land Article Rural Roads Are Paving the Way for Land-Use Intensification in the Uplands of Laos Jean-Christophe Castella 1, * and Sonnasack Phaipasith 2   Citation: Castella, J.-C.; Phaipasith, S. Rural Roads Are Paving the Way for Land-Use Intensification in the Uplands of Laos. Land 2021, 10, 330. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10030330 Academic Editor: Andreu Bonet-Jornet Received: 15 February 2021 Accepted: 13 March 2021 Published: 23 March 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 SENS, IRD, CIRAD, UPVM, Univ Montpellier, F34080 Montpellier, France 2 Department of Geography and Information Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, National University of Laos, Vientiane, Laos; s.phaipasith@nuol.edu.la * Correspondence: j.castella@ird.fr Abstract: Road expansion has played a prominent role in the agrarian transition that marked the integration of swidden-based farming systems into the market economy in Southeast Asia. Rural roads deeply altered the landscape and livelihood structures by allowing the penetration of boom crops such as hybrid maize in remote territories. In this article, we investigate the impact of rural road developments on livelihoods in northern Laos through a longitudinal study conducted over a period of 15 years in a forest frontier. We studied adaptive management strategies of local stakeholders through the combination of individual surveys, focus group discussions, participatory mapping and remote-sensing approaches. The study revealed the short-term benefits of the maize feeder roads on poverty alleviation and rural development, but also the negative long-term effects on agroecosystem health and agricultural productivity related to unsustainable land use. Lessons learnt about the mechanisms of agricultural intensification helped understanding the constraints faced by external interventions promoting sustainable land management practices. When negotiated by local communities for their own interest, roads may provide livelihood-enhancing opportunities through access to external resources, rather than undermining them. Keywords: feeder roads; maize expansion; landscape changes; livelihood transformations; Laos 1. Introduction In the last few decades, dramatic changes in landscapes and rural livelihoods have swept across montane mainland Southeast Asia. These changes are typically marked by the interwoven processes of infrastructure establishment and the introduction of cash crop production. The construction of rural roads tends to systematically precede the conversion from shifting cultivation to other land uses. The establishment of roads has thus played a prominent role in facilitating the transformation from exclusively swidden-based livelihood systems to cash crop production integrated into the market economy [1–6]. However, the impacts of roads on local livelihoods and rural development more broadly are contested [7–9], and it is difficult to untangle the complex relations of causality between the multiple factors at work in agrarian transition. Rigg (2002) attempted to reconcile two opposite discourses about the role of rural roads in local development. On the one hand, roads are seen as an important element of state territorialization; they ‘bring the state (and the market) to the people, and the people to the state (and market)’ [5]. Con- necting montane, marginal, ethnic minority populations with the rest of the country helps securing national territories and asserting control over abundant natural resources [10]. Neoliberal discourses of the 1980s therefore largely supported road expansion in rural areas as an instrument of market integration, and consequently poverty reduction [8,11]. Roads provide access to services that have a direct impact on socioeconomic well-being such as schools, healthcare, labor markets, and credit facilities. On the other hand, some scholars warn about the unequal capacities of target populations to seize the opportunities brought by rural roads through improved accessibility and transportation [12–14]. Roads may Land 2021, 10, 330. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10030330 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land