Material Itineraries of Electric Tuk- Tuks: The Challenges of Green Urban Development in Laos

Abstract

In the context of global climate change, development organizations aim to align their aid schemes with new environmental concerns. Since the transport sector is crucial to achieve carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the introduction of environmentally-friendly transportation systems and technologies to developing countries has become a major focus of development aid. This paper examines one such sustainable transport project in Laos, centering on the introduction of electric vehicles (EV). At the beginning, aid professionals envisioned the establishment of an EV network, in which batteries, hydroelectric powerplants, the CO2 market, and numerous other entities would be rolled out in the capital of Vientiane and several other towns. A few years later, it had been downscaled to introduce a small number of EVs to the World Heritage town of Luang Prabang. The article analyses this process of transformation by examining the network extensions and cuts that shaped the trajectory of the EV into Laos. It further scrutinizes how the contexts of more-or-less urban places influenced the material itineraries of the project. This process, which led to the eventual implementation of EVs in Luang Prabang, and their subsequent disappearance, provides a window of opportunity for analyzing the significant challenges of green urban development in Laos and Southeast Asia more generally.

Keywords:

• Electric vehicles (EV)
• green technology
• technology transfer
• development aid
• projectification
• network
• Luang Prabang Laos

1 Introduction

As global climate change has risen to prominence, development organizations experiment with how to align various aid schemes with new environmental concerns. Because the transport sector is crucial in order to achieve the required reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the introduction of environmentally-friendly transportation systems and technologies to developing countries has become a major focus of development aid. This trend is exemplified by the growing interest in electric vehicles (EVs), which have radically changed over the last decades due to a mixture of technological improvements, rising environmental awareness, and environmentally supportive policies and systems, including those of international CO2 trade.

This paper offers a close examination of a sustainable transport project in Laos, which aimed to align climate policies and new modes of urban mobility and living. Funded by the Japanese government with the aim of introducing electric vehicles to the country, the project was carried out by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). A basic data collection survey was conducted in Vientiane and other cities in 2012, and implementation eventually took place in Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage town located in northern Laos, between 2015–2016.¹ Similar to other cases described by STS and the anthropology of science and technology (e.g. Aasen et al. 1990; Akrich 1994; de Laet and Mol 2000; Jensen 2019; Pacey 1983), this process of technology transfer was characterized by numerous translations and redefinitions, and generally fraught with problems.

At the beginning, the project was ambitious or even somewhat grandiose. Japanese aid professionals and Lao officials envisioned an EV network, in which a Japanese electric vehicle company, batteries, hydroelectric powerplants, the world CO2 market, and many other socio-technological entities would be rolled out in the capital and several other towns and smoothly integrated at a national scale. It also aligned with the nation’s claim to global significance through the pursuit of hydro-electric power. A few years later, the project had moved and shrunk, and was concerned merely with introducing a small number of EVs to Luang Prabang. In the following, I examine this process of transformation by asking the following questions: What kinds of network extensions and cuts shaped the material itinerary of the EV into Laos? Which actors were in- and excluded in these networks and why? In turn, how did these varied actors, and the infrastructures of more-or-less urban Lao co-construct the trajectory of the project, until the point where it had shrunk and relocated to a rather small pocket of Laos? Finally, what does this case tell us about environmental development, technology transfer into Southeast Asia’s emerging cities, and about the relations between the material itineraries of environmental technologies and urban transformation?

We know from actor-network theory (Callon 1980, 1986, 1987, 1991; Latour 1987) that the introduction of new entities, like electric vehicles, into new contexts, like Laos, poses many obstacles. Hence, it is famously necessary to enroll and involve many actors, which thus participate in expanding the network. As the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1996) has emphasized, however, it is often equally crucial to “cut the network” in various ways, for various purposes. In the following, I show how material itineraries for EVs into Laos were shaped by a project form that itself entailed an art of cutting, while also relying on a logic of expansion that made it vulnerable to external cuts.

The central part of the article is a detailed examination of the material itinerary through which EVs were introduced to Laos. As the EV implementation project took form, various actors were enrolled and the network extended in various ways. Meanwhile, the network was also shortened in several ways. Not only did the project detach from the CO2 market, it was also cut down to size, shrinking from the national scale to a modest implementation in Luang Prabang. After this relocation, the EV project was no longer about either carbon emission trading or radical urban greening of the capital and elsewhere. Instead, it became attached to World Heritage agendas and the limited aspiration to “green” Luang Prabang while also supporting the Japanese presence on the EV market. By the time the project ended in 2016, these aims had not been accomplished either.

Compared with the massive urban centers of Southeast Asia––Jakarta, Bangkok, or Manila––Luang Prabang appears far from significant, and indeed hardly urban. Its smaller scale, however, makes it easier to pinpoint some of the central challenges, tensions and dilemmas facing new environmentally oriented development projects – like the introduction of EVs. Thus, the implementation in Luang Prabang provides a window of opportunity for tracing the material itineraries that (failed to) tie together new transport technologies, green development practices, and urban eco-transformations in Laos. Simultaneously, the case illustrates the relations and trajectories that tie together development projects with new horizons of the global emerging in so-called third-world cities.

