quite limited,
contrary to media narratives of Chinese land grabbing. Another assumption
cautioned against by Wolford et al. (2013) concerns the role of the state,
which is often treated as a unified actor in land grabbing processes, either
as a powerless victim or as a predatory grabber. Wolford et al. (ibid.) call
for scholars to conceptually unbundle the state in order to view government
and governance as processes, people and relationships. They persuasively
argue that contemporary land deals should be analysed in terms of how they
shape and are shaped by the institutions, practices and discourses of territory,
sovereignty, authority and subjects.
Another key assumption that has been contested by recent land grabbing
literature concerns the ways in which marginalized actors will politically
react. Borras and Franco (2013) call for a recognition and examination
of their heterogeneous responses. It is important to not focus exclusively
on processes of resistance — which cannot be assumed to automatically
transpire — but more broadly on political reactions ‘from below’. Groups of
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 5
poor, vulnerable and marginalized people affected by land deals react in a
variety of ways, with responses that range from resistance and claims making
to cooperation and cooptation (Baird and Le Billon, 2012; Gingembre, 2015;
Mamonova, 2015; Moreda, 2015). Additionally, politically marginalized
people can play important roles in catalysing processes of dispossession,
even expropriating land from those they know well — what Hall et al.
(2011) have termed ‘intimate dispossession’.
The politics ‘from below’ literature aligns with scholarship that reacts to
the ‘resistance is everywhere’ perspective, or what Holly High refers to, with
tongue-in-cheek, as ‘resistance to resistance studies’ (High, 2014). Her work
builds upon Ortner’s (1995) argument about the importance of recognizing
the internal contradictions of groups that are ‘resisting’ and creating ethno-
graphically thick accounts of their politics. Similarly, David Mosse (2005)
has highlighted how the new ethnography of development questions mono-
lithic notions of dominance and resistance, including the complex agency of
those from below who may express a range of perspectives in response to
development interventions. The focus of this work is to complicate narra-
tives that frame transitions from subsistence agriculture to market-based,
capitalist cash cropping as a result of coercive pressures from agribusiness
corporations and the state and that view peasant farmers as inherently resis-
tant to these processes, even if such resistance is hidden (Scott, 1987). For
example, Tania Li (2014) shows how indigenous highlanders in Indonesia,
contrary to the expectations of critical scholars, independently enclosed their
forest frontier to grow cacao trees, creating a privatized market land system
in the process.
We take this work one step further by arguing that the actions taken by
communities or individuals in reaction to change should not be examined in
isolation from their broader political relations. Furthermore, critiques of as-
sumptions concerning the actions of marginalized actors, as well as those of
political-economic elites and the state, should be matched by a critique of as-
sumptions about how these different groups interact with one another. While
the literature on political reactions ‘from below’ and ‘resistance to resistance
studies’ shows how people respond to land investments and development in
highly differentiated ways, we argue that it is critically important to examine
the reactions of those ‘below’ in relation to the politics of those ‘above’, ‘in
the middle’ and in all positions of power. Those whose lands are targeted
for expropriation often do not politically react on their own, but with and in
relation to other actors, whether in alliance or conflict. Thus, we call for a
connection of two key foci of the land grabbing literature — examinations
of the state, or politics ‘from above’, and of marginalized resource users,
or politics ‘from below’ — to generate understandings of political reactions
‘all the way down’. We call for an examination of the political reactions that
emerge from groups and actors in all parts of society. Resistance occurs and
land-based development projects are stalled not only due to the actions of the
marginalized and weak, but also in relation to how their interests align with
6B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
those of more powerful groups in society, potentially against the interests of
project developers.
‘TURNING LAND INTO CAPITAL’ IN THE LAO PDR
The 450 Year Road was framed as a project that could generate economic
growth and development as part of the TLIC policy of the Government of
Laos (GOL). Set within the context of the country’s increasing orientation
towards a market economy since the 1980s, the TLIC policy was estab-
lished in order to generate economic value through various forms such as
developing land markets and leasing state lands to private investors. Like
the 450 Year Road, the TLIC policy has not performed well economically
and is under reconsideration by the current leadership (KPL, 2016). Thus, a
political analysis of the 450 Year Road also offers insight into the economic
failures of TLIC projects.
