Politics and practices of conservation governance and livelihood change in two ethnic Hmong villages and a protected area in Yên Bái province, Vietnam.

Bernhard Huber

Department of Geography McGill University, Montreal

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

© Bernhard Huber 2019

i Abstract

What happens in a remote village of traditional shifting cultivators and hunters when, in the course of twenty years, traditional livelihood practices are banned, alternative income opportunities emerge, a protected area is established, and selected villagers are paid to patrol fellow villagers’ forest use? In this thesis, I aim to investigate how ethnic Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải district, Yên Bái Province, Vietnam, and their livelihood practices have intersected with outside interventions for rural development and forest conservation since 1954.

Addressing five research questions, I examine historical livelihood changes, contemporary patterns of wealth and poverty, the institutionalisation of forest conservation, the village politics of forest patrolling and hunting, as well as the local outcomes of Vietnam’s nascent Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program. I find that these aspects vary significantly within and between two Hmong villages, in which I collected most of my data. The forced transition in the 1990s from shifting cultivation to paddy cultivation increased food security, but has also resulted in new patterns of socio-economic differentiation, as some households had limited access to paddy land. More recently, socio-economic differentiation has further increased, as households have differently benefited from PES, government career opportunities and bank loans. These sources of financial capital are increasingly relevant to peasant livelihoods elsewhere in Vietnam, but remain largely under-studied.

I draw on livelihood studies, political ecology and social science studies of conservation to examine the conservation practices and agendas of villagers, state, and non-state actors. In 2006, an international conservation NGO helped establish a protected area in Mù Cang Chải and introduced co-management and community-based forest patrolling to curb illegal forest use. I find that social structure and social capital can hamper effective community patrolling in Hmong communities, which remains very contentious. On the other hand, I find that local governance structures in Vietnam are not conducive to effective village representation in co-management.

Vietnam’s most recent attempt to address both forest conservation and rural poverty is the national PES program, which collects over USD 50 million per year, mostly from Vietnam’s hydropower operators. These funds are distributed to over 500,000 rural households living in the watersheds of hydropower operations. The households sign forest protection contracts, but PES

ii does not provide any incentive for the recipient to improve forest management or quality. While household payment levels are very high in one of the two study villages, they differ vastly within and across villages, contributing to household differentiation. In theory, PES and individual land tenure go hand-in-hand, but my analysis of Mù Cang Chải suggests that Vietnam’s PES system reinforces state forest governance and forestland tenure, which allows for more efficient and equitable PES distribution. Although the political and institutional contexts of my case study are specific to Vietnam, my thesis identifies limitations to peasant livelihood development, community-based conservation, PES and international cooperation that are very relevant elsewhere in the Global South, as well.

iii Résumé

Comment évolue un village isolé de chasseurs et d’agriculteurs pratiquant la culture itinérante lorsque, au cours des vingt dernières années, les pratiques traditionnelles de subsistance sont interdites, de nouvelles activités génératrices de revenus apparaissent, une aire protégée est créée et certains villageois sont payés pour patrouiller l'utilisation des forêts faite par leurs voisins? Dans cette thèse, j'ai pour objectif d'étudier comment les villageois de minorité ethnique Hmong du district de Mù Cang Chải (province de Yên Bái, Vietnam) et leurs pratiques de subsistance se sont entremêlés avec des interventions extérieures pour le développement rural et la conservation des forêts depuis 1954.

À fin de répondre à cinq questions de recherche, j'examine l’évolution historiques des moyens de subsistance Hmong dans mon site d’étude, les tendances contemporaines d’accumulation de la richesse et de pauvreté, l'institutionnalisation de la conservation des forêts, les politiques villageoises de patrouille forestière et de chasse, ainsi que les résultats locaux du programme de paiements pour les services écosystémiques (PSE) qui a récemment été instauré au Vietnam. Je constate que ces aspects varient considérablement au sein des deux villages Hmong que j'étudie ainsi qu’entre ces deux villages; tous deux situés dans la zone tampon de l'aire protégée de Mù Cang Chải. La transition forcée, dans les années 90, d'une culture itinérante à une culture de riz sédentaire a accru la sécurité alimentaire mais a également entraîné de nouvelles tendances de différenciation socioéconomique, certains ménages ayant un accès limité aux rizières. La différenciation socio-économique ne cesse de s’accentuer, alors que certains ménages réussissent davantage à bénéficier des PSE ou à obtenir un poste dans le gouvernement ou des prêts bancaires. Ces sources de capital financier jouent un rôle de plus en plus important dans la subsistance des paysans dans mon site d’étude et ailleurs au Vietnam, mais elles demeurent encore insuffisamment étudiées.

Je fais appel aux études sur les moyens de subsistance et à la littérature ressortant des domaines de l'écologie politique et la science sociale de la conservation pour examiner les stratégies et les pratiques de conservation des villageois et des acteurs étatiques et non étatiques. En 2006, une ONG internationale de conservation a appuyé l’établissement d’une aire protégée à Mù Cang Chải et a introduit la cogestion et les patrouilles communautaires pour freiner l’exploitation

iv illégale des forêts. Mon étude démontre que la structure sociale et le capital social qui se trouve au sein des communautés peuvent entraver l'efficacité des patrouilles communautaires, qui demeurent très controversées au niveau du village. D'autre part, mon étude démontre que les structures de gouvernance locale au Vietnam peuvent limiter l’efficacité de la représentation des villages dans la cogestion.

Le programme national de PSE représente la tentative la plus récente au Vietnam de s'attaquer à la fois à la conservation des forêts et à la pauvreté rurale. Ce programme reçoit des éloges internationaux pour avoir collecté plus de 50 millions de dollars, principalement auprès des opérateurs hydroélectriques au Vietnam. Ces fonds sont distribués à plus de 500 000 ménages ruraux vivant dans les bassins versants des exploitations hydroélectriques. Alors que les ménages signent des contrats de protection des forêts, mon étude démontre que les PSE n'incitent pas les bénéficiaires à améliorer la gestion ou la qualité des forêts. Bien que les niveaux de paiement des ménages soient très élevés dans un des villages d'étude, ils diffèrent considérablement d’un ménage à l’autre ainsi qu’entre villages, ce qui accentue la différenciation socio-économique. En théorie, les PSE requièrent un régime foncier de propriété individuelle. Cependant, le programme ne contribuera probablement pas à l'allocation des terres forestières car le maintien d'un régime foncier étatique, comme on retrouve à Mù Cang Chải, permet une distribution plus efficace et équitable des PSE, même si la littérature sur les PSE le contredit. J’identifie dans ma thèse les obstacles et défis que confrontent les paysans pour développer leurs moyens de subsistance et ceux qui limitent la conservation gérée par les communautés, les PSE et la coopération internationale. Bien que les contextes politique et institutionnel de mon étude de cas soient spécifiques au Vietnam, ces défis sont également très pertinents à d’autres pays du Sud.

v Acknowledgements

Completing this PhD dissertation would not have been possible without many individuals and institutions providing me with vital supervision, funding, field support, friendship and work/life balance. Academically, I am indebted to my supervisor Sarah Turner, whose dedication to teaching and supervision is exceptional. Sarah took me on as a student before I had secured any external funding and guided me to develop my own PhD project. Although our research interests and our approaches to field work and writing differ in some ways, Sarah remained dedicated and supportive throughout my long PhD journey. Sarah’s detailed feedback on grant proposals and draft chapters was invaluable, and I sincerely appreciate her advice, understanding and patience. Thomas Sikor (University of East Anglia) soon joined my supervisory committee and helped me shape my research objectives and conduct my field work. Sadly, he could not continue his work due to poor health, and his contributions to the study of forest governance in Vietnam are sorely missed. Fortunately for me, Brian Robinson agreed to join my committee in my final year, and I much appreciate his thoughtful feedback on my thesis drafts. George Wenzel, my fourth committee member, also provided important feedback, departmental support and inspiration. I sincerely thank all my committee members for their time and their input. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received for my PhD studies and fieldwork from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Sarah Turner’s research funds, as well as several internal McGill and departmental sources, including entry scholarships, the Theo Hills Memorial Fund, and Graduate Research and Travel Awards. The McGill Department of Geography provided a supportive working environment with many student-oriented staff and faculty, and a very collegial graduate student community. I am grateful for the friendship and company I shared with many fellow graduate students, including Clara Champalle, Julia Christensen, Noelani Eidse, Marlene Elias, Jonathon Gerber, Tim Holland, Heidi Karst (University of Waterloo), Magalie Quintal-Marineau, Jean-Francois Rousseau, Sarah Wilson and Sylvie Wood. In Vietnam, many kind people helped me prepare and conduct my fieldwork, most of whom I cannot acknowledge here individually. At my host institute, the Institute of Anthropology (Vietnam Academy of Social Science), Nguyen Van Minh and Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh worked very hard to obtain all necessary research permits for my multiple trips to the field. In Mù Cang Chải, many district, commune and forestry officials supported my research and provided valuable interview and official data. None of my fieldwork, however, would have been possible without my two field assistant cum translators Dan and Pha, both of whom worked very hard. The majority of my fieldwork took place in two ethnic Hmong villages, and Pha, a Hmong rice farmer with excellent English proficiency, became a close friend. His dedication to my research, as well as villagers’ heart-warming hospitality and their willingness to spend ample time answering my never-ending questions made our fieldwork a deeply rewarding experience for me. Throughout my fieldwork, I was dependent on different factors and actors, and I am very grateful that it all unfolded relatively smoothly. In Hanoi, numerous key informants volunteered their time and shared their expertise, as did other Vietnam experts and friends, including Christine Bonnin, Hoang Cam, Tran Hong Hanh, Hoang Thi Hanh, Danielle Labbe, Pamela McElwee, To Xuan Phuc, Elisabeth Simelton and Eileen Vo. I thank all of them for the engaging conversations and the good times we shared.

vi Most of this thesis I wrote while living in the wonderful town of Smithers BC, where I made many close friends. They provided a rich social circle and much-needed encouragement, although none of them were jealous of my task of writing a dissertation. Balancing this with being a home owner and a family father was challenging, and I am sorry to say that it was my family who suffered the most throughout my PhD program. Excessive working hours and seven trips to Vietnam took a toll on family life, and I cannot thank my wife Jennifer enough for all her endurance, support and love. She kept the family together and buffered my absence for our two children, Emery and Roland. Living far away from other family members added to the challenges of student/family life. Nevertheless, my parents provided much support and encouragement throughout my many years of university studies in Germany, New Zealand and Canada, for which I am very grateful. As I was in the final stage of writing this thesis, our life took another turn when we relocated from small-town Canada to Hanoi for me to take up a position funded by the German Ministry of Development. Placed by the Centre for International Migration (CIM) as a so-called Integrated Expert at the Vietnam Forest Protection and Development Fund (VNFF), I have been able to benefit from everything I learned throughout my PhD studies. I am indebted to my wife Jennifer for supporting our move to Vietnam, which required her to give up a wonderful job and life in Canada and resulted in further delays in the completion of this thesis. However, this enabled me to reflect on and review this thesis, based on valuable feedback I received from my committee members and my friend William Badger. He volunteered to proofread my entire dissertation, and I sincerely appreciate his commitment, thoughtful feedback and eye for detail. Wholeheartedly, I thank all faculty, friends and family who have helped me pursue my studies, and all the people in Vietnam and Canada who contributed to my PhD research and the completion of this dissertation.

vii Table of contents

Abstract ...... ii Résumé ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... vi Table of contents ...... viii List of figures ...... xiii List of tables...... xiv List of abbreviations, Vietnamese terms, and units ...... xv

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 1.1. Introduction ...... 2 1.2. Fieldwork locales in national context ...... 2 1.3. Thesis aim and research questions ...... 7 1.3.1. Research questions on livelihoods ...... 7 1.3.2. Research questions on forest conservation ...... 9 1.4. Conceptual framing and research rationale...... 11 1.5. Methodological and disciplinary framing ...... 13 1.6. Analytical thread and thesis structure ...... 15 Chapter 2 The political ecology of rural livelihoods and forest conservation ...... 19 2.1. Introduction ...... 19 2.2. Livelihood studies ...... 20 2.2.1. The emergence of the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) ...... 20 2.2.1.1. The analysis of access in the SLA ...... 23 2.2.1.2. The core livelihood assets of the SLA ...... 24 2.2.2. The role of social capital in the SLA and beyond ...... 25 2.2.2.1. The vast and varied literature on social capital ...... 25 2.2.2.2. The shortcomings of social capital ...... 27 2.2.2.3. Social capital in natural resource management ...... 27 2.2.3. The structuration of peasant agency and livelihoods: filling the gaps in the SLA ...... 29 2.2.3.1. Attending to diverse meanings of livelihood assets ...... 30 2.2.3.2. Attending to structural processes, power relations and subjectivities ...... 31 2.2.3.3. Interpreting the interplay of structure and agency ...... 31 2.2.3.4. Interpreting peasant agency as (everyday) resistance ...... 33 2.2.4. Summary: This thesis as a livelihood study ...... 36 2.3. Political Ecology ...... 36 2.3.1. Analytical elements of political ecology used in this framework ...... 37 2.3.1.1. Actor-oriented political ecology ...... 37 2.3.1.2. Multi-scalar analysis ...... 38 2.3.1.3. Biopower and Governmentality ...... 39 2.3.1.4. State territorialisation and resource control ...... 40 2.3.1.5. Property relations and resource access ...... 42 2.3.2. Summary: This thesis as a political ecology study ...... 44 2.4. The Social Science of Forest Conservation ...... 45 2.4.1. The lasting legacy of protected areas (PAs) ...... 45 2.4.2. Contemporary “conservation reality” and paper parks ...... 46 2.4.3. Conservation behaviour, enforcement and resistance ...... 47 2.4.4. Alternative models for conservation governance ...... 48