2 “Projectification,” an Expansionist Logic, and the Art of Cutting

The obstacles to make technologies successfully travel into foreign contexts have been widely discussed in STS and related fields, including the anthropology of development and postcolonial studies (e.g. Akrich 1994; Anderson 2009; Green 1999; Latour 1987; Mohácsi and Morita 2013). It is now widely recognized that technology transfer does not take the form of a simple, one-way, movement of a single distinct entity from a donor to a receiver, but is rather a complex, multi-stranded process comprising numerous cultural, organizational, political and technical elements.

Detailed research on the failures of technology transfer projects have uncovered that what seem like purely technical issues involve aligning social contexts and forms of organizational capacity (e.g. Aasen et al. 1990; Pacey 1983). The term “technology transfer” implied passivity on the side of the recipient, but later studies have shown that receivers absorb, adapt, translate and improve––or innovate, renovate or obstruct–– technologies in numerous ways (Green 1999). This changing perception is visible not only in academic discourse but also in the world of development aid projects, where donor countries and organizations now send experts and engineers to the receiving countries in order to gather and convey knowledge of whole systems, rather than mere technical “know-how.”

As shown by ANT, this complex process involves numerous actors and has many potential pitfalls. Crucially, the strength and success of an actor-network, lies “in the ability to bind together forces, to make them compatible and equivalent” (Callon and Latour 1981: 292). The more actors or actants are mobilized, the more robust and durable the network becomes (Callon 1991: 150). “Technologies” in general,––or immutable mobiles, entities that are enabled to remain the same even though they move in time and space (Latour 1987: 226)––are produced by “[b]uilding, extending and keeping up these networks” (Guggenheim 2016: 6). The stabilization of extensive networks, in turn, makes it possible “to act at a distance, that is to do things in the centres that sometimes make it possible to dominate spatially as well as chronologically the periphery” (Latour 1987: 232, cited in Murdoch 2006: 72).

Meanwhile, the emphasis on connection and expansion as the direct road to success has also been subject to criticism. With reference to technology transfer from the West to the non-West, the historian of science Warwick Anderson has criticized Latour’s depiction of an “unconstrained expansion of sovereign networks” for omitting “local agents and context, thus turning the network into a sort of iron cage through which no native can break” (Anderson 2009: 392). Anderson and others have called for more textured descriptions of how technical objects and practices are adapted and reconfigured as they travel to foreign sites (e.g. Anderson and Adams 2008: 190).

In “Cutting the Network” (1996), Marilyn Strathern argued that any relation simultaneously connects and divides (see also Candea et al. 2015; Myhre 2013). Examination of just how, where, by whom, and why networks are cut is crucial in order to understand the particular pattern and form of relations. To identify a new virus in a scientific laboratory, for example, an expanded network of people, institutions, equipment and theories is surely required. Yet, the patent that may result from the heterogeneous network will refer to only a few actors as inventors. Patentable knowledge and ownership require that most involved actors are cut out (Strathern 1996: 524).

Strathern argued that networks are often cut by interventions of external agents. For example, the cut “created for the purposes of the patent (…) was established not by some cessation of the flow of continuity but by a quite extraneous factor: the commercial potential of the work that turned a discovery into a patentable invention” (Strathern 1996: 524). By following how patents slice up networks, we are thus enabled to glimpse various “external reasons that reveal how power is distributed and enacted by forces such as law or putative property rights.” (Gershon 2010: 173). Carefully attending to how networks are cut, makes it possible to understand how external forces matter differentially for agents.

In the present context, the question of “cutting the network” can be related to the form and implication of development projects. In general, a project is a particular way of organization of task-specific activities over a delimited time period (Midler 1995). The project form originated within private firms in the 1990s, but has since spread like wildfire across international development aid. This form entails an art of cutting. On the one hand, cutting is crucial in order to manage time and handle resource constraints. On the other, faced with infinitely big issues like poverty eradication or climate change, cutting is also necessary to make action possible. The anthropologists Meinert and Whyte (2014) describe this as “projectification,” which among other things entails construction of a specific agenda, selection of a delimited site, and delimitation of relevant stakeholders. Meanwhile, however, an expansionist logic aiming to create as many links as possible is also in play within the project form. As we shall see, the uneasy co-existence of these different aspects of “projectification” had many consequences for the EV project.

The difference between emphasizing extension and cutting can be overdrawn (Jensen and Winthereik 2015). After all, ANT did more than simplistically celebrate expansion, and friendly critics like Star (1991) paid close attention to processes and consequences of being marginalized within a network. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that ANT analyses have tended to follow the early Latour’s fascination with following those who successfully extend networks. While this remains important in contexts of development “projectification,” understanding the challenges of EV implementation requires paying equal attention to the varied ways in which the network was cut, to their reasons, and to their implications.

Initially, development professionals worked to extend the network by connecting EVs with particular environmental discourses and emergent global CO2 markets, as well as with various Lao policymakers and stakeholders at the national level. Eventually, the network was radically downsized for diverse reasons, which were at once more or less external to the network itself and a consequence of the thin links through which it had been extended. Among these reasons, as we shall see, were questions of materiality pertaining to the specific relationship between the electric vehicles and Lao’s urban and semi-urban landscapes.

3 Devices of Purity

According to the historian of technology Bassala (1988: 198), the first electric vehicles built in the United States in the late 19th century were seen as “the cars of the future.” Late 19th century developers and other promoters imagined “the twentieth century [as] destined to be the electrical age,” Bassala showed, and they assumed that “there [is] no place in it for the noisy, exhaust-spewing internal combustion engine” (Bassala 1988: 198). Electricity became a symbol of future American society.