The details of the TLIC policy, announced in 2006, were never specified
or formalized. As a result, it has acted as a broad and flexible approach
to promote the generation of economic value from land within the coun-
try’s liberalizing economy. While we continue to refer to it as a policy,
labelled as such by the GOL, it operates more as a strategy of economic
development used to provide political support for land-based development
schemes. Dwyer (2013) has documented how the TLIC policy was first en-
visioned as a means of developing land markets, based on the idea that land
titling could generate economic development by transforming land into an
exchangeable commodity and increasing its value. The focus of the policy
was later expanded to support the government’s promotion of large-scale
land development projects, such as a deal to provide 1,600 ha of peri-urban
wetlands to a Chinese real estate company in exchange for the construction
of a national sports stadium for the 2009 Southeast Asian Games held in
Vientiane (Vientiane Times, 2007).
By 2008, the former National Land Management Authority had discur-
sively linked the TLIC policy to the practice of conceding state land to
investors for a wide range of projects, such as industrial tree plantations and
mineral extraction, claiming them to be a ‘vital part of implementing the
government’s policy of turning land into capital’ (Vientiane Times, 2008).
In this model, land is ‘turned into capital’ when investors provide a yearly
lease or concession fee per hectare to the government. In 2009, TLIC was
used to justify the 450 Year Road, which was explicitly referred to as a
TLIC project on the title page of the summary report (GOL, 2010). The 450
Year Road is a variation of the TLIC policy in that it is a government-owned
project in which ‘capital’ is generated by building infrastructure and selling
additional land to the private sector at inflated rates. The government has also
increasingly used TLIC as a strategy for financing the construction of new
government offices. Prime real estate in the city centre has been allocated to
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 7
well-connected companies who in return have paid for the construction of
new, larger and more modern government buildings on cheaper land plots
outside of the urban centre.
Within TLIC, a number of different means have been used to acquire
the land for projects. In some cases, land explicitly owned by the state
is provided to investors, as for example when land on which government
buildings are located is leased out. In other cases, especially in rural and
upland areas, land claimed by the state is allocated to investors because the
people who use it do not hold land titles. In such cases, decisions concerning
which lands belong to the state and which belong to villages and households
is contested at the local level (Barney, 2011; Dwyer, 2011; Kenney-Lazar,
2012). In the case of projects like the 450 Year Road, the state must use the
power of eminent domain to acquire titled land based upon the definition of
the project as ‘public purpose’.
Despite the aims of the TLIC policy to generate revenue, development and
jobs, researchers have shown that TLIC projects often fall short of achieving
these goals, especially when state land is given out to investors. State land
leases and concessions, for example, have been shown to contribute little
to government revenue: in the 2004–05 fiscal year, fees amounted to only
0.24 per cent of GDP due to low leasing rates, fee and tax exemptions
during the initial investment years and limited enforcement of fee collection
(Schumann et al., 2006). When the government exchanges prime real estate
for infrastructure, such as new office buildings, they are likely to undersell
the land vis-`
a-vis the value of the building received in exchange. Much
research has shown that land concessions for agricultural and tree plantation
projects in Laos, a type of TLIC project, have actually increased rural poverty
in impacted villages by dispossessing peasants of the land and resources
that comprise critically important aspects of their agrarian livelihoods, as
their lands are claimed by the government as ‘state land’ appropriate for
allocation to investors (Baird, 2010; Barney, 2011; Kenney-Lazar, 2012;
Obein, 2007).
Recent research on land-lease and concession projects reveals a range of
other problems. Many projects have failed to secure all of the land needed
for their project, have stalled and been implemented more slowly than antic-
ipated, have not been as productive as expected, have not been profitable, or
have failed altogether (McCallister, 2015; Sch¨
onweger and Messerli, 2015).
Politics and power relations among various actors have played an important
role in shaping the way that land deals are implemented. Political relation-
ships between investors and the Lao state can influence how easily land
is allocated for industrial tree plantations (Kenney-Lazar, 2015); political
histories, particularly the memories of the roles people played in the Second
Indochina War and Lao communist revolution, can affect whether or not
villages are targeted for concessions (Baird, 2014a; Dwyer, 2011).
All of this scholarship has addressed key dimensions of how politics
‘all the way down’ operates in Laos. However, it is challenging in the
8B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
Lao context to fully study what goes on behind the scenes and the roles
of various actors, especially those in power. As described in the method-
ological section below, we have used our positionality working within the
government to pull back the curtain and get a glimpse of the power poli-
tics that would otherwise be hidden from view. Furthermore, research on
the politics of the TLIC policy has largely focused on land concessions in
rural areas for agricultural and tree plantation projects (exceptions which
deal with urban or infrastructure-related concessions include Dwyer, 2013;
Laungaramsri, 2015; Sims, 2012, 2015). Thus, there is a lack of examination
of how these politics operate for other types of TLIC projects such as the
exchange of land for infrastructure, the development of land markets and
government-owned land development projects. The 450 Year Road is a suit-
able project for studying the politics of infrastructure development and land
expropriation because it shows the salience of politics ‘all the way down’,
even in a political context where the state manages land in an authoritarian
manner.
METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
This article is based upon data collected in Vientiane from February 2013
to March 2016. The first author led the fieldwork, assisted by a team of
research assistants from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environ-
ment (MONRE). They collected data via semi-structured interviews, archival
work and participant observation. Interviews were conducted with GOL of-
ficials in MONRE at the capital and district levels, village chiefs and original
landowners in villages affected by the road project, and land buyers.
Villages and households were selected for interviews using non-random,
non-representative sampling methods. Six villages were selected for study
using quota and purposive sampling methods. To select for geographic di-
versity, two villages were chosen in each of the three districts through which
the road passes. In two of the districts (Hatxaifong and Xaithany), we se-
lected the only two villages that had been impacted. In Xaisettha districts,
the two villages selected out of the 10 impacted were the ones where the
largest number of landowners had been affected. Within the six villages,
we surveyed 143 out of the total 281 households affected by land expro-
priation.2Households within each village were selected using quota and
convenience sampling. To analyse the reasons for accepting versus rejecting
compensation, half of the households selected had accepted and the other
half had rejected compensation. Within those two groups, households were
interviewed based on their availability. It was more challenging to interview
land buyers as they are political-economic elites who do not live in the
2. ‘Affected’ means that at least some of their land was expropriated. None of the households
lost all of their land due to the project.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 9
area. Village leaders were able to connect the first author with some who
were willing to meet and to share inside information about the compensation
process.
This project was originally not intended to be ethnographic, as it was set
up to survey compensation prices and the effectiveness of the road devel-
opment model. However, the first author’s close connections and informal
engagement with landowners, village authorities and government officials
provided a great deal of ethnographic understanding about how the project
was developed, who was buying land and why individuals were accepting
or refusing compensation. Much of this information came from moments
of casual conversation and chatting outside of formal interviews. Thus, we
have used these ethnographic understandings to tell a more interesting story
than the one that was the original focus of the research. In addition to inter-
views, archival documents were also collected, including media articles,
government policies, development master plans and project implementation
summary reports.
Conducting research on sensitive issues in Laos is challenging due to
government attempts to control how government policy and projects are
depicted. Thus, it is important to reflect upon the methods that the authors
used to gain access to data used in this article, including how we are po-
litically positioned in relation to the government. The fieldwork and data
collection were conducted by the first author, a MONRE government of-
ficial who was at the time on leave for his doctoral studies. Through his
government affiliation, the study was approved by all levels of government
(ministerial, municipal, district and village) as a study on compensation is-
sues related to the development of the 450 Year Road. The article also builds
upon informal interactions and conversations between all three authors and
other government officials concerning the development of the project and
the involvement of political and economic elites, including government of-
ficials. The third author, who contributed to the data analysis, is also a Lao
government official within MONRE. The second author, who analysed data
and wrote the manuscript, is an American researcher who was institution-
ally hosted by MONRE while conducting his dissertation research in Laos
between 2013 and 2015.
While the unique positionality of all three authors in relation to the gov-
ernment gave us access to the data that inform this project, it also holds
implications for the ways in which we have analysed and written about the
results in this article. Published critique of the Lao government can have se-
rious ramifications for authors. The careers of the first and third author could
be affected, preventing them from advancement. The second author could
be prevented from conducting future research in Laos. All three authors be-
lieve in the importance of critique and an honest assessment of development
projects in Laos. Thus, we have sought to find a middle ground that explains
why the 450 Year Road experienced significant problems but without plac-
ing blame on any particular actor. As a result, we have been able to provide
10 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
Figure 1. Timeline of Road Events
Sources: interviews, project documents.
an effective mix of insider insight and critical analysis, presented in such a
way that it will be considered rather than rejected by policy makers.
