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Coal‐fired thermal power has recently become one of the most pressing issues in Vietnam's development agenda. The country's economic development, industrialization and modernization, and population increases have put increasing pressure on energy demands. The Vietnamese government sees coal‐fired power as a way forward in ensuring energy security, which had led to the planning and construction of plants nationwide, particularly from 2016. Simultaneously, a growing anti‐coal power development movement argues that coal‐fired power adversely transforms local people's lives and livelihoods, and negatively impacts the ecological balance in plant locations. Through the lens of environmental justice, this paper examines the development of Vietnam's power sector with a focus on coal‐fired thermal power and its impacts on local livelihoods, food production and water resources. The paper argues that Vietnam's development of coal‐fired power is about much more than energy. It speaks to the state's rule over resources, and how this very process of power generation disproportionately affects local communities in the Mekong Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Vietnam's capital city Hanoi, the growing popularity of application based (app‐based) motorbike taxis has offered many inhabitants new opportunities to pursue a mobile livelihood with ride‐hailing platforms. Nonetheless, as this influx of app‐based drivers has hit the city's streets, specific livelihood and mobility frictions have emerged, notably with informal, 'traditional' motorbike taxi drivers, or xe ôm. In this paper we analyse these evolving sites and moments of friction and their impacts on driver livelihoods and mobilities for both driver groups. We draw conceptually on debates regarding mobility, platform economies, and urban livelihoods, while specifically interrogating the concept of friction to highlight three possible analytical applications. Methodologically, we interpret static and ride‐along interviews completed with over 130 drivers. We highlight a range of tactics 'traditional' and app‐based motorbike taxi drivers have employed to respond to rising frictions, defend their 'turf', and maintain their street‐based livelihoods. Driver responses reveal differing access to distinctive forms of social capital and social networks, and contrasting levels of agency regarding their mobilities. By conceptually teasing apart the notion of friction, we wish to expand and deepen understandings of the experiences of vulnerability, precarity, and other impacts of platformisation for different motorbike taxi driver cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly the environment, and climate risks in particular, are influencing migration and planned resettlement in Vietnam, raising the spectre of increased displacement in a country already confronting serious challenges around sustainable land and water use as well as urbanisation. Planned resettlement has emerged as part of a suite of measures being pursued as part of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies. This paper provides an historical, political, legal and environmental overview of resettlement in Vietnam identifying key challenges for framing resettlement as climate change adaptation. The paper outlines the scale of past resettlement in Vietnam, identifying the drivers and implications for vulnerability. Detailed case studies of resettlement are reviewed. Through this review, the paper reflects on the growing threat of climate change and the likelihood of increased displacement associated with worsening climate risks to identify some critical considerations for planned resettlement in climate change adaptation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agrotourism in Vietnam has been identified as one of the strategies used to achieve green growth and countryside modernisation, and it is often included as part of the national and local agenda. In this paper, we examine agrotourism in a village in the periphery of Hội An city (an international tourism hub in central Vietnam) to question tourism's interaction with ongoing development processes. More specifically, we aim to understand the impact of fast peri‐urbanisation on agrotourism and the impacts of agrotourism on people's daily lives, specifically when it comes to physical changes in their living environment, tensions in their social life and their concerns about the future. Our analysis is supported with data generated from interviews with farmers, local officials, tourism workers and tourists. We find that agrotourism products lacked authenticity and farming was not of great interest for tourists, yet the state's investment in the village tended to favour spaces and infrastructure that could attract more tourists and generate profit, to the detriment of cultural infrastructure. Land speculation and an unequal distribution of income were the main tensions in the village along with farmers' concerns about their rural heritage, income diversification and environmental quality. As such, agrotourism in the village has been driven by rapid urbanisation and mass tourism, creating a competition between a consumption activity and a productive activity. Those are important parameters that future policymakers need to take into consideration in order to sustain the city's food production and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of globalisation in the conventional food provision system have had widespread negative impacts on small-scale farmers. Yet, alternative food networks, which are characterised by more sustainable production/consumption practices and fairer trade relations, have