Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR), long considered regionally and geopolitically as the ‘Battery of Asia’, has often been positioned as a central provider of regional hydroelectric power to neighboring Southeast Asian countries and China. Rampant development of large-scale hydropower plants over the last three decades within Laos and along the Mekong and surrounding tributaries for hydro-energy export were meant to generate revenue for the Lao state and ease its modernization efforts. Despite an international narrative of hydro-energy abundance and financial windfalls, this talk discusses the paradox of hydropower development in Laos as generating severe domestic shortage – of power, fuel, and currency – in the face of competing foreign demands for Laos’ hydro-resources and in the context of climate change impacts and strong global pressure to decarbonize across nations and sectors.
In 2021, the Lao government introduced a state-sponsored industrial policy to foster the conversion of hydropower dam sites and the sale of hydro-electricity into a revenue-generating domestic crypto-mining sector. This talk will discuss how the hydro-crypto plan came to be and the major pitfalls, tradeoffs, and unintended environmental, social and economic consequences that have accompanied the Lao state’s venture into building a hydro-crypto nexus.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Pon Souvannaseng is Assistant Professor in the Global Studies Department at Bentley University. Her research expertise spans the politics of development and infrastructure finance, energy systems & environmental governance, and digital economies in the developing world. She has extensive research experience in Southeast and East Asia and Africa. She is a former US Fulbright researcher in Laos; Mansfield-Luce Asia Policy Scholar (2020-2022); Wilson China Fellow (2021), and APSA Asia Fellow (2019). She is a Board Member of the Thai, Lao, Cambodia (TLC) Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies. Her research has been supported by Fulbright, UKRI and Bentley Research Council grants. Pon has previously worked at the UN Research Institute for Social Development and ASEAN Labour Secretariat. A political economist by training, she holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).