EXPROPRIATION, COMPENSATION AND SPECULATION ALONG THE 450
YEAR ROAD
The 450 Year Road was developed as part of the TLIC policy by expropri-
ating land to the side of the road, compensating landholders at depressed
rates and then reselling the land to investors at a highly inflated floor price,
far above the rate of compensation. The funds thus generated were intended
to finance road construction, land compensation and other unrelated gov-
ernment projects. However, the planned increase in land prices in the area
attracted the attention of land buyers who, by 2010, had purchased 95 per
cent of the land parcels to the side of the road, before any of it had been
expropriated (see a timeline of events in Figure 1).3Many of the buyers
were members of the powerful political and economic elite who were in a
position to refuse the low compensation rates offered by the government,
thus complicating the process of land expropriation and exchange. It took
eight years from the beginning of road construction in 2008 to force most of
the landholders to relinquish their land at a low compensation rate: by March
2016, 78 per cent of the land had been acquired and compensated by the
municipal government (Figure 1).4In this section, we examine the politics
behind the messy and contested process of development and dispossession
that characterized the 450 Year Road project. We first describe the events
that transpired in the development of the project, chronologically and largely
based on interviews with government officials and village authorities, and
3. Reported in GOL (2010) and by government interviewees at the municipal and district
levels, February 2013 to March 2015.
4. Interviews, Vientiane Capital PONRE officials, March 2016.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 11
Figure 2. Geographical Context of the 450 Year Road in Vientiane, Laos
Sources: Vientiane Capital Department of Public Works and Transportation; National Geo-
graphic Department; OpenStreetMap.
analyses of government project documents. We then discuss the political
dynamics that shaped how expropriation, compensation and speculation ac-
tually took place, based upon interviews with original landowners and land
buyers.
Developing the 450 Year Road Project
The 450 Year Road project was originally proposed in 1991 by the Vientiane
municipal government as part of the city’s master plan for economic and
urban development. The road would link the Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge
— construction for which had begun shortly before the road was planned
— with the country’s major north–south highway, Route 13 (see project
map in Figure 2). It would expand Laos’s road network connecting with
its neighbours and major trading partners, Thailand, China and Vietnam,
and would dovetail with Laos’s strategic plan to transition from being a
landlocked to a land-linked country. The city justified developing the road
because it would allow trucks to bypass the Vientiane downtown area,
thereby reducing traffic in the city and increasing transportation efficiency.
Additionally, it would spur economic development in the new road area by
increasing land values (GOL, 2010).
12 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
The project stagnated until 2004, when it was included in a set of 21 focal
projects to be developed by the municipal government in anticipation of
the 450th year anniversary of Vientiane’s establishment as the capital of the
Lao Kingdom. The project was approved to be developed and owned by the
Vientiane Capital city government, with MONRE playing a supervisory role.
Vientiane Capital’s PONRE (a municipal line agency of MONRE) would
be responsible for transferring land titles and paying out compensation; the
district authorities would be responsible for coordinating project develop-
ment within the boundaries of their districts; and village authorities would
communicate between villagers and city government officials. Despite new-
found political will for the project, the government still lacked funding and
the project was delayed again until the 8th Party Congress of the Lao Peo-
ple’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) in 2006, when a strategy was developed
to build the road using the TLIC policy. Instead of spending a significant
portion of the government’s annual transportation budget to pay for the road,
the authorities sought a way to make the road pay for itself.
The city government eventually settled upon a land-based financing model.
Vientiane Capital PONRE officials felt that this was the only viable option,
explaining that ‘At this time for our country, which doesn’t have a strong
economy, turning land into capital is necessary to have available capital for
developing road projects’.5The Bank of the Lao PDR lent US$ 83 million
to the municipal government (GOL, 2010), to be repaid when the municipal
government could sell land acquired to the side of the road (Vientiane Times,
2010). As well as expropriating a 50-metre wide strip of land for the road
itself, the government sought to acquire an additional 50 m to each side of the
road, along a stretch of more than 20 km. The Mayor of Vientiane justified
the expropriation of land from ‘occupiers’ by invoking the Constitution and
Land Law, which give the Lao government the mandate to regulate the
country’s land on behalf of the Lao people (Vientiane Times, 2009b). The
land to be acquired was mostly agricultural and rural, lying on the periphery
of urban Vientiane, a mixed landscape of paddy rice fields, grassland for
raising livestock, patches of secondary forest and fish ponds. Most of the
local landholders had titles to their land.