increasingly been 'going global' and, in the process, have been integrating small-scale farms in the South. One such high-value export-led commodity is certified organic shrimp. International third-party certification schemes are becoming popular as a tool to verify the intangible attributes of such commodities. Using concepts of multifunctionality and agrarian change, this paper examines the implications of introducing an international environmental certification programme to a site where the 'peasantry' has been preserved and has limited integration in the global agro-food system. Drawing on a case study that examines the first certified organic shrimp production project in Vietnam, this paper concludes that the current movement towards post-productivism in the global North has potential to keep local farming practices in the global South by justifying the value of peasant-like production methods through international certification. As a result, the development path of agrarian transition might be reshaped into a form not necessarily pursuing industrialisation. This leads to the new interpretation of pre- and post-productivism beyond the North and South divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the limitations of research on global educational mobility has been the primary classification of key participants - students and educational institutions - in national terms. This paper tests the challenges involved in such methodological nationalism by examining the provision of cross-border education in one city. As Vietnam's commercial centre, Ho Chi Minh City ( HCMC) has experienced rapid transformation over the past two decades as the country has moved steadily from a state-directed to a more market-driven and globally integrated economy. Since the late 1990s there has been a parallel growth in cross-border higher education in HCMC, through the outbound mobility of students and the provision of foreign programmes by international partnerships and branch campuses. Drawing on available data supplemented with insights gleaned from interviews and existing literature, this paper develops a methodology for identifying and quantifying the key features of each form of domestic, overseas and transnational provision. We estimate that around 6% of HCMC's tertiary students are studying overseas and between 2% and 3% in foreign programmes delivered in the city. The rates of enrolment in overseas and transnational programmes by students in HCMC are thus far higher than for Vietnam as a whole, but still considerably lower than in those well-established cross-border education hubs, Hong Kong and Singapore. We argue that concerns about the growth of private education and inequalities in access may continue to limit the growth of transnational provision in HCMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts an analysis of the socioeconomic determinants of Vietnam's cross-provincial variations in natural disaster vulnerability. The purpose is twofold: (i) to capture disaggregated vulnerability variations normally obscured by national statistics, thereby providing more nuanced insights into Vietnam's vulnerability to natural disasters; and (ii) to take advantage of the fact that the overall political system and key institutional structures to a large extent are constant across Vietnam's provinces, which makes the analysis a novel addition to the many disaster studies based on cross-national variations. The paper's analysis indicates that much of Vietnam's cross-provincial variations in natural disaster fatalities and economic costs can be explained by differences in key socioeconomic factors. High provincial rates of inequality, poverty and infant mortality, for instance, appear to drive up natural disaster fatalities. Local adaptation efforts should focus as much on these broader socioeconomic dimensions as they focus on the geophysical susceptibility to natural hazards of individual areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the relations between youth and the socialist state in contemporary Vietnam, which sheds light on the wider state–society relations. Amid rapid social changes brought about by economic liberalisation, the Vietnamese Communist Party and socialist state may no longer be the sole driving force that motivates young people. As they seek to be both in control of and in touch with youth, the leaders of the Party and state find themselves negotiating between maintaining their ideological integrity and accommodating the changing needs and desires of youth. An analysis of recent events demonstrates that youth are no longer merely a subject of political propaganda and mass mobilisation, but instead they have evolved to become an important social actor urging the leadership to further reform itself. As young people express a desire to embrace socioeconomic and cultural changes wrought by processes of marketisation and globalisation, the Party and state are actively reforming themselves not only to respond to young people’s desires and aspirations, but also to strengthen their political authority and leadership, and to consolidate their control and management of youth amid the new conditions of a market-oriented society. Overall, this paper sheds light on the changes in what is considered to be the ‘strategic’ relationship between the state and youth, and the wider process of sociopolitical transformation in present-day Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has changed the face of Vietnam's highlands in the second half of the 20th century. Areas of forest and swidden agriculture, inhabited by ethnic minorities, have lost their tree cover and, especially in the Central Highlands, are planted with coffee and other