Cutting the Infrastructure: How Electric Vehicles Survive in Laos

• In Event: Infrastructure: Mitigate, Sustain or Vacate?

Abstract

Development organizations, who are increasingly attentive to global environmental change, have created mitigating ideas such as international carbon markets and credit systems. As part of the promotion of electric vehicles in Laos, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) planned to introduce a so-called Joint Crediting Mechanism. This mechanism would allow Japan to use the reduction of greenhouse emissions due to increased use of electrical vehicles in Laos to offset Japanese reduction targets at home. Due to a growing concern about the increase of cars and motorbikes in the country, the project held particular promise. Laos produces thirty times the hydroelectric power required by domestic demands and thus it was also seen as a possible development of a zero-emission clean transport model. However, as STS has shown in other cases, this process of ‘technology transfer,’ too, was fraught with problems. They included technical issues such as limited mileage and short battery lives, and the fragility of the vehicles. They also involved a range of negotiations and adjustments relative to existing Lao infrastructures. In the terminology of the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, to keep EV’s running, other networks had to be cut. Considering the implementation of EVs’ in the UNESCO World Heritage town Luang Prabang, this paper analyzes entanglement of new electric vehicles with already existed infrastructure, and it draws attention how infrastructures had to be cut and reshaped to enable their survival.

Author

• Miki Namba, Hitotsubashi University