Funds necessary to cover the costs of the project, and to provide a further
US$ 167 million in revenue (GOL, 2010), were to be generated by compen-
sating landowners for their expropriated land at depressed rates and reselling
the land to buyers at a set floor price markedly higher than the compensation
rates. Landholders were to be compensated at an average rate of US$ 3.43
per m2while the government planned to resell the same land at an average
price of US$ 130 per m2(see Table 1) — a difference of more than 3,000
per cent between compensation rates and planned sale prices.6
5. Interview, March 2013.
6. Actual compensation rates and resale prices differed from these averages, depending upon
the distance from major connecting roads and intersections.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 13
Table 1. Variations in Land Purchasing Rates
Type of purchase Average rate (US$/m2)
Market price prior to land purchasing by speculators ( –2004) 1.1
Government compensation (2008–2016) 3.43
Purchases by land speculators after road project announced (2004–2008) 8.87
Re-sale price set by government (2008– ) 130
Market rates of land after purchased from government (2015) 300
Sources: Interviews with village chiefs and original landowners, February 2013 to March 2015.
The expected increase in land prices that the development of the road
was to generate caught the eye of land brokers and buyers. They began
purchasing land in the area from local landowners in the early 2000s, long
before road construction began, even buying land alongside all three of the
possible routes before the final route was selected. By the end of 2010,
they had purchased 95 per cent of the land alongside the road from farming
households.7Authorities in Sokgnai village noted that brokers visited almost
every day to facilitate these purchases.8Some plots were exchanged four to
five times with the result that the city government did not know who the new
owners were or where they could be found.9This occurred despite a 2008 ban
issued by the city on land transfers in the project area.10 The land exchanges
were informal: land titles remained in the name of the original landowner and
an unofficial written agreement between the two parties was signed. Buyers
had no assurance that the original landowners would not cheat them, but since
they were both involved in an illegal transaction, it was unlikely that either
party would want to invite conflict and risk exposure. Original landowners
sold their plots knowing they would get a better price than the compensation
rates they would be forced to accept from the city government. They also
sold their land because they were uncertain what would happen next, as
expressed by leaders of Saphangmuk village: ‘The steps for implementing
the project were not clear . . . . The policy changed all the time, which made
villagers afraid that they would receive low compensation. But there were
brokers looking to buy land when the road was being surveyed’.11
Land brokers played an important role in facilitating land exchanges, sim-
ilar to their involvement in land markets throughout the city, connecting
7. GOL (2010) and interview, acting director, Vientiane Capital PONRE, March 2013. The
remaining 5 per cent did not sell their land, mostly because the land was not desirable and
the buyers were not interested in purchasing it. For example, some plots were four metres
higher than the road and would be expensive to level.
8. Interview, March 2013.
9. Interview, acting director, Vientiane Capital PONRE, March 2013.
10. Vientiane Capital Governor’s Office, Notification No. 126, 24 April 2008.
11. Interview, Saphangmuk village officials, Xaithany district, March 2013. Not only did the
compensation rates frequently change, the government-set prices for reselling increased,
from an average of US$ 44 per m2to US$ 130 per m2, thus making the property even less
affordable.
14 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
buyers and sellers and taking a cut of the purchase price (prices often being
inflated to accommodate the broker’s cut). In some cases, the broker con-
trolled the whole exchange process, even handling the money, and could
negotiate a price difference between what the buyer paid and what the seller
received, profiting from the difference. As the brokers never owned the land
at any point and were not responsible for legal violations of land sales,
they had an incentive to encourage sales even when such transactions were
prohibited. In the case of the 450 Year Road, the brokers downplayed the
restrictions on land sales when trying to broker deals; any problems which
arose later with the government would not affect the brokers who would
have already taken their money and run by that point.
Although the compensation rates offered by the government were higher
than the going rate for land in the area prior to the development of the road
(see Table 1), landowners knew that the value of the land would increase
rapidly due to the planned road project. In the six villages surveyed, original
landowners sold the land for an average of US$ 8.87 per m2, 2.5 times higher
than the average compensation rates offered. As succinctly phrased by the
chief of Nakhe village, ‘The main problem is that the compensation rate
is lower than the purchase prices [from buyers] but the [resale] price from
the state is far too high for original land owners to buy [the land] back’.12
Many of those who bought the land from the original landowners (the land
buyers) knew that they were not supposed to buy land in the area after the
ban announced by the city government in 2008, but they were willing to take
a risk that they could negotiate with the state and hold on to their land.