From early on, however, it was also recognized that electric vehicles had some fairly serious drawbacks. For one thing, they were rather costly, slow, and they had difficulties with steep slopes. More than anything, they suffered from limited cruising range. Since the early 20th century, proponents of electric vehicles have tried to overcome these hurdles in more or less the same way: by making batteries lighter and more powerful. This goal, however, continued “to elude electric car promoters” (Bassala 1988: 200), and to an extent it still does today. Despite the early promises of electric vehicles, technical constraints eventually made the internal combustion engine far more popular (Bassala 1988: 202).

According to Bassala (1988: 198), no “clear-cut technological superiority” could be ascribed to combustion engines, steam engines, or electricity to begin. The steam engine, however, proved unable to overcome its negative connotations of being “the technology of the previous century,” and as the technical drawbacks of the EVs also continued to be insoluble, the path was paved for the dramatic triumph of the internal combustion engine (Bassala 1988: 202). Bassala’s account, however, does not adequately explain why so much popular interest in EVs was retained given their evident technical problems.

The cultural anthropologist Miyatake (2000) has advanced our understanding of this issue through an analysis that shows that the steam engine actually contributed to the early popularity of the EVs. Drawing on Mary Douglas’ influential Purity and Danger (1966), Miyatake focused on late 19th Century contrasts between the cleanliness, quietness and “purity” of electric vehicles and the noisiness and “pollution” of steam cars. A similar contrast between electric and fuel-driven cars still plays out in Laos today.

Douglas (1966: 2) had argued that the elimination from a community of what is considered polluting, rather than an exclusively “negative movement,” should be seen as “a positive effort to organize the environment.” On this basis, Miyatake noted that EV’s have been inscribed with positive values of cleanliness and purity since their emergence in the 19th century. Promoters of EVs have constantly sought to gain allies and expand their networks by emphasizing the purity of these vehicles and their contributions to cleaner urban environments. Gasoline cars, conversely, were consistently depicted as dirty and polluting. The significance of EVs, in other words, lay as much in the way they expressed new cultural configurations of cleanliness and pollution as in their “purely” technical features. Such processes of reconfiguration also continue in the present.

These insights can be related to observations by Callon (1980, 1986, 1987), whose early work on actor-network theory (ANT) centered on the development and ultimate failure of an earlier generation of electric vehicles in France. During the development process, entities including an electric company, accumulators, fuel cell developers, the car producer Renault, and prospective users constituted “actor-worlds” into which heterogenous actors were enrolled and mobilized. Translation was a constant necessity in order to generate interest and maintain the actor-network, in which various actors were gradually aligned to promote EVs against the danger and pollution of fuel-engine cars.

Although Callon’s material-semiotic approach is very different from Miyatake’s symbolic account, this process of eliminating pollution––by cutting dirty elements from the network––illustrates Douglas’ (1966: 2) point that efforts to remove matter “out of place” amounts to a positive re-ordering of society. Douglas (1966: 2) depicted such situations as embedding “a creative moment, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.” For those who have been cut off or excluded, like designers or drivers of polluting gasoline cars, however, the situation appears less admirable or innovative. This point has been made in relation to the politics of urbanization and pollution (e.g. Dürr and Jaffe 2010). Drawing on Douglas, Dürr and Winder (2016) describe ecological activism in the context of educational programs about street garbage, cleaning and management in Tepito, Mexico City, in a way that highlights disturbing connections between pollution, poverty, and violence. In Tepito, many low-income residents feel excluded and discriminated by the new garbage rules. Littering on purpose becomes a sort of resistance to ruling class and hegemonic regulations.

Similar processes have been described in the context of eco-gentrification (Dooling 2009).² New urban improvements, typically resulting from green policies such as building public parks or introducing new environmental laws and regulations (Checker 2011; Rice et al. 2019), attract wealthier, environmentally conscious people from the outside while pushing out the original inhabitants. While green improvements are important for much urban planning and might be rooted in ideas of environmental justice, they are thus also prone to a politics of cutting, which creates eco-friendly urban environments through socially exclusionary means. This, too, becomes relevant as I trace the material itinerary of the EV project into Luang Prabang.

4 Electric Expansions

As noted, international organizations acting as donors for infrastructure projects in developing countries have become increasingly attentive to global environmental change. In support of environmental development aid, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol established a “Clean Development Mechanism,” under which emission-reduction projects in developing countries can earn and sell credits to developed countries that use them to offset their own emission reduction targets. Since 2011, Japan has developed its own version, the so-called Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) (MOFA 2018).³ Since the project to introduce electric vehicles to Laos initially intended to apply for JCM status, the Japanese government tried to convince the Lao government to join the JCM partner countries.

But why electric vehicles? And why in Laos? The EV project in Laos appeared promising for various reasons. First, the rapid increase of cars––by more than 20% annually over the last several years––gave rise to a growing concern. Thus, the introduction of electric vehicles would reduce air pollution and mitigate future increases in emissions. Second, the import of petroleum from foreign countries is a large burden on Laos’ national economy. Third, because public transport is lacking, people ride their own motorbikes or cars, and the expenses of gasoline take a toll on families and households.

Last but not least, there is more than enough electric power in Laos. Electricity is almost exclusively generated from hydroelectric power plants, and these plants produce more than 30 times of the domestic demand, most of which is sold to neighboring countries. The famous aspiration of the Lao government to turn the country into “the battery of Southeast Asia” has led to plans to complete 36 new dams by 2020, on top of the already existing 53 ones (see also Whitington 2018). Contrary to many developing countries that rely on fossil fuel to generate electricity, which means that the introduction of electric vehicles would not lead to a 100% clean transportation system, Laos’ abundant hydroelectricity made it seem an ideal implementation site for a zero-emission transport model.

Today, the global electric vehicle market is expanding and the number of users is increasing rapidly. This is mainly on account of China, which is by far the world’s largest electric vehicle market (IEA 2019). However, when it comes to developing countries in Asia, such as Laos, the situation is quite different. Here, there are numerous challenges, including the lack of environmentally supportive policies and regulations (Nandanpawar 2017).

As is usually the case when new projects are proposed for Laos, many long-time residents and other foreigners––myself included––were skeptical. When the electric vehicles project was brought up in conversations they almost always insisted that the project was too early for Laos, especially since even “regular” transportation infrastructure still functions poorly. Thus, they (or we) expressed commitment to a conventional, linear theory of technology transfer. In contrast, from the point of view of JICA and Lao officials the country seemed quite ideal. For reasons given above, they saw a natural fit between Laos, the region’s electric battery, and new electric vehicles. When asked about the project, for example, Mr. Chantason⁴ who works at the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MPWT) was favorable. With reference to Laos as the region’s battery, he suggested that something similar “cannot be done in Thailand or even in Japan” (Personal conversation, October 2012). In line with Ong’s (2011: 2) argument that developing cities in Asia have become contested sites of global aspiration and recognition, he located EVs in a comparative context as part of a new horizon for a clean Laos (see author). In this vision, EVs represent not only the “purity” of a green future but also an imaginary of “global city” standing. EVs appeared as technologies that would enable Vientiane and other cities to skip some of the alleged stages of the urban evolution process while also, as mentioned, contributing to the Japanese carbon reduction target.

At the end of 2012, an initial proposal of the EV project had been prepared, based on results from preliminary information gathering and surveys conducted in the capital of Vientiane and elsewhere. JICA intended to make the EV transport system as inclusive as possible. It was proposed to introduce a total of 1000 EVs including electric cars, buses, bikes and tricycles to Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and certain rural areas between 2014 and 2016. The project was designed to include a wide-range of users, and it aimed to get EVs adopted for public transportation. The optimistic estimate was that EVs would reach 30% of vehicles by 2030, thereby defining Laos as a promising emerging market for Japanese companies. This is not to say that unlocking business opportunities was the real but hidden motive behind the project. Nevertheless, both JICA and the consultant team were conscious about the potentials for market expansion in the region and cognizant of stiff competition from Chinese companies, which had sold cheap electric motorbikes in Laos since the early 2000s.

After sustained criticism of “hit and run” development projects premised on short-term engagement, many projects aim to ensure the continuation of implemented activities after their own completion. Meinert and Whyte (2014: 83) describes this aspect of “projectification” in the following way: the mobilization of “resources, including personnel, in order to realize objectives through planned activities. If those activities and personnel are ‘mainstreamed’ into enduring organizations, then they are no longer projects.” The attempt to lodge the project within the broadest possible network can thus be seen as a way to facilitate the mainstreaming of EVs in Laos.

I became interested in the project when I found out that JICA and the government aimed to use JCM to promote and transfer EVs to Laos. With reference to STS – not least ANT – I wondered how the many different actors from battery charging facilities to institutions and laws, and knowledges––from maintenance techniques to organizational capacities––would be able to “sum up” (Latour 1999: 17) EVs in a way that would also connect to the networks of international CO2 markets and global environmental discourses. To explore this question, I accompanied the consultant team on the feasibility study in Vientiane.⁵

Following the initial data collection survey in 2012, the consultant team embarked on a feasibility study, which I had the opportunity to accompany over several periods. The team visited a number of potential places for launching EVs, including airports and a university campus where some EVs had already been tried. The team also contacted several organizations including the taxi union, a public bus service company, and a small electric motorcycle manufacturer, all the while negotiating with related ministries about making supportive laws and regulations about tax exemption, vehicle registration, and insurance. As one member of the consultant team said during the survey in Vientiane in 2013: “We have to find as many potential stakeholders as possible.”

Meanwhile, an environmental consultancy company arrived in Vientiane from Japan and, piggybacking on the potentials of JCM, began preparatory research to enable the project to meet the requirements for registration with the JCM. The fuel efficiency of tuk-tuks and jumbos⁶ was measured, for example, and it was calculated how many tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) they emitted. Based on these studies, the consultants came up with a mathematical formula to calculate how much future GHG exhaust would decrease due to the introduction of EVs. In 2013, Japan and Laos signed a bilateral document that launched the Joint Crediting Mechanism. Everything seemed to go without a hitch.