viii 2.4.4.1. The promise and prospects of integrating conservation and development ...... 49 2.4.4.2. Community-based conservation and co-management ...... 50 2.4.5. Decentralization and Recentralization in Conservation ...... 51 2.4.6. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) for conservation and development ...... 52 2.4.6.1. The emergence of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) ...... 52 2.4.6.2. Evaluating the justice of PES ...... 54 2.4.6.3. Gaps in the social science literature on PES ...... 56 2.4.6.4. The (in)ability of PES to fund biodiversity conservation...... 57 2.4.7. From governmentality to environmentality ...... 59 2.4.8. Summary: This thesis as a conservation study ...... 60 2.5. Conclusion: Synthesis of the conceptual framework for this thesis ...... 61 Chapter 3 Methodology and politics of access, positionality and power ...... 64 3.1. Introduction ...... 64 3.2. An iterative itinerary of inductive research ...... 64 3.3. Actors mediating access: Formal and informal gatekeepers ...... 67 3.3.1. Institutional affiliation and formal gatekeepers ...... 67 3.3.2. Mind the researcher: The range of surveillance and assistance ...... 69 3.4. Actors mediating data collection: My assistants and our positionalities ...... 72 3.4.1. Reflexivity and Relativity ...... 72 3.4.2. My language proficiency and positionality ...... 73 3.4.3. The limitations of translation ...... 74 3.4.4. Assistant positionalities ...... 75 3.4.5. Our relationships and dependencies ...... 77 3.5. Maintaining ethical research protocols and relationships ...... 78 3.6. My methods of data collection and analysis ...... 80 3.6.1. The case study approach ...... 80 3.6.2. Selection of case study sites ...... 81 3.6.3. Data collection methods ...... 83 3.6.3.1. Overview of methods, informants and language proficiency ...... 83 3.6.3.2. Conversational interviews ...... 83 3.6.3.3. Semi-structured interviews and sampling strategies ...... 84 3.6.3.4. Gender bias and access to female informants ...... 86 3.6.3.5. Participant observation ...... 87 3.6.3.6. Interviews with commune and district-level officials ...... 88 3.6.3.7. Key informant interviews in Hanoi...... 90 3.6.4. Recording, coding and analysis of qualitative data ...... 91 3.7. Conclusion ...... 92 Chapter 4 The context of Hmong livelihoods and forest governance in Vietnam ...... 93 4.1. Introduction ...... 93 4.2. The Southeast Asian highlands and its ethnic peoples ...... 93 4.2.1. My field site in the Southeast Asian Massif ...... 93 4.2.2. Diversity and settlement of ethnic minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif ...... 95 4.2.3. State classification and scholarly study of ethnic minorities in the Massif ...... 97 4.3. Hmong people and culture in Southeast Asia ...... 99 4.3.1. The scholarly literature on different Hmong groups ...... 99 4.3.2. Hmong spirituality and social structure...... 102 4.3.3. Hmong gender roles and cultural change ...... 104 4.4. History of Hmong land use, land degradation and opium cultivation ...... 106

ix 4.4.1. Differentiation and stigma in Hmong land use ...... 107 4.4.2. The role of opium in Hmong land use ...... 109 4.4.3. Hmong spirituality and property relations surrounding forest use ...... 110 4.5. The history of forest and ethnic minority development in northern Vietnam ...... 112 4.5.1. Forest governance during French colonial times (1885-1954) ...... 112 4.5.2. The territorialisation of the highlands in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1954-1975) ...... 114 4.5.3. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the emergence of reforms (1980s) ...... 117 4.5.4. Vietnam’s forest policy reform (post 1986) ...... 117 4.5.5. Vietnam’s forest transition and conservation payments (since 1990s) ...... 119 4.6. Contemporary forest and conservation governance in Vietnam ...... 122 4.6.1. Policies for biodiversity conservation and protected areas (PAs) ...... 123 4.6.2. The development of Forest PES in Vietnam ...... 125 4.6.3. My contribution to the study of forest governance in Vietnam...... 129 4.7. Conclusion ...... 131 Chapter 5 State development and Hmong livelihood transitions in Mù Cang Chải ...... 133 5.1. Introduction ...... 133 5.2. Hmong livelihoods and land use under shifting cultivation (pre-1990s) ...... 134 5.2.1. Migration and settlement of Hmong in Mù Cang Chải ...... 134 5.2.2. The roles of opium and cattle as economic capital (pre-1990s) ...... 135 5.2.3. Food security and labour requirements of “composite swiddening” ...... 136 5.2.4. Customary forest dependence and hunting practices ...... 138 5.3. Mù Cang Chải during the subsidy period (1954-1980s) ...... 141 5.3.1. Tax collection, tax evasion and collectivization in Mù Cang Chải ...... 141 5.3.2. Centrally-planned market integration in Púng Luông (1970s) ...... 142 5.4. Livelihood and land-use change following sedentarisation...... 147 5.4.1. The cultural dynamics of agricultural intensification ...... 147 5.4.2. Emerging patterns of socio-economic differentiation ...... 151 5.4.3. The reliance on fertilizer and hybrid seeds ...... 151 5.4.4. Shaping livelihood identities and discourses of sedentarisation ...... 155 5.5. Contemporary dynamics and discourses of wealth and poverty ...... 156 5.5.1. State poverty metrics and benefits for “poor households” (hộ nghèo) ...... 157 5.5.2. The economics of Hmong house construction ...... 159 5.5.3. From property to economic capital ...... 162 5.5.4. Cattle as economic and cultural capital ...... 163 5.5.5. The economic risk of raising animals ...... 164 5.5.6. The cultural importance of eating meat ...... 165 5.6. Conclusion: Intensification and differentiation of peasant livelihoods ...... 167 Chapter 6 From forest income to micro-credit: Access to financial capital ...... 169 6.1. Introduction ...... 169 6.2. Successive patterns of forest income from NTFPs and pơ mu timber ...... 170 6.2.1. The exploitation of NTFPs (from late 1980s) ...... 170 6.2.2. How villagers in Nả Hàng B sold the last of their pơ mu trees (mid-1990s) ...... 171 6.2.3. How villagers in Chế Tạo managed to keep (and sell) some of their pơ mu trees ...... 174 6.2.4. Contemporary NTFP trade in Mù Cang Chải...... 177 6.2.5. The tenuous links between forest degradation and forest income ...... 179 6.3. Cardamom cultivation as the final frontier of forest income ...... 182 6.3.1. Property relations for cardamom cultivation ...... 182 6.3.2. The variability and sustainability of cardamom income ...... 186

x 6.4. From forest income to conservation payments ...... 188 6.4.1. Conservation payments under Programs 327 and 661 ...... 188 6.4.2. Livelihood significance of cardamom income and PES ...... 190 6.4.3. Dependency and differentiation with rising incomes ...... 191 6.5. Formal employment and bank loans: access to non-forest income ...... 192 6.5.1. Government career opportunities for Hmong villagers ...... 192 6.5.2. The role of agricultural production in Hmong livelihood identity ...... 195 6.5.3. The debt trap of micro-finance for subsistence livelihoods ...... 197 6.6. Seasonal expenditures and the social dynamic of monetization ...... 202 6.6.1. The growing expense of subsistence farming ...... 202 6.6.2. Modernity at a price: novel expenses and expenditures ...... 204 6.7. Conclusion: The monetization of peasant livelihoods ...... 206 Chapter 7 Conservation governance by national and international actors ...... 208 7.1. Introduction ...... 208 7.2. The agenda of Fauna and Flora International (FFI) in Mù Cang Chải ...... 209 7.2.1. The agency and attitudes of FFI actors ...... 209 7.2.2. FFI’s gibbon conservation agenda in Mù Cang Chải ...... 210 7.2.3. FFI’s community-based conservation interventions ...... 212 7.2.4. FFI’s dependence on villagers, donors and gibbons ...... 217 7.3. The protected area of Mù Cang Chải: an internationally funded paper park? ...... 220 7.3.1. Delineating a protected area in policy and practice ...... 220 7.3.2. The financing of a paper park ...... 222 7.4. International agendas for local participation and forest access in protected areas ...... 223 7.4.1. Agendas and failures of Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF) ...... 224 7.4.2. Limitations to co-management in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam ...... 226 7.4.3. The governmentality of co-management in Vietnam ...... 229 7.5. Conclusion: Protected area access in policy and practice ...... 232 Chapter 8 Village politics between hunters, non-hunters, and forest patrols ...... 234 8.1. Introduction ...... 234 8.2. The demise and persistence of Hmong hunting practices ...... 235 8.2.1. Villagers’ perspectives on the demise of forest wildlife ...... 235 8.2.2. The persistence of hunting practices ...... 238 8.2.3. The cultural and culinary significance of hunting and trapping ...... 239 8.2.4. The absence of economic drivers of contemporary hunting in Chế Tạo ...... 242 8.3. Village politics between hunters and non-hunters ...... 243 8.3.1. Conservation impact of hunting ...... 243 8.3.2. Bittersweet wild meat: Secrecy in contemporary hunting culture ...... 244 8.4. The politics of gibbon hunting and conservation ...... 247 8.4.1. Socio-cultural barriers to gibbon hunting ...... 248 8.4.2. The hidden practice of gibbon hunting ...... 249 8.5. The politics and perils of community-based forest patrolling ...... 251 8.5.1. Forest patrolling by community conservation teams (CCTs) ...... 252 8.5.2. Forest use and patrolling beyond national policy ...... 252 8.5.3. The Forest Protection Department (FPD) in Mù Cang Chải ...... 255 8.5.4. The dilemma of community-based enforcement ...... 257 8.5.5. Suspicions and resentment towards community conservation teams (CCTs) ...... 258 8.5.6. The legitimacy of patrolling by insiders, outsiders and hunters ...... 261

xi 8.6. Conclusion: Conservation expectations in a paper park ...... 263 Chapter 9 The policy and practice of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) ...... 266 9.1. Introduction ...... 266 9.2. The institutionalisation of PES as livelihood subsidies in Mù Cang Chải ...... 267 9.2.1. The valuation of Mù Cang Chải’s forests for PES ...... 267 9.2.2. Ignoring forest quality in national and local PES governance ...... 269 9.3. PES governance and distribution in Mù Cang Chải ...... 271 9.3.1. The debate over PES as livelihood subsidies in Mù Cang Chải ...... 271 9.3.2. PES distribution and differentiation at the commune level ...... 274 9.3.2.1. Commune leadership in benefit sharing ...... 274 9.3.2.2. The distribution of PES for planted forest areas ...... 277 9.4. The contested governance and distributive justice of PES in Chế Tạo ...... 279 9.4.1. Contestations surrounding Chế Tạo’s PES wealth ...... 279 9.4.2. Contestations surrounding PES governance in Chế Tạo ...... 281 9.5. The nexus of PES and opportunity costs in Chế Tạo ...... 283 9.5.1. Can PES prevent a return to shifting cultivation? ...... 284 9.5.2. Can PES prevent ongoing hunting and cardamom cultivation? ...... 285 9.6. Lessons learnt from Mù Cang Chải for Vietnam’s PES policy ...... 287 9.6.1. Governance and equity in PES distribution ...... 287 9.6.2. PES distribution and forestland tenure ...... 288 9.7. Conclusion: PES between conservation and development ...... 290 Chapter 10 The prospects of conservation, development and PES in Vietnam ...... 292 10.1. Introduction ...... 292 10.2. Synthesis of research findings and their significance ...... 292 10.2.1. Socio-economic differentiation in livelihood transitions ...... 293 10.2.2. The monetization of subsistence livelihoods ...... 294 10.2.3. Actors and agendas of conservation governance ...... 296 10.2.4. The governance, distribution and effects of PES ...... 298 10.3. Unique context and scholarly contributions of this thesis ...... 299 10.3.1. Mù Cang Chải in the national context of forest governance ...... 299 10.3.2. Ethnic minority livelihood opportunities in Mù Cang Chải ...... 302 10.3.2.1. Monetary livelihoods and income opportunities ...... 302 10.3.2.2. Political context of ethnic minority livelihood change ...... 305 10.4. Interpreting the intersections of Hmong livelihoods and state interventions ...... 306 10.4.1. The intersections of territorialisation and resistance in Mù Cang Chải ...... 306 10.4.2. Governmentality and livelihood identities of sedentarization ...... 308 10.4.3. Villagers supporting state restrictions of livelihood practices ...... 310 10.4.4. Hmong social structure impeding collective agency ...... 312 10.5. Interpreting the political ecology of PES in Vietnam ...... 314 10.5.1. The financing of PES in Vietnam and beyond ...... 315 10.5.2. The developmental approach to PES as livelihood subsidies ...... 316 10.5.3. PES in the nexus of land tenure and conditionality ...... 318 10.5.4. Policy objectives and conceptions of PES ...... 320 10.6. Policy recommendations for revising PES in Vietnam...... 322 10.7. Conclusion: Gibbon conservation and survival ...... 323 Appendix 1: The genealogy of political ecology (part of Section 2.2) ...... 327 Appendix 2: List of interviewees and codes of identification ...... 3321

xii List of figures

Figure 1.1: Map of Yên Bái province showing Mù Cang Chải and other places mentioned in this thesis (map produced by Nguyen Mai Phuong)...... 4 Figure 1.2: Map of Mù Cang Chải district showing fieldwork locations and selected place names (map produced by Nguyen Mai Phuong)...... 5 Figure 1.3: The official People’s Committee buildings of Chế Tạo commune (left) where my fieldwork site of Chế Tạo village is located, juxtaposed with that of Púng Luông commune (right) where my case study village of Nả Hàng B is located...... 6 Figure 2.1: Analytical framework of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) by Scoones (1998:4) ...... 22 Figure 2.2: Overview of conceptual and analytical ideas drawn from the literature ...... 62 Figure 3.1: Document of introduction by district authorities ...... 69 Figure 3.2: Author conducting household interview in Nả Hàng B (December 2013, photo blurred) ...... 84 Figure 3.3: Author conducting interview with forestry official (July 2012, photo blurred) ...... 90 Figure 4.1: Map of greater Southeast Asia and the extent of the Southeast Asian Massif (Source: Michaud 2010:205) ...... 95 Figure 4.2: Distribution of Hmong people in mainland Southeast Asia (source: Turner et al. 2015:21) ...... 100 Figure 4.3: Vietnam’s historical forest cover increase relative to population density in regional comparison (Lamb 2010:61) ...... 121 Figure 5.1: Traditional clothing of Hmong villagers in Nả Hàng B ...... 138 Figure 5.2: Villager’s Red-book certificate over tea plantation in Nả Hàng B (details blurred) ...... 146 Figure 5.3: Prior maize land converted to very narrow rice terraces in Nả Hàng B ...... 149 Figure 5.4: Final assembly of a traditional Hmong house in Nả Hàng B ...... 161 Figure 6.1: Some of the NTFPs for sale in Mù Cang Chải (in May 2014) ...... 177 Figure 6.2: Publically displayed lists of outstanding household bank loans in Púng Luông commune ...... 198 Figure 6.3: Wooden TV cabinet, as seen in several Hmong houses in Mù Cang Chải ...... 205 Figure 7.1: Excerpts from anti-hunting publication by FFI (source: Hardcastle and Giang A De, 2014) ...... 217 Figure 7.2: Numbers of gibbon family groups in Mù Cang Chải and Mường La from successive FFI surveys (source: Rawson et al. 2011:34)...... 219 Figure 7.3: Map of Mù Cang Chải protected area with surrounding villages (source: Nguyen Huu Dung, 2013:7) ...... 222 Figure 8.1: Typical hunting shack in Chế Tạo’s forest with three hand-made, long-barrel muskets ...... 241 Figure 8.2: Mù Cang Chải FPD staff explaining forest fire risk to Hmong women ...... 256 Figure 9.1: List of household names (blurred) and forestland holdings in Nả Hàng B for PES calculations ...... 276 Figure 10.1: FFI’s gibbon calendar in Chế Tạo household: “our survival depends on you” ..... 326