In 2009, the city government created a new policy which stated that,
when the land was resold by the government, the previous owners would
have the first right to repurchase their land before it could be sold to other
potential buyers (Vientiane Times, 2009c). This was intended to make the
compensation scheme more attractive, giving the landowners the chance to
hold onto their land and benefit from the anticipated increase in land values
after the construction of the road. In spite of this, by March 2015, only 54
per cent of the land buyers had accepted compensation. In formal interviews,
government authorities suggested that land buyers were unwilling to accept
the compensation scheme because they were not involved in the initial
meetings to promote and explain the project — they ‘didn’t understand the
party and government policy’.13 Our research, however, has shown that land
buyers were very much aware of the policy changes occurring, and their
knowledge of the project was what had prompted them to buy land in the
area in the first place.
Eventually, the land buyers who refused to accept compensation negoti-
ated a deal with the city government in which they were able to repurchase
the land at an average rate of $130 per m2in instalments over six months
12. Interview, March 2013.
13. Interview, Governor of Xaithany district, August 2013.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 15
(although it is possible that the land buyers may push to extend the timeline
of repayment). This would give them the time to sell the land at a higher
price. This change in policy enabled the government to increase the pro-
portion of land buyers that accepted compensation to 78 per cent by March
2016.14 Some of the buyers who took this opportunity, however, have not
paid the city government back after selling the land and the government has
had a difficult time tracking them down to collect the payments because they
do not have a clear record of the land transactions.15
Resisting Dispossession: Peasant–Elite Alliances
Despite the critical role that land buyers played in impeding the compensa-
tion scheme and the city government’s efforts to recoup the costs of the road
construction, their involvement was largely hidden from public view. The
Vientiane Times attributed dissatisfaction with compensation to the original
landowners (Vientiane Times, 2009a); it repeated this claim more recently,
identifying the landowners as the ones who refused compensation because
they ‘bought the land for a higher price but were now being offered only a
small payout’ (Vientiane Times, 2014). The refusal to give up land, however,
emanated from the new, speculative land buyers.16
The involvement of land buyers remained hidden in part because they had
acquired the land illegally. Not only would it be embarrassing for the city
to admit that their ban on land transfers was so widely ignored, they would
be equally ashamed to reveal the types of actors involved. The land buyers
were from the political-economic elite; many of them had close ties to the
government and some of them were government officials themselves.17 In
the Lao context, many members of the elite have close connections with
the government, whether through business links or kinship connections.
Economic success is often contingent upon connections with government
agencies and officials as the state controls much of the political-economic
sphere of activity, enabling investors to gain access to business licences,
lucrative development contracts with government projects or exemptions on
business taxes and fees (Stuart-Fox, 2006).
The land buyers had invested significant amounts of capital into their
property and were in a position within society to protect it. As the acting
director of Vientiane Capital PONRE put it, ‘The new landowners are out
to make a profit, for the most part, they are officials who have power,
14. Personal communication, Vientiane PONRE.
15. Interview, Vientiane Capital PONRE, March 2015.
16. Interviews, original landowners and village leaders in all six surveyed villages, March 2013
to November 2014.
17. The first and third authors are aware of links to powerful business families and government
officials, based upon surnames of the land buyers.
16 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
businesspeople and brokers’.18 It is worth noting that these political-
economic elites and the land brokers who facilitated the deals are all outsiders
to the communities affected by the development of the road.19 Village lead-
ers characterized them as absentee landowners who often arranged deals
to have the original landowners rent or otherwise take care of their newly
purchased land.20 Some are government officials from other provinces, in-
cluding provincial governors and district governors.21 Some are government
officials based in Vientiane, in the National Assembly (NA) and in MONRE
and its municipal line agencies. Others do not work directly with the gov-
ernment but have kinship connections to powerful government authorities,
including a son-in-law of a high-level military official.22 There are also pri-
vate sector buyers without direct links to the government, who in the words
of the chief of Nakhe village, ‘are mostly businesspeople, selling cars or
gold in the morning market’.23 Finally, it was rumoured among villagers
that Duangchaleun Construction Company, which built the road, had pur-
chased much land alongside the road, using proxy land purchasers to cover its
tracks.
All of the land buyers had an interest in maintaining control over the land
they had purchased to avoid a financial loss. However, some were more
willing to accommodate government plans while others were more resistant,
based upon both economic and political differences. Economically, those
buyers who had more to lose and were unable to repurchase the land at the
higher rate were more likely to reject compensation. This included buyers
for whom a large portion of their land parcel was directly adjacent to the
road (and would therefore be expropriated), those who had purchased the
land for a higher than average price, and those who did not have capital
available to repurchase the land at the average rate of US$ 130 per m2.In
interviews, they often expressed their expectation that government policy
would change to accommodate them, given that the policy had frequently
changed in the past concerning other aspects of the project.24 In contrast,
buyers who would lose little land, who had invested comparatively little in
buying their plots, or who could afford to repurchase the land were more
likely to accept compensation.