commodity agriculture. Their populations now have a high proportion of lowland Vietnamese in-migrants. This paper argues that this transformation is the product of two sets of strategies. One is a state strategy, set in place in the North in 1954 and extended to the South after reunification, to ‘tame’ the region, in terms both of economy and security. The other consists of the strategies of ordinary people in the plains of the North, who migrated with or without reference to the state, hoping to get rich in a region recently described in the lowlands as a ‘promised land’. State organised migration programmes, the Doi Moi process of economic reform, and the decisions and struggles of these families and individuals thus combined to bring about the transformation of the highlands. As the paper shows, however, this combination, has not been without its difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the uneven experiences of decollectivisation, using Thai Nguyen province as a setting for an exploration of divergent outcomes of, and local responses to, land allocation. Ethnicity, blood relations and settlement history are identified as emerging axes of differentiation in new patterns of vulnerability regarding access to land. This trend is evidenced by the phenomenon of farmers who migrated to the region during the collectivisation period and were subsequently left landless as longer term residents from other ethnic groups reclaimed their ancestral lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how rural households engage in different segments of non-farm wage labour markets using panel data from three Vietnamese provinces that also include perceived reasons for obtaining employment. We show that it is important to appreciate the heterogeneous nature of rural non-farm wage employment from a livelihood perspective. Different jobs vary in terms of seasonality, earning potential, social insurances, location and entrance requirements. Most notably, public service jobs are most favourable from a livelihood perspective. Regarding factors influencing participation, education has a positive effect on engagement in public and private service jobs, a negative effect on participation in construction jobs and no significant effect on employment in industry jobs. Further, family contacts are crucial in the process of finding non-farm employment in all sectors. The disaggregated approach allows a better conceptualisation and can lead to better targeted policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how tour guides position themselves in Vietnam's transition from a command economy to market socialism. The case study of the Dalat Easy Riders motorcycle guides demonstrates that tour guides take advantage of, personify and contribute to the economic, political and social transitions in the country. Relatedly, we argue that Vietnam's transition (known as đổi mới) is a key component of the Easy Riders' promotional narratives. In sum, we analyse how tour guides become tourist products in a transitional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks through what processes and for which interests the emerging Vietnamese climate change strategy is being designed, and if, ultimately, it is likely or not to be effective in the face of the looming threat. Through a review of an emerging body of literature and field observations, the paper finds the strategy partial and problematic in several ways. Its technocratic process prevents a pluralist representation of interests, obfuscating and perpetuating sectorial ones, at the expense of a more transparent and democratic resource allocation. The strategy therefore reflects and reinforces existing power relations in both politics and production. It feeds into a business-as-usual complacency, protecting national and international interests vested in unchallenged continuity, even when considering post-carbon technological fixes, which largely serve to expand capital accumulation opportunities. The article concludes that the national climate change strategy provides an illusion of intervention and security, but largely fails to identify and mitigate the underlying causes of climate change, or to lay the ground for a robust mid- and long-term adaptation strategy that can cope with yet unknown levels of climatic and other structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local communities are frequently displaced from areas selected for environmental protection. Development of nature-based tourism, believed to be more environmentally benign than traditional agricultural systems, has been encouraged by governments and national park managers in the hope of providing alternative livelihoods for local people. This paper examines the extent to which indigenous peoples resettled from within one Vietnamese national park have engaged with the nascent tourism industry, thereby providing a perspective on the success of their resettlement, through the eyes of those communities affected. The perspectives of resettled peoples are contrasted with those of villagers who have continued to reside within the national park, using traditional means of survival, along with new initiatives designed to supplement their livelihoods and to reduce their dependence on national park resources for survival. Resettled villagers are unable to survive on agricultural activity alone, tourism has done little to provide an alternate livelihood and the park environment is still threatened by the use of park resources by resettled communities in their struggle to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vietnamese state's interaction with international capital has been influenced by the Communist Party's strategy to