Sanghamitra Mahanty

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.

Conservation and Development Interventions as Networks: The Case of the India Ecodevelopment Project, Karnataka

Experience with community-based biodiversity conservation programs in the 1980s and 1990s contributed to the conviction among donor agencies and researchers that such programs must be based on the active support of local resource users, appropriate incentives, and institutional support. Yet the continuing struggles of practitioners to implement conservation interventions that are socially and ecologically sustainable point to difficulty in realizing these principles on the ground. Actor-oriented research in rural development and actor network theory emphasize that the capacity of facilitators to engage effectively in negotiation processes and establish strong networks with key actors is critical in mediating intervention outcomes. Drawing on the case of the India Ecodevelopment Project at Rajiv Gandhi (Nagarahole) National Park in Karnataka, India, this paper explores the role of relationships and networks between actors in a conservation and development intervention, finding that practitioners need to focus on negotiation and network building as a central rather than subsidiary part of the intervention process. Associated with this is the need for change in the way donor and implementing agencies conduct themselves, to promote communication and greater flexibility in intervention processes.

A fair share? Sharing the benefits and costs of collaborative forest management

SUMMARY Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) has attracted significant attention in Asia in recent years, with around 25 percent of forests currently outside direct State management. Advocates of CFM suggest that it has the potential to achieve sustainable forest management in a way that improves the welfare of the rural poor. Whether this potential is realised in practice largely depends on the type and scale of benefits created through CFM relative to costs, whether communities are able to secure any of these, and how they are distributed locally. This paper provides an overview of benefit sharing from community-managed forests in Asia based on a recent joint initiative of some key international CFM support organisations. The paper examines why the flow of benefits from community-managed forests to local actors is lower than it could be, highlighting institutional and policy constraints that need to be addressed for this to change, as well as the role and arrangement of community-level governance.

Sustainability Assessment and Local Government: Achieving Innovation through Practitioner Networks.

Abstract A strategic approach to local sustainability assessment requires that sustainability implications of proposed policies, plans and programmes are evaluated. These evaluations need to critically consider organizational structures, processes and outcomes. The establishment of ‘communities of practice’, groups or networks of practitioners with shared interests, is a helpful mechanism for facilitating change in a wide range of organizations. This paper analyses the potential for communities of practice to contribute to the implementation of sustainability assessments by local government. Focusing on Sutherland Shire Council in Sydney, Australia, this paper presents the findings of a project that engaged practitioners in the design of a sustainability assessment system. The establishment of communities of practice helped to break down the ‘silos’ created by institutional divides within local government, but this approach also raises challenges in maintaining momentum and overcoming political agendas.

The Livelihood Impacts of Payments for Environmental Services and Implications for REDD

International discussions on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) foresee payment for environmental services (PES) schemes as an important mechanism to provide local incentives for the conservation and enhancement of carbon stocks. There are concerns, however, about the potential impacts of REDD+ and PES on local livelihoods. This article assesses the livelihood impacts of seven existing PES schemes using a comparative case study approach, and reviews lessons for the design of REDD+. It finds that PES schemes provided some livelihood benefits to participants, particularly in terms of building individual participants’ and community institutions’ capacity, and in some cases contributing to income. Insights for the design of PES for REDD+ schemes are derived in relation to the issues of the role of intermediaries, individual versus collective contracts, payment schedules and amounts, conditionality and permanence, and property and access rights.

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.

Crafting sustainability? The Potential and Limits of Institutional Design in Managing Water Pollution from Vietnam's Craft Villages

Despite a raft of government initiatives, Vietnams rapidly growing craft villages—rural hubs for small-scale industry—produce alarming levels of water pollution that seriously affects human health and the environment. Framing water quality as a commons dilemma creates the scope for appropriately designed, collaborative institutions that better address local conditions and the need for vertical and horizontal coordination. However, institutional and social theorists highlight that broader historical and social relationships can interact recursively with institutions and are not readily manipulated through institutional crafting. Our research in four craft villages of northern Vietnam finds that the challenge for managing water quality in craft villages is thus broader than institutional design, and requires an understanding of how regulations and policies emerge from and interact with broader societal processes.

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.

LIVING WITH POLLUTION: Juggling Environmental and Social Risk in Vietnam's Craft Villages

ABSTRACT Vietnams rural provinces are home to thousands of craft villages; communities engaged in small- and medium-scale manufacturing of a range of goods, from recycled paper products to processed food. Since the liberalization of the Vietnamese economy in 1986, craft villages have played a significant role in poverty reduction and livelihood diversification for rural households, and currently employ nearly one-third of Vietnams rural labor force. However, the rapid expansion of craft manufacturing, combined with a lack of planning, has brought increased air, soil, and water pollution to craft villages and surrounding areas. Pollution levels are now so serious that they pose a major risk to local health and agriculture. This article examines why producers continue to expose themselves to environmental pollution and its associated health risks. Drawing on four case studies of craft villages in the Red River Delta region of northern Vietnam, the authors find that risk is a multidimensional phenomenon. Craft production typically involves a value chain of closely connected family economic units and takes place against a backdrop of fierce competition for market share both within Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. In this context, the current policy of managing the environmental risks of pollution through regulation requires producers to take risks in other domains of equal or greater importance to them; their livelihoods and social relations. Craft producers make explicit trade-offs between the risks of ill health and the security that family and community ties provide in the face of uncertain production space, markets, and livelihoods. These findings highlight the importance of thinking beyond regulation toward more holistic approaches to understanding and working with environmental risk.