Programme de bourses "Jeunes Chercheurs"

By the early 1990s, following decades of widespread deforestation and the failure of direct state management, the Vietnamese central leadership was forced to rethink forest policy fundamentally. The new Vietnamese forest policy is centred upon the devolution of management authority to the localities, signified by the issuance of long-term forest use certificates to rural households. Forests however remain highly contested spaces between actors on the local, national and global level, marked by widely diverging understandings of legitimate claims and control over use and access to forest resources.
This research project aims to investigate the new modes of forest governance in reform-socialist Vietnam and the ways such regimes are intended to ‘work’. On the one hand it explores how local people perceive, renegotiate and embed the shift in forest management authority in existing practices of everyday life, how this influences peoples’ indigenous norms of conduct, their social relations with others, and how this reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the state. On the other hand this research attempts to examine the role local state cadres play as mediators and negotiators in the complex relationship between the central state and the local peasant population in a time of fundamental policy restructuring.
Largely based on an ‘analytics of government’ approach, this research project intends to offer new insights into how policy aims in reform-socialist Vietnam are intended to be accomplished, how such intentions translate into remote marginalised realities, and how they impact on local livelihood systems in upland areas. It will moreover contribute to a more profound comprehension of local peoples’ response to a rapidly changing governance environment. Pursuing these issues in a conflict-laden and contested field such as forest policy not only serves as a valuable source of learning for other fields of governance reform, but is also vital for a better understanding of governance as a negotiated and interpreted rather than a state implemented process. This draws attention to the paramount importance of local political and social processes that will determine the success or failure of policy campaigns at the national level.