develop a ‘socialist market economy’ which aims to maintain the leading role of the state and its one party dominance while implementing economic reforms. This is at odds with alternatives proposed by neo-liberal institutions such as the IMF and World Bank who favour a progression towards a more fully-fledged market economy coupled with political pluralism. As a result, foreign investors and the Vietnamese government have had a turbulent relationship over the past decade stemming in large part from differing perceptions of a market economy and what foreign investment should entail. This paper depicts the principal issues that lay behind the restrictive policies toward foreign tour operators through a case study of their management and regulation in Vietnam throughout the 1990s. It is argued that foreign tour operators and Vietnamese tourism authorities perceive the role of international capital in tour operations quite differently. Over-regulation has provided little space for foreign tour businesses to operate in a manner that has met their expectations, while government policies have been intent on ensuring that profits remain in the country. This paper also illustrates how social networks undermine top-down government policy directives and allow foreign tour businesses to continue operating, albeit in a complex and insecure environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining a liveable environment in Vietnam's polluted craft villages is a daily challenge for state authorities and residents. Neighbouring urban populations demand that the state effectively curtails and manages pollution, while local residents prioritise their livelihoods and routinely flout regulations. The commune official, tasked with the seemingly impossible task of environmental regulation, occupies a fraught position, torn between the imperatives and constraints of craft producers and state regulatory demands. This study of water pollution in northern Vietnam's craft villages finds that commune officials' conflicted role in environmental governance is a central factor in the failure of the current environmental governance regime, and reflects the internally conflicted nature of the Vietnamese state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the social and cultural dimensions of fish hatchery development in Vietnam and Thailand. Two detailed case studies highlight the importance of a variety of culturally mediated, informal interpersonal relationships in facilitating the establishment of new hatchery enterprises. The analysis reveals that in both Vietnam and Thailand, informal relationships are extremely effective conduits for the transfer of productive technologies from public institutions to private entrepreneurs and for the subsequent development of private enterprises. It is concluded that if current policies aimed at promoting private sector development are to be more successful, they must be better tailored to the contours of specific cultural geographies in locations where they are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two issues. First, it focuses on the question of what is the most appropriate theoretical framework for the study of the urbanisation process in China and Vietnam over the last 30 years? It is argued that Le Fefebvre's theory of the ‘production of urban space’ offers the most useful approach because the political economy it adopts helps identify the major driving forces in the urbanisation process in these formerly socialist societies. The second issue involves the investigation of the differences and similarities in the urbanisation process in the two countries that are engaged in similar processes of structural economic transformation. The conclusion suggests that despite historical and cultural differences between Vietnam and China, the urbanisation process in both countries is exhibiting converging features as both countries are adopting a form of ‘hybrid urbanisation’ that involves a combination of socialist and market economies that does not involve an inevitable move to ‘capitalism’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vietnam has a long tradition of social engineering through which the ordering of urban space has effectively been used to enforce the state's vision of political and social order. With the country currently in transition from a centrally planned to a market‐oriented economy, the ordering of urban spaces is currently all the more important. This is prominently manifested in the numerous beautification projects that are being implemented in Vietnamese cities. This article explores recent ordering endeavours and considers the way they are legitimated and contested in Vietnam's new socio‐political context. Three beautification projects in Hanoi are examined using materials from policy documents, professional journals and media coverage. The article argues that state ordering actions and the 'exemplary' urban spaces they seek to create are embodiments of a complex system of orders of powers in transitional Vietnam, in which political visions of modernist socialism and the new market‐oriented agenda are sometimes in alignment and sometimes clash. Overall, the state's failure in sustaining these 'exemplary' urban spaces is emblematic of this hybrid system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vietnamese government, along with country-based non-government organisations, are well aware of the vulnerability of Vietnam's coastal and low-lying areas to extreme weather events. Yet scant attention has been paid to extreme weather hazards affecting Vietnam's northern mountainous regions and the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers residing there. Building on conceptual