Public Management in Vietnam in the Context of Globalization:
Analysis of Higher Education Policy Transfer Process during the "Doi Moi"?
– By Miss VU Bich Thuy* –

ABSTRACT

A new page has been turned in the contemporary Vietnam’s history since December 1986 when the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) - leading party since 1932 – decided to rethink its forty–year centralist tradition, inspired from soviet model, and to reorient its economic governance policy toward market-style model. This renovation policy (“doi moi” in Vietnamese) aimed at facing food shortage and economic crisis aggravated by the end of soviet assistance since the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, the “doi moi” has become a three-dimension process - privatization (ownership), deregulation (legal framework) and liberalization (open to global market) – while its finality is to construct “a market economy oriented toward socialism”. The “doi moi” in Vietnam perfectly illustrates global trends in the 1990s: faith of the soviet model and collapse of the communist block, in the one hand, and triumphal emergence of neo-liberalism in planetary scale, in the other hand. Globalization is the analytical concept to qualify this national and international context. However, politically the “doi moi” has been governed mainly by the State under the supervision of the unique party. Such a dilemma between market practice and centralist policy is a particularity of the Vietnamese case. Thus, the current research aims at understanding the nature of the “doi moi” policy and the role of the State in the process.

In fact, the dilemma between market practice and intervention policy in Vietnam is linked with the fact that the country has crossed many models simultaneously applied since 1986. In other words, there is a co-existence between diverse models, which seem to be very different, even contradictory. The starting point of the current research resides in the stance that the “doi moi” process in Vietnam is a public learning process in which the Vietnamese government looks for the most appropriate model from diverse national and foreign experiences in order to resolve specific problems of the country and prepare its development in the future. Otherwise, in the “doi moi” process, the State perform its development promotion function in analyzing its faiths in the past, the collapse of ex-communist countries, the evolution of similar Chinese model, and of course, the success of Western powers and the ascension of Asian Tigers as well as the assistance of international organizations.

During the public learning process, in selectively applying foreign models, the Government has tried to use a model at some time in some situation and another model at other time and in other context before choosing the best one for the country. It is an experimentation of solutions based at the time on market practice and centralist policy.

Thus, the purpose of our research is to question about this specific phenomenon of the public management in the globalization context in the 1990s. The public learning process is defined as the one in which the State’s new function is to find the best model in face of new constraints and opportunities created by the dynamic globalized world.

The fundamental questions of research consist with determining the conductive forces and inspiration sources which have guided current reforms as well as the ways in which these have been operated by the Vietnamese government. Beyond an intellectual contribution to current literatures on the role of the State in social development, the answer to these questions is all the more important as the reform process in Vietnam has been considered as a exploring lead for alternatives to capitalist model and dominant liberalist orthodoxy. For achieving this general thematic objective, higher education has been chosen as study case.
The theoretical framework is designed on the basis of policy transfer theory, which enables us to formulate working hypotheses and specific research questions. The policy transfer is defined as a process by which knowledge of ideas, institutions, policies and programs in one time and/or place is fed into the policy marking arena in the development of policies and programs in another time and/or place. This framework highlights a series of specific questions: why do actors engage in policy transfer? Who transfers policy? What is transferred? From where are lessons drawn? Are there different degrees of transfer? When do actors engage in policy transfer and how does this affect the process? What restricts policy transfer? Thus this framework helps provide a greater understanding of the content and development of public policy in various settings.
Methodologically, we opt for a qualitative research in techniques of gathering information and data by the fieldwork and also in techniques of qualitative analysis (qualitative approach by theorization). The five criterion of scientific validity in a qualitative research are internal acceptation completion, saturation, internal coherence, and external confirmation.

Miss VU Bich Thuy: Born on 5th July 1974 in Hanoi. MBA in Corporate Management and MSc in Development Studies. Currently Ph.D. Researcher at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies – University of Geneva.