In order to introduce electric vehicles into an already developed transportation network that is heavily reliant on fuel engine cars, many actors that use or support existing infrastructure will have to be replaced by others more supportive of an alternative EV network. The consultant team was keenly aware of these socio-technical complexities. In Laos, both JICA and Lao officials were indeed also aware that an EV will be no more successful than the network of which it becomes part––that is, a greener network of EVs, batteries, hydroelectric power plants, paved roads, drainage system, urban drivers and, finally, the international carbon market.⁷

Even so, the project finally proved unable to create a network capable of sustaining EVs in Laos. The reasons are instructive of the limits of an expansionist logic that, by focusing on the creation of numerous thin links, gives shape to networks that are vulnerable to unpredictable cuts.

5 Downsizing and Relocating

Among the feasibility study team members were Japan-based promoters and EV researchers, who had been temporarily flown into Laos. Arriving with fresh eyes, they found several indications that the country would pose more obstacles than had originally been assumed. For instance, a team member from a Japanese car company was shocked by Vientiane’s road conditions. As we turned from the paved main road, onto a small dusty side street near the government office quarter, he observed that the frames of the EVs probably would not last long in these conditions.

Road conditions in Vientiane are indeed generally bad: many are unpaved or damaged by rain and heavy trucks (Namba 2016). The problem is that EVs are poorly equipped to absorb shocks from bumpy rides since their frame is as light as possible to make batteries last longer. In hostile environments, like the side alleys of Vientiane, the comfort level is thus likely to be very low, and the vehicles prone to damage. And there was more. A Japanese university professor who had joined the consultancy team observed that flooding – a regular occurrence during the rainy season – may cause electrical short-circuits. Moreover, limited driving range was a recurring issue, since people often need to travel considerable distances due to the aforementioned lack of public transport.

All of this suggested that the success of EVs depended on having already achieved quite urban conditions, such as well-paved and non-flooded roads, and preferably a somewhat functioning public transportation system. And indeed, the global spread of electric vehicles has generally been enabled by the gradual alignment of technological improvements––light bodies and batteries––with other infrastructural developments, and changing habits of urban mobility. Conversely, the evident mismatch between the materiality of the EVs and the bumpy conditions of Vientiane threatened to fatally cut the prospective network.

According to Star’s (1999: 382) classic characterization, “[i]nfrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base.” Clearly, this was also always the case for EVs, which, as proverbial “cars of the future,” were oriented toward already developed urban settings, where short rides would take place on fully paved roads with an adequate water drainage system. But faced with the deteriorated road conditions of Vientiane, the implementation of EVs had to go far beyond any simple idea of technology transfer. To be successful in these settings, quite wide-ranging rearrangements and recalibrations of the infrastructural environment would be required.

During the preliminary data collection, the project nevertheless struck an optimistic tone: The introduction of the EVs was seen as an occasion for a complete overhaul of the urban environment. As stated in the report: “[t]here is a significant need for upgrading and improvement of the roads and power supply network as motorization makes progresses and economy grows [sic]. This is a weakness but can be considered as an opportunity to develop EV infrastructure hand in hand with roads and power supply network in integral and effective manner [sic]” (JICA 2012: 4–45). Thus, the project would attempt to change the existing infrastructure in order to accommodate and stabilize the EV network. At some point after the feasibility study, however, this optimism vanished.

I flew to Japan after having accompanied the feasibility study, and when I returned to Vientiane in 2014, I was told that it had been decided to pursue a greatly reduced version of the 2012 proposal. For one thing, the initially central joint credit mechanism had fallen out altogether. This was evidently a major cut––one of the central actors had been surgically removed from the network!––yet aside from expressing disappointment, the consultant did not provide me with any clear explanation. At the time, I didn’t pursue the issue further with JICA officials, mainly because I was not particularly surprised. After all, I had not really expected the project to succeed to begin with.

Since the final report does not offer an explanation either, the reason for the change remains something of a mystery.⁸ In contrast, what had become clear was that the relations stretching outward from the project to the greening mechanism and the official discourse of Lao as South East Asia’s battery had been too thin to tolerate much pressure.⁹

This change to the project had serious implications. In stark contrast with the initial proposal for 1000 EVs, the project scope had been reduced to a mere 14 electric tricycles plus five electric buses to be piloted for public transport. Moreover, the capital of Vientiane had been discarded as the project site, as the diminished project would relocate to much smaller Luang Prabang.¹⁰

The changed scope of the project raises various questions. In one sense, cutting and downsizing made it possible to continue the EV project but this continuation only made sense because the project’s goalposts had also been changed. After all, the introduction of a dozen electric tricycles and a handful of electric buses lacked all significance from the point of view of reducing CO2 emissions. Thus, we are faced with the tendency––common to “projectification”––to gradually replace ends and means. Originally, “greening” was the end of the project, but as problems accumulated, the means to achieve the objective––introducing EVs––became the new end.

Since the project could no longer receive funding from the JCM budget provided by the Japanese Ministry of Environment, a new application had been submitted to another development program called “Support for Japanese Small and Medium Enterprises Overseas Business Development.” Within this program, a Japanese EV company would export electric tricycles to Luang Prabang and experts would be sent to train local engineers and drivers. The aspiration was to create a market for EVs in Laos, and eventually install a production base in the country. This was not an entirely new project component, although the initial report had stated that: “Lao PDR does not need to get involved in technology development and EV production” (JICA 2012: 2–61). In order to mainstream the use of EVs, the project would henceforth support a Japanese producer of electric tricycles to run its business in Laos.¹¹ In this way, the transformed and diminished project would also contribute to solving problems with air pollution and traffic noise at a World Heritage Site.

