Laos is the most isolated country in Southeast Asia, a slash of thick forests, jagged mountains, and snaking rivers that cuts through the heart of the region. Until relatively recently, road access to other countries was virtually impossible, and the flow of people, goods, and information was along the Mekong or the Nam Ou rivers. Even today, nearly half of the settlements in the country have no road access.
While Laos is developing at an explosive rate, much of it remains relatively pristine, and it was fascinating for me to see first-hand the course that development has taken in these untouched areas. I’m going to use Laos as a microcosm for how I see the way that culture relates to the prospects for sustainable development in the Global South.
One of the most startling initial impressions while riding through the winding mountain roads was seeing huge swathes of forest on the mountainside slashed and burned. In much of northern Laos, this is how agriculture works; the burnt forests provide rich soil for planting crops, though they last only a single season. After the rice is harvested, the torrential rainy season washes away the arable soil on the unterraced hillside, and the local farmers repeat the process somewhere else. In a sparsely populated country where three-quarters of the people live rurally, its easy to see how farmers might imagine that their natural bounty is inexhaustible. Especially when that style of agriculture is what they have always practiced. Trying to convince a poor, scattered population that they need to break from tradition and work harder to foster more sustainable methods of agriculture ‘for the good of the planet’ is hardly a challenge unique to Laos.

However, while food and farming may be firmly rooted in cultural history, there is some reason for optimism when it comes to the elements of development that have no traditional precedent; namely power and communications. In these circumstances, the best technology wins, and when it comes to remote regions with inaccessible, inhospitable geography and climates, more often than not, the winner is renewables.
When I visited the village of Ban Kiew Kan in northern Laos, a day’s trek by foot from the village of Muang Ngoi, itself accessible only by boat, I would never have expected to see electricity. Yet every home had a compact-fluorescent bulb, and the chief’s house was even decked out with a satellite dish. Fossil-fueled generators would have been impossible option here in the mountains, with no practical or affordable way to resupply them with fuel, and so the solution came in the form of micro-hydro.

Scattered among the infinite streams that flow down from the mountains, the locals had set up wooden scaffolds that held machines resembling tiny outboard motors, their long driveshafts dipping into the current. These generators were enough to provide a modest, but simple, cheap, and consistent electrical supply to remote villages. The villagers aren’t ‘going green’ to pump up their eco-cred; they’re doing it because fossil fuels just don’t make sense for them.
Local micro-generation shows great promise to spur development in areas that lack access to transportation, let alone grid electricity. This sort of leap-frogging is certainly not restricted to power generation; the mobile phone has been the basis for a tremendously important communications revolution in the Global South, especially Africa. Without even the option of expensive, infrastructure-intensive land-lines, mobile phones in Africa have quickly become one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries in the entire world.
The take-home point is, while there are obvious challenges associated with shedding bad habits, places where those bad habits have not yet had a chance to take root can become great breeding grounds for sustainable development. When cleaner technologies win on the basis of practicality, availability, and affordability, is it any surprise to see their adoption?