Excerpt from “The birth of a discipline: Producing authoritative green knowledge, World Bank-style,” Ethnography, 2001.
The Bank and its contactors have held numerous public consultations to
exchange information and ideas on the Nam Theun 2 dam and its
affiliated conservation projects with the people who will be most
directly affected. The idea behind these interactions was that local
people who could – and should – help planners understand their needs
and concerns, which would lead to project `improvement’. Indeed, public
consultation has been honed to a science, especially since the issue of
participation and consultation has become politically volatile for the
Bank. The Bank takes it so seriously that for Nam Theun 2, it hired an
evolution expert to evaluate formally the effectiveness of the Nam
Theun 2 public consultations. According to her final report, while
attending these meetings, the consultant noticed that most of the
plateau people just stared at the presenters (Franklin, 1997).
Rightfully so, she wrote, as the presenters had described the dam
project in a language `more appropriate to an Army Corps of Engineers
meeting’. After the day-long sessions of Power Point presentations of
maps, schemes, and diagrams, she interviews the attendees – forest
dwellers who had been brought down to the town to fill the
consultation. She learned that a high percentage of them had absolutely
no idea what the meeting was about. Of those who said they did
understand the topic, when questions, most of them had no idea that
these meetings were about moving them from their land and resettling
them as rice farming entrepreneurs. In fact, some thought these men had
come to present them with a simple but appreciated gift: not Laos’
largest dam, but a village water well. Despite its most overt and
costly attempts, the Bank fails at the most direct form of information
exchange with its `objects’ of development.