The following is based on my visit in August 2016, 14 months into the implementation process (the duration of the project was planned as October 2014–January 2017).

6 A Circumscribed Test-Site: Luang Prabang

When the project to launch Japanese electric tricycles arrived in Luang Prabang in 2015 (JICA 2016), the town had been a World Heritage site for two decades. Similar to other cases (e.g. Berliner 2012) this had led to rising land prices, complex new regulations for heritage protection, and an increasing influx of tourists. Let us now consider what the EV project added to this mixture.

The increase of tourists and the general development of the town had led to a large increase in tuk-tuks and jumbos with the unintended consequence that noise pollution had become a growing local concern (Matsui et al. 2011). Ironically, this led to problems with adhering to UNESCO’s requirements for World Heritage areas, which include protection of the sonic environment alongside physical structures, buildings and landscapes. Accordingly, UNESCO requested Luang Prabang’s municipal government to decrease noise levels (Matsui et al. 2011). In combination with the global trend of turning UNESCO World Heritage towns into carbon-free cities, these demands paved the way for the introduction of JICA’s EV project. Here, “projectification” reappeared in the form of efforts to link the EV network with Luang Prabang in its capacity as a UNESCO-listed town.

There were several other reasons why the World Heritage status of Luang Prabang made it seem like an ideal test-site (Jensen and Winthereik 2015) for the EVs. One was the small size of the area, which spans a mere 6 km from one end to the other. Another was that, compared with the poor road quality of Vientiane, Luang Prabang’s roads are mostly paved, as required by the strict regulations of UNESCO and enabled by tourist money. By cutting down the project size and relocating it, it might thus be possible to circumvent some of the major problems with Vientiane’s messy environment. This had in fact been recognized by a previous Japanese study of the potential of EVs to eliminate road traffic noise in Luang Prabang (Matsui et al. 2011).¹² Spearheaded by the Japanese consultancy team and the EV manufacturer, it was decided to introduce a public bus and a taxi service using electric tricycles.¹³ JICA also built a battery charging station (JICA 2016).

For the electric taxi service, the Japanese company applied a new rental method. This was deemed necessary not only because of ownership issues, but also because drivers would not be able to change batteries on their own or to afford new replacement batteries. According to the system, drivers would not have full responsibility for the maintenance of the EVs, and the project manager at the battery charging station would keep a close eye on them to prevent breakdowns.

At the same time, the system intended to make the project socially inclusive. Normally, a tuk-tuk driver has to buy a vehicle at a price of about 40 to 80 million LAK (5000 to 10,000 USD). The electric tricycles, instead, were rented out at a daily rate of 80,000 LAK (about 10 USD), which made them attractive options for newcomers searching for jobs in the tourist area. One man from the ethnic group Tai Lu, who had become an electric taxi driver during the project told me that since he had no money when he arrived in Luang Prabang, and would not have been able to afford a normal tuk-tuk, the rental system was helpful. His story is not unique. Since the registration of Luang Prabang as a UNESCO World Heritage, the economic gap between the surrounding villages and the center has grown rapidly, with the consequence that many villagers––often from ethnic minorities––move there in search of work.

Along similarly inclusive lines, the fare for the EV taxi service was cheaper than regular taxis, which made them particularly attractive to young monks and the elderly. One older woman who lived within the World Heritage area even told me of using an E-bus for a funeral ceremony. The bereaved family lined up and walked along an EV carrying the body to the crematorium at the temple. This was possible, she explained, because EVs are quiet, slow and smooth, as appropriate––in her words “just about right” (phoo dii)––for a funeral march.

In these scenes, we have evidently moved very far from the networks of Joint Credit Mechanisms and planetary environmental governance. The project has also been detached from obstacles posed by Vientiane, where long drives, unpaved roads and floods posed serious threats to fragile vehicles. Lodged within small, well-paved Luang Prabang, as part of a global World Heritage network, the EVs seemed able to run safely.

Despite various complications, “cuts” and transformations, the project had managed to create a successful material itinerary for the introduction of EVs in (a small part of) Laos. The project seemed to have finally found a context for which it could provide a “just about right” technology. Still, the story does not quite stop here. Instead, the implementation in Luang Prabang gave rise to a new series of network extensions, cuts and translations, and to eventual failure at “mainstreaming” the EVs.

7 Clean Cuts

Because of steep increases in land prices after Luang Prabang was registered as a World Heritage site, many locals have gradually been replaced by tourists and other outsiders. Today, the flourishing tourist industry of Luang Prabang is comprised of small enterprises including guesthouses, restaurants and shops, which are mostly owned by foreigners and people from other cities and provinces (Staiff and Bushell 2013). Many owners of tourist businesses see the UNESCO rules and regulations as necessary for the preservation of the town heritage, and they are accordingly environmentally conscious, at least in principle. A 2011 study states that business owners hope that the town will not change except in two ways: by banning cars from the heritage area and by establishing it as a carbon free zone (Suntikul and Jachna 2013: 63).

One day, I talked with Jid whose family owns a guesthouse by the Mekong River. When hearing that I was studying EVs, she replied that “Electric vehicles are good. You know, Luang Prabang was a quiet town before. Please bring more EVs here so we can kick out the heavy, dirty, noisy Chinese trucks and tuk-tuks and jumbos from our town!” This was a rather common sentiment. Several times I heard that EVs would or should replace loud, harmful, gasoline vehicles. In the same breath as she invoked the rising number of tuk-tuks and jumbos, Jid also referred to the environmental impact of railway construction from southern China to Laos; a massive project, which has increased the traffic of heavy trucks. Although trucks and buses are not in fact allowed to enter the central World Heritage Area where her family lives, she saw both as contributing to air pollution and noise.

Her line of thinking embeds a contrast between Chinese investments, which are crucial for Lao economic growth but generally unconcerned with green issues and a very different imaginary of the quiet and “simply beautiful”¹⁴ historical town of Luang Prabang, which thrives precisely because it is environmentally attuned. For Jid and the other tourist business owners who benefit from heritage conservation, it was thus not difficult to see EVs as part of progress. An active member of the community, she acted as something like a resident green advocate.

The same cannot be said for those who, depending on gasoline-driven vehicles for their livelihoods, stood to be harmed by any tightening of environmental regulations. When I asked a jumbo driver, he replied that he wasn’t interested in the E-taxi rental system, since he preferred owning his own car. Nevertheless, he worried about the spread of EVs in Luang Prabang: “I heard that the government says that if the number of EVs increases in Luang Prabang, gasoline tuk-tuks and jumbos will be all banned. If that happens, I cannot keep the ownership of my jumbo.” And in fact, from early on the Division of Transport in the Department of Public Works and Transport of Luang Prabang had informed JICA of their intention “to replace all existing tuktuk to [sic] electric tuktuk (e-tuktuk) if the e-tuktuk factory is built in Luang Prabang” (JICA 2012: 3–27). What looks from one side as a network extension that contributes to greening Luang Prabang, looks from another side as a way of cutting the network in a way that excludes a whole range of other citizens.

8 From Promise to Collapse

As the project detached from the global sustainability agenda, EV implementation, which was originally the means for achieving environmental goals, became an end in itself. This end was pursued in Luang Prabang, which had already been environmentally pre-formatted for two decades. And for a while the EV network seemed to fit hand in glove with this new environment. New taxi services and maintenance arrangements were put in place, some locals took up new jobs, and the EVs became part of local green policy agendas.

All projects, though they must come to an end, embody the aspiration to have their objectives live on. In the present case, too, it was assumed that the taxi service would be running in Luang Prabang long after the departure of the Japanese engineers if only proper maintenance of the EVs could be ensured. This hope proved to be fickle.

When I returned in February 2019, only five of the fourteen vehicles were in service. A driver told me that the batteries and other parts had badly deteriorated and that spare parts were not available in the country. At the charging station, nine broken electric tricycles, covered with dust and missing tires stood side by side. While the project had managed to keep the EV network alive long enough to create a material itinerary into Luang Prabang, it had seemingly failed to create conditions that would allow it to survive when left to its own devices. Disrupted by the material and social environment, all that was left of the network were a few EVs and some rusting equipment.

Confronted with the material collapse of the project, it is tempting to think that the skeptical evaluation of foreign residents has been vindicated. Perhaps, the EVs did indeed arrive “too early” for Laos? Yet, this linear theory of technological adoption is unsatisfying. After all, there are many examples of supposed technological phases being “skipped”: wi-fi has spread in innumerable countries without dial-up internet, and electric motorcycles have indeed become popular in some other Asian cities and towns (Cherry et al. 2016; Jones et al. 2013). Contrary to many failed development projects, there was no strong opposition to the EVs and indeed the Department of Public Works and Transport shared the vision of reducing gasoline consumption and greening Lao urban spaces. Finally, the project did in fact manage to create a material itinerary with many points of connection to local settings, from taxi rental to funeral marches. With such examples in mind, it does not seem that the Japanese project was inherently unrealistic. Why, despite all this, was the network still so fragile?

To try to answer this question, it is relevant to return to the expansionist logic of the development form (Jensen and Winthereik 2013). Similar to Anderson’s critique of (2009) and Strathern’s (1996) observations about the “auto-limitlessness” of the actor-network imagination, “projectification” entailed a constant focus on adding relations and bringing in new actors and agendas to help the EVs spread. In contrast, much less attention was spared for the qualities and “thickness” of the relations made. This allows for a final discussion of the consequences of “projectification” and expansionist logics in relation to the challenges of green urban transformation in development contexts.

9 Conclusion

As a carefully circumscribed test-site, Luang Prabang ought to have been ideal for attaining the project aim. Yet, even though the project had created a material itinerary and the EVs successfully arrived in town, their durability could not be maintained.

I have described the EV project as premised on an expansionist logic, which assumed that the creation of numerous thin links would be sufficient to allow the network to live on after JICA had left the scene. Now, it is clear that without “projectification,” the EVs would have had no chance in Laos in the first place. At the same time, however, the temporal frenzy of “deadline-driven work” (Jensen, Thuesen, and Gerald 2016: 28) meant that the majority of these relations were fragile and prone to cuts. This meant that the form of “projectification” worked directly against the aim to mainstream EVs.