xiii List of tables

Table 1: Basic statistical data of study villages and communes from 2011 census (Source: GSO 2012) ...... 3 Table 3.1: Itinerary of fieldwork trips and activities ...... 66 Table 4.1: Overview of PES recipients and forest areas under Vietnam’s PES scheme ...... 128 Table 9.1: K-factors to assess forest quality for the calculation of PES ...... 269 Table 9.2: Selected data on forest land and PES for Mù Cang Chải communes mentioned in text...... 275

xiv List of abbreviations, Vietnamese terms, and units

BSP Vietnam Bank for Social Policies (Ngân hàng Chính sách xã hội) CCTs Community conservation teams CPC Commune People’s Committees (Ủy ban nhân dân cấp xã) CPV Communist Party of Vietnam (Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam) DPC District People’s Committee (Ủy ban nhân dân cấp huyện) DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1954-1975) ES Environmental/Ecosystem Service EVN Electricity Vietnam FPD Forest Protection Department FPDF Forest Protection and Development Fund (provincial level) (Quỹ Bảo vệ và Phát triển rừng cấp tỉnh) MAC Management Advisory Committee MARD Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development NTFPs non-timber forest products PA protected area PES Payments for Ecosystem Services (international term) PFES Payments for Forest Ecosystem Services (Chi trả dịch vụ môi trường rừng) PPC Provincial People’s Committee (Ủy ban nhân dân cấp tỉnh) RBC Redbook Certificates (land-use certificates in Vietnam) SLA Sustainable Livelihoods Approach SRV Socialist Republic of Vietnam (since 1975) SUF Special-use forest (rừng đặc dụng) TFF Trust Fund for Forests (Quỹ Ủy thác lâm nghiệp) UNDP United Nations Development Program USD US Dollar VASS Vietnam Academy of Social Science (Viện Khoa học xã hội Việt Nam) VCF Vietnam Conservation Fund VND Vietnam Dong VNFF Vietnam National Forest Protection and Development Fund (Quỹ Bảo vệ và Phát triển rừng Việt Nam)

Units and conversions: 1 USD = 20,000 VND, approximate to the official exchange rate at the start of fieldwork (2011) 1 hectare (ha) = 0.01 square kilometres = 2.47 acres = 10,000 square meters 1 tonne (metric ton) = 1000 kilograms

xv Chapter 1 Introduction

From my field notes, December 2012: Much of my fieldwork for this thesis took place in the two ethnic Hmong villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B in the highlands of northern Vietnam. Villagers’ livelihoods there have changed rapidly since the 1990s, when the government banned traditional livelihood practices of shifting cultivation, opium cultivation, and forest use. My Hmong research assistant cum translator Pha and I spent countless hours visiting village households, sitting around fire places, and interviewing Hmong villagers about shifting patterns of land use, forest use, and forest conservation. These household visits were often extended by a joint meal and were the primary source of data for my livelihoods study. The histories of livelihood change in each village are fascinating and differ in important ways. Chế Tạo is a very remote village that can be reached via a 35-kilometre dirt road from the district town of Mù Cang Chải (Yên Bái province). Households in Chế Tạo were relatively cut off until this road was completed as recently as 1998. Nowadays, they typically have more rice land and higher cash incomes than villagers across the ridgeline in Nả Hàng B, where most households still struggle to make ends meet. These village communities had been relatively egalitarian for generations, but new patterns of wealth, poverty and household differentiation have emerged since the 1990s, both within and between the villages. Nowadays, most villagers are still semi- subsistence peasants who have few sources of monetary income. Nevertheless, some households in each village now engage with new sources of financial capital, including cardamom cultivation, government employment, bank loans and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Apart from peasant livelihoods, I also examined forest use and forest conservation. During my first of three stays in Chế Tạo, a few young villagers approached my research assistant Pha and said: “If your friend is interested in forest conservation, he should come and talk to us”. We found them preparing the timber for Chế Tạo’s first motorbike repair shop that one of them was building. We joined them for some casual conversation and introductions. After explaining the purpose of my fieldwork, and obtaining consent to ask some more focussed questions, we quickly came to the topic of PES, which was a contentious topic of conservation governance that emerged during my fieldwork. Households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B had been receiving cash payments for forest protection since the 1990s, but payment levels increased in 2011 with the new PES program. While large households in Chế Tạo received around 30 million VND (1500 USD) per year, there was some confusion about how much Chế Tạo households were entitled to. “I thought all households here received 1.2 million dong per person this year?” I said, citing amounts I had previously been told by state officials. The young men reacted in disbelief, and insisted their families had received a lot less. “If we got that much money, everyone here would protect the forest!” one of them exclaimed, explaining that some villagers had become increasingly opposed to state-led forest conservation, partly due to suspicions of unfair PES distribution. I soon learned that household PES levels varied significantly within and between different villages. I became fascinated with how PES distribution was governed locally and perceived by villagers in terms of distributive justice. The topic of PES is central to both forest policy and villagers’ livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải, and it is the topic of my final findings chapter.

1 1.1. Introduction

With the above vignette from my fieldwork, I introduce the setting and some selected topics of my fieldwork. In this chapter, I provide a systematic introduction of the locations and people involved in this thesis, before outlining my research aim and questions in Section 1.3. I then situate my thesis in conceptual and disciplinary terms, outlining the bodies of literature I draw on and contribute and justifying my methodological approaches (see Sections 1.4 and 1.5). In the final section of this chapter, I outline the structure of this thesis and the chapters that follow, highlighting the analytical thread. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize key aspects of this thesis and provide some essential contextual information to situate the subsequent chapters, which cover the conceptual, methodological and contextual dimensions of this thesis in more depth.

1.2. Fieldwork locales in national context

As noted in the introductory vignette, this thesis partly examines how the semi-subsistent livelihoods of Hmong peasants in northern Vietnam have changed in response to a series of state interventions for rural development and forest conservation. The Hmong are one of many ethnic minority groups living in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in Southwest China, Thailand, Laos, and northern Vietnam (see Section 4.3). Within Vietnam, the Hmong are the fifth-most numerous of 53 officially recognized ethnic minorities, which are known in Vietnam as dân tộc thiểu số (GSO 2009). According to state poverty metrics, the Hmong are one of Vietnam’s poorest ethnic minority groups, although much scholarly work on Hmong livelihoods in Vietnam has provided more nuanced perspectives, to which I seek to contribute (see Section 4.3.1).

This thesis builds on fieldwork in two ethnic Hmong villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, which are located on opposite sides of a mountainous ridge in Mù Cang Chải district, an upland district in Yên Bái province (see Figure 1.2). Mù Cang Chải is sparsely populated with 49,390 people (36 people per square kilometre) living in 114 villages that belong to 12 communes (data from 2011, the most recent available at the beginning of my fieldwork, see Table 1).1 In 80 per cent of these villages, ethnic Hmong constitute 98 per cent or more of the population, which is the case

1 Vietnam has three sub-national levels of administration and is currently divided into 58 provinces (tỉnh), 548 rural districts (huyện) and 9050 rural communes (xã), in addition to urban districts and towns (GSO 2009).

2 for the two villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B (GSO 2012). Overall, over 90 per cent of the population of Mù Cang Chải district are ethnic Hmong, which is the highest concentration of Hmong in any district of Vietnam (GSO 2009). There are only four villages in Mù Cang Chải district, all located along National Highway 32, that have a sizable ethnic Thái population (more than 30 per cent). Mù Cang Chải township (Thị trấn Mù Cang Chải, with a population of 2078) and a smaller roadside town of Ngã Ba Kim (located in Púng Luông commune) are primarily inhabited by ethnic Kinh, Vietnam’s ethnic majority (GSO 2012). The towns of Mù Cang Chải and Ngã Ba Kim are bustling roadside towns that serve as primary market places for villagers from Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, respectively, as well as for other villages of Mù Cang Chải district. Mù Cang Chải town also serves as the district centre and features several government offices, services and schools.

Geographically, the district of Mù Cang Chải straddles the southern reaches of the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range (the shaded area in Figure 1.1, see also Section 4.2.1), and its mountainous terrain has been extensively terraced by local Hmong and Thai peasants for irrigated rice cultivation. Despite provincial efforts to develop Mù Cang Chải as a tourism destination, advertising its spectacular scenery of terraced rice fields and its Hmong culture, very few visitors come to Mù Cang Chải, according to district officials, tour operators, and my observations. This is partly because travelling to Mù Cang Chải from the national capital of Hanoi is a day-long 280 kilometre drive, crossing Khau Phạ Pass, which is partly unsealed and sometimes not passable during the rainy season.2

Table 1: Basic statistical data of study villages and communes from 2011 census (Source: GSO 2012) Average Total Population Distance Households Population household land density to size area [ha] [people/km2] market Mù Cang Chải district 8.196 49.390 6,0 119.692 41,3

Chế Tạo commune 290 1945 6,7 23.540 8,3 Data not Chế Tạo village 84 622 7,4 35 km available Púng Luông commune 617 3245 5,3 5.319 61,0 Data not Púng Luông village 54 329 6,1 7 km available

2 Nevertheless, Mù Cang Chải can also be easily reached in four hours from the busy tourist town of Sa Pa (located, as the crow flies, only 70 kilometres north-west along the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range in Lào Cai province) via a spectacular 135 kilometre drive through the karst landscape of Lai Châu province.

3

Figure 1.1: Map of Yên Bái province showing Mù Cang Chải and other places mentioned in this thesis (map produced by Nguyen Mai Phuong).

With 84 households, my first fieldwork village of Chế Tạo is the largest of seven villages of Chế Tạo commune (see Table 1). The commune is encircled by a horse shoe-shaped mountainous ridge, large parts of which were gazetted as a protected area in 2006 (see Figure 7.3). Chế Tạo village can be reached by a 35-kilometre dirt road from Mù Cang Chải town, which can become a treacherous three-hour motorcycle ride during the rainy season. This road was only completed in 1998, and arriving in Chế Tạo feels like going back in time, partly due to the lack of traffic, concrete and sealed roads. The remote location and rugged drive attract the occasional group of off-road motorcycle tourists, typically lowland Vietnamese, who pass through Chế Tạo en route to Sơn La province. I spent a total of eleven weeks living in Chế Tạo village with my Hmong research assistant Pha and reflect in-depth on our relations to local actors in my methodology chapter (see Section 3.4).

4 Nả Hàng B, my second fieldwork village, is a village of 54 households in Púng Luông commune and is located close to the small roadside town of Ngã Ba Kim, which served as my base for approximately eight weeks while doing interviews in Nả Hàng B and surrounding villages. The commune centre of Púng Luông commune is located four kilometres outside of Ngã Ba Kim (along the new road to Sơn La province), and the villages of Nả Hàng B is reached via a dirt track that climbs up approximately three kilometres from the commune centre. In both Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo, the houses are somewhat dispersed among densely terraced hillsides, steep maize fields and small patches of secondary forest. In both villages, all family homes are simple wooden constructions, typically window-less, built according to Hmong traditions, as I explain in more detail in Section 5.5.2. While Chế Tạo village features a school and a building for the Commune People’s Committee in the centre of the village (see Figure 1.3), Nả Hàng B does not have a school or a village centre.

Figure 1.2: Map of Mù Cang Chải district showing fieldwork locations and selected place names (map produced by Nguyen Mai Phuong).

5 To avoid confusion between these different locales and administrative levels, I refer to the village of Chế Tạo simply as “Chế Tạo” and I specify when I occasionally refer to Chế Tạo commune as a whole. In turn, when I speak of “Mù Cang Chải”, I typically refer to the entire district of Mù Cang Chải, unless I mention “Mù Cang Chải town” specifically. The distinction between Nả Hàng B and Púng Luông is clearer, where the latter refers to the entire commune of Púng Luông, in which Nả Hàng B is one of 12 villages.

The two villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B are markedly different, and I selected them for multiple reasons, which I further explain in Section 3.6.2. Many interviewees from outside Chế Tạo portrayed Chế Tạo village as a particularly challenging place to live, where peasant livelihoods were burdened by remoteness, lack of infrastructure, and hardship. Nevertheless, I found that many Chế Tạo households enjoyed relatively high incomes from Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) and cardamom cultivation, and that processes of livelihood change and monetization had been particularly rapid in Chế Tạo. In turn, villagers in Nả Hàng B historically benefitted from relatively good market access, but nowadays have very limited sources of monetary income. These two villages provide a useful contrast in my study of livelihood transitions and contemporary patterns of wealth, poverty and household differentiation.

Figure 1.3: The official People’s Committee buildings of Chế Tạo commune (left) where my fieldwork site of Chế Tạo village is located, juxtaposed with that of Púng Luông commune (right) where my case study village of Nả Hàng B is located.

Historically, the district of Mù Cang Chải as a whole was hard to reach until the current road from Nghĩa Lộ to Mù Cang Chải was built in the late 1960s. Prior to that, Hmong villagers engaged in trade relationships with Thái people living in the valleys of present-day Sơn La and

6 Yên Bái provinces (see Section 5.2). Like the town of Mù Cang Chải, the small roadside town of Ngã Ba Kim only emerged in the 1970s, when the road from Nghĩa Lộ had been built, and brought the first Kinh people (Vietnam’s majority ethnic group) to Mù Cang Chải (see Section 5.3.2). Nowadays, Mù Cang Chải is one of Vietnam’s poorest districts, and receives substantial provincial funds for poverty alleviation, most recently through Program 30a.3 Overall, Mù Cang Chải proved to be a very fruitful site for my research interests, and I specify my research questions in the following two sections.

1.3. Thesis aim and research questions

I approached my fieldwork with a good understanding of Hmong livelihoods in Vietnam, forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải, and the relevant conceptual literature on livelihood studies and political ecology. I did not, however, have any hypotheses, as I followed an inductive research approach, seeking to encounter and examine issues of local relevance (cf. Auerbach and Silverstein 2003; Bowen 2005). I thus developed the overarching research aim of this thesis, namely to investigate how ethnic minority Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải district, Yên Bái Province, Vietnam, and their livelihood practices have intersected with outside interventions for rural development and forest conservation since 1954. From this research aim five research questions emerged, which I address consecutively in Chapters 5-9. I next outline the context and relevance of my first two research questions, which examine historical and contemporary livelihoods of Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải. In Section 1.3.2, I introduce three more research questions that cover specific aspects of forest conservation.

