ARTICULATING CO-GOVERNANCE STAKEHOLDER AGENCY IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY: IN VIETNAM

The report analyzes rural development in Vietnam through a conceptual lens of co-governance and stakeholder agency. It examines the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market socialist system, highlighting how local actors—including farmers, ethnic minorities, and NGOs—negotiate, adapt, or bypass state policies to secure their livelihoods. Through case studies on flood management, tea production, national park conservation, forest allocation, and mangrove rehabilitation, the document demonstrates a persistent gap between top-down legislative frameworks and local realities. It concludes that while the state has introduced initiatives like the Grass roots Democracy Decree to increase participation, implementation remains often formalistic. The authors advocate for a shift toward 'epistemic resilience' and social learning to reconcile conflicting interests between economic development, environmental sustainability, and local livelihoods.

• Stakeholders in rural development often bypass or adapt formal policies to align them with direct needs due to existing policy gaps and inefficiencies.
• The Grass roots Democracy Decree (GDD), intended to expand citizen participation in local government, has seen slow and ineffective implementation, often characterized by formalism.
• In the case of Cat Tien National Park, indigenous minorities (Chau Ma and Stieng) frequently violate forest laws to collect resources for survival, viewing the park's designation as an imposition on ancestral land rights.
• The 1999 floods in central Vietnam revealed that government disaster recovery efforts were biased toward lowland paddy rice producers, leaving those with different primary incomes at a disadvantage.
• In the tea-growing region of Dai Tu, poor households face marginalization due to limited access to land and credit, which results in lower tea quality and prices compared to middle-income groups.
• Mangrove rehabilitation in Tien Hai is complicated by conflicting interests between national hazard reduction goals, local livelihood needs, and the economic drive of the aquaculture industry.
• Forest land allocation in Thua Thien Hue was often implemented through 'short cuts' and lacked transparency, with the District Forest Protection Department (DFPD) acting as the dominant coordinator despite legal ambiguities.
• In Kim Thieu village, craft-peasants developed 'everyday politics' and improvisation tactics to survive the collectivization era, such as using social capital to gain more work-points or secretly producing prohibited goods.
• The transition to a market economy (doi moi) shifted the primary economic unit from the collective to the household, but this has increased the individual burden of risk.
• Vietnam's entry into the WTO has increased market uncertainty for small-scale producers, such as tea growers, who must now compete with higher quality and more technically advanced foreign products.

APA

Powell, N., Swartling, Å. G., & Ha, H. M. (2011). ARTICULATING CO-GOVERNANCE STAKEHOLDER AGENCY IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY: IN VIETNAM. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-Book-Powell-StakeholderAgencyAndRuralDevelopmentPolicy-2011.pdf

Chicago

Powell, Neil, Åsa Gerger Swartling, and Hoang Minh Ha. ARTICULATING CO-GOVERNANCE STAKEHOLDER AGENCY IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY: IN VIETNAM. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2011. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-Book-Powell-StakeholderAgencyAndRuralDevelopmentPolicy-2011.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Powell |first1=Neil |last2=Swartling |first2=Åsa Gerger |last3=Ha |first3=Hoang Minh |title=ARTICULATING CO-GOVERNANCE STAKEHOLDER AGENCY IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY: IN VIETNAM |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=May 2011 |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-Book-Powell-StakeholderAgencyAndRuralDevelopmentPolicy-2011.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{powell2011articulating, author = {Powell, Neil and Swartling, Åsa Gerger and Ha, Hoang Minh}, title = {{ARTICULATING CO-GOVERNANCE STAKEHOLDER AGENCY IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY: IN VIETNAM}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2011}, month = may, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-Book-Powell-StakeholderAgencyAndRuralDevelopmentPolicy-2011.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }