Sango Mahanty

Learning in sustainable natural resource management: challenges and opportunities in the Pacific

The importance of learning in natural resource management (NRM) is being recognized by an increasing number of scholars and practitioners. A learning approach to NRM applies principles and theories of adult, organizational and social learning, and is underpinned by three core elements: systems thinking, negotiation, and reflection. By combining learning theories with concepts from adaptive management, comanagement, and participatory resource management, this article explores how the explicit inclusion of learning principles and processes can strengthen community-based natural resource management. Case studies from the South Pacific are used to draw out lessons for the wider application of learning approaches to NRM.

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.

Crafting Sustainability: Managing Water Pollution in Viet Nam’s Craft Villages

The spontaneous growth of Vietnam’s 2,790 rural craft villages has been a mixed blessing. Specialising in ‘traditional’ crafts such as processed foods, textiles and furniture, as well as newer commodities, such as recycled products, craft businesses have expanded rapidly since Vietnam adopted the ’Doi Moi’ (economic renovation policy) in the mid-1980s. As with small scale rural industries in other developing countries, the expansion, modernisation and diversification of craft production in Vietnam presents significant development opportunities as well as environmental and social risks. This largely unregulated increase in industrial activity has reduced rural poverty and brought prosperity to rural entrepreneurs, but it has also generated dangerously high levels of pollution with attendant risks to human health. Since the 1990s, the Vietnamese government has developed several laws and initiatives to regulate industrial activities and control craft village pollution, such as the ‘polluter pays principle’. However, the small scale and dispersed nature of craft production has continued to defy effective management by the state, and pollution levels in craft villages have increased alarmingly. The Crafting Sustainability project aimed to provide a better understanding of the drivers of pollution, and policy approaches to better addressing them. Drawing on four cases study sites in the Red River Delta region of Northern Vietnam, this paper provides an overview of key findings and policy recommendations.

Contingent Sovereignty: Cross-Border Rentals in the Cambodia–Vietnam Borderland

An investigation of land rentals by Vietnamese farmers in Cambodian border districts reveals the contingent nature of state sovereignty in a postconflict borderland. Cross-border leasing activity has prompted criticism that Cambodias “national sovereignty” has been weakened. Although it is in the interests of the ruling party to demonstrate firm control of the Cambodia–Vietnam border, land rentals expose three key factors that mitigate this interest. First, they uncover the emergence of competing territorial and political claims in the countrys upland borders. Second, the process of state-making at these margins is derailed by dissonant practices among state actors, through their everyday negotiations and actions to accumulate land and capital. Third, the rapid growth of land and commodity markets has intensified local contests for land. These factors render the border porous and weaken the ruling partys exercise of territorial authority. Thus, cross-border rentals expose a fragile and networked form of state sovereignty that is contingent on the ongoing enrollment of disparate state and nonstate actors. This presents risks for a state that is often cast as authoritarian.