Phuc Xuan To

The Prospects for Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) in Vietnam: A Look at Three Payment Schemes.

Global conservation discourses and practices increasingly rely on market-based solutions to fulfill the dual objective of forest conservation and economic development. Although varied, these interventions are premised on the assumption that natural resources are most effectively managed and preserved while benefiting livelihoods if the market-incentives of a liberalised economy are correctly in place. By examining three nationally supported payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes in Vietnam we show how insecure land tenure, high transaction costs and high opportunity costs can undermine the long-term benefits of PES programmes for local households and, hence, potentially threaten their livelihood viability. In many cases, the income from PES programmes does not reach the poor because of political and economic constraints. Local elite capture of PES benefits through the monopolization of access to forestland and existing state forestry management are identified as key problems. We argue that as PES schemes create a market for ecosystem services, such markets must be understood not simply as bald economic exchanges between ‘rational actors’ but rather as exchanges embedded in particular socio-political and historical contexts to support the sustainable use of forest resources and local livelihoods in Vietnam.

How Biodiversity Conservation Policy Accelerates Agrarian Differentiation: The Account of an Upland Village in Vietnam

This paper shows how the implementation of Vietnams recent biodiversity conservation policy in Ba Vi National Park has increased the economic value of nature, created sustained conflict, and exacerbated agrarian differentiation in an upland village in northern Vietnam. Increased global and national interest in biodiversity conservation has intersected with markets for ecosystem services that attempt to commoditise biodiversity resources in Ba Vi National Park and reconfigure conservation as market-based development. Efforts to marketise conservation have simultaneously increased the financial value of forestland and drawn new capital investments. In Ba Vi, local elites have captured these new forms of wealth through their connections to political parties, reinforcing the already unequal distributions of wealth and power. Coupled with political power, rising land value has also allowed local elites to become landlords, with the capacity to further dispossess other villagers. The resulting skewed access to natural resources has widened the gap between poor and wealthy villagers, and contributes to their over-exploitation of forests within the Park through informal agricultural expansion. The ensuing local conflicts have also negatively affected livelihoods and biodiversity resources.

Social Networks of Corruption in the Vietnamese and Lao Cross-Border Timber Trade

Although corruption is a core issue in discourses on Southeast Asian states and the regions illegal timber trade, its specific meanings, characteristics, and role are poorly understood. Our ethnographic study of corruption and timber trade in the lower Mekong uncovers the relationships, dealings, and networks that enable illegal timber flows. We follow the disputed case of a shipment of high-value timber that originated in Laos and was seized by Vietnamese seaport customs officials in 2011. By examining the actors involved and their efforts to obtain the release of the timber, we reveal the complex and networked nature of relationships from local to national levels that enable illicit rosewood trade from Laos to Vietnam and onward from Vietnamese ports. At the same time, interactions between timber traders and state officials highlight the recursive relationship between ‘private’ and ‘state’ actors, and the scope for mobility between these categories. Our analysis challenges the current international and national emphasis on law enforcement as a means to tackle illegal logging. Instead, policy would be better founded on a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the socio-political relationships that characterise and perpetuate corruption across these multiple scales.

Examining how long fallow swidden systems impact upon livelihood and ecosystem services outcomes compared with alternative land-uses in the uplands of Southeast Asia

Swidden agriculture or shifting cultivation has been practised in the uplands of Southeast Asia for centuries and is estimated to support up to 500 million people – most of whom are poor, natural resource reliant uplanders. Recently, however, dramatic land-use transformations have generated social, economic and ecological impacts that have affected the extent, practice and outcomes of swidden in the region. While certain socio-ecological trends are clear, how these broader land-use changes impact upon local livelihoods and ecosystem services remains uncertain. This systematic review protocol therefore proposes a methodological approach to analysing the evidence on the range of possible outcomes such land-use changes have on swidden and associated livelihood and ecosystem services over time and space.

Rearticulating governance through carbon in theLao PDR

Interventions to ‘improve’ the human condition through democratic and capitalist ideals increasingly draw on capital and markets to influence governance in line with Western mandates of state building. As a major recent example, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ‘plus’ (REDD+) develops new market regimes to govern, finance, and trade carbon in line with donor discourses of civil liberties, market expansion, and, more broadly, state building. Emerging REDD + networks that aim to finance and trade carbon now align with the conditionality and ideals of democratic governance, transparency, and accountability through processes of institution building (for state stability). This paper examines the connection between REDD + projects and state-making ideals in policy and practice as bilaterals and NGOs fuse the conditions and governance of one with the other. In the Lao PDR we argue that the governance machinery and interventions associated with REDD + facilitate governance agendas to manage people, goods, and carbon in line with Western narratives of robust governance, free markets, and integrity. We contend that the adoption of REDD + will nudge local markets and governance in this postsocialist bureaucracy toward such principles, but in ways that partly reinforce the states longer term political and economic objectives. We conclude that, rather than conserve carbon per se, REDD + governance reflects a tempered, less absolute ‘extraterritoriality’, where its transnational influence is differentiated depending on how assumptions and ideals align with state motives in the context of forest governance, democratic reform, and rural development.

State Territorialization and Illegal Logging: The Dynamic Relationships between Practices and Images of the State in Vietnam

ABSTRACT In spite of a government logging ban and wide deployment of forest protection staff, illegal logging persists in Vietnam. This article delves into this apparent paradox, examining the dynamic relationship between state governing practices and illegal logging. Using the lens of “territorialization” and taking a historical view, the author argues that the present logging ban should be understood as one element of a range of state territorial strategies that have been implemented since the beginning of the postcolonial era – strategies that have all aimed to control local peoples access to forest resources. The author explains that in the 1950s–1980s, the government officially excluded local people from accessing forest resources, particularly timber; but then, following the doi moi (renovation) in the 1980s, it launched a “regulated inclusion” of local people. In this analysis, I show how state territorialization, including the logging ban, works to create spaces of state control that can then be used to generate informal rents, both materially and discursively, for state actors. These rents in turn bolster the state in myriad ways. However, various discrepancies emerge in the process, for example between state images and practices and between different levels of state administration.