1.3.1. Research questions on livelihoods

Research Question 1 examines state programs for livelihood development and villagers’ transition from shifting cultivation to permanent agriculture: Since 1954, how have state actors pursued rural development in Mù Cang Chải, and how has this affected livelihood practices and socio-economic differentiation in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B villages?

This research question is addressed in Chapter 5, where I examine how state programs for rural development, poverty alleviation, food security, and social assistance have been implemented in

3 Program 30a is formally known as the ‘The programme for rapid and sustainable poverty reduction in the 61 poorest districts in Vietnam’, named, like many state programs in Vietnam, after the government decree that established it, in this case Resolution 30a/2008/NQ-CP.

7 Mù Cang Chải district, and how they have affected household livelihoods in the two case study villages. The temporal scope of this research question commences in 1954 to provide sufficient context for the livelihood transitions and state intervention I examine. I start with an analytical account of customary Hmong livelihoods during the long era of shifting cultivation. This lasted from the time of Hmong settlement in Mù Cang Chải in the late 19th century to the 1990s, when state policies of sedentarisation sought to ban shifting cultivation and intensify wet rice cultivation. This lead to a ‘race’ among village households to convert suitable land to rice terraces. In Section 5.5, I track this livelihood transition and examine its effects, which include new patterns of household differentiation and livelihood vulnerability. Socio-economic differentiation also increased, as some households became increasingly dependent on state assistance and monetary income. This leads to my second research question.

Research Question 2 examines the emergence and effects of livelihood monetization: Since the 1990s, how have villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B engaged with emerging opportunities to obtain financial capital, and how has this affected household expenditures?

This research question in the focus of Chapter 6. When opium cultivation was banned in 1993 in Vietnam, many Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải lost their most important source of income. They subsequently started collecting and selling specific forest products, including high-value timber (pơ mu), orchids and other non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B had very different access to these forest resources and market opportunities, and I examine how patterns of forest exploitation and forest income developed in both sites.

I further track how, since the early 2000s, cardamom cultivation and payments for ecosystem services (PES) have become two of the most important sources of household income. I seek to understand how and why these incomes vary within and between villages, and how villagers access, use and conceive of different sources of financial capital, including government employment and bank loans. Poor households can access preferential loans from Vietnam’s Bank for Social Policies very easily, but I found that this had become a debt trap for subsistence- based households. To examine how households spend and invest money, I collected quantitative data on household budgets, which highlight the rising costs of peasant livelihoods and cultural practices (Section 6.6).

8 An analytical thread that runs through my first two research questions is examining socio- economic differentiation. I find that the expansion of terraced rice cultivation has led to new patterns of household differentiation (Chapter 5), which growing incomes and monetization have exacerbated and alleviated in different ways (Chapter 6).

1.3.2. Research questions on forest conservation

My first two research questions (above) provide for an in-depth livelihood study that attends to several new aspects of agrarian livelihoods in Vietnam. This understanding of local livelihoods grounds my analysis of conservation governance, which also examines the agency of different actors. Both state and non-state actors have been pursuing forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải since the early 2000s, and both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B village lie in the buffer zone of a protected area (PA) that was established in 2006. The following three research questions examine selected aspects of conservation governance and villagers’ forest use, which I address successively in Chapters 7, 8 and 9. Below, I introduce these questions and highlight their relevance.

Research Question 3 examines international and national agendas for forest conservation: Since the early 2000s, how have state- and non-state actors pursued forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải, and how have their agendas intersected?

In 1999, a biodiversity survey by the international conservation NGO Fauna & Flora International (FFI) discovered the critically endangered White-crested Black Gibbon (Nomascus concolor) in the remote forests around Chế Tạo village. Following years of lobbying by FFI, a protected area (PA) covering the mountain ridge between the two study villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B was established in 2006 (Section 7.3).

The establishment of the PA in Mù Cang Chải district opened the way for internationally funded conservation projects in 2008 and 2010, which sought to enhance PA management, institute co- management, and pilot villagers’ access rights to the PA (Section 7.4). In Chapter 7, I evaluate the efficacy of these projects, which sought to introduce significant reforms to conservation governance, forest access and land tenure in Vietnam. Thus, the purpose of my third research question is to examine the legacy of forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải and use this case study

9 to illustrate how international and national approaches to forest conservation and governance intersect in Vietnam.

Research Question 4 examines the village politics of hunting and patrolling: Since the early 2000s, how have villagers’ practices surrounding hunting and forest conservation changed, and how has this intersected with community-based forest patrolling?

Building on my livelihood study, in Chapter 8, I first examine how both hunting practices and forest wildlife populations had declined in the 1990s, before FFI and state actors implemented any forest conservation activities (Section 8.2). I examine the drivers, livelihood significance, and conservation impacts of contemporary hunting practices. I further try to represent villagers’ differing perspectives on forest conservation, as well as the relationships between hunters and fellow villagers who have given up hunting (Section 8.3).

Community-based forest patrol groups, FFI’s most lasting and controversial intervention, have complicated the village politics of forest conservation. Although the so-called community conservation teams (CCTs) informally allow villagers to access the PA for subsistence purposes, most importantly for cardamom cultivation, they have become the subject of much conflict in Chế Tạo village. I dedicate the latter third of Chapter 8 to an analysis of how the CCTs, still fully funded by FFI, have affected villagers’ practices and discourses towards hunting (Section 8.5). This provides an insightful lens into villagers’ environmentality, Agrawal’s (2005) useful concept of conservation attitude and behaviour.

The broader purpose of my fourth research question is to evaluate how forest conservation is governed in Mù Cang Chải and to what effects. Together with my analysis of FFI’s interventions in Chapter 7, Chapter 8 provides a case study of an international conservation agency operating in Vietnam, trying to protect an endangered primate species and introduce participatory PA management.

Research question 5 examines the contested policy, practice and justice of PES: Since 2010, how are payments for ecosystem services (PES) distributed in Mù Cang Chải district, and how does this intersect with local conceptions of distributive justice and forest use?

10 Since 2010, Vietnam’s national PES policy requires hydropower operators and water companies to pay uniform fees for ecosystem services provided by watershed forest areas. Provincial institutions distribute these funds to forest owners and households living in the watersheds. In Chapter 9, I examine how PES funds are allocated to Mù Cang Chải district and then distributed among communes, villages and households, and how PES affect villagers’ livelihoods and conservation attitudes and village politics. All peasant households in Mù Cang Chải receive PES, but the way the funds are allocated and distributed varies significantly between different communes and villages, which has significant implications for household PES levels. I tie this to a lack of regulation, transparency and auditing of PES distribution, and I examine villagers’ discourses regarding PES governance and distributive justice. Stakes are particularly high throughout Chế Tạo commune, where, to my knowledge, households receive the highest PES levels in the entire country.

The multiple differences between my two case study villages, as well as the legacy of conservation and livelihoods that I examine through my other research questions, make Mù Cang Chải district an insightful case study to examine PES implementation at sub-provincial levels and its effects. Following an actor-oriented approach, I examine the roles of different actors and their agendas, building on my analysis of conservation governance in Chapters 7 and 8. In the conclusion chapter, I build on my analysis of PES in Mù Cang Chải to provide further interpretations of PES governance in Vietnam (see Section 10.5) and policy recommendations for how PES could better enhance rural livelihoods or forest conservation in ethnic minority villages (see Section 10.6).

1.4. Conceptual framing and research rationale

After providing some initial context of my study and introducing my aim and research questions above, I now situate my thesis within three overlapping fields of scholarly literature. Firstly, I draw on several concepts from the livelihoods literature for my analysis of villagers’ historical livelihood transitions and contemporary patterns of wealth and poverty. Secondly, the intersection of peasant livelihoods and forest conservation falls squarely within the sprawling field of political ecology, which serves as the conceptual umbrella for my thesis. Thirdly, my analysis of forest governance draws on a body of literature that I refer to as the social science of conservation. I here briefly introduce relevant elements of these bodies of literatures and review

11 them in more depth, relate them to my analysis and outline the scholarly contributions of this thesis in Chapter 2.

From the broad literature on livelihood studies, I draw on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) to study how social capital and a range of institutions, in a broad sense, mediate villagers’ access to livelihood assets and opportunities. Examining the role of livelihood assets and access also helps me explain drivers and patterns of household differentiation, a key objective of my first two research questions. To overcome the limitations of the SLA (Section 2.2.3), I also draw on actor-oriented livelihoods perspectives that consider how different villagers may engage with livelihood assets and opportunities quite differently. Bringing these literatures together, I show how land, labour, livestock, meat and new building materials have all taken on new situated meanings and values in the livelihoods of Hmong villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B (see Section 5.5). I use this to highlight how endogenous conceptions of wealth and poverty shift over time and differ from state poverty metrics.

The second body of conceptual literature I engage with is political ecology, which seeks to examine the political, cultural and social drivers and implications of environmental problems (Section 2.3). Similar to livelihood studies, political ecology has its roots in structuralist approaches that emerged in the 1980s, but I draw mostly on more recent poststructuralist political ecology approaches. These direct my analytical attention to different actors’ conceptions and practices surrounding forest use, property relations and conservation governance. For instance, I examine state and NGO perspectives on PAs and community participation (Chapter 7), as well as how Hmong villagers and Vietnamese officials conceive of forest use and PES (Chapters 8 and 9).

Thirdly, I draw on the social science literature of conservation, which examines the social, cultural and political dimensions of environmental conservation, for which a political ecology perspective has proven very useful. An analytical approach that has advanced both livelihood studies and political ecology, but is often lacking in the conservation literature, is the actor- oriented approach (Sections 2.2.3 and 2.3.2.1). I seek to disaggregate the multiple groups of

12 actors involved and examine their agency in shaping formal and informal institutions.4 I differentiate between different households and villagers, and try to understand their idiosyncratic livelihood practices and conservation behaviours, for the latter drawing on Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework (Section 2.4.7). Throughout my findings chapters, I examine different aspects of state governance by paying attention to the agency of different state actors, namely how district forestry officials, local commune officials, and village patrol groups implement forest policy.

1.5. Methodological and disciplinary framing

The three bodies of literature introduced above all fall squarely in the wide disciplinary realm of human geography, which is concerned with how humans interact with their natural environment. Traditionally, this includes the study of peasant livelihoods, people’s resource use, as well as how people shape and interact with political, social and cultural institutions. Such elements are also addressed by anthropologists, and both human geography and (cultural) anthropology share some analytical and conceptual ground. What makes this a geography thesis is my analytical focus on spatial differences and environmental dimensions in different places, primarily in two distinctly different case study villages. In this section, I further situate my thesis in disciplinary, analytical and methodological terms. In doing so, I justify my approaches, define key terms and outline how I source, analyze and interpret my data.

The Hmong people of Mù Cang Chải, their livelihoods, and their interaction with outside interventions are at the heart of my study. I therefore sought to understand multiple aspects of Hmong cultural practices and social structure, but these elements are not the subject per se of my study, as it might be in an anthropology thesis.5 Neither are my village case studies extensive

4 As I explain in Section 2.2. on the livelihoods literature, I follow Scoones’ (1998:12) definition of institutions as “regularised practices (or patterns of behaviour) structured by rules and norms of society which have persistent and widespread use” and, secondly, Ortner’s (2006:143-4) definition of agency as “the forms of power people have at their disposal, their ability to act on their own behalf, influence other people and events, and maintain some kind of control in their own lives”. 5 The concept of culture is notoriously difficult to define, and scholarly conceptions of the term have shifted over time and among different social science disciplines. While Carl Sauer and other early human geographers afforded the term little scrutiny and used it in terms of ‘material culture’, the so-called cultural turn in human geography of the 1980s led scholars to increasingly conceive of culture in more interpretive terms (Barnett 2009). Given the conceptual literature I draw on in this thesis, I similarly understand culture as Castree et al. (2013) define it threefold: “1. A way of life underpinned by particular values and traditions. 2. The expression of those values and traditions through writing, music, visual, and performing arts, or through rituals, festivals, and the like. 3. The intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development that distinguishes humans from animals.”

13 village ethnographies, as traditionally conducted in sociocultural anthropology. The scholarship of ethnography has moved beyond descriptive anthropology, since Clifford and Markus (1986) helped propel the so-called “reflexive turn” in anthropology, which acknowledged the inevitable subjectivity of the researcher, as well as how their positionality affect their data collection and representation (England 1994, Venkatesh 2013:3). Consequently, to make this explicit and transparent, writing in the first person has become a scholarly increasingly accepted strategy in English-language academia over the past 20-30 years, which in the discipline of geography was first taken up by feminist geographers, such as McDowell (1992), England (1994), and Kobayashi (1994). I follow this school of thought and therefore recount my fieldwork, data collection and representation as a first-person narrative. Empirically, my study is partly a ‘multi- sited ethnography’, as Markus (1998) called for in his critique of descriptive ethnography. Responding to the related expectations of Gupta and Ferguson (1997), I examine how spatial differences shape and are shaped by village livelihoods and villagers’ agency. Examining this intersection and addressing my research aim and questions requires an actor-oriented approach, as scholars have pursued in both livelihood studies (cf. Long 1992, 2001; Carr 2013, 2014) and political ecology (cf. Brosius et al. 1998; Bury 2008). This means that I try to avoid treating villagers, local officials or other actor groups as homogenous social groups. Rather, I differentiate within these groups and try to examine, for instance, how villagers’ practices, positions and agency vary between and within households.

Methodologically, my thesis is very typical of a social science study that focusses on qualitative data obtained from in-depth interviews with relatively small sample sizes. All my primary data I derive from interviews, unless I specify otherwise. I cite respondents (using anonymous codes, see Appendix 2) and provide additional information on them or on the interview situation when necessary or insightful. I use verbatim quotes from interviews where I find these to be particularly telling, but, more often, I represent their stories in analytical terms. I also do this when I seek to understand certain discourses that emerge in the rhetoric and practice of different actors.6 Apart from qualitative data, I collected some quantitative data, such as on household

For the term ‘tradition’, I follow Calhoun’s (2002) definition of a “set of social practices that seek to celebrate and inculcate certain norms and values, implying continuity with a real or imagined past, and usually associated with widely accepted rituals or other forms of symbolic behaviour.” 6 I follow Campbell’s (2009:166) definition of discourse as a “specific series of representations and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established, and political and ethical

14 income and expenditure, but small sample size and limited reliability of these data precluded quantitative data analysis, as I explain in Section 3.6.3.3. Nevertheless, I use these data to illustrate certain aspects of peasant livelihoods, their variability and the extent of recent livelihood monetization. Expanding on these introductory explanations, I provide full details on my fieldwork and methodology in Chapter 3.

1.6. Analytical thread and thesis structure

I next outline the structure of this thesis and the content of each chapter. I cover my theoretical chapter (Chapter 2) and my results chapters (Chapters 5-9) briefly, as I introduced them above. In Chapter 2, I develop a conceptual framework of analytical elements from three bodies of literature: livelihood studies, political ecology, and the social science of forest conservation. All three are large fields of both scholarly and policy-oriented contributions, and I therefore engage primarily with the contributions most relevant to my thesis, at times indicating the wider scope of the literature for contextualisation. I keep this chapter largely conceptual, but exemplify how I will use certain aspects of the literature in my analysis.

In Chapter 3, my methodology chapter, I explain how I collected and analysed my data. I give an introductory account of my research journey and the formal and informal processes of gaining access to field sites, informants, and data. I highlight the role of my host institute in Hanoi, local gatekeepers, and my research assistants. Drawing on contemporary approaches to qualitative fieldwork in cross-cultural settings, I provide a reflective analysis of how my positionality and that of my assistants influenced the relationships and processes of data collection in Mù Cang Chải. My principle sources of primary data were conversational and semi-structured interviews with three groups of informants: Hmong villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B villages; commune and district-level officials, including from the Forest Protection Department (FPD), most of whom were ethnic Hmong; and key informants, both Vietnamese and expatriates, most of whom were working for conservation or development organisations in Hanoi. In addition to interview data, I collected a broad range of observational data, as well as official reports and statistics from outcomes made more or less possible.” I thus understand discourse not only as a linguistic rhetoric, but also as attitudes and conceptions that are shaped by and expressed in social practice. Although people’s conceptions and discourses play an important role in my research, I do not undertake a formal analysis of these discourses, such as a Critical Discourse Analysis (as developed by Fairclough 2001). This would involve a more in-depth content-oriented analysis, which is not part of my methodology and not necessary to understand and represent people’s positions and practices in the context of my research questions.

15 different offices in Mù Cang Chải district. I provide a grouped list of informants (see Appendix 2) and explain the system of codes and pseudonyms that I use to protect the confidentiality of their identity.

In Chapter 4, I provide vital contextual information to situate my analysis. I start with a brief introduction to the ethnic diversity of the Southeast Asian highlands and I expand on key aspects of Hmong culture and social structure, highlighting areas of cultural change I observed in the field. Turning to Hmong land-use and livelihoods, I distinguish the historical land-use systems of the Hmong in Mù Cang Chải district from better-studied Hmong groups in Thailand. This also serves to clarify misconceptions about Hmong livelihoods, shifting cultivation, opium production and forest degradation. The latter two sections of the chapter focus on Vietnam. In Section 4.5, I provide an historical overview of forest governance in Vietnam since French colonial rule, with a focus on the reform of forest policies since the 1990s. Most relevant to this thesis is the evolution of state policies for forest conservation and PES, which I cover in Section 4.6.

In Chapters 5 to 9, I address my five research questions, as outlined above in Sections 1.4 and 1.5. The five results chapters build upon each other both chronologically and in terms of content, although there are some inevitable overlaps in temporal coverage. In Chapter 5, I first outline customary livelihoods of Hmong villagers during the long era of shifting cultivation, which generally lasted until the early 1990s. I then document how villagers adapted to the ban of shifting cultivation by expanding paddy cultivation, which eventually brought higher levels of food security than shifting cultivation. After focussing on agrarian aspects of livelihood change, I illustrate how different livelihood assets and proxies for wealth have acquired new meanings, which highlights the increasing monetization of Hmong livelihoods that I focus on in the subsequent chapter.

In Chapter 6, I track how Hmong households have engaged with different income opportunities since the 1990s, which include the sale of forest products, including orchids, valuable pơ mu timber, and cultivated cardamom. In addition, conservation payments, government employment and low-interest bank loans have become increasingly vital sources of financial capital for many households. I pair this analysis of monetary income by highlighting the rising costs of agrarian livelihoods and of cultural practice. After analysing villagers’ use of bank loans, I call into

16 question the potential for micro-credit loans to contribute to poverty alleviation in the case study villages and among subsistence peasants, more generally.

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 each focus on one of three conservation-specific topics: conservation governance, hunting and conservation enforcement, and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), which I examine when addressing research questions 3, 4 and 5, respectively. In Chapter 7, I provide an analysis of the conservation interventions by Fauna and Flora International (FFI) in Mù Cang Chải, and how this has intersected with state forest governance; in Chapter 8, I analyse the practices and politics of contemporary hunting and patrolling, the latter undertaken by FFI-funded village patrol teams; and in Chapter 9, I examine how the nascent policy framework for PES has been implemented in Mù Cang Chải. I further analyse PES distribution at the commune and village level with close attention to villagers’ discourses of distributive justice, which responds to several debates I draw from the PES literature.

In Chapter 10, my discussion and conclusion chapter, I first synthesize my research findings (Section 10.2) and highlight how my case study in Mù Cang Chải district differs from other studies elsewhere in Vietnam and beyond, identifying my scholarly niche and some methodological limitations (Section 10.3). Providing further interpretations of my case study findings, I provide an explanation why state interventions into villagers’ livelihoods were necessary for certain livelihood changes, as Hmong social structure is not conducive to collective action (Section 10.4). My interpretation of the political ecology of PES in Vietnam suggests that it serves its purpose for all national and local actors involved, despite its shortcomings I identify (Section 10.5). While international actors and scholars argue that it could be improved with further land allocations and performance-based payments, I contend that this is inconceivable in Vietnam, and would likely make PES distribution less efficient and less equitable. I use my analysis of PES in Vietnam to highlight some fundamental limitations of the PES concept, which have arguably received too little attention in the scholarly literature. I further argue that both conservation and PES governance are symptomatic for the interplay between international agendas and Vietnam’s state approaches to forest governance. In Section 10.6., I make a number of policy recommendations for rural development, biodiversity conservation and PES in Vietnam. I finally return to the case of gibbon conservation in Chế Tạo, which provides an insightful lens to discuss the different agendas of FFI, villagers, and state actors (see Section

17 10.7). I conclude this thesis with an empirical riddle on gibbon survival, which also highlights the epistemological difficulty of interpreting my research findings.

18 Chapter 2 The political ecology of rural livelihoods and forest conservation

2.1. Introduction

In this chapter I develop a conceptual framework of selected scholarly themes and analytical elements that draw from a review of three bodies of literature: livelihood studies, political ecology and social science perspectives on forest conservation. Where appropriate, I also illustrate how I use these elements in my data analysis and interpretation. I do this to justify the scholarly relevance of my research and to outline the contributions I make to the literature. I thus explain my conceptual and empirical approach and indicate how my analysis unfolds in Chapters 5 to 9. I review the three bodies of literature in the given order to show how they build upon each other. Throughout this chapter, I underline selected terms that are central to the literature and to my analysis.

In Section 2.2, I develop an analytical livelihoods perspective that builds on fundamental elements of the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA). In addition, I draw on actor-oriented approaches to livelihood studies that focus on how social actors interact with their structural environment. I illustrate how I employ my livelihoods perspective in the analysis of Hmong peasant livelihoods in Chapters 5 and 6.

In Section 2.3, I draw on selected analytical elements of the political ecology literature, which partly mirror the development of the livelihood literature. Overall, my political ecology perspective serves as a conceptual umbrella to my analytical framework, which I explain in Section 2.3 and review in conclusion of this chapter (see Section 2.5).

In Section 2.4, I review the social science literature on forest conservation and governance, which I conceive of as a sub-field of political ecology. I track the interaction between the scholarly literature and international conservation policy, which lets me situate my analysis of conservation governance in my field sites (see Chapter 7). I review the literature on conservation enforcement, compliance, and resistance, which I draw on in Chapter 8. Finally, within the burgeoning literature on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), I develop an analytical approach to study the justice and equity of PES distribution and, secondly, the intersection of

19 biodiversity conservation and PES. These two topics are central to my analysis of PES governance in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam more broadly (see Chapter 9).

In Section 2.5, I synthesize this chapter, highlight the scholarly and practical relevance of my conceptual framework, and present a diagram highlighting the elements from the three bodies of literature that are most pertinent to my analysis (see Figure 2.2). Overall, I conceive of my study as a political ecology perspective on the intersection of livelihoods and conservation.

2.2. Livelihood studies

Livelihood studies seek a holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of how individuals, typically poor people in the Global South, make a living. I rely on Long’s (2001:241) definition of a livelihood as the “practices by which individuals and groups strive to make a living, meet their consumption necessities, cope with adversities and uncertainties, engage with new opportunities, protect existing or pursue new lifestyles and cultural identifications, and fulfil their social obligations”. This definition acknowledges that livelihoods encompass more than people’s productive practices and material wealth, and emphasizes their agency in shaping their own economic and social lives.

In the following sections, I outline the scholarly genealogy of livelihood studies, including the rise of the so-called sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA). I review the elements of the SLA I draw upon, namely livelihood assets, access mechanisms, as well as the role of institutions and social capital. I then review the critiques that have been levied at the SLA and draw on Long’s (2001) work and other contributions that have advanced the study of rural livelihoods beyond the SLA. Throughout these sections, I illustrate how I will draw on selected concepts in my analysis of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải, primarily in Chapters 5 and 6.

2.2.1. The emergence of the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA)

Prior to the 1980s, the study of poverty and development was dominated by macro-economic, typically structuralist approaches (Scoones 2009), which conceived of poverty as an inevitable outcome of social and political structures (cf. Lewis 1959, 1966).7 In the 1980s, early actor-

7 Structuralist precursors of livelihood studies include the so-called New Home Economics approach, developed in the 1960s by Nobel-laureate Becker (1965, 1991), whose analysis of household dynamics popularized the household as an economic unit (Schmink 1984). Becker’s work eventually became the subject of much feminist critique

20 oriented studies of poverty and vulnerability started shifting analytical attention from structure to agency (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). Norman Long’s (1984) early work sought to understand how some poor people could overcome structural barriers, while others were trapped in poverty. Similarly, Amartya Sen’s (1981) seminal work on famines reveals how different actors are differently vulnerable and resilient to famines and natural hazards (cf. Watts 1983; De Waal 1989; Swift 1989). Drawing on these analytical advances and countering structuralist approaches to development, Chambers and Conway (Chambers and Conway 1992:6) suggest that livelihoods are shaped by individual capabilities (cf. Sen 1981), tangible and intangible assets (cf. Swift 1989) and livelihood activities. Further, to be sustainable, a livelihood needs to “cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities for the next generation” (Chambers and Conway 1992:6).8

Ian Scoones (1998) expands on Chambers and Conway’s (1992) discussion of how people claim and negotiate access to their livelihood assets by highlighting the role of social institutions and organisations in mediating this access. Scoones (1998) provides a visual framework of the main components and processes surrounding rural livelihoods (see Figure 2.1), which was widely applied and adapted in international development policy and academic livelihood studies (see, for instance: Carney 1998; Carney 1999; DFID 1999; Ellis 2000). Central to these approaches, collectively referred to as the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), is the analytical focus on how, in a given historical, political, social and environmental context, livelihood assets, access and activities (or strategies) interact to shape livelihood outcomes (Scoones 1998; Ellis 2000; Scoones 2009).

(Bergmann 1995; Grossbard-Shechtman 2001), which also helped deconstruct the primacy of the household as an essential unit of analysis (Folbre 1986). 8 The term ‘sustainable livelihood’ had previously been proposed by Swaminathan (1987) in the Brundtland Report, as well as by Conroy (1988). Many publications portray Chambers and Conway’s (1992) paper as the origin of livelihood studies, but I find it important to trace the analytical and intellectual genealogy of livelihoods studies, which I outline above.

21

Figure 2.1:Analytical framework of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) by Scoones (1998:4)

The SLA is usually based on five types of livelihood resources, also referred to as ‘livelihood assets’ or ‘capitals’, namely: natural, human, economic, physical and social capital (explained below in more detail).9 The concept of livelihood assets suggests that rural actors invest, combine and transform a range of resources to pursue their diverse livelihood activities or strategies (Long 1984; Bebbington 1999; Whitehead 2002). Scoones (1998) and other early applications of the SLA seem to assume that social actors can actively strategize and shape their livelihoods by drawing on their specific livelihood assets, and their livelihood strategies lead to specific livelihood outcomes. Central to these processes and to the SLA is the question how people can access and employ their livelihood assets to pursue livelihood opportunities (Bebbington 1999; Ellis 2000; de Haan and Zoomers 2005).

9 However, Scoones’ (1998) framework does not include physical capital. Carney’s (1998) rendition of the framework was the first to depict the five livelihood assets in shape of a pentagon, which I critique in Section 2.2.3.1.

22 2.2.1.1. The analysis of access in the SLA

The analysis of access to livelihood resources goes back to Sen’s (1981) entitlement approach, which differentiates between endowment and entitlement. For instance, different actors may be endowed with similar assets, resources and rights, but may have different entitlement sets, which capture what they can actually obtain or achieve with their endowments (cf. Devereux 2001). Sen (1989) later formulated this specific range of what social actors can achieve as their capability (see also: Sen 1997). Incorporating this analytical lens into the development of the SLA, Scoones (1998) and Ellis (2000) emphasize the role of social institutions and social capital in mediating access to livelihood assets. De Haan and Zoomers (2005) add that the question of access does not only pertain to livelihood assets, but also to livelihood opportunities.

Scoones (1998:12) broadly defines institutions as “regularised practices (or patterns of behaviour) structured by rules and norms of society which have persistent and widespread use” and he highlights the importance of who controls the institutions that mediate access, which I turn to in Section 2.3.1.5.10 Illustrating the central role of institutions in shaping actors’ relationships with the natural environment, Leach et al. (1999) remind us that institutions can be formal, often state-mandated, or informal and customary, often embedded in local socio-cultural practices (cf. Ellis 2000). Based on these approaches, I understand ‘access mechanisms’ as dynamic, contextual and idiosyncratic processes that govern how social actors can employ their endowments to achieve their entitlements (Bebbington 1999; Leach et al. 1999; Devereux 2001).

I further review the concept of access in the political ecology section in the context of formal and informal property relations as social institutions that govern access to land and forest resources (see Section 2.3.1.5). In each of my five results chapters I address questions of access to property, livelihood assets and opportunities as I examine how and why different households’ entitlements and capabilities differ.

10 Examples of institutions include government regulations and agencies, markets and trade agreements, property regimes, social norms and hierarchies, gender roles and traditional rituals that are institutionalized in society. Institutions are distinct from organizations, which are commonly defined as groups or alliances of people with a common agenda (North 1990).

23 2.2.1.2. The core livelihood assets of the SLA

With the above conceptualisations of access in mind, I next explain four types of livelihood assets that are integral to different renditions of the SLA, before turning to social capital in the subsequent section. I also illustrate what these livelihood assets refer to in my livelihoods study.

