The temporally cumulative effects of hydropower development in northern Laos: Insights from the Nam Ou Basin

• Laos’ Nam Ou dams are used as sites to explore long-term changes in rural livelihoods. • An analytical distinction is made between time and event in hydropower development. • The notion of temporally cumulative effects is developed. • We show how local histories are folded into the social outcomes of Mekong dams. Projects like hydropower schemes often lead to ruptures in the fabric of life, especially among rural communities reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods and well-being. But livelihoods are shaped by longer pathways of change, and a focus on singular projects can sometimes hide the cumulative effects of successive interventions. Drawing on a study of the lower reaches of the Nam Ou Basin in the Pak Ou and Nam Bak districts of Luang Prabang province in Laos, this paper explores how the social outcomes of a major hydropower project emerge from and are contingent upon long-term changes in livelihoods that can be dated back to the 1970s. The Nam Ou River Cascade Hydropower Project is only the most recent of a historical accumulation of extractive development projects and their cascading effects on a particular place and its inhabitants. The paper critically engages with how time and event, era and moment are employed in understanding the scale and nature of social and environmental transformations in places like the Nam Ou Basin.