From one end, the material environment continuously threatened to overwhelm the capacities of the EV network. Though Luang Prabang was more manageable than Vientiane, weather conditions, dust, heat, and humidity, still conspired together against the EVs. Meanwhile, instability with service providers rendered maintenance slow or impossible. From another end, the fact that Luang Prabang was already on a green trajectory brought along unforeseen complications, like emergent forms of social exclusion (see also Eitel, this issue) that ran counter to the project’s inclusive ambitions. While Jid and her colleagues found new opportunities in this changing context, tuk-tuk drivers who cherished the freedom of ownership refused to replace their gas-guzzling vehicles. Some locals felt threatened and many others were simply not interested. Aligning with STS insights, the conclusion of the previous Japanese study thus still stands: the implementation of EVs in new urban environments requires quite radical rearrangements and recalibrations of the infrastructural environment, which are likely to surpass the capacity of any specific development project.

In his Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996), Bruno Latour concluded that in the end, the reason why Aramis ended up as a dead object rather than as a lively train system was that it had not been loved enough. It could be said JICA experts and other promoters loved the EVs. However, the form of the project limited their ability to give it full expression. At the end, the implementers had no choice but to abandon the test-site and stop caring for the material itinerary. All they could do was watch the decline from afar. Meanwhile, the tuk-tuk drivers, intended to be the new spokespersons for the network, had found no reasons to love the EVs.

If anything is to blame for this sad state of affairs the honor must probably go to “projectification.” The continuous outwards expansion of the EV network led to the creation of thin links, vulnerable to social and material obstructions, rather than thick relations of trust, shared interest, or––with Latour––of love. Such relations of care are sorely needed to give new environmentally friendly technologies a chance to thrive in difficult urban circumstances. In turn, this also suggests the methodological importance of learning to slow down and stay in place, rather than breathlessly following the actors.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive comments. I would like to thank Casper Bruun Jensen for his insightful comments and generous feedback in the process of writing this article. Finally, I thank all the informants, especially the Ministry of Public Works and Transport of Lao P.D.R., Lao Academy of Social Sciences, and the members of the consultant team for their guidance and generously sharing their views in the field.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [18J30002].

Notes on contributors

Miki Namba

Miki Namba is a lecturer at Kagoshima University, Japan. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her research is broadly concerned with the complex relation and interaction between human society and infrastructure in Laos. Her research currently focuses on an ephemeral bamboo bridge in Laos and the multitemporality of livelihood and infrastructure.

Notes

¹ Luang Prabang was the capital during the pre-dynasty and prospered as the economic center of the northern part of Laos. Built on a peninsula formed by the Mekong and the Khan River, the town became a World Heritage Site in 1995, due to its distinctive fusion of Lao traditional architecture and French colonial-style buildings.

² The phenomenon is also known as green gentrification (Gould and Lewis 2016) and environmental gentrification (Checker 2011).

³ CDM is a complicated system, which involves not only the CDM Executive Board and the national authorities of the involved countries, but also a range of other participants and auditors, not to mention the private firms that are the major beneficiaries (Fiske 2009). The approval process is also complicated and the measures for climate change mitigation are highly contested. JCM sought to develop an easier alternative that would support more Japanese projects and companies.

⁴ All names of individuals are pseudonyms.

⁵ This was possible because the consultant team and I temporarily shared working space at the office of the MPWT of Lao P.D.R. which I often visited during field work between 2012 and 2014.

⁶ A tuk-tuk is a motorized three-wheel taxi, which can be seen in various developing countries and also goes by names like auto-rickshaw and bajaj. A jumbo, also known as a samloh (which means “three wheels” in Lao and Thai) is smaller and less powerful than a tuk-tuk.

⁷ Problematic for my initial interests and expectations, this situation also made abundantly clear that it is no longer particularly path-breaking to display how human and non-human actors are connected in building networks. After all, the consultant team already seemed to know what a network is, and members had a clear idea of how it would need to expand to bring EVs to Laos (cf. Riles 2000).

⁸ Towards the end of the study, a consultant team member proclaimed that “the conditions of Laos do not at all seem sufficiently convincing JICA” (Personal conversation with the member of consultant team, August, 2013). Informally, I have heard other explanations that I cannot share, but which do not change the general picture.

⁹ While development projects based on the expansionist logic of creating numerous thin links often appeal to cities with global aspirations (Ong 2011), their effect is often patchy forms of urban materialization that leave existing infrastructures untouched (author).

¹⁰ As of August 2019, 147 JCM projects were underway, three of which took place in Laos: the implementation of a floating solar energy generator, installation of a high-performance electric transformer to a power transmission system, and suppression of slash-and-burn agriculture in Luang Prabang (GEC 2019).

¹¹ The company was chosen because it had previously built a production factory for electric tricycles, which had been sold in the Philippines since 2012. Akin to Ong’s comparative “art of being global,” where cities “cite” others that have achieved success, the Philippine experience became a citation for Luang Prabang, where it helped to create “legitimation for particular enterprises” (Ong 2011: 17).

¹² Like arguments previously surveyed, the authors also noted that Laos produces sufficient hydroelectric power to make the introduction of electric vehicles advantageous (Matsui et al. 2011: 151).

¹³ The initial aim to create a public bus service is described in the report. “Introduction and Implementation of Low-emission Public Transportation System by the Application of Electric Tricycles in Lao P.D.R.” However, as the passengers only reached 20% of the target number, the project gradually increased the use of electric tricycles as taxi service from April 2016.

¹⁴ Laos’s official tourism slogan.