Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

8/18/2019 Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

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Forests Are GoldT R E E S , P E O P L E , A N D

E N V I R O N M E N TA L R U L E

I N V I E T N A M

PA M E L A D . M c E LW E E


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, ,

K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series EditorCentered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses

new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, ocus-

ing on the intersection o culture, ecology, and politics in global, national,

and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge

and issues rom the multiple and ofen conflicting perspectives o various

cultural systems.


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Forests Are Goldrees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

Seattle and London

.


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Publication o this book was supported by grants rom the Association or Asian Studies First

Book Subvention Program and the Rutgers University Faculty Research Council.

© by the University o Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States o Amercia

All rights reserved. No part o this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any orm

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any inormation

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing rom the publisher.

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McElwee, Pamela D., author.

Title: Forests are gold : trees, people, and environmental rule in Vietnam /

Pamela D. McElwee.

Description: Seattle : University o Washington Press, [] | Series:

Culture, place, and nature | Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

Identifiers: | (hardcover : alk. paper) |

(pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: : Forest policy—Vietnam—History. | Forest management—Vietnam—History. |Forest and community—Vietnam—History.

Classification: . | .—dc

record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/

e paper used in this publication is acid-ree and meets the minimum requirements o

American National Standard or Inormation Sciences—Permanence o Paper or Printed

Library Materials, .–. ∞


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Tis book is dedicated to the memory of Nguyễn Kiều Oanh and to my new

daughter Riley Shea Duncan—although they never had a chance to meet, I

know that they would have liked each other very much.


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Contents

Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii

Vietnamese erminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv

Introduction: Seeing the Trees and People or the Forests . . . . . . . . . . . .

Forests or Profit or Posterity? e Emergenceo Environmental Rule under French Colonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Planting New People: Socialism, Settlement,and Subjectivity in the Postcolonial Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Illegal Loggers and Heroic Rangers: e Discoveryo Deorestation in Đổi Mới (Renovation) Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rule by Reorestation: Classiying Bare Hillsand Claiming Forest Transitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Calculating Carbon and Ecosystem Services:New Regimes o Environmental Rule or Forests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Conclusion: Environmental Rule in the Twenty-First Century . . . . . .

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


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ix

-

tile ground or developing a variety o fields o inquiry including environ-

mental history, political ecology, cultural geography, and social studies o

environmental sciences. Pamela McElwee joins an already crowded field o

distinguished scholarship in one or more o these modes o studying South-

east Asia and its environment to inorm wider scholarly debates. But with

this book we now have a work that stands tall: dominating the canopy o the

dense orest, many-hued in the flowers o research that may be ound in it.

is wonderully detailed and theoretically provocative study o orest

management in Vietnam brings to ruition work that began in the late s

as McElwee visited and revisited the ield sites, amiliar and new, acrossVietnam’s highlands, with various questions. It is inormed by new discovery

that will literally reshape the environmental history o Vietnam as a field o

study. To develop her argument, McElwee stays in the woods long enough

to move through shifing paradigms in policy and public investment that

remade orests rom the source o raw natural resources into the ount o

ecosystem services.

From French colonial rule to the most recent market-oriented socialism

as Vietnam united, prospered, and entered the twenty-first century, it hasbecome a powerul growing economy that has engaged in both ambitious

conservation projects and rapid land conversion or a variety o development

initiatives. In evaluating this transition, McElwee is equally attentive to the

working o the state and other social institutions and to how orest man-

agement was experienced and occasionally shaped by the ordinary people

caught up in its processes and outcomes. She is at once concerned with what

government agents and social elites are doing, as well as deeply inormed by

the lives o armers, orest dwellers, and ethnic minorities whose existence

is rendered both visible and more precarious by the inclusion o their land

and livelihoods in national pursuits.

Issues dear to the study o colonial and postcolonial orestry elsewhere in

Foreword


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x

Southeast and South Asia are visited and analyzed defly, be it classification

and silviculture, or the regulation o access or a variety o users and benefi-

ciaries. McElwee finds that orestry was as much about orest management as

it was about social control and exclusion and the appropriation o resources

or various national and elite projects o development. But she also brings

this synthetic work across the past century and into the present one through

revisiting the same research areas. Along the way she is able to take on the

topic o ecosystem services, or which orestry is increasingly being desig-

nated as a crucial sector in tropical and sub-tropical environments. us it is

possible to see that orest management in Vietnam enables a process o envi-

ronmental rule or resources and people, reordering landscape and society

in the name o sovereign government and social assimilation o minorities.

e rise o environmental ideas and the spread o nature conservation

programs across Asia occurred in a variety o political landscapes since the

s. In many instances as extant scholarship shows the programmatic

and social outcomes relected longer colonial legacies and more recent

compulsions o national integration and economic development. How

nature conservation interacted with pacification o rontiers, incorporation

o minorities, and projects o national sel-ashioning in Asia remains a topic

o great interest.Forests Are Gold provides a comprehensive study o these processes at

work. McElwee draws well on the checkered and ast-changing political

history o Vietnam, as colonialism, reedom struggles, war, revolutionary

socialism, and globalization emerge as governing conditions through the

twentieth century or determining the ate and use o orests. Long-term

research in a rapidly transorming environment with orests renders this

a masterul work that is brimming with insight or the next generation o

social-ecological studies in Asia and beyond in a world that has been unda-mentally altered by human action.

K. Sivaramakrishnan

Yale University

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o , orests were on everyone’s mind. e country was at a low point o

tree cover, at around percent o the total land area, which was bemoaned

by officials as a mere hal o the orest estate at the twilight o colonial rule.

Vietnamese newspapers regularly published stories about the nearious

deeds o illegal loggers, and several extensive floods ocused urther attention

on the presumed link to deorestation. e official concern over orest loss

was so great that the government mobilized nearly two billion US dollars

in domestic and international unding or a massive campaign to restore

tree cover to percent o the country’s land area, which was the amount o

orest posited to exist in the mid-s. Just twelve years afer the campaignto reorest five million hectares o orests began in , the government

claimed they had met their goal.

There have been many postmortems on how (as well as i) Vietnam

achieved this outcome and what other nations can learn rom these lessons

(de Jong ; Lambin and Meyroidt ). Vietnam has been lauded as

an example o a “orest transition,” whereby states move rom net deoresta-

tion to net afforestation as they develop (Mather ). Forest transition

theory draws heavily on the “environmental Kuznets curve” postulate, whichsuggests an inverse U-shaped curve relating environmental degradation to

income; poor countries experience rising degradation and deorestation

during early developmental processes, but such patterns are replaced by

environmental cleanup and reorestation once countries reach middle-

income status (Bhattarai and Hammig ). e assumption rom these

theories is that Vietnam has undergone a orest transition because it has

strengthened its market economy since the s, and thus can be a green

success story or other nations to emulate, i only they would ollow a similar

development path.

But as I undertook fieldwork throughout this period in Vietnam, two

things struck me as not only incongruous, but incorrect, about this expla-

Preface


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nation. First, while it was true that the country was planting trees on a

monumental scale, this coincided with continuing high deorestation rates

in other areas (primarily biodiverse natural orests). At one point in the late

s, Vietnam had both the tropical world’s second highest deorestation

rate afer Nigeria, as well as the third highest afforestation rate afer French

Polynesia and Rwanda. at a country could simultaneously plant and deor-

est so many trees was not addressed anywhere in orest transition theory, and

it stood out as very strange.

Second, I had the opportunity to watch the reorestation program in

action during fieldwork in – as unding to encourage households

to plant trees trickled into the area o north central Vietnam where I was

working. What I saw on the ground was not an environmentalists’ dream

o expanding green orests, but rather a nightmare o overreliance on intro-

duced ast-growing but low-value trees that displaced native flora and auna.

e afforestation, mainly by monocropped exotic Australian eucalypts and

acacias, could not hide the continuing degradation o natural orests in

a nearby nature reserve. Social changes accompanied the spread o these

plantations as well, and rom the local point o view, the orest transition was

a process that involved struggle and contestation, not a linear pathway rom

ewer trees to more trees. Tenure over newly planted trees was highly conten-tious, and those with power and access were getting benefits rom afforesta-

tion while the poor ofen did not. Gender relations too were unequal, with

women losing rights to land as men claimed it or new orest plantations,

and the promised poverty reduction benefits rom the tree-planting program

ailed to materialize or many.