Natural capital refers to all natural resources that people draw on for their livelihoods (e.g., land, water, and forest products), as well as the environmental services that are of indirect benefit to them, such as soil and water conservation provided by forests (DFID 1999). The most important assets of natural capital for peasant households in Mù Cang Chải are fertile land, especially well- irrigated terraced paddy land, but also land suitable for cardamom cultivation and house construction. Following customary Hmong property relations, villagers maintain individual ownership over land they cultivate or use, whereas forest resources largely remain under open access, despite formal state ownership and forest access restrictions.

During the past era of shifting cultivation, they relied more heavily on the forest as a source of natural capital, particularly for swiddening, grazing and opium cultivation. Nowadays, villagers are much less dependent on the forest, but rely on it for cardamom cultivation as a source of construction timber, fuel wood and a range of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) for food, medicinal and other household purposes. When these forest products are harvested or cultivated for sale, they become economic capital, which the concept of payment for ecosystem services (PES) seeks to achieve for ecosystem services.

Economic capital includes income, insurances, loans and other valuable assets. Traditionally, the primary source of income for Hmong swiddeners throughout the Southeast Asian highlands was the sale of livestock and opium. Nowadays, cardamom cultivation, PES, formal employment and bank loans and the most significant sources of financial capital for Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải (see Chapter 6). I also show that some forms of economic capital that are imbued with social and cultural meaning beyond their exchange value. However, such idiosyncratic meanings, valuations, usages and conceptualisations are often not captured in applications of the SLA (see Section 2.2.3.1).

Physical capital includes all human-made infrastructure, including communal buildings, roads, transportation, energy and irrigation systems, as well as physical household tools and assets

24 (Rakodi 1999). Prior to state-led infrastructure development in the 1990s, few Hmong households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B had more than a house, some simple furniture, basic kitchen and agricultural tools, a hunting musket, a manual rice pounder and a corn mill. Since the early 2000s, a motorcycle, agricultural inputs and a growing range of household commodities have become novel forms of physical capital that require economic capital.

Human capital consists of the labour, skills, knowledge, education and health that are required for people to employ their assets and pursue different livelihood strategies (Bebbington 1999). I found that in Mù Cang Chải access to a career in government services requires specific forms of human, economic and social capital.

This conceptual treatment of livelihood assets and access mechanisms is what I draw on in my study of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải (see Chapters 5 and 6). In both these and subsequent chapters, I highlight the role of social capital in shaping both livelihoods and conservation behaviour. I thus draw on the broader social capital literature, as I illustrate in the following review of this contentious body of literature.

2.2.2. The role of social capital in the SLA and beyond

2.2.2.1. The vast and varied literature on social capital

The concept of social capital was originally proposed by Bourdieu (1984, 1986) and has gained prominence since its sociological application by Coleman (1987, 1988; 1990) and Putnam (1993; 2000), in particular.11 Social capital became a popular but much contested concept in many disciplines, as well as in the field of international development, while Putnam himself became the most cited social scientist of the 1990s (Mohan and Mohan 2002; Fine 2010).

While different authors have variously defined and studied social capital (Portes 1998; Bebbington and Perreault 1999), I adopt Narayan’s (1997:50) definition of social capital as “the rules, norms, obligations, reciprocity and trust embedded in social relations, social structures,

11 While Loury (1977) actually coined the term social capital, Bourdieu (1986:248) developed the first analytical framework for social capital, defining it as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable [social] network of more of less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group”. However, scholars have defined and studied different forms of social capital at different social scales. While Bourdieu and Coleman (1987, 1988; 1990) examine the social capital of individuals linked to group membership, Putnam (1993; 2000) seeks to examine collective social capital across regions and countries.

25 and society's institutional arrangements, which enable its members to achieve their individual and community objectives”. I find that this aptly reflects the way social capital is employed and works for Hmong actors in Mù Cang Chải. More generally, social capital can be thought of as “the social ‘glue’ or ‘fabric’ that … creates societies” and is integral to many livelihood processes and access mechanisms (Rigg 2007:51).

To usefully differentiate between different ways that social capital operates, Putnam (2000) introduced the concepts of bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital refers to social ties within closed networks, such as families or communities of shared kinship, class or faith. Bridging social capital refers to social connections beyond such networks. In terms of livelihood benefits, bonding social capital is thought to provide social support systems, especially in times of crises, and bridging social capital expands people’s social networks and thus might diversify access to livelihood resources, markets and opportunities (Bebbington and Perreault 1999; Turner 2007a).

While bonding and bridging social capital operates horizontally, such as within social strata, Woolcock’s (2001) concept of linking social capital captures the vertical links that some social actors build across socio-political hierarchies, typically between citizens and people of authority or government institutions (Turner and Phuong An Nguyen 2005). Bebbington (1999:2038) portrays collaborative state-society relations as a form of linking social capital that serves to “embed the state more deeply” in society and enhances accountability and social protection (cf. Putnam et al. 1993; Evans 1997b:178; Bebbington and Perreault 1999).12 In my mind, this is what proponents of co-management and participatory governance seek to achieve, although they rarely frame their objectives as enhancing linking social capital. It seems that linking social capital between citizens and state agents is particularly difficult to foster, and variable in its outcomes. The well-documented risk of co-management is that community representatives become embedded too deeply into the state to remain accountable to the people (Stevenson 2006;

12 Similarly, some proponents hold that social capital is the ‘missing link’ to empowering marginalized groups and improve their livelihoods, and development interventions ought to build or enhance social capital (Fox 1997; Harriss and Renzio 1997; Portes and Landlot 2000). For instance, five contributors to Evans’ (1997b:178) volume “argue for the possibility of ‘state-society synergy,’” and Evans concludes that such synergy is “constructible, even in the … Third World”. Many such calls for the development of social capital, however, fail to discuss how social capital could be built, how changes in social capital could be studied, and what effects this may have (see for example: Tacconi et al. 2009; Nguyen Ngoc Thuy et al. 2011).

26 Kubo 2008; Caruso 2011). I find that this risk is particularly pertinent to local governance in rural Vietnam, based on my analysis of co-management in Mù Cang Chải (see Section 7.4.2).

2.2.2.2. The shortcomings of social capital

Critiques of social capital hold that the concept is notoriously fuzzy and poorly defined, but yet too often conceived as inherently ‘good’, without considering that it can also disable or constrain social actors (Foley and Edwards 1997; Portes 1998). The “dark side” of social capital (Putnam 2000:220) is that social relations can exclude, restrict or pressure certain actors, and that “social ties [are] sometimes … far more of a liability than an asset” (Turner and Phuong An Nguyen 2005:1696). More generally, bonding social capital usually implies the exclusion of others (Waldinger 1995), and social capital in form of identity or gender norms, can confine personal freedom and subjectivity (cf. Geertz 1963b; Portes and Landlot 2000; di Falco and Bulte 2011). For instance, I illustrate how Hmong social structure provides for strong bonding social capital, but does not preclude the emergence of “negative social capital”, when relatives turn against each other, for instance (Portes 1998; Portes and Landlot 2000).

Several commentators have highlighted that too many social capital studies disregard the multiple power and gender relations that are latent to social capital processes (Harriss and Renzio 1997; Silvey and Elmhirst 2003). Bourdieu’s (1986) original framework of social, cultural and economic capital actually captured how different capital endowments produce social power and inequality (Ballet et al. 2007), but much of the subsequent literature on social capital conflated Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital and failed to attend to the social production of power and cultural meanings (Fine 2010). I find that idealistic conceptions of how social capital operates, or could even be shaped by outside agents (cf. Evans 1997a), also pervade much of the literature on social capital and conservation, which I review next.

2.2.2.3. Social capital in natural resource management

In the 1990s, the concept of social capital gained prominence in the study of the commons and collective action, and community-based resource management more generally, providing a seemingly handy concept to explain how cooperation facilitates sustainable resource management (Ostrom 1999; Dietz et al. 2003; Pretty 2003; Brondizio et al. 2009). Within this literature, social capital most often refers to provisions for collective agency, including trust,

27 cooperation and compliance with relevant institutions, and is thus heralded as the key to building viable resource management institutions and averting the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Bouma et al. 2008).13 I find that several authors overlook the complexities of both social capital and conservation when they suggest that conservation interventions could facilitate the building of social capital (cf. Weyerhaeuser et al. 2006; Nguyen Ngoc Thuy et al. 2011). Other authors hope for the reverse, that social capital enhances conservation behaviour. They use the concept of social capital as a poorly defined proxy for conservation attitude that is thought to facilitate what Pretty (2004 :631) calls “biodiversity dividend[s]” (cf. Schwartz 2006; Jin 2013).14

Robbins’ (2000) study of corrupt conservation enforcement has important parallels to parts of my study and shows how villagers need to invest in and maintain their social capital with forest guards to maintain forest access. He frames this “stable relationship of lower-level officials to local producers” in terms of social capital with “social expectations that rules will be enforced in particular ways and that no one will inform to higher authorities” (Robbins 2000:427).

In Mù Cang Chải, the hope of a conservation NGO was that forest patrolling by villagers would be more acceptable than by outsiders, but I found that the opposite was true. Similarly, social capital undermined a different state-led initiative that seeks to foster the ‘dark side of social capital’ by offering monetary incentives for ‘whistle-blowing’ villagers to report local offenders of forest law infractions (see Chapter 8). In general, I find that social capital can either build, erode or undermine villagers’ conservation behaviour and attitude.

In each of my five findings chapters, I identify the salience of social capital in social relations among Hmong villagers and between villagers and state actors. In my interpretation of social capital, I try to not fall into the positivist trap that I found much of the literature on social capital and resource management does, as noted above. The empirical study of social capital can be difficult (Robbins 2000), particularly for outsiders, and the causal link between social capital and livelihood outcomes is often tenuous (Bebbington 1999). As an analytical concept for the study

13 Theoretically, this literature thus builds on Putnam’s conceptions of collective social capital, as well as Coleman’s (1988:104) more individual “norm that one should forgo self-interest and act in the interest of the collectivity”. 14 As an example from Vietnam that reflects these shortcomings, Nguyen Ngoc Thuy et al. (2011) examine the conditions for such social capital to emerge. They undertake a mechanistic regression analysis of socio-economic variables and conservation outcomes, but, like the other studies, neither consider causal pathways of how social capital might affect conservation behaviour nor wider cultural and political contexts that shape such tenuous processes.

28 of social actors, networks and institutions, I find the concept of social capital useful to examine how social actors interact and shape social institutions and structural contexts, which I turn to next (cf. Long and Long 1992; Long 2001; Bebbington 2002).

2.2.3. The structuration of peasant agency and livelihoods: filling the gaps in the SLA

Several of the criticisms that have been levied at the social capital literature also apply to the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) as a whole. Both concepts were received enthusiastically in the development community, but often applied in more formulaic ways than they were intended (Fine 1999; Scoones 2009; Sakdapolrak 2014). In this section, I highlight two shortcomings of the SLA most relevant to my study and outline how my actor-oriented approach, as developed in subsequent sections, provides for a conceptually and ontologically more rigorous livelihoods study.15

I first show the importance of different socio-cultural meanings that people may attribute to livelihood assets, which their generic treatment in the SLA conceals. Secondly, I show that the SLA is similarly marred by a lack of theorization of power relations and subjectivities, which brings me to the ontological challenge of conceptualising and interpreting the interplay between structure and agency (cf. Scoones 2009; Prowse 2010). I illustrate how actor-oriented approaches to livelihood studies offer situated perspectives on livelihood assets and agency, but still risk to essentialize the latter. Finally, I review the critiques that have been levied at structuralist and actor-oriented approaches to peasant resistance. I show how I have tried to overcome them, partly referring to further literature on resistance and subject formation that I draw on in subsequent sections of this chapter.

To clarify the meaning of key terms I use here, I rely on Ortner’s (2006:143-4) definition of agency as “the forms of power people have at their disposal, their ability to act on their own behalf, influence other people and events, and maintain some kind of control in their own lives”. That means I understand power in a Foucauldian sense of being latent to social relations and enacted or perceived in multiple ways to different effects.

15 In the latter sections of this chapter, I also engage with additional points of criticism that have been levied at the SLA. Many authors have duly noted that the SLA is marred by a lack of theorization of the concepts of sustainability, vulnerability and of the household as a unit of analysis (Scoones 2009; Prowse 2010). In this thesis, I do rely on the latter and I explain in the subsequent methodology chapter that this is justifiable in the context of my research objectives and Hmong social structure.

29 2.2.3.1. Attending to diverse meanings of livelihood assets

Several commentators have criticized the elusive treatment of idealized livelihood assets and capitals in the SLA. The concepts of human, natural, financial, physical and, in particular, social capital encompass wide ranges of fundamentally different elements, which cannot be assessed in similar ways or weighed up against each other (Toner 2003; Staples 2007). The economic terminology of capitals or assets arguably invokes their commodification, and, furthermore, a presumption that livelihood strategies seek to maximize material returns (Carr 2014). This neglects the cultural and idiosyncratic meanings that livelihood assets have for different social actors, as well as the diversity of livelihood aspirations and economic behaviours beyond rational choice (Bebbington 2000; Whitehead 2002; Arce 2003; de Haan 2003; Carr 2013). Similarly problematic I find the plotting of the five livelihood assets as a descriptive polygon, which became the iconic centrepiece of the SLA (Carney 1999; Scoones 2009). This requires a direct comparison of fundamentally different types of resources and, I find, neglects that similar asset endowments give different actors different capabilities (Wood 2003). I agree with many scholars who contend that the SLA risks privileging material dimensions of livelihood assets and does not capture the complex reality of human and social capital nor people’s aspirations and agency (Sen 1997; Toner 2003; de Haan and Zoomers 2005; Staples 2007).

For the analysis of my case studies, I do employ the concepts of livelihood assets, but I seek to represent the socio-cultural meanings some assets have, and how these have evolved with shifting livelihood patterns. I do this, for instance, when explaining different endogenous conceptions of wealth and poverty that go beyond endowment with material assets (see Section 5.5). While I dedicate a separate research question and chapter to the growing importance of financial capital, I show how this monetization is culturally embedded and actually provides a fruitful conceptual lens to examine contemporary socio-cultural institutions (see Chapter 6). Similarly, previous studies of ethnic minority livelihoods in my wider study area have highlighted how livelihood aspirations, decisions and change are often grounded in cultural traditions, agendas and identities (Michaud and Forsyth 2011; Bonnin and Turner 2014; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). In addition, my interpretation of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải is informed by several analytical tenants of the broader livelihoods literature beyond the SLA, which I draw on in the following sections.