Political differences also affected whether or not the compensation
schemes were accepted. Those who worked closely with the government
18. Interview, March 2013.
19. Although most households in the affected communities are ethnically Lao, as are most of
the buyers (apart from a few Hmong buyers who are from other provinces), the buyers did
not have any meaningful ethnic connections with the communities in the road area.
20. Interviews, chiefs of Nakhe and Sokgnai villages, March 2013.
21. Interviews, chiefs in all six surveyed villages, March 2013 to November 2014.
22. Ibid.
23. Interview, March 2013.
24. Interviews, land buyers, all six visited villages, February 2013 to March 2015.
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 17
or were government officials themselves were hesitant about rejecting com-
pensation as it would be politically risky.25 Some buyers rejected the com-
pensation scheme but persuaded the original landowners to make a complaint
to the NA on their behalf.26 Importantly, the power to refuse compensation
did not come solely from the more powerful land buyers but was based on
an alliance between peasant landowners in the area and the new buyers.
Operating alone, neither group would be likely to succeed in resisting dis-
possession. The land buyers would be rebuked for purchasing land illegally
and not having title to the land; the arguments of the original landowners
would be disregarded, as the compensation offered was higher than the price
of land in the area prior to the development of the road. Moreover, they could
use the money to buy cheaper farmland elsewhere. When the two groups
collaborated, however, the government was hard-pressed to challenge farm-
ers who held the title for the land, while knowing that the real ownership
was in the hands of a political-economic elite with a high economic stake in
the land and the political connections to protest should their interests not be
taken seriously.27
A short case study will illustrate in more detail the politics of how land
was sold and how positions of power were used to negotiate the compen-
sation process. Bounteng (a pseudonym) owned 2 ha of land in Sokgnai
village, a mix of dry dipterocarp forest and grassland for grazing cows and
buffalo. He recalled the rural character of the area in the past: there were
many wild animals and it was common for soldiers and government staff
to hunt and fish there. Land was not commonly sold at that time; Bounteng
had inherited his land in 2007 from his parents, who had been using land
in the area and claimed customary ownership over it for several decades. In
2008, when the land was being surveyed for the road, city-dwellers, land
brokers and business people began asking to buy his land. They tried to
convince him and other landowners to sell by telling them that the gov-
ernment was going to expropriate the land with little or no compensation.
Bounteng refused to sell at first, because he planned to keep the land for
his children, but when the buyers tripled their proposed offer, Bounteng
decided to sell a third of a hectare so that he could buy a motorbike to
take his kids to school. He also bought another hectare of land in Nakhao
village.
Bounteng was afraid at first to sell his land because he knew it would
violate the government ban, but the land buyer insisted that it would be
fine. They signed an informal contract, which the village chief was aware
25. Interviews, land buyers, Saphangmuk and Nakhe villages, Xaithany district, Vientiane
Capital, March to April 2013.
26. Informal discussions with government officials who had purchased land in the area, and
interviews with original landowners in all six surveyed villages, March 2013 to February
2015.
27. Informal discussions with government officials revealed that they knew political-economic
elites had purchased the land illicitly.
18 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
of but did not sign. Due to the illicit nature of the sale, they were not
able to divide up the land and create a new land title. The district gov-
ernment appeared to be aware of the land sale; Bounteng was called to
the district office and to the NA to discuss compensation. He went to the
NA with a group of landowners who had sold land along the road. Boun-
teng felt he had no choice but to take the case to the NA on behalf of
the land buyer because the land title still included both the land that he
had sold and the land he had kept for himself. The buyer refused to ac-
cept compensation due to the sizeable difference between the price that
he had paid for this plot of land (US$ 2.40 per m2), and the repurchase
price (US$ 130 per m2). The buyer’s strategy, which he discussed with
Bounteng, was to see how the compensation process played out before ac-
cepting. This strategy eventually paid off. The buyer was forced to pay the
government price to repurchase the land but was allowed to pay for it in
instalments. This case illustrates how political entanglements impeded the
government’s plan to finance the project and generate actual real estate devel-
opment along the road corridor, rather than fuel speculation and illegal land
transactions.