Eventually I came to a recognition that these outcomes were linked, and

not unexpected. Afforestation policy was not really aimed at “improving” the

landscapes o Vietnam or biodiversity or conservation’s sake. Rather, it was apolicy with other social and economic goals in mind: the shifing o respon-

sibility or large areas o land rom previous state-managed cooperatives to

households, the accessing o international development dollars to stave off

unemployment in a declining orest sector, and the expansion o low-quality

wood supplies or local sawmills and pulp actories. Because the afforestation

policy was not in act aimed at, and did not actually address, the underlying

drivers o environmental change and pressures on orests, it was no surprise

that reorestation and deorestation could coexist, or that the outcomes o

afforestation practice could be so ecologically and socially questionable.

Many commentators have assumed that environmental policy is primar-

ily aimed at improving the natural world, such as reducing orest degradation


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and conserving biodiversity. is book explores why that assumption is ofen

wrong. As I will show, environmental policy is at times aimed not at nature,

but at people, and ailing to acknowledge this act has resulted in numer-

ous unintended, not to mention some intentional, consequences. Vietnam

provides a prime example o this problem in action. While there has been

rising concern about processes o environmental change in Vietnam, such

as “deorestation,” and the development o many interventions and policies

deemed as “environmental” to combat these changes, this has been accom-

panied by the dispossession o orest land, particularly or poor and mar-

ginalized groups, the rise o wealthy mafia-style timber smugglers, and the

continued loss o species and biodiversity, even rom so-called “protected”

areas. ese effects are not coincidences. ey are outcomes o a situation

I term “environmental rule,” whereby states, organizations, and individuals

use environmental explanations to justiy policy interventions in other social

areas, such as populations, markets, settlements, or cultural identities. is

book outlines what environmental rule is, how it develops, and how it can

be analyzed, using the case study o orests in Vietnam.

Although I have been trained as an anthropologist as well as an environ-

mental scientist, this book is not an traditional ethnography per se. I make

use o multiple sources, including extensive work in archives in Vietnam andFrance, and numerous interviews and interactions with government officials,

international conservationists, and everyday citizens to contextualize how

orests have been subjected to various orms o environmental rule. I did

most o my fieldwork in – in Hà Tĩnh province, approximately

kilometers south o the national capital o Hanoi, along the narrow central

coast o Vietnam, thereore much o the book reers to this area, once known

as Annam under French colonialism, and which was part o the Democratic

Republic o Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) afer . Later I was ableto extend fieldwork to the provinces o Quảng Trị, ừa iên Huế, Quảng

Nam, and Đắk Lắk in – and Lâm Đồng Province in –, which

were part o the ormer South Vietnam (the Republic o Vietnam, RVN)

rom to . However, the book by necessity ocuses much more on

the experiences o environmental rule in the DRV than the RVN.

My fieldwork in – ocused on rural areas o Hà Tĩnh, and was

aimed at understanding state and local management o orests around a

protected area (the Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve, or KGNR). Hà Tĩnh was his-

torically important in several ways: it was the province in Annam with the

most orest reserves demarcated under French colonialism, and, in a not-

unrelated development, the site o well known protests o , the Nghệ


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Tĩnh Soviets, that gave rise to the Indochinese Communist Party as a serious

political movement. Hà Tĩnh was also the site o the discovery o new mam-

mals previously unknown to science in , such as the saola (Pseudoryx

nghetinhensis), which established the area’s reputation as a site in need o

biodiversity conservation.

Two major nature reserves, the Vũ Quang National Park and the KGNR,

were demarcated within Hà Tĩnh to protect the newly discovered biodiver-

sity in the s. e KGNR was described at the time o ounding as having

one o the “largest remaining blocks o broadlea evergreen orest in the

level lowlands o central Vietnam,” and according to biologists rom Birdlie

International, species o mammal, species o bird, and species o

plant could be ound there (Lê Trọng Trải et al. , vii). Despite the grand-

sounding description, however, in act the KGNR was heavily disturbed

orest, as it had been the site o past logging by numerous state-owned timber

companies or decades, until the area was declared a Watershed Protection

Forest in . Limited logging still occurred up to when the area was

converted to a nature reserve, one o over one hundred new protected areas

that were proclaimed in Vietnam in the late twentieth century.

e KGNR was not alone among the many protected areas that were

created out o the ashes o over-logged ormer timber reserves, and mostestimates agree that Vietnam has very ew remaining orests that could be

classified as primary or undisturbed (FAO ). e KGNR was also typi-

cal o many protected areas in Vietnam in that thousands o people lived

near the park boundaries and exerted pressure on the reserves’ resources,

which were now to be strictly protected behind ences and rangers. To

understand orest use around the reserve, and why the new park was so

contested, I worked in five main villages along the buffer zone, interviewing

households as well as local officials and rangers. I also implemented a stan-dardized quantitative survey on orest and land use with participating

households (the main results o these surveys can be ound in McElwee

and ).

In –, I returned to Vietnam or additional fieldwork on migration,

conservation and orest management around several protected areas in cen-

tral Vietnam. ese studies were aimed at assessing the livelihood impacts

o local ethnic minority populations on the nature reserves, as well as the

pressures o Vietnamese migration into these sites. I also had the opportunity

in – to advise the Institute or Ethnic Minority Affairs, a government

research institute, on how to proessionalize their research practices, and, as

a result, I was able to travel to a number o other sites in Vietnam to carry out


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research with them on major issues like swidden agriculture and sedentariza-

tion policies or ethnic minorities.

In the summers o and I returned to Vietnam and interviewed

stakeholders in Hanoi regarding policymaking on orest and biodiversity

issues, including a number o national figures, such as heads o departments

at the Ministry o Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) and the

Ministry o Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), the ormer head

o the national orest ranger service (Kiểm lâm), congresspeople in the

National Assembly (Vietnam’s legislative chamber), and heads o interna-

tional and local conservation NGOs and donor-unded conservation proj-

ects. My research assistant and I carried out over fify policymaker interviews

in total. Finally, since the all o , I have been working on a new research

project on payments or environmental services (PES) and orest carbon

sequestration policy (known globally as Reduced Emissions rom Deoresta-

tion and Degradation or REDD), together with a team o researchers rom

the Center or Natural Resources and Environmental Studies and the NGOs

PanNature in Hanoi and Tropenbos International Vietnam in Huế city, and

we have surveyed over our hundred households in Lâm Đồng, Sơn La,

ừa iên Huế, Kon Tum, Kiên Giang, and Điện Biên provinces on PES

and REDD policy.In addition to this local fieldwork, I have made use o inormation col-

lected at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) in Aix-en-Provence,

France in ; the National Archives o Vietnam Number (NAV) in

Hanoi in and ; the National Archives o Vietnam Number

(NAV) in Ho Chi Minh City in ; the National Archives o Vietnam

Number (NAV) in Hanoi in ; and the National Archives o Vietnam

Number (NAV) in Dalat in . As many researchers have discovered,

using the documents in the various branches o NAV can be challenging,especially in NAV where many files are not in indexes or else are deemed

too sensitive or oreign eyes. Luckily orests and conservation did not all

into this latter category (an interesting act in and o itsel ), and some o the

documents on orest policy reerenced in chapters and have not to my

knowledge been seen or used beore in the English language scholarship

on Vietnam. (All translations rom documents in Vietnamese, French, and

German used in this book are my own, unless noted otherwise.)

Additional publications were consulted at the National Library o Viet-

nam in Hanoi, the Science and Technology Library o Ho Chi Minh City,

the NGO Resource Library in Hanoi, the Social Science Inormation Library

in Hanoi, the United Nations Development Programme Library in Hanoi,


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and the small libraries o grey literature held by the Food and Agriculture

Organization, the World Wildlie Fund, and the International Union or

the Conservation o Nature, all in Hanoi. Supplemental documents were

obtained rom the very substantial Vietnamese language holdings o Sterling

Memorial Library at Yale, the Kroch Library at Cornell, the library at the

School o Oriental and Arican Studies in London, the Library o Congress,

and the Arizona State University library.

All o these sources have provided the evidence or my analysis o envi-

ronmental rule. My goal in this book is not to identiy an exact typology o

environmental rule. Rather, my goal is to illuminate what environmental rule

can look like and how it might be analyzed, whether by examining the case

study o orests in Vietnam here, or, as I hope, or my arguments to be taken

up by others to explain causes and consequences o environmental change

and social policies in other places where environmental rule can be ound.


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to completing a book, an excessive number o debts pile up. I have many

thanks to multiple unders. Grants or field research rom to were

provided by the Social Science Research Council; a Wenner Gren Founda-

tion Small Grant; and a National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology

grant no. , “e Effects o Ethnicity and Migration on Forest Use and

Conservation in Central Vietnam.” Additional unding was provided by the

Yale Center or Biospheric Studies Hutchinson Fellowship, the Yale Center

or International and Area Studies Henry Rice Hart Fellowship, a Charles

Kao Fund grant rom the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, the Yale Pro-

gram in Agrarian Studies, and the Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies.I was able to write up fieldwork findings thanks to the generosity o a Yale

University Writing Fellowship, a Teresa Heinz Scholars or Environmental

Research Fellowship, and a Switzer Foundation ellowship.

In –, I returned to Vietnam as co-principal investigator with Chris

Duncan or a project on “Environmental Consequences o State-Sponsored

Rural-Rural Migration in Southeast Asia: A Comparison o Transmigration

and Resettlement in Indonesia and Vietnam,” generously unded by the John

D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Global Securityand Sustainability Research and Writing Grant. From through ,

I received several internal grants rom Arizona State, including a aculty

development grant rom the Center or Asian Studies, which enabled me

to undertake archival research. A Global Engagement Seed Grant rom the

Office o the Vice President also unded additional interview work. In the

summers o and , I received unding rom a John D. and Catherine

T. MacArthur oundation grant to the “Advancing Conservation in a Social

Context” project.

Since , a National Science Foundation (NSF) Geography and

Regional Science Division grant no. has generously provided sup-

port or our project “Downscaling REDD policies in developing countries:

Acknowledgments


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Assessing the impact o carbon payments on household decision-making

and vulnerability to climate change in Vietnam.” My position at Rutgers has

also been supported by the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station,

and specifically Hatch unding rom the National Institute or Food and

Agriculture. My Vietnamese collaborators on this project were additionally

unded by the Economy and Environment Program or Southeast Asia or

fieldwork in , and since , they have also been supported by a US

Agency or International Development Partnerships or Enhanced Engage-

ment in Research grant titled “Research and Capacity Building on REDD+,

Livelihoods, and Vulnerability in Vietnam: Developing Tools or Social

Analysis and Development Planning.”

Anyone who has worked in Vietnam knows the importance o local

connections and sponsorships, which will make or break research success.

I have been enormously lucky in getting access to an extraordinary range

o research sites, or which I have numerous people to thank. First, Dr. Võ

Quý has been Vietnam’s preeminent conservationist or decades, and I have

been honored to know and work with him. I hope I have done justification

to his home province in the pages herein. For my work in Hà Tĩnh, Võ

anh Giang, Dr. Quý’s son, was my key contact: Giang went to numerous

meetings to make sure I got and kept my permission to work there at a timewhen almost no other oreign researchers were allowed out in rural areas. Dr.

Trương Quang Học, ormer head o the Center or Natural Resources and

Environmental Studies at Vietnam National University, deserves my hearty

thanks or agreeing to help and sponsor my research when it seemed like no

one else was interested. Dr. Hoàng Văn ắng, the current head, has taken

the baton and continued the strong support.

I have also been tremendously ortunate to have a tight-knit group o

collaborators in the past ew years. Dr. Nghiêm Phương Tuyến, Dr. Lê ịVân Huệ and Vũ ị Diệu Hương have worked closely with me on a num-

ber o projects since , some on orests, some on climate change, and

the results o each have been made better by their diligence, kindness, and

above all, senses o humor. Hương also served as my key research assistant

during – in interviewing biodiversity policy makers. Trần Hữu Nghị o

Tropenbos International Vietnam has also been an invaluable collaborator,

and his support was crucial or fieldwork in , as well as on our current

carbon orestry project. All these riends have made work in Vietnam the

past ew years not just interesting, but enjoyable.

My fieldwork in Hà Tĩnh in – was made possible with the help

o a wide number o people: Đặng Anh Tuấn, Trương anh Huyền, Nguyễn


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ái Bình, and Lê Duy Hưng served as research assistants at different points

in the project. A number o people in Cẩm Xuyên district also made my

fieldwork possible: first o all, Trần Văn Sinh and Trần ị Kim Liên o the

Non-Timber Forest Product project field office and field officers Mr. Trần

Đình Duy, Mr. Danh Viết Vị, and Mr. Hà Huy. During fieldwork in –

on ethnic minority resource use in Quảng Trị, Đào Nguyên Sinh o the

Forest Inventory and Planning Sub-Institute in Huế city and (now Dr.)

Vũ ị Hồng Anh o Syracuse University were helpul research assistants.

Since , administrative assistance or our NSF-unded project has been

provided by Dr. Đào Minh Trường, Lê Trọng Toán, and Hà ị u Huế o

CRES and Hà ị Tú Anh o Tropenbos International Vietnam. Phạm Việt

Hùng, Nguyễn Minh Hà, Ðặng Tú Loan, and Vũ ị Minh Hoa o CRES and

Nguyễn Việt Dũng, Trịnh Lê Nguyên, Nguyễn Xuân Lãm, and Nguyễn Hải

Vân o PanNature have also been instrumental in the project. Assistance was

also provided in our field site o Lâm Đồng by Mr. Ðỗ Mạnh Hùng o Bi Ðúp

Núi Bà National Park.

Additional thanks go to individuals in Vietnam who have helped in other

ways over the years, through discussions, documents, and patiently answer-

ing my questions: Võ Trị Chung and Phùng Tửu Bôi o the Forest Inventory

and Planning Institute; Dr. Lê Ngọc ắng, Dr. Lê Hải ÐưỜng, and Dr. PhanVăn Hưng o the Institute or Ethnic Minority Affairs; Hà Hoa Lý o the Ho

Chi Minh Political Academy; Koos Neees o the United Nations Develop-

ment Program; Dr. Vương Xuân Tình o the Institute or Anthropology; and

Dr. Lê Trần Chấn o the Biogeography Division o the Institute o Geography

in Hanoi, who very generously identified my plant specimens.

In the eternal struggle to speak Vietnamese properly, I have many people

to thank (and some to blame). I first encountered Vietnamese with Uncle

Long Nguyễn, a New Haven resident who generously tutored me in my firstyear at Yale, and a series o excellent teachers in Hanoi, including ầy Bình,

Cô Hương, Cô Đài, Cô Quyên, and Cô Oanh. I particularly want to thank

Cô Nguyễn Kiều Oanh and her entire extended amily, especially Hồ Quỳnh

Giang, or being my surrogate amily. Cô Oanh and Giang were more like my

mother and my sister than my teacher and her daughter-in-law whenever I

was in Vietnam. Cô Oanh sadly passed away in all o just as this book

was heading toward publication, so she was not able to see how her wayward

pupil had finally improved, but I hope I have done justice to her consider-

able efforts to make me as Vietnamese as possible. My lie in Vietnam was

also always made better by several amilies with whom I lived in Hanoi,

particularly the amily o Bác Cao Xuân Chử in –, and especially


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my landlady (and riend) throughout much o my time in Vietnam rom

–, who always made a room in her house open to me when I was

in Hanoi, Chị Đỗ ị Quỳnh.

As this work has gone through various iterations, I want to thank the

many people who read, listened, commented, and ofen challenged me on

this material. My early mentors Michael Dove, Eric Worby, K. Sivaramak-

rishnan, James C. Scott, and Helen Siu began pushing me down this path.

Others who read through my work careully and sent me in new directions

in graduate school include Nancy Peluso, Hal Conklin, and Arun Agrawal.

Various ideas and iterations o the chapters in this book that I gave at con-

erences and talks over the years have been commented on by James Rush,

George omas, Peter Zinoman, Peter Brosius, Paige West, Erik Harms,

Shivi Sivaramakrishnan, Philip Taylor, Hy Van Luong, Oscar Salemink,

Arun Agrawal, Ashwini Chhatre, Raj Puri, Andrew Mathews, Ben Kerkvliet,

and Ben Orlove, and I hope I have included their many helpul suggestions

satisactorily. I also greatly appreciate the comments rom the students

and aculty who attended talks I gave at the Cornell Southeast Asian Stud-

ies program (April ), the Berkeley Southeast Asian Studies Program

(November ), the Columbia University Workshop on Politics, Society,

Environment, and Development (September ), the Uppsala Universityworkshop on Climate Change, Environment and Society in Southeast Asia

(August ), the Vietnam Update at the Australian National University

(November ), the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies (February ),

the Boston University Global Development Seminar (April ), and the

Rutgers University Geography department (April ). Several people very

generously read some or all o this final manuscript and provided very useul

comments which strengthened my arguments considerably: Karen O’Neill,

Tom Rudel, Bernhard Huber, and Mitch Aso. I also thank the two reviewerswhose thoughts were immensely useul in shaping the inal book, along

with the editorial guidance o Lorri Hagman and Shivi Sivaramakrishan.

Vũ ị Hồng Anh and Trần Hữu Nghị did final checks o the Vietnamese

spellings in the manuscript. Subventions rom the Rutgers University Faculty

Research Council and the Association or Asian Studies First Book Subven-

tion Program helped make publication possible.

General thanks are also due to a number other people who have helped

along the way with additional ideas, suggestions, sources, and sometimes

just a distraction rom writing: Mila Rosenthal, Jenny Sowerwine, Jane

McLennan, omas Sikor, Mark Poffenberger, Mike Arnold, Nina Bhatt, Vũ

ị Hồng Anh, Huỳnh u Ba, Dương Bích Hạnh, Hoàng Cẩm, Tô Xuân


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xxi

Phúc, Patrick Meyroidt, and Kathleen Abplanalp. Charles Keith, who gave

assistance in navigating the French archives in , was deeply appreciated

by this non-historian.

At Yale, my path was made smoother by Kay Mansfield at Agrarian Stud-

ies, Kris Mooseker at Southeast Asian Studies, Elisabeth Barsa at the School

o Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Rich Richie at Sterling Library.

At Arizona State University, Gisela Grant provided useul administrative

assistance. At Rutgers, the administrative support o Kristen Goodrich,

Justine DiBlasio, and Wendy Stellatella has made work and travel to Vietnam

more manageable. I also thank William Hallman, the chair o the Depart-

ment o Human Ecology, or a semester’s leave in all to enable me to

spend time in Vietnam. My colleagues in the department o Human Ecology

at Rutgers, particularly Karen O’Neill and Tom Rudel, have also been exceed-

ingly helpul in reading through various materials I needed eedback on.

Dean Bob Goodman o the School o Environmental and Biological Studies

has also been highly supportive since my arrival at his school in .

My parents, Carl and Marge McElwee, deserve thanks or being my mail

and money managers while I was away rom the United States on many

occasions, and or being a supportive presence generally. My sister Heather

came to visit me during my last two weeks o fieldwork in , and shewas an excellent bag-carrier and travel companion as we carried out

pounds o books and surveys on my exit. And finally, my longtime partner in

Southeast Asian crime, my husband Chris Duncan, has been my best riend

and strongest supporter since we met in graduate school, including residing

with me in Vietnam in –. He has read through much o this work, but

mostly he has listened to me complain about various obstacles in fieldwork

and writing or over fifeen years, and, or that, he deserves an enormous

gold medal. What he will get instead is the completion o this book, alongwith our first child, Riley Shea, who arrived just as these pages were going

off to press, which I hope will suffice as a down payment on my many debts

o gratitude to him.


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xxiii

Because Vietnamese requires the use o diacritics to distinguish between

words with similar spellings, I use these diacritics or most words and placenames throughout the book, with the exception o words that are amiliar

to English readers: or example, Vietnam rather than Việt Nam, Hanoi

rather than Hà Nội, and Ho Chi Minh, rather than Hồ Chí Minh. Where

Vietnamese proper names do not have diacritics (such as some sources in the

bibliography), it is because the authors themselves choose not to use them.

đất trống empty lands, waste lands

Định Canh Định Cư e Fixed Cultivation and Sedentarization Program

đổi mới Renovation, an open door economic and political policy

đồi trọc Bare hills

Khai hoang “Clear the Wilderness” program

Kiểm lâm Forest Protection Department, or orest ranger service

Kinh Ethnic Vietnamese

lâm tặc Illegal logger

lâm trường State Forest Enterprise, or state-owned logging company

rẫy Swidden agriculture

rừng Forest

Rừng là vàng “Forests are gold,” a quote rom Ho Chi Minh

sào Local land measurement unit, equivalent to m in northern Vietnam,

m in central Vietnam, and m in southern Vietnam. In this text,

m

is the standard.Việt Minh League or the Independence o Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh

Vietnamese Terminology


25/55


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xxv

ARBCP Asia Regional Biodiversity Conservation Program

ANT Actor-Network eory

CAOM Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, France

CHER Cultural, Historical, Environmental and Landscape Reserve

DRV Democratic Republic o Vietnam (also known as North Vietnam)

EVN Electricity o Vietnam

FCPF Forest Carbon Partnership Facility

FCSP Fixed Cultivation and Sedentarization Program

FIPI Forest Inventory and Planning Institute

MHRP Five Million Hectare Reorestation Program

FPDF Forest Protection and Development Funds

FULRO Front Unifié de Lutte des Races Oprimées (Unified Front or the

Liberation o the Oppressed Races)

GGI Government General o Indochina

ICP Indochinese Communist Party

ICRAF World Agroorestry Center

KGNR Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve

KL Kiểm lâm: Forest Protection Department

MARD Ministry o Agriculture and Rural Development

MEA Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

MOF Ministry o Forestry

MOIT Ministry o Industry and Trade

MONRE Ministry o Natural Resources and Environment

NAV National Archives o Vietnam

NTFPs Non-Timber Forest Products

Abbreviations


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xxvi

NXB Nhà Xuất Bản: publishing house

PAM Programme Alimentaire Mondial : World Food Program

PES Payments or Environmental Services

REDD Reduced Emissions rom Deorestation and Degradation

RSA Résident Supérieur o Annam

RST Résident Supérieur o Tonkin

RUPES Rewarding Upland Poor or Environmental Services project

RVN Republic o Vietnam (also known as South Vietnam)

SFE State Forest Enterprise

SIDA Swedish International Development Agency

SRV Socialist Republic o Vietnam

STS Science and Technology Studies

SWAT Soil and Water Assessment Tool

UN-REDD United Nations’ Reduced Emissions rom Degradation and

Deorestation Program

USAID United States Agency or International Development

VND Vietnamese đồng , the currency unit o Vietnam

VNFF Vietnam Forest Protection and Development Fund

VNFOREST General Directorate o Forestry

WWF World Wildlie Fund


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30/55

, ’ -

leader, once amously remarked,“Forests are gold; i we know to protect and

develop them well, they will be very precious.” For many years, orest rang-

ers and government officials told me that this phrase was uttered by Ho in

, during the dedication o Cúc Phương National Park, the independent

state o North Vietnam’s first designated protected area. is expression o

environmentally conscious engagement was striking given the timing: in

the early s conflict with South Vietnam was escalating into what would

become the US–Vietnam War. e act that the president o North Vietnam

would take time off rom revolutionary struggles to personally attend thepark’s opening ceremony, I was told on multiple occasions, was a testament

to the country’s emergent conservationist sensibilities. Ho’s shortened catch-

phrase, “orests are gold” (rng là vàng ), subsequently became a slogan afer

his death, which was repeated in government campaigns to plant trees and

protect biodiversity (see figure I.).

I soon discovered that this version o the story was not quite right. ere

is no record o Ho’s speech at Cúc Phương in , or o his even making

that trip. But he did say “orests are gold” at an event in that had noth-ing to do with biodiversity or conservation. On August , President Ho

met with two-hundred delegates to the Mountainous Areas Party Educa-

tion Conerence in Hanoi. The conerence aimed to review propaganda

work and assess what was needed to move solidly towards socialism, and

Ho exhorted cadres to improve their efforts to spread party ideology into

the mountainous hinterlands, especially among the ethnic minorities that

made up much o the population. His talk covered a wide range o issues,

rom how to introduce theoretical and political concepts to the masses to

how to expand collectivized agriculture. By the middle o the speech, Ho also

insisted that environmental campaigns were part o the work o making new

citizen-subjects. He urged the assembled delegates,

Introduction

Seeing the Trees and People or the Forests


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All o you need to pay urgent attention to orest protection. I the situation

continues where our ethnic compatriots destroy a little, then the state

agricultural arms destroy a little, then industrial arms destroy a little, even

i a survey team that is inspecting local geology also destroys a little, then it

is damaging. Destroying the orest is easy, but bringing about orests again

will take us decades. Large-scale deorestation in this way will cause great

impacts: on climate, on production, and on lie. We ofen say ‘Gold orests,

silver seas.’ Forests are gold; i we know to protect and develop them well,

they will be very precious.

is vision o a strong nation, encompassing marginalized ethnic minori-

ties in the remote borderlands, united in protecting and replanting orests or

climate regulation and agricultural production, contrasts with the image that

contemporary environmentalists provide o President Ho laying the oun-

dations or wildlie and biodiversity preservation or conservation. Yet the

speech encapsulates much that is noteworthy about orest policy in Vietnam,

particularly the ocus on the confluence o nature, the state, and citizens. e

. Ho Chi Minh’s phrase “Forests are gold; i we know to protect and develop

them well, they will be very precious” at the entrance to a protected watershed orest in

Lâm Đồng Province, . Photo by author.


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overall gist o Ho’s message is clear: orests are about more than trees. ey are

about the management o people as subjects and nature as an object.

Environmental policy is ofen presented as a tool to shape “things,” such as

plants, soils, or water, rather than people. What this study o orest manage-

ment in Vietnam over the last century instead reveals is that environmental

interventions have never been exclusively about “nature” or ecology, but

rather about people and society, as Ho Chi Minh suggested. Although labeled

as “environmental,” many policies and actions directed at orests were in act

about the supply o wood or a war-torn nation, the movement and control

o people in sensitive remote areas, or the prolonging o state employment in

a declining orest sector. In other words, orest policy in Vietnam has rarely

been about ecological management or conservation or nature’s sake, but

about seeing and managing people, a strategy I term “environmental rule.”

Environmental rule occurs when states, organizations, or individuals use

environmental or ecological reasons as justification or what is really a concern

with social planning, and thereby intervene in such disparate areas as land

ownership, population settlement, labor availability, or markets. Imposing a

vision on landscapes has always been a role o the state (Scott ; Sivara-

makrishnan ; Peluso and Vandergeest ). What is unique about envi-

ronmental rule is that while the justification or intervention is to “improve” or“protect” the environment itsel, in reality, underlying improvements to people

or society are envisioned. For example, a policy on watersheds may really be

about resettling ethnic minorities perceived to be opposed to the state; a policy

on restricting timber sales may be about controlling revenues or a orestry

agency rather than stopping illegal logging. One practical example can be

seen in the treatment o the practice o swidden (or shifing) agriculture, a

long-standing system among many highland dwellers in tropical Asia to rotate

or interplant agricultural crops with orests (Dove ), but which has beenopposed by all political authorities in successive regimes in Vietnam. Attempts

to control or prevent swidden agriculture have always relied on ecological

explanations, such as avoiding soil erosion on slopes or loss o biodiversity

in cultivated landscapes, but in nearly every case, the ecological “science”

underlying these justifications has been sparse, while the social pressures to

assimilate ethnic minorities to ethnic majority customs, resettle them out o

economically valuable orests, or simply extract more tax revenue rom them,

have been the clearest concerns driving so-called “environmental” policy.

Environmental rule provides a useul lens or understanding policy

interventions and outcomes that at first glance might appear incongruous or

inconsistent. e concept offers a clearer explanation or the interventions


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directed at nature, which have not been confined to linear patterns o capi-

talism, socialism, or neoliberalism, as others have asserted (Prudham ;

Humphreys ; Peet et al. ). Rather, policies or the environment ofen

emerge out o unexpected relational interactions between people, ideas, and

objects—what have been called “networks o rule” (Miller and Rose ).

By comparing and contrasting these myriad processes and networks we can

see how different projects o environmental rule are ormed, how they oper-

ate, and how they transorm action on the ground (or ail in these attempts,

as the case may be). Environmental rule is not static, but transorms over

time. Forest policies under the French colonial regime in Indochina were

characterized by top-down state power and undemocratic coercion in the

demarcation o orest reserves and restrictions on woodland use by locals.

Yet by the end o the twentieth century, discussions o ree markets and local

participation, with an emphasis on voluntary and individual efforts or orest

carbon conservation, dominated policy. In both cases, however, what looked

on the surace like interventions directed at orests were in reality directed at

changing the location, conduct, and even the identities o people themselves.

e shifs in ocus o environmental rule over time, and o the people

and institutions that enorce or engage in ruling and those subject to it,

also highlights the act that environmental rule is always co-produced inthe sense that both natural and social ormations are created and mutually

reinorce each other, and that objects o rule (whether people or trees) ofen

have their own ideas which differ rom those o the rulers. Environmental

rule does not get implemented in a vacuum—it is inluenced by global

knowledge networks that circulate shifing ideas, concepts and classifica-

tions about “nature” or the “environment,” the resistance o human subjects

to doing what they are told to do, and even by the physical properties o the

environment itsel. Co-production implies that we cannot look solely orpower and orce in our discussions o environmental rule; we must seek out

the ways representations, identities, knowledge, and culture meld together

to subtly direct human action towards some goals and not others, and the

important effects that physical constraints, such as tree growth rates, water

supplies, or soil chemical content might have on nature-society interactions.

To show how environmental rule arises and evolves, this book assesses

orest policy and management in Vietnam during the long twentieth century,

rom roughly , the beginning o ormal French colonial rule, to the

present day, and draws on several years o anthropological fieldwork in rural

areas o Vietnam (see map I.), extensive interviews with numerous state

and local officials, NGOs, and donors, and archival work in Vietnam and


34/55

Lào Cai

Nghệ An

Hà Tĩnh

Đ k L k

Lâm Đồng

NORTHWESTMOUNTAINS

NORTHEAST

MOUNTAINS

RED RIVER

DELTA

NORTH CENTRAL

COAST

SOUTH CENTRAL

COAST

CENTRAL

HIGHLANDS

SOUTHEAST

MEKONG

DELTA

QuảngTrị

Thừa ThiênHuế

QuảngNam

Gia Lai

Sơn La

ThanhHoá

ĐồngNai

Kẻ Gỗ NatureReserve

Sóc

Trăng

Yên Bái

Cao Bằng

Điện Biên

Hà

Giang

KiếnGiang

Kon Tum

Cúc PhươngNational Park

110 km

Scale

Hanoi

Ho Chi MinhCity

Bi Đúp- Núi BàNational Park

. Regions and provinces o Vietnam showing locations o field-

work mentioned in text. Base map rom Vietnam location map by Uwe

Dedering on Wikimedia Commons. Map redrawn by author.


35/55

France. is historical-ethnographic approach contrasts with other histories

and policy studies, which oten take or granted the existence o a clear

problem like “deorestation,” which is then explained in terms o a theoretical

approach like population growth (Kummer ). Instead, thinking o orest

policy as a orm o environmental rule asks how particular issues come to be

posed as problems in need o solutions (that is, as justifications or “rule”)

in the first place. Epistemological questions become especially relevant in

this exercise, as divergent conceptions o orests have influenced different

pathways o environmental rule, and definitions o the social and biological

processes that are called deorestation and reorestation have shifed over

time and among different actors.

Environmental rule is not just a power or governance problem—involving

the state and subject peoples over contested resources—and not just an epis-

temological problem o how orests are defined and classified, but it is always

an ontological problem as well (Carolan ). e physical properties and

materiality o the world, or in our case, the lands and trees o Vietnam, have

strongly influenced the policies and practices that are applied to them. Trees

are not merely material objects acted on by people, but can be social actors in

and o themselves. For example, specific biological properties o tree species

(such as a demand or water or or being planted at certain distances romother trees in order to grow) may require distinct types o active labor or

afforestation, which may in turn require certain types o policies and social

relations. However, a ocus on ontology does not mean that “nature” is a

thing outside o human action: where trees can now be ound in Vietnam

has less to do with simple ecological actors o soil or climate and much more

to do with social, economic, and political decisions o human actors. Trees

and people together have remade each other in compelling and contingent

ways through the interplay o power and politics, knowledge, and materiality.

What are the orests o Vietnam like, and how have they been understood?

e answer to those questions varies across space and time; species com-

mon a century ago are now rare, and introduced species, like eucalypts and

acacias that now dominate much o the landscape, were once nonexistent.

Tree products etching astronomical prices in the eighteenth century, like

Vietnamese cassia (Cinnamomum loureiroi), can now be had or less than

the price o a bowl o soup. Many households once dependent on local

orests or ood and uelwood or subsistence now rely instead on planting


36/55

global commodities like rubber or coffee or cash. e common theme or

Vietnam’s orests has been change.

Early adventurers to the Far East ofen remarked upon the scale and scope

o Vietnam’s orest resources, particularly the high number o economically

valuable species in international trade, notably with China. A naval officer

on the American brig Franklin, which pulled into Saigon harbor in ,

wrote o the riches o the Cochinchinese countryside:

e orests, besides the various kinds o odorierous woods, such as

the eagle, the rose, the sappan, and others, afford iron-wood, several

species o the varnish-tree, the dammer or pitch tree, the gambooge,

the bamboo, and the rattan, besides a great variety o woods useul in

dyeing, in construction, and the mechanic arts. e country produces,

also, cinnamon, honey, wax, peltry o various kinds, areka, betel, tobacco,

cotton, raw silk, sugar, musk, cassia, cardomums, some pepper, indigo,

sago, ivory, gold dust, rhinoceroses’ horns, and rice o six different kinds.

(White , –)

e allure o timber or navel shipbuilding attracted European attention, and,

less than fify years afer White’s initial description, the French establishedsuzerainty over Vietnam’s orests, justified not only by colonial demands

or resources, but by concerns the orest estate was being wasted by native

populations. Dr. Clovis orel, a French naval doctor with an interest in

botany, wrote o his concerns:

In terms o orestry all peoples o Indochina, including the Chinese, only

know ways o destroying orests. Everywhere they burn orests, whether

to grow orest rice, maize and cotton; to clear land so they can more easily

move about and hunt animals; or, as we saw so many times, to simply

distract themselves. is barbaric habit is general, and one can confirm

that each year hal o the total area o orestland in Indochina, even on

many mountainsides, is ravaged by fire. is practice, so contrary to

orest management in cold and temperate climates, is riddled with serious

problems. . . . e practice o excessively stoking up fires, however, shows

a genuine disregard or conservation which one cannot help but deplore

the more one travels through the region. ere are only a ew rare places,

distant rom populations, where truly virgin orests grow in all their ull

power and grandeur, a state that orests so easily obtain in this climate.

(orel [], –)


37/55

Yet despite this plea that orest management needed to ocus on native

practices to ensure conservation o resources, a ew decades later the French

colonial orestry project was also to come in or critique. Well-known French

geographer Pierre Gourou provided a rank assessment o the state o Viet-

nam’s orests to colonial administrators, noting that more than fify years o

French rule, with its ocus on private concessions or timber cutting, had

done little to conserve resources and had in act accelerated degradation in

many ways, leaving orests “poor in valuable wood” and providing “not a

centime o revenue” to impoverished residents near orests, given state and

commercial control (Gourou , ).

Forests, degraded though they were by the mid-twentieth century, served

another key unction at the close o colonial rule: as important hideouts or

resistance fighters during the more than thirty years o war that began in the

s. e revolutionaries’ strategic use o orests or concealment eventually

spurred the US military to spray herbicides in South Vietnam to remove

vegetation cover along roads, canals, and other transportation arteries, as

well as in dense jungles that were suspected o being supply routes or the Ho

Chi Minh Trail. Over two million hectares o orests, ranging rom coastal

mangroves to high canopy dipterocarp orests, were subjected to herbicide

attacks, including the deoliant Agent Orange, over the course o the war(Westing ). At the same time that US orces tried to systematically

eliminate orests in South Vietnam, the need or a steady supply o wood

or domestic use and wartime needs preoccupied North Vietnam. Forestry

development complemented the process o collectivizing agriculture in the

new socialist state, and building a new nation required building new orest

institutions and practices as well. Large-scale State Forest Enterprises (SFEs)

or logging were ounded to provide the state with timber rom wherever it

could be useully cut, and to encourage socialist labor practices in the ruralmountains, and were extended to the south afer the reunification o the two

sides at the close o the US–Vietnam War in .

e cessation o war brought peace, but years o isolation, until Vietnam

again became the site o new attention to orests afer international con-

servation organizations tentatively ventured back into the country in the

late s. The discovery o several new mammals previously unknown

to science highlighted the act that Vietnam’s orest estate, while degraded,

diminished, and ragmented, still held new orms o value. International

donor aid flowed back into the country and was used to set up new nature

reserves in previously overlogged orest enterprises. One o these new or-

est reserves was the Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve (KGNR) on the north central


38/55

coast, established in late with a total area o , hectares, ostensibly

to protect habitat or two endangered species o pheasant. Prior to this

designation, Kẻ Gỗ had been the site o logging by our different SFEs, and

was mostly composed o degraded secondary orests (in act, Kẻ Gỗ in Viet-

namese means “place with timber”). Approximately , people lived in

the buffer zone o the new reserve, many o them migrants who had moved

to the remote area as part o state development plans in the high socialism

o the s. ese communities depended on orests to provide lumber

or houses, uelwood, charcoal, and non-timber orest products (NTFPs)

that could be sold to supplement poor agricultural harvests in the area. Kẻ

Gỗ, where I did a year o fieldwork rom to , was an ideal site or

exploring the challenges o orest conservation and development in Vietnam.

Upon arriving in the all o , I met local village headmen to introduce

mysel and share the proposed schedule o my research with them. One o

my very irst conversations in the village nearest the nature reserve was

with the elderly Uncle ông, who had been sitting outside the headman’s

house, waiting or a meeting on party issues. With his close-cropped grey

hair, olive-green army jacket, and pith helmet with the red star emblem o

the Socialist Republic o Vietnam (SRV) on it, he looked the very model

o a supportive citizen-subject. He inquired about what I was researching,conusing my presence with those o the oreign conservation groups that

had visited beore to help set up park activities. Despite assuring him that

I was in his village to objectively understand the impact o orest policies

on local peoples, he remained skeptical. “Hmmm,” he harrumphed, and

pointed at me, “You want to make a ‘civilized environment’ [môi trường văn

minh], but we here are the ones who have to implement it.” I asked him to

explain urther what he meant. He began to speak about being excluded

rom the orest reserve since it was demarcated a ew years earlier in ,a process that had involved deployment o new government rangers and

ences or boundary marking, despite the act that local people were doubt-

ul the endangered pheasants could even be ound here, given the degraded

nature o orests. Using the small bamboo table where we were drinking

tea to represent the area o the Kẻ Gỗ orest, he began to move the little

teacups around to represent villages that had lost access to the reserved

area. Uncle ông argued that relinquishing old lands and ocusing on new

environments took getting used to, as i a village were moved to Germany,

at which point he abruptly sent a cracked cup off the table to a chair by his

side. “is village,” he said, pointing at the German teacup, “would have to

learn a new language, new customs, a new environment to survive. Well,


39/55

it’s the same here, even i the distance is not.” I nodded and asked whether

he had raised these concerns about loss o orest access and social identity

with authorities, since he was a Party member and highly involved in village

issues. He shook his head no. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said emphatically,

“I’m enthusiastic about protecting the orest ( phấn khởi về bảo vệ rng ), but

I want to emphasize that this orest is also or the livelihoods o the people,

as well as or birds and animals.”

Uncle ông was an ambivalent subject o the new orms o environ-

mental rule that had been applied to the orests o the Kẻ Gỗ area, and his

uneasiness with the type o conduct that he should be involved in, such as

supporting demarcation o state orests to protect a pheasant no one had ever

seen, reflected many people’s uncertainty regarding care o the environment.

e concerns Uncle ông expressed, that the conservation o orests, while

presented as justified on ecological grounds, had required great sacrifices

rom local people and involved degrees o social engineering that citizens

long accustomed to top-down state policy ound uncomortable, can be seen

across multiple times and places in Vietnam. Contrasting and competing

visions and histories o orests as valued, but endangered; as occupied by

local peoples, but in need o protection rom them; as rich in resources, but

poor in economic benefits, have stretched across different generations, andhave influenced how environmental rule has emerged.

Given my ocus on understanding orest socio-ecologies, this study alls

clearly into a field o inquiry known as political ecology. Political ecology

aims to produce nuanced descriptions o resource use that go beyond simple

biophysical explanations or environmental change, and instead looks atsocial influences and practices at multiple scales (Blaikie and Brookfield

; Blaikie ). For political ecologists, “nature,” like capitalism or

socialism, is not a fixed real entity; it is a concept o the imagination that

must be conceived and described by actors rom their being in and o the

world (Ingold ). us it is the task o political ecologists to understand

“the underlying processes through which particular global assemblages o

nature and society are produced” (Braun , ). Authors working in

this field have used a number o heuristic devices to reer to these complex

socio-natures that combine nature and culture; or example, geographers

have oten called these assemblages hybrid landscapes (Robbins a;

Whatmore ; Zimmerer ). Other recent work has ocused on the


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orms in which nature/culture combinations have been realized, such as

in discussions about “technonatures,” “post-humanist natures,” or “multi-

species interactions” (Braun ; Haraway ; Kirksey and Helmreich

). Perhaps the most prominent expression o this view is the recent

declaration that we are now living in the Anthropocene, a geological age

under total human influence (Zalasiewicz et al. ). Complementing these

approaches, this book’s case study o environmental rule at work shows the

implementation o policy as complicated by ideas, identities, and physical

properties o the environment that combine to result in ormations that can-

not be clearly identified as either exclusively social or natural.

My characterization o environmental rule as a unique but understudied

phenomenon, and a key process in the creation o nature-society hybrids,

owes much to Foucault’s work on “governmentality,” which irst turned

attention in the study o politics rom the sources o sovereign state power

to “relations o knowledge, authority and subjectivity” (Miller and Rose

, ). Foucault believed that government was essentially a way to influ-

ence the “conduct o conduct,” in his well-known ormulation. is change

rom previous studies was remarkable; power had long been seen as thatwhich was wielded by the state monopoly on violence, in Weber’s phrasing,

a kind o “negative, exterior” power (Mitchell , ). Ater Foucault,

government could instead be seen as interior and productive, “a domain o

strategies, techniques and procedures through which different orces seek to

render programs operable, and by means o which a multitude o connec-

tions are established between the aspirations o authorities and the activities

o individuals and groups” (Miller and Rose , ). It was these diffuse

orms o power which Foucault amously labeled governmentality (Foucaultet al., ).

By turning away rom studies o states and regulations and towards

knowledge, networks, and practices, a more complex, realistic, and con-

tingent picture o governance emerges (Dean ). Yet applications o

governmentality to the environmental field have remained somewhat more

limited. Environmental rule provides a clear example o how those seeking

to change the “conduct o conduct” around the natural world have needed to

engage new orms o authority, drawing less on power and laws, and more on

knowledge, norms, and cultural approaches. A ocus on environmental rule

asks us to look not just at the means and measures by which environmental

action is encouraged and enorced in specific policies and projects, but at the


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ignored. ese practices taken together set the stage or later detailed inter-

ventions in conduct.

For this case study o orests in Vietnam, as a first step orests must be

deined as objects o action and classiication and enumeration o what

constitutes a orest in a particular setting must be carried out. While it might

at first seem easy to identiy an object as a orest, to make it visible, it is in

act a complex procedure. ere are standardized definitions o “orests”; or

example, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) o the UN defines

orest as “land with tree crown cover (or equivalent stocking level) o more

than percent and area o more than . hectares” (FAO ). However,

even standard deinitions contain points o ambiguity, such as “whether

various types o tree crops are to be defined as orest, as well as the point at

which allow in regeneration comes to be classified as orest” (Fairhead and

Leach , ). Definitions and classifications o “orest” thus ofen come to

be based primarily on political or economic actors (Peluso and Vandergeest

; Agrawal ). Trees themselves contribute to the problem and create

ecological messiness—different plants grow various types o woody mate-

rial, to different heights, in different places—which complicates attempts at

classification. Typologies o orests, such as eco-types or biomes, are hard

to standardize: some classification systems rely on lea type (deciduous orconierous), climate (temperate or tropical), physiognomy (old growth or

secondary growth), or dominant plant type (Douglas fir or teak orests).

ere is no global standard classification system in place, and many countries

use idiosyncratic systems based on local histories or useulness o certain

species.

In Vietnam, orest classification and reclassification happens regularly.

From the colonial era, when the first lists o tree species were made, to the

socialist era, which ocused on timber-rich areas or the construction o anew nation, through to the modern era, when remotely sensed data show

the carbon content o orests, classification has remained important. How

orests are classified plays an extraordinarily important role in how they are

later managed, and labels or certain orest types, such as those classified as

“pristine” or “intact” versus “degraded” or “ragmented,” then become rally-

ing cries and justifications or specific orms o environmental rule (Forsyth

and Walker ). e concept o “intact orest” carries with it associations

o certain types o management (or example, ofen directed by the state),

which would differ i we were to call the same plot o land a “tree arm,” a

“plantation,” or a “field” (which might be managed by individuals). us

classification and definitions o orest are crucial moments, rom defining


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a orest worthy o protected areas status to definitions o what constitutes a

“tree,” and these patterns o classification have real material consequences.

For example, designations o certain lands in Vietnam as “bare hills,” even

though these lands were being actively managed or other uses, turned them

into targets o reorestation projects in the s. ese classifications ended

up dispossessing poor amilies and women o sites or pasturage or uelwood

in avor o richer amilies who planted exotic eucalyptus or pulp actories

(chapter ).