30 2.2.3.2. Attending to structural processes, power relations and subjectivities

The SLA aims to explain how rural people get out of poverty and what factors might keep them in poverty, but it does not help to understand what gets them into poverty (Staples 2007). This is partly due to a poor conceptualisation of structural drivers of marginalization and poverty, especially questions of governance and power (Ashley and Carney 1999; Carney 2002; de Haan and Zoomers 2005; Carr 2013). Bebbington (1999) and Leach et al. (1999) do acknowledge the role of power relations in their discussions of access mechanisms, but much of the livelihoods literature has focussed on local agency without analysing structural contexts (Scoones 2009; Sakdapolrak 2014).

One of the authors who I find has most usefully integrated the role of power into livelihoods studies is Carr (2013:77, 84), who employs the Foucauldian concept of “intimate government” to show how development interventions function as insidious “tools of coercion” to shape people’s livelihoods, conduct and subjectivities. While the governmentality literature, which I turn to below, focuses on how the state shapes people’s behaviour, Carr (2013) also frames social institutions and power relations within a household or the wider community, including gender dynamics (cf. Carr 2008), as ‘tools of coercion’ that can shape actors’ agency and livelihood choices.16 In Carr’s (2014:116, 118) view, how people forge their livelihoods is thus a function of exogenous and endogenous influences (‘tools of coercion’), which shape common “livelihood discourses” and “livelihood identities”. The latter two concepts capture how certain livelihood activities and subjectivities are discursively privileged through socio-cultural norms, although different actors are differently shaped by these, of course.

2.2.3.3. Interpreting the interplay of structure and agency

Carr’s (2013, 2014) approach to the study of agency and livelihoods overcomes a key conceptual shortcoming of the SLA and structuralist approaches to human agency. Such approaches presume that social actors act voluntaristically, as if in a socio-cultural vacuum, or following a generic rationale, such as that of maximizing material gain (Scoones 2009; Sakdapolrak 2014). Bourdieu (1984, 1986) has been amongst the most influential social theorists to inform

16 Arguably, these ways in which political and social institutions shape livelihoods have been included in different renditions of the SLA through their emphasis of the mediating role of institutions. However, I agree with Carr (2013) that most applications of the SLA have paid scant attention to how both state governance and social norms shape people’s livelihoods, which is also evident in my analysis of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải.

31 contextual conceptualisations of human agency, including Giddens’ (1984, 1987) structuration theory. Giddens (1984) contends that social actors are not only shaped by their social environment, but also continuously shape these structures through their agency and discourse. Furthermore, Bourdieu (1977:214) holds that their agency is guided by their “habitus”, which he defines as culturally embedded “predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination” to act in certain ways (cf. Maton 2008). Bourdieu (1977) suggests that people’s individual or collective habitus provides a certain ‘structuring’ to their agency, an effect that the structuralist SLA, for instance, primarily affords to exogenous institutions (cf. Sakdapolrak 2014).

Several livelihood scholars have built on Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory to provide useful concepts for my interpretation of villagers’ agency. Most useful for my thesis is Long’s (2001:20) “actor-oriented approach [that] begins with the simple idea that different social forms develop under the same or similar structural circumstances”. Long (1992; 2001) holds that agency is shaped by an actor’s habitus and by structural constraints, which include social norms and relations. Through their livelihood practice and discourse, social actors, in turn, help shape the social structures and meanings they operate in (Long 2001). This is also mirrored in Carr’s (2013) conceptualisation of livelihood discourses and identities, as outlined above. Other authors have also drawn, both explicitly and implicitly (Sakdapolrak 2014), on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to suggest that people have a socially embedded disposition to pursue a certain style or repertoire of livelihood activities, akin to Carr’s (2013) functioning of livelihood identities. De Haan and Zoomers (2005) develop the concept of a livelihood style, which “consists of a specific cultural repertoire composed of shared experiences, knowledge, insights, interests, prospects and interpretations of the context [of their livelihoods]” (de Haan and Zoomers 2005:40).17 Similarly, Long’s (2001:18) actor-oriented approach assumes that ”[a]ll societies contain within them a repertoire of different lifestyles, cultural forms and rationalities which members utilise”.

On the Bourdieusian premise that our habitus guides how we act, de Haan and Zoomers (2005) offer two useful concepts of livelihood change that I employ in my livelihood study. They define “livelihood pathways” as “observed regularities or patterns in livelihood among particular social groups”, such as the collective livelihood change from shifting to permanent cultivation that took

17 De Haan and Zoomers (2005) build on Nooteboom’s work (2003:54), who similarly acknowledged that livelihoods are “structured by an internal logic and conditioned by social, economic and personal characteristics of people involved”.

32 place in my study villages in the 1990s (cf. Scoones and Wolmer 2002; de Haan and Zoomers 2005:42). Secondly, their concept of “livelihood trajectories” refers to individual life paths, which I use to examine how different households performed very differently along the collective livelihood pathway (de Haan and Zoomers 2005:28).

At several points of my livelihood analysis, I indicate evidence for a cultural habitus that underpins some villagers’ agency and livelihood practices. However, I find that identifying a certain cultural habitus also comes with the risk of romanticizing people’s culture and agency. Several scholars have highlighted this risk when framing people’s agency as resistance, which I consider in the following section.

2.2.3.4. Interpreting peasant agency as (everyday) resistance

As noted above, both Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory and Bourdieu’s theories of human agency emphasize that social actors both adapt to, and shape social contexts and institutions. Michaud (2012) examines this in the context of state programs for modernization and finds that Hmong peasants in Lào Cai Province selectively engage with and adapt modern forms of rice cultivation, clothing, transport, communication and education (cf. Michaud and Forsyth 2011; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). Firstly, he finds “indirect evidence at the individual, household and clan level of Hmong vernacularization” or “indigenization of modernity” (Michaud 2012:1854, 1869). On the other hand, he finds limited evidence that Hmong peasants intentionally and consciously embody a certain cultural habitus (cf. Ortner 1995). Secondly, Michaud (2012) reminds us that the egalitarian structure of Hmong societies provides limited capacity for collective action, such as coordinated resistance to state tools of coercion. Before outlining how I interpret villagers’ agency, I first provide an initial engagement with relevant parts of the literature on resistance, which I continue in latter sections of this chapter in the specific context of resistance to conservation interventions (see Section 2.4.3).

The vast literature of peasant resistance can be broadly divided into studies of overt resistance and rebellion, including social movements (Wolf 1969; Adas 1981; Edelman 2001; Mittelman and Chin 2005; Borras 2010), as well as the more specific field of everyday forms of peasant resistance, which I draw on here (Scott and Kerkvliet 1986). This consists of quotidian, low-key and non-organized strategies, such as sabotage, pilfering, non-compliance, as well as critical

33 peasant discourses about their superiors. Scott’s (1976:35) first study sought to explain the motivations underlying two 1930s peasant rebellions in present-day Vietnam and Burma, which were triggered by the colonial head tax that threatened peasants’ “subsistence security”.18 Scott (1976) portrays the peasantry as preoccupied with maintaining their subsistence livelihoods, which were vulnerable to state and market forces, and who therefore tended to pursue risk-averse livelihood strategies. He further suggests that peasants maintain a moral economy to reduce their livelihood vulnerability, consisting of specific social capital and institutions, including communal redistribution of livelihood resources, reciprocity and common property regimes.19

Scott’s historical work on peasant resistance, including his more recent work on highland ethnic minority groups avoiding state control (Scott 2009), has sought to develop theoretical concepts of peasant agency and state governance rather than empirical insights. Scott’s contributions to scholarship cannot be understated, but they have also attracted ample critique, including for Scott’s structuralist views on peasant agency and monolithic conceptualisation of the state (Moore 1998; Li 2005a; Mittelman and Chin 2005). Scott himself called for more studies to understand the multiplicity of actors and agendas in state-society relations (Sivaramakrishnan 2005), which more recent work on resistance has illustrated (Amoore 2005; Turner and Caouette 2009). However, interpreting peasant agency as intentional resistance also poses empirical and ontological risks. During the 1990s, the surge in resistance studies following Scott’s work was soon critiqued for essentializing state-society relations and romanticizing peasant agency as creative responses to domination (Abu-Lughod 1990; Ortner 1995; Brown 1996; Moore 1998). Similarly, the broader body of actor-oriented livelihood studies has been critiqued for affording peasants more agency than they often have when facing structural constraints (Wood 2003; Rigg

18 Replacing prior levels of taxation proportionate to a household’s grain production, both the British colonial administration in Burma and the French administration in Indochina instituted a so-called head tax, which disadvantaged poor households disproportionately, particularly in years of poor harvest (Chapuis 2000; McElwee 2007). Scott (1976) suggested that these new forms of taxation triggered peasant revolts in present-day Myanmar and central Vietnam, and he, more generally, postulated that threats to peasant’s subsistence security and moral economy were primary drivers of peasant resistance. McElwee (2007) argues that this extrapolation made it easy for critics to find the counterfactual (cf. Popkin 1979; Brocheux 1983; Greenough 1983), as Scott (1977) acknowledges in his response to some common critiques. 19 In his theory of the moral economy of the peasant, Scott (1976) drew on Thompson’s (1968, 1971) study of peasant food riots in 18th century England, who demanded staple goods to be sold for fair prices, and who resisted farmers who sold their crop for higher market prices to maximize profits (see also: Götz 2015).

34 2006; Masaki 2007; Nygren and Myatt-Hirvonen 2009).20 I seek to avoid this by grounding my study of peasant livelihoods in an SLA-inspired analysis of livelihood assets, opportunities and access (see Section 2.2.1), which highlights both the opportunities for and limitations to individual agency.

Kerkvliet (2005), a former student of Scott, has usefully applied and expanded Scott’s (1976; 1986) idea of everyday resistance in his study of resistance to collectivized agriculture in Vietnam. Kerkvliet (2009:232) subsequently coined the term “everyday politics”, which “involves people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organised or direct”. Conceptually, Kerkvliet (2009) partly avoids the ontological challenge of ‘finding’ intentionality in peasant agency by focussing on its political effects and showing, for instance, how overt compliance can be a form of covert resistance. As he points out, this is particularly relevant under authoritarian or socialist regimes that are “aimed at maximising conformity, uniformity, and discipline” (Kerkvliet 2009:237). With his collaborators, he has shown how to avoid portraying state governance as monolithic and unilateral by providing a fine-grained analysis of the multiple state institutions of Vietnam’s hierarchical system of governance (Kerkvliet 2001; Kerkvliet et al. 2003; Kerkvliet and Marr 2004). I draw both on this latter work and on Kerkvliet’s (2009) concept of everyday politics in my analysis of villagers’ agency in relation to exogenous institutions of development and conservation. Trying to identify different villagers’ reactions and resistance to conservation, as well as underlying subjectivities, I further employ some of the more specific literature on environmentality and resistance to conservation, which I review in subsequent sections of this chapter. I try to avoid what I call the positivist pitfall of finding resistance and environmentality wherever I look for it by grounding my interpretation of villagers’ conservation practice and livelihood pathways in my analysis of their livelihoods, including their livelihood discourses and identities (cf. Carr 2013).

20 Indeed, Long (2001:16), for instance, contends that the concept of “agency attributes to the individual actor the capacity to process social experience and to devise ways of coping with life, even under the most extreme forms of coercion”.

35 2.2.4. Summary: This thesis as a livelihood study

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) was applied enthusiastically in development research and policy but arguably too methodically, which often essentialized both peasants and their livelihoods. The analytical nuance inherited from Sen (1981) and Long (1984; 1992) was seemingly lost until the shortcomings of the SLA become too obvious. The emergence of more situated actor-oriented approaches invigorated the field of livelihood studies, which, like international development itself, had seemingly reached an impasse (Scoones 2009). These approaches draw on social theory of how people’s agency and their structural environment interact (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984) and thus allow for, what I call, the structuration of livelihoods (see Section 2.2.3). This conceives of livelihood pathways, discourses and identities as contextual, cultural and idiosyncratic processes (Carr 2013, 2014). Throughout this section, I have indicated how I will draw on specific elements of this livelihoods literature in my analysis of the semi-subsistence livelihoods of Hmong peasants. I highlight where certain perspectives fall short of my analytical needs and indicate how I draw on additional literature to strengthen my conceptual framework.

From the SLA, I take the diversity of livelihood assets and the role that institutions and social capital play in mediating access to livelihood assets and opportunities. I elucidate how villagers’ differential endowments with and access to livelihood assets and opportunities have contributed to different livelihood pathways and patterns of socio-economic differentiation since a 1990’s ban on shifting cultivation required village households to compete for suitable paddy land (see Chapter 5). In the formation of their contemporary livelihoods, I aim to understand the shifting roles of both social capital and different forms of economic capital (see Chapter 6). Throughout the livelihoods-focussed and subsequent findings chapters, I pay close attention to cultural, symbolic and subjective meanings of livelihood assets and concepts of wealth and poverty. My attention to villagers’ livelihoods strengthens my analysis of conservation interventions and their effects, as I emphasize in the conclusion of this chapter.

2.3. Political Ecology

Political ecology is an evolving analytical perspective that aims to consider political, social and cultural dimensions of environmental issues. The political ecology perspective serves as a conceptual umbrella for my thesis, as my study of peasant livelihoods in the context of forest

36 conservation falls squarely within the purview of the political ecology literature, as it has evolved (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003; Vaccaro et al. 2013).

In Appendix 1, I provide an overview of the scholarly genealogy of the field of political ecology, and outline how the literature was influenced by key intellectual developments of the 1990s. To briefly synthesize, the field of political ecology formed after Wolf (1982) argued that prior perspectives of cultural ecology were no longer sufficient to address the effects of market integration and global change that had come to affect all societies, including pre-industrial village societies (Robbins 2004; Prudham 2009). Specifically, early political ecology incorporated a political economy perspective with attention to property relations and institutions (cf. Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In the 1990s, poststructuralist influences brought attention to the social constructiveness, power, knowledge and identities in environmental politics (Moore 1998; Escobar 1999; Forsyth 2003; Latour 2004). It is this literature that I largely draw on in this thesis, as I outline in the following section. I draw out five prominent analytical elements and conceptual themes, and indicate how I draw on these in this thesis. I keep this section brief and focussed on these foundational elements. In the subsequent Section 2.4 on the social science of conservation, I explain that much of that literature is an emblematic application and effectively a sub-field of political ecology. It is there that draw out more specific conceptual elements that I use in my analysis of conservation governance

2.3.1. Analytical elements of political ecology used in this framework

My conceptual approach draws on specific methodological and conceptual elements that have become hallmarks of political ecology, including actor-oriented and multi-scalar approaches, which I explain here first. My thesis also examines the role of different property regimes over natural resources, which I find have been better theorized in the political ecology literature than within livelihood studies (see Sections 2.3.1.4 and 2.3.1.5). I situate these elements in the political ecology of power and governmentality (see Section 2.3.1.3).