CONCLUSION
In this article, we have argued that the challenges experienced in developing
the 450 Year Road and generating economic development along its corridor
reflect political reactions ‘all the way down’, from both marginalized and
powerful actors. Land buyers, from the political-economic elite classes of
the city, purchased land throughout the area despite government regulations
against such land exchanges. The buyers included powerful actors with close
working relationships with the government and even government officials;
they took a political risk because they were confident that they would be able
to profit from the investment. The land buyers used the original landowners
to refuse compensation from the government, while exercising their political
power behind the scenes. The unexpected alliance of rural peasant landown-
ers and political-economic elite land buyers created a powerful front to stall
the project until revisions to government policy were made that enabled
many land buyers to repurchase the land from the government and still make
a profit from selling it again.
The land-based financing model of the 450 Year Road experienced sig-
nificant problems because the politics and political relationships of a wide
variety of relevant actors were not taken into account. In particular, the in-
terests, capabilities and recalcitrance of both original landowners and new
land buyers were underestimated. The government sought to employ an en-
trepreneurial urban governance model of land commodification which relied
upon centralized political control over the land to be acquired, without rec-
ognizing the de facto power that non-state actors exercise over the ways
Laos: Financing the 450 Year Road 19
in which land is held, used and exchanged. The project required that the
boundaries between private and public interests were carefully negotiated
and managed; in the event, however, the project was run as if non-state actors
would be compliant with government policy. The municipal government re-
lied upon two groups within the private sector — the original landowners, to
concede their lands, and land buyers, to act as a source of funds to purchase
the lands once the government was ready to sell — without seeking ways
to incorporate their interests into the project so that they could significantly
benefit.
Ultimately, the city government experienced difficulties in developing
the 450 Year Road project because officials did not meaningfully include
the actors whose cooperation they desperately needed. Furthermore, they
failed to consider the political power that peasant landowners, backed by
wealthy and politically connected land buyers, could jointly wield to im-
pede land expropriation and compensation. They assumed that poor, rural
landowners would make way for a state-sponsored infrastructure project
that provided them with rates of compensation marginally higher than
the value of the land prior to the development of the road. They failed
to account for the politics ‘all the way down’ — the combined political-
economic interests of land buyers, including government officials and the
road construction company, and peasant landowners who sought to make
more than the low rates of compensation offered. In the Lao context of
coercive state control, resistance often occurs with rather than against
powerful political interests. Cases of failed or impeded project develop-
ment and refusal by marginalized actors must be analysed carefully in or-
der to tease out the interactions of political-economic interests behind the
scenes.
There are important broader implications that emerge from these findings
and analysis. First, they demonstrate the critical importance of examining
the politics behind processes of project failure or success. More importantly,
they show that when examining resistance or political reactions ‘from be-
low’, it is necessary to examine the politics of all actors involved, regardless
of their position within society. An important element of politics ‘all the
way down’ is how different actors relate to one another, in conflict or in
precarious alliances based upon mutual interest. Analyses of resistance from
marginalized land users should always examine how such resistance re-
lates to the actions, interests and politics of more powerful political players.
Second, the research shows the necessity of examining the role of the do-
mestic state and state actors in processes of land grabbing, particularly their
contradictory involvement as both instigators of and impediments to pro-
cesses of land dispossession. Careful consideration of the complex politics
of multiple actors in different positions of power, and their interactions,
provides a much more nuanced ethnographic understanding of how land
grabbing processes manifest themselves and are contested across the global
South.
20 B. Pathammavong, M. Kenney-Lazar and E.V. Sayaraj
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Bounnhong Pathammavong (pathammavong_bounnhong@yahoo.com) is
a doctoral candidate in the School of Management, Lanzhou University
in Lanzhou, China, and a Division Director at the Natural Resources and
Environment Information Centre, Ministry of Natural Resources and Envi-
ronment in Vientiane, Laos. His research interests include land valuation
and urban development in Laos.
Miles Kenney-Lazar (corresponding author; mklazar@cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp)
is a post-doctoral fellow with the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto
University in Kyoto, Japan. His research interests centre on the impacts,
governance and politics of land deals and agro-industrial plantations in the
Mekong Region, especially Laos.
Ek Vinay Sayaraj (ekvinay@live.com) is the Director of the Division of
Research, Data and Statistics at the Natural Resources and Environment
Information Centre, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in
Vientiane, Laos. His research interests include infrastructure financing op-
tions, land-based development strategies and urban planning in Laos.