Next, orests, once they have been defined, must be made visible, usu-

ally through mapping. Maps are key to environmental rule: management

regimes, land tenure politics, and unding practices all center on the idea

that a orest must exist in certain designated areas i it is ound on a map. e

production o seemingly objective maps that represent biophysical reality is

in act a largely political process, as many geographers have long asserted

(Kitchin and Dodge ). Within Vietnam, French authorities ofen made

maps even when there had been no on-the-ground assessment o actual land

types, labeling large green swaths o the countryside o Indochina simply as

unexplored orests ( forêt inexplorée). Later Vietnamese authorities strongly

promoted one speciic visualization o orests: a map made by a French

orester that claimed that Vietnam had percent orest cover in (map.). Despite the act that this map made clear there were very ew areas

o rich or primary orest remaining afer years o colonial exploitation, the

picture was later reproduced by authorities in the s and became an

important tool to guide a massive reorestation program. Even advances

in mapping technology, moving rom the hand-drawn cartography o the

colonial era to advanced satellite imagery today, has not obviated the need

to pay attention to how maps present certain views and not others, and the

ways in which these images are contested (Robbins b).Finally, processes o environmental change must be defined, or ramed,

and some identified as problems. at is, deorestation must be named beore

it is noticed. When the processes that make up land use change happen, such

as cutting lumber or burning shrubs or pasture, they appear to be less o

a problem i they are not called “deorestation.” Definitions o what counts

as deorestation have shifed over time, and rom actor to actor, providing

rich opportunities to see knowledge creation and policy mobilization in

practice. Ofen, these discourses o deorestation could be more accurately

described as a type o “environmental orthodoxy,” as Timothy Forsyth has

termed them; these orthodoxies are “institutionalized, but highly criticized

conceptualizations o environmental degradation” that continue to circulate


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and influence real-world policy decisions, even when they have been shown

to be inadequate, simplistic, or downright wrong (Forsyth , ). All too

ofen, these orthodoxies are constructed at a distance, and are aimed not at

understanding the underlying dynamics o change, but how these changes

might be halted or harnessed or already determined goals o improvement

(Li ). These orthodoxies demonstrate how important the raming

o problems is, and how crucial politics and power is in allowing certain

ramings to dominate and circulate above other alternative understandings;

Maarten Hajer has termed this process the creation o “discourse coalitions”

(). e new explanation we can add, via the lens o environmental rule,

is that these narratives and discourses ofen circulate and become supported

by coalitions because they are helpul in masking the true reasons or so-

called “environmental” interventions.

Within Vietnam, contemporary concerns over deorestation oten

ocused on the idea that orest change in the late twentieth century was rapid,

extensive, and linked solely to human population movement and growth.

Yet even in the nineteenth century, French authorities bemoaned the lack o

primary orests on their arrival, and re-imagined vast areas o Vietnam as

dense orest that must have been lost to deoresting natives in the recent past.

In reality, deorestation has been ambivalently addressed by the state and bycitizens, with some deorestation seen as necessary by policy makers (or

example, state logging) and other types o deorestation in need o reorm

(such as ethnic minorities practicing swidden agriculture). How certain

orest use practices became problems, and coalitions and networks built to

tackle these problems, while others were ignored, is taken up in each o the

chapters o the book, as these problematizations have changed over time.

-: ‘’

Governmentality and environmental rule are both undamentally under-

girded by knowledge production. Scholars have placed emphasis on the

act that knowledge is not, as positivists have long claimed, a way to render

the real world understandable in objective ways; rather, knowledge produc-

tion makes an object real, and thus “susceptible to evaluation, calculation

and intervention” (Miller and Rose , ). Ideas about the world and

its problems are produced and co-produced by multiple actors, and ofen

require particular technologies in order to be conceptualized; sociologist

Michel Callon has termed these tools “dispositifs de calcul ,” or calculative

mechanisms, that render or translate newly visible problems into discrete


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parts amenable to solutions (Callon, ). We can think o the many tools

by which much early state authority operated, or example, which were in

act knowledge tools and calculative mechanisms: maps to fix borders and

boundaries, geological explorations o the best soils or cash crops, or the

use o statistics to represent orests (Agrawal ; Demeritt ). It also

becomes important to have inormation about orest users via similar tools.

Classification o peoples, particularly indigenous or marginalized ones, and

landscapes ofen operate in tandem; it is not a coincidence that at the same

time as orests have been studied and mapped, so too have nearby popula-

tions become the object o ethnographic and spatial gazes (Sivaramakrishnan

, ; Bose et al. ). All are mechanisms o calculation that enable

knowledge to be turned into interventions: moving populations, taxing

them, or asking them to replant orests and protect species. Environmental

rule depends on these calculation techniques because policy ofen becomes

less controversial and less political i it can be cast in the dry languages o

data and science. For example, a map that shows plans to confiscate land

rom households would quickly arise ire and protest, but a map showing the

location o endangered species that need to be protected (and which ignores

the social impacts o such intervention by leaving out settlements or people),

might be ar less controversial.Further, production o knowledge ofen requires, and indeed orms the

parameters o, expertise, and governmentality scholars have documented the

concurrent rise o experts within the modern problematics o government

(Mitchell ) as well as documenting the authority that this expertise cre-

ates (Li ; Mathews ). Experts are regularly called upon to help enact

environmental rule, and ofen, expertise and authority become intertwined

as ruling actors emerge. Others have written o the “perormativity o data”

(Waage and Benediktsson ): to have statistics, reports, inventory dataand the like is to be able to perorm this expertise. “Science” is regularly

invoked in the construction o expertise or rule, usually with an eye to

asserting the apolitical and objective nature o scientific inquiry. Yet the

practice o science itsel is a orm o politics, and it needs to be incorporated

in any analysis o policy outcomes (Jasanoff ; Forsyth ). It is also

important to recognize in any analysis that knowledge production under

environmental rule is never simply top-down rom experts, but is oten

multiaceted, as it is influenced by co-production: local knowledge can have

as important an eect on the way rule is enorced or resisted as ormal,

“scientific” knowledges (Birkenholtz ; Peluso ).

We can see how these processes play out in the production o knowledge


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or environmental rule or orests. First and oremost, forests must be given

value through expert knowledge and mechanisms of calculation. Specialized

training in orestry grew throughout the nineteenth century, centered on

Germany and France (Scott ), and spread throughout the world via

colonial management techniques and eventually the emergence o a global

institution, the Food and Agriculture Organization, where “expert” oresters

provided calculative techniques or timber production, smallholder manage-

ment, and other approaches (Vandergeest and Peluso b). Mechanisms

o calculation or orest knowledge have included orest mensuration

inventories to determine species, age, volume and orm o timber-producing

trees; test plots to measure regrowth afer cutting; working plans to rotate

cutting throughout a orest to even out age classes; studies o the hydrologi-

cal impacts o orest cover; and genetic manipulation and breeding o tree

species (Galudra and Sirait ; Mathews ). rough these techniques,

“expertise” about orestry becomes privileged; that is, specialized training in

orestry as a science and discipline becomes valued over local knowledge o

actual orests in specific places.

Knowledge-ormation about orests in Vietnam has ocused on a ew

key themes, but what they share in common is a ocus on knowledge that

is generated by elites, and then internationalized and articulated by ormalinstitutions. French colonial orestry research, explored in chapter , dwelled

on the links between orests, hydrology, and slope, influenced substantially

by the experience in the metropole with Alpine floods. Knowledge orma-

tion about orests in Vietnam has always been highly internationalized, even

when economically cut off rom much o the Western world at the close o

the US-Vietnam War. Economic bedellows in the socialist bloc, namely

Eastern Europeans and Russians, provided training and research on orest

composition that was developed in the cold temperate regions o Europe, andwhich was not always relevant to the tropical diversity o Vietnam (chapter

). e arrival o multilateral donors and global conservation NGOs in the

past twenty-five years has resulted in unding shifs to ocus on species bio-

diversity and landscape conservation (chapter ). e most recent approach

to knowledge generation has reverted back to a ocus on orests or climate

regulation, as new attention has ocused on the idea o orests as providers

o “environmental services” (chapter ).

Expertise has shifed over time as well, as environmental rule is character-

ized by diffuse knowledge and discourse coalitions that are ofen temporarily

strong, but unstable. From colonial oresters who were required to be trained

at the metropolitan orestry school in France, to contemporary orestry


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officials who need to be fluent in a bewildering array o acronyms or par-

ticipation in international carbon projects, expertise has varied. So too have

varying concepts o orest (“rng ”) meant different things to different actors,

ranging rom committed Marxist officials working in upland environments,

international NG

Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

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