tools from vulnerability, food security and sustainable livelihoods literatures, we examine the impacts of extreme weather, namely drought and severe cold spells, in Vietnam's northern uplands. We explore the degree to which these events impact the livelihood portfolios and food security of ethnic minority farmers, and examine the coping strategies households initiate, based on their ecological knowledge as well as recent market integration initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with ethnic minority Hmong and Yao semi-subsistence households undertaken yearly from 2012 to 2014, we demonstrate that financial capital - now more central to households' livelihoods than ever before due to state-sponsored agricultural intensification - is an important means for farmers to cope with extreme weather events. Yet concurrently, longstanding culturally rooted social capital, networks and ties remain critical. Nonetheless, short- and long-term adaptation is not widespread, leading us to investigate possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In colonial Southeast Asia, the process of enclosure aimed to integrate communities living in the borderlands, along with their lands and resources, into the state project. In 1891, the newly established French colonial administration in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) decided the upland region bordering China should be physically and administratively enclosed to achieve these aims. The governor general ordered the French military to administer these borderlands and to complete two surveys of local 'tribes' in 1897-1898 and 1903-1904 to make upland populations and their livelihoods more legible and, the administration hoped, more controllable. By examining details of these surveys, we not only obtain proof of this enclosure project but we also gain rare insight into and a snapshot of upland border livelihoods at the turn of the 20th century. The surveys reveal details regarding local cross-border trade strategies, marketplace manoeuvres, the means by which the colonial government enforced a common currency and, despite such attempts, the enduring nature of barter. We probe how local populations reacted to the state's processes of legibility, and in particular, how upland residents adapted their trade livelihoods to the new realities of being included within the colonial state and, progressively, within the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways by which special dishes prepared for the Chinese community festivals in the Vietnamese town of Hoi An negotiate and expand the notions of ethnic identity and place of origin of migrant groups. Although the festivals stress specific regional identities in (Imperial) China, the food consumed in the communal feasts defines much wider scopes of ethnicity and territory. By discussing these alternative scopes and comparing the feasts in two festivals, the article suggests that a new transnational ‘greater-Chinese’ identity is celebrated in contemporary Chinese-Vietnamese community festivals. The scope and importance of this new identity is analysed in relation to an imagined ‘greater-China’ as a dominant player in the forthcoming ‘Pacific Century’. The position of the culinary sphere as a privileged arena for sociocultural negotiation, especially in post-socialist authoritarian regimes, is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note offers a brief summary of recent cartographic work in the province of Lao Cai in northern Vietnam, with a specific focus on the districts of Sa Pa and Bac Ha. By providing a representation of topography in digital format, which enables a connection between demographic and physical variables, the long term aim is to illustrate the relationship between ethnicity and topography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1975, the territory within the limits of Vietnam has been subject to rapid land use changes. Agricultural colonisation by ethnic Viet in the mountains and plateaus of the Central Highlands constitutes one of the most visible trends in this process. As one of the traditional dynamics in Viet history, agricultural colonisation has contributed to the integration of marginal peoples and territories into the national body. In the province of Lam Dong, in the Central Highlands, the actual distribution and structure of the population are directly inherited from four phases of agricultural colonisation: the Colonial period (1858-1954); the regime of South Vietnam (1954-1975); the unified communist State (1975-1987); and the Vietnam of Doi Moi (1987 onwards). By analysing these phases, this article aims to show that agricultural colonisation has contributed to the penetration and consolidation of the State in such marginal territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These notes are based on observations conducted over seventeen years, including visits to projects, both structured and open ended interviews with participants and, more recently, a systematic review of reports prepared between 1991 and 1995. Results show that the principal thrust of all foreign aid projects which targeted indigenous people as preferred recipients were designed to provide access to state schooling, an education conducted in the national language and dominated by curricula objectives originating in the capital city. This is not what the people want. The preoccupation of state authorities with nation building and teaching skills that meet urban and industrial needs rather than the rural and agricultural priorities of indigenous people has contributed to the latters growing sense of alienation and eroded their sense of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]