2.3.1.1. Actor-oriented political ecology

Much like livelihood studies, political ecology has also struggled with the analytical dualism of structure and agency, which I introduced in Section 2.2.3. Attending to the diversity and individuality of human agency, actor-oriented political ecology studies examine the variety of

37 actors with divergent agendas that are typically at play. This premise requires overcoming what Bury (2008:309) calls a common “tendency to essentialize actors such as the state, NGOs, or local community organizations and treat them as monolithic entities” that hold homogenous and stereotypical positions, such as village communities resisting forest conservation (see also Brosius et al. 1998). Instead, an actor-oriented political ecology approach allows for a consideration of how these actors shape social structures and institution, and not vice-versa (Giddens 1984).

Paige West (2005) cautions that many so-called actor-oriented political ecology studies conceptualize people’s agency in Western cultural terms, rather than in local cultural and structural contexts. Donald Moore (1998) also raises concern that political ecology had so far failed to attend to different actors’ agency and the symbolic and cultural meaning or natural resources. I find that this is particularly evident in some of the literature on conservation that embodies Western, normative agendas of biodiversity conservation with too little empirical attention to local actors’ agency and its effects. I further ground my study of villagers’ environmental attitude and agency in a differentiated understanding of their livelihoods.

2.3.1.2. Multi-scalar analysis

Before political ecologists started to unpack human agency, Blaikie’s (1985) analysis of environmental degradation examined how socio-economic and political economic processes operating at different scales forced cattle herders to use marginal land for grazing, which resulted in desertification. However, Blaikie (1985) and other structuralist political ecology studies arguably conceived of these different scales as hierarchical, “pregiven sociospatial containers such as rural-urban, local, regional, national, and international” (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003:3). Subsequent developments of constructivist and actor-oriented political ecology have shaped a more interdependent conception of multi-scalar analysis.

So-called ‘political ecologies of scale’ draw on the geographical literature on scale (Marston 2000; Brenner 2001) and the social production of place (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]) to consider how processes at different spatial and temporal scales interact and how these scales are context contingent and socially constructed (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003; Rocheleau 2008; Rangan and Kull 2009). In my study, I also attend to multiple processes of structure and agency that take

38 place at various scales. For instance, villagers’ conceptions of the forest have shifted over time with different livelihood practices of using the forest as a source of agricultural land, food, and income. Transitions in forest use have been driven by both national policies and local governance, implemented by different actors at different spatial scales. To understand villagers’ agency in relation to conservation and development interventions, I consider the historical legacy of villagers’ conservation practices and of state interventions. This avoids merely taking a ‘snap- shot perspective’ of contemporary livelihoods, as I noted in the previous section on livelihoods studies.

2.3.1.3. Biopower and Governmentality

The study of state resource governance has become a prominent theme in political ecology since the 1990s, with many scholars employing Foucauldian ideas of power (see Section 2.2.3) and his concept of governmentality, which Foucault (1979:20) defines as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics” (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995; Watts 2004; Vaccaro 2005; Rose et al. 2006; Véron and Fehr 2011).21 Other scholars have criticized an over-reliance on Foucauldian theorization in political ecology (Mann 2009; Winkel 2012), which has, for instance, left largely un-examined to what extent state governmentality actually shapes citizens’ attitudes and agency (Rutherford 2002; Cepek 2011). I employ an actor-oriented perspective to examine how state governmentality has been implemented and has affected villagers’ livelihood strategies and conservation behaviour, paying particular attention to both the intended and unintended effects of state interventions for livelihood development and forest conservation.

Underpinning a governmentality perspective, Foucault’s (1990) concept of biopower describes a mode of governance that operates “through the regulatory controls of the population (rather than the individual) through the management of life” (Rutherford 2002:296). This conception illustrates that power is not necessarily an oppressive or constraining force, but rather should be seen as latent to state governance and as productive in a sense that it enables social actors and

21 To develop his theories of power and governmentality, Foucault (1977) examined a series of treaties from 16th century Europe, where feudal rulers had come to the conclusion that the traditional exercise of ‘sovereign power’, epitomized through public execution, is prone to attracting resistance. He found that they had thus become increasingly concerned with questions of “how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, [and] how to become the best possible governor” (Foucault 1991:87).

39 structures to function (cf. Giddens 1984). Biopower thus facilitates a form of governmentality that controls people not by force but, more ‘intimately’, by shaping people’s identity, aspirations and agency (Rabinow 1984; Cepek 2011). This “conduct of conduct”, is what Foucault (1991:2) refers to as governmentality, primarily focussed on the state. Other scholars have since examined the agency of non-state actors in terms of governmentality (cf. Corson 2011), and Carr’s (2013:77; 2014) conceptualisation of “livelihoods as intimate government” suggests that state agents, fellow villagers and household members all shape people’s agency through different, including subtle, “tools of coercion” (see Section 2.2.3.2).

Although Foucault never actually wrote about the governance of natural resources (Rutherford 2007; Winkel 2012), his concept of biopower translates well into the analysis of environmental politics (Darier 1999; Malette 2009). It explains how “the environment is constructed as in crisis” to justify conservation interventions and regulation of resource use by state or non-state actors (Rutherford 2002:295). Much of the critical political ecology literature, as developed by Forsyth (1998, 2003), draws on Foucauldian perspectives of knowledge and biopower to interrogate, for instance, the conservation value attributed to biodiversity or specific species (Bryant 2002 ; Hanson 2007; Fletcher 2010; Véron and Fehr 2011; Dempsey 2013; Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Davis and Zanotti 2014). I draw on this literature when analysing the value that different actors attribute to the biodiversity of Mù Cang Chải’s forests.

2.3.1.4. State territorialisation and resource control

In addition to state power and governmentality, another related political ecology theme that is important for this thesis is the study of property relations, primarily concerning villagers’ concepts of access to land and conceptions of land and forest ownership. I situate my thesis in the literature on property relations in the following section. However, I preface this here by introducing the related concept of state territorialisation, which has often been used by human geographers examining state resource governance of remote forests and protected areas (see references below). Although I do not follow this approach and find little evidence for the dichotomy of state territorialisation and peasant resistance (see Section 10.4. for further interpretations), a brief review of the related literature is useful here to situate my thesis in the wider scholarly literature.

40 In their seminal study of state territorial governance in Siam, present-day Thailand, Vandergeest and Peluso (1995) identify three strategies that are central to state territorialisation: surveying and mapping of state territory; commodification and classification of land; and the assignment of formal property and land use rights. To maintain a gaze on its citizens, the authors emphasize the roles of the census and state administrations at provincial and local levels. The census allows the central state to place all its citizen on the map, all the way down to the level of the household, a “twentieth-century product of territorial administration” (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995:399).

Nevertheless, Vandergeest and Peluso (1995: 389) contend that “territorial land-use planning is, like market liberalism, often a utopian fiction unachievable in practice because of how it ignores and contradicts peoples’ lived social relationships”. Because citizens are invested in customary property regimes and resist state territorialisation, states have often had to resort to coercion and exercise their “monopoly of violence” to expropriate people in order to, for instance, implement a land reform or establish a protected area (PA) (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995:390). The concept of state territorialisation has provided a fruitful lens for the analysis of forest governance in Vietnam (Sowerwine 2004b; Rugendyke and Nguyen Thi Son 2005; Barney 2008), elsewhere in Southeast Asia (see, for example: Hubbel and Rajesh 1992; Li 2005b), and in India (Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Agrawal 2005; Corbridge 2005).22

Since Vandergeest and Peluso’s (1995) writing on state territorialisation, other authors have devised related frameworks to examine state strategies of resource control, which have also been applied to conservation (Dressler 2005; Igoe 2007; de Jong and Ruiz 2012). Scott (1998) shows how statutory property relations, land-use designation and other aspects of state administration serves to make landscapes ‘legible’ to bureaucracy, as PAs do very effectively (Sowerwine 2004b; Sikor 2011a; Véron and Fehr 2011). Sowerwine (2004b, 2011) refers to state representations of landscapes and land use as ‘environmental imaginaries’, which often conflict with how locals conceive of their environment. Examining the tools of state governmentality and biopolitics, other studies show how states use expert knowledge, statistics and bureaucracy to

22 Apart from forest protection, reforestation projects in both Lao PDR and Vietnam have been conceived as cases of territorialisation, when state-led surveying designates ostensibly ‘barren’ lands for reforestation (Barney 2008; McElwee 2009). In this process, land that may be under multiple informal property regimes and land usages, such as regenerating swidden fields or livestock grazing lands, can be expropriated. While this perspective is relevant in many parts of Vietnam, I explain in Chapter 6 that reforestation in my study area was not extensive enough to significantly encroach on agricultural land use.

41 establish a utilitarian management regime over their territory and, specifically, forest areas (Agrawal 2005; Vandergeest and Peluso 2006b, 2006a). Conversely, in Mù Cang Chải it took years of lobbying by an international NGO to establish the protected area, which was arguably not established to secure state territorial control or legibility over a remote territory and its ethnic minority inhabitants.

Indeed, state territorial control is rarely totalitarian, as Vandergeest and Peluso (1995) already caution. Interestingly, MacLean (2013) reveals how Vietnam’s central administration has partly failed to maintain bureaucratic power over provincial and local state actors, as they supply data on agricultural land use that is according to state plans, but not to reality. This essentially supported a false impression of state territorial control. In my field site, local forest protection officials allow local forest use in a protected area, which is counter to state regulation, essentially undermining state forest governance (see Section 6.2.3 and Chapter 8).

The context of decentralization in Vietnam and elsewhere has furthered the need to deconstruct the state as the singular source of power and territorial control. Furthermore, Sikor (2011a) observes “shifts in the Southeast Asian literature away from state territorialisation to struggles over territoriality” (see also: Natter and Zierhofer 2002; Peluso 2005). In the context of my fieldwork, I also found villagers’ expressions of territoriality and their access to different resources to be highly relevant to their livelihoods. They are interestingly shaped through past patterns of forest use and shifting economic value of different forest resources, such as selected timber species and NTFPs, as well as former swidden plots suitable for cardamom cultivation (see Section 6.2 and 6.3). To examine these aspects, I engage the literature on property relations, which I turn to next.

2.3.1.5. Property relations and resource access

The study of property relations has a long pedigree in both political economy and anthropology, which has illustrated both material and symbolic dimensions of property (Shipton and Goheen 1993; Fortmann 1995; Hann 1998). The idea that property and resource access are socially mediated goes back to Malinowski’s (1935) anthropological perspective that property relations reflect the interplay between individual and collective claims. Building on Sen’s (1981) differentiation between endowment and entitlement (see Section 2.2.1.1), Ribot and Peluso

42 differentiate between property (“the right to benefit from things”) and access, defined as “the ability to benefit from things” (2003, emphasis in original). Therefore, some formal land holders cannot access or benefit from their property, but need to negotiate social or political institutions or have other assets to wield their property rights (cf. Berry 1989b; Shipton and Goheen 1993).23 Ribot and Peluso’s (2003:154) theory of access thus examines “why some people or institutions benefit from resources, whether or not they have institutionally recognized rights to them”.24

A careful analysis of institutions is particularly important in the context of legal pluralism, when there are multiple institutions at play that seek to regulate access to the same resource.25 This is often the case after land reforms, when customary property relations prevail alongside imposed statutory tenure regimes, as it is the case with forestland, in particular, in rural Vietnam (Sowerwine 2004b; Sturgeon and Sikor 2004; To Xuan Phuc 2007). Explaining this dynamic in Vietnam and beyond, Sikor and Lund (2009) argue that people’s claims and practices based on customary property relations reify the socio-legal legitimacy of the institutions or traditions underlying these property relations (cf. Sikor 2011b, 2012a). Access to natural resources is thus tied to the power and authority of certain institutions and their actors to legitimize the property relations they stand for (Sikor and Lund 2009). This builds on Berry’s (1989a) idea that property relations only exist with, and are shaped by, peoples’ engagement with them and thus emerge from regularised practices and evolve over time (cf. Leach et al. 1999). These perspectives show that people’s agency is not limited by access structures but can actively shape them (cf. Giddens 1984). These contextual and actor-oriented perspectives on property relations thus advance the conceptualisation of access and property in the livelihoods literature (see Section 2.2.1.1).

Throughout my results chapters, I examine different property relations and their implications. In several cases, I see the salience of Sikor and Lund (2009) theory that access is subject to

23 Interestingly, Berry (1989a) shows how social institutions of kinship and gender, amongst others, mediate access to state structures, and how this access became a goal in itself, rather than a means to gaining access to other assets. Her work is fleetingly cited by Bebbington’s (1999) and Ellis’s (2000) early contributions to livelihood studies, but her nuanced attention to the social processes of access formation, however, was not adopted in the further development of livelihood studies. 24 For example, powerful social actors may be able to negotiate access without having formal (or informal) rights, while other right-holders may lack necessary assets to derive full benefits from their entitlements. 25 The term legal pluralism is commonly used by social scientists to describe a situation of competing sets of regulation, such as informal property relations prevailing amidst their official replacement with statutory land tenure. Tamanaha (1993), however, considers this a misnomer and argues that the term legal pluralism should be reserved for legal matters.

43 villagers legitimizing certain social institutions, which illustrates what Moore (1998) calls the “micro-politics” of property and access. To understand the underlying legal pluralism, I document the legacy of informal property relations, the emergence of statutory property relations, and the role of state land ownership. Following the common typology that has emerged in the property literature, I differentiate between villagers’ individual property relations and open access regimes (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975; Bromley 1992). I document the role of different property regimes in mediating villagers’ access to land and forest resources (see Chapter 5), including opportunities for forest income (see Chapter 6). For instance, I examine how Hmong villagers maintain informal property regimes over specific forest resources that effectively enable them to sell these resources, although they may be located within the PA and thus under formal state ownership (Sikor and Lund 2009).

2.3.2. Summary: This thesis as a political ecology study

During the early expansion of the political ecology field in the 1990s, Blaikie (1999:131) himself remarked that political ecology had already become “a capacious vehicle for academic hitchhikers”. Since then, the growing breadth and prevalence of political ecology studies has indeed produced a sprawling body of literature, but I find that this should not distract from the analytical and disciplinary developments that political ecologists have brought. Much like other fields of social sciences, political ecology has been shaped by the philosophical and epistemological debates of the 1980s and 1990s, including the debate to what extent social reality is shaped by structure and agency, which I review in the context of livelihood studies (see Section 2.2.3). In this section, I have shown how poststructuralist approaches have contributed to political ecology perspectives that attend to the effects