ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dimension of political contest simultaneously suppressed by and embodied in the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) discourse of indigenous ‘local’ knowledge. The international NGO is, classically, multi-sited, with offices both in the ‘developed’ north and the ‘developing’ south. The interaction of north and south, across the INGO’s transnational terrain, represents an organisational dynamics of understanding and knowledge in which authority over ‘true development’ is ambiguously distributed through an organisational space that emphasises and embodies simultaneously globality and locality. The economic interpretation of Non-Timber Forest Product (NTFP) is associated with the perspective of the state, and with the modernist farming project exploitatively converting indigenous practices into plantation relations. Some goals reinforces the articulation of NTFP as in essence an epistemological set to be installed, through progressive investigation and revelation, in the wider national and economic set of Lao knowledge.
