The Enabling and Constraining Factors of Planned Intervention in Rural Vietnam: An Analysis of Government Policies and International NGO Projects

摘要

Vietnam has made remarkable achievements in economic growth, poverty reduction and improvement of food security. However, disparities between rural and urban as well as upland and lowland areas still exist. Upland areas account for 75% of Vietnam’s land surface and contain many valuable natural resources, including most of the forests in Vietnam. They are also home to some of Vietnam’s poorest people, many of them members of ethnic minority groups.Improving ethnic minorities’ land management systems and reforesting barren hills have been two major aims for policy makers. Numerous programs have been implemented in mountainous areas but have frequently failed to achieve its objectives. Both the formulation and implementation of these policies and programs have been criticised. Specifically, the top-down approach of the government and its failure to recognise local informal institutions and the strategies that shape household decision-making, has produced unintended results.Since the 1990s, numerous international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have started working in the country; most delivering services related to agricultural development and natural resource management in rural areas. Unlike government intervention, international NGO development programmes and projects often employ a bottom-up approach in order to represent the most marginalised groups in society. However, the contrast between government and NGO intervention poses a challenge to NGOs working in Vietnam. The enabling and constraining factors of planned intervention by both the Vietnamese government and international NGOs are analysed using a case study of CARE international as a representative example of NGOs working in Vietnam. Household decision-making is often affected by government policies in unintended ways, and complex, heterogonous communities are often the product of both external influence and the uncertain natural and social environments found in mountainous areas. This limits the operational space of NGOs whose activities are determined by pre-planned project designs. These NGOs often use approaches based on the transfer of technology through innovative farmers and project-created organisations as a means of intervention. However, this approach rests upon the assumption that target communities are cohesive and homogenous, which often is not the case. Based on the government programs and NGO projects analysed, planned intervention mostly benefits households that already possess significant human and social capital and are able to strategically incorporate elements in existing livelihood strategies. Many other actors are constrained by intervention as a result of dependency on consumer goods, inputs, technology for intensive farming, as well as issues of inequality and debt.