Infrastructural Connectivity and Difference

Abstract

This chapter, Infrastructural connectivity and difference, presents two strategic planning proposals dealing with “direct” impacts of the construction of the China-Laos Railway. Practices of “sustainable” development, in those practices’ approaches, however genuine, to physically and economically connect communities to new markets and generate new economies, disrupt preexisting modes of connectivity, whether socioeconomic, cultural or ecological. One proposal offers strategies to mitigate the socioecological impacts of temporary access roads built tends of kilometers into rural landscape to construct the China-Laos Railway, while the other proposal offers physical and organizational strategies for impacted agricultural communities to mitigate the disruption of irrigation networks, fragmented farmlands, issues of development transparency and uncertainty in compensation timelines. Through these proposals’ analyses and strategic deployment of connectivity and emphasis of cultural and ecological difference, they may help reform discourse on the assessment of cumulative impacts in the development process.