IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envira/v55y2023i6p1565-1580.html

Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos

Author

Listed:
  • Miles Kenney-Lazar

Abstract

Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a policy of “Turning Land into Capital†, which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The policy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theorizations of land, value, capital, and rent, this paper argues that land under capitalism does not only operate as a rent-bearing asset, in which value is extracted from elsewhere. Land can also be treated as a real form of capital, or capitalized, when its social relations are transformed to facilitate value expansion and act as a store of value mobilized for further investment. It is imperative to investigate how land is used to expand value as capital, extract value as rent, or do both. This paper examines four manifestations of the Turning Land into Capital policy to outline the contours of struggles and contestations over the production and distribution of value in the Lao political economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Miles Kenney-Lazar, 2023. "Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(6), pages 1565-1580, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:1565-1580
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X211063493
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X211063493
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0308518X211063493?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ian G. Baird, 2017. "Resistance and Contingent Contestations to Large-Scale Land Concessions in Southern Laos and Northeastern Cambodia," Land, MDPI, vol. 6(1), pages 1-19, February.
    2. Wendy Wolford & Saturnino M. Borras Jr. & Ruth Hall & Ian Scoones & Ben White & Michael Levien, 2013. "Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 44(2), pages 381-407, March.
    3. Callum Ward & Manuel B Aalbers, 2016. "Virtual special issue editorial essay: ‘The shitty rent business’: What’s the point of land rent theory?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 53(9), pages 1760-1783, July.
    4. Derek Hall, 2013. "Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(9), pages 1582-1604, October.
    5. Wendy Wolford & Saturnino M. Borras Jr. & Ruth Hall & Ian Scoones & Ben White & Michael B. Dwyer, 2013. "Building the Politics Machine: Tools for ‘Resolving’ the Global Land Grab," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 44(2), pages 309-333, March.
    6. W. Nathan Green & Ian G. Baird, 2016. "Capitalizing on Compensation: Hydropower Resettlement and the Commodification and Decommodification of Nature–Society Relations in Southern Laos," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 106(4), pages 853-873, July.
    7. Miles Kenney-Lazar, 2018. "Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 108(3), pages 679-694, May.
    8. Miles Kenney-Lazar, 2019. "Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post)Socialist Laos," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 109(2), pages 338-348, March.
    9. Gareth Bryant, 2018. "Nature as Accumulation Strategy? Finance, Nature, and Value in Carbon Markets," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 108(3), pages 605-619, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fan, Ben & Hua, Xiaobo & Kono, Yasuyuki, 2025. "Transcending banana investments: Unraveling the hidden dynamics of Chinese land investment in Laos," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Woods, Kevin M., 2020. "Smaller-scale land grabs and accumulation from below: Violence, coercion and consent in spatially uneven agrarian change in Shan State, Myanmar," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    2. Nanhthavong, Vong & Bieri, Sabin & Nguyen, Anh-Thu & Hett, Cornelia & Epprecht, Michael, 2022. "Proletarianization and gateways to precarization in the context of land-based investments for agricultural commercialization in Lao PDR," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 155(C).
    3. Mutlu Özdoğan & Ian G. Baird & Michael B. Dwyer, 2018. "The Role of Remote Sensing for Understanding Large-Scale Rubber Concession Expansion in Southern Laos," Land, MDPI, vol. 7(2), pages 1-20, April.
    4. Sändig, Jan, 2021. "Contesting large-scale land acquisitions in the Global South," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    5. Dwyer, Michael B. & Nanhthavong, Vong, 2023. "Making concessions pay? Historical vs. potential tax revenues from Laos’s rubber sector," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 172(C).
    6. Vorbrugg, Alexander (Форбруг, Александр), 2018. "Not about land, not quite a grab: Dispersed dispossession in rural Russia [Не Только О Земле И О Ее Захватах: Дисперсное Лишение Прав В Сельской России]," Russian Peasant Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, vol. 3, pages 19-47.
    7. Toumbourou, Tessa D. & Dressler, Wolfram H. & Werner, Tim T., 2022. "Plantations enabling mines: Incremental industrial extraction, social differentiation and livelihood change in East Kalimantan, Indonesia," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    8. Carol Upadhya, 2017. "Amaravati and the New Andhra," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 12(2), pages 177-202, August.
    9. Josh Ryan-Collins, 2021. "Breaking the housing–finance cycle: Macroeconomic policy reforms for more affordable homes," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(3), pages 480-502, May.
    10. Nikita Sud, 2020. "The Unfixed State of Unfixed Land," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 51(5), pages 1175-1198, September.
    11. Bourgoin, Jeremy & Diop, Djibril & Jahel, Camille & Interdonato, Roberto & Grislain, Quentin, 2023. "Beyond land grabbing narratives, acknowledging patterns and regimes of land control in Senegal," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    12. Castet, Antoine, 2024. "The impact of large-scale land acquisitions on child food insecurity in Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).
    13. Preetha K. V. & Ajit Menon, 2019. "Neo-Liberalising Energy Production: The Making and Unmaking of an Ultra Mega Power Project in South India," Review of Development and Change, , vol. 24(2), pages 242-258, December.
    14. Kartik Misra, 2019. "Accumulation by Dispossession and Electoral Democracies : An Analysis of Land Acquisition for Special Economic Zones in India," UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers 2019-16, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics.
    15. Edward Shepherd & Matthew Wargent, 2024. "Embedding the land market: Polanyi, urban planning and regulation," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(3), pages 905-926, May.
    16. Lara M. Lundsgaard-Hansen & Flurina Schneider & Julie G. Zaehringer & Christoph Oberlack & Win Myint & Peter Messerli, 2018. "Whose Agency Counts in Land Use Decision-Making in Myanmar? A Comparative Analysis of Three Cases in Tanintharyi Region," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(10), pages 1-30, October.
    17. Thong Anh Tran & Van Touch, 2024. "How agricultural extension responds to amplified agrarian transitions in mainland Southeast Asia: experts’ reflections," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 41(4), pages 1773-1789, December.
    18. Bin Yang & Jun He, 2021. "Global Land Grabbing: A Critical Review of Case Studies across the World," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-19, March.
    19. Shiwaye M. Tesfay & Genet Alem Gebregiorgis & Daniel G. Ayele, 2025. "Peri-Urban Land Transformation in the Global South: Revisiting Conceptual Vectors and Theoretical Perspectives," Land, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-22, July.
    20. Antona, Laura, 2024. "Geographies of bodily (dis)possession: domestic work, unfreedom, and spirit possessions in Singapore," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121458, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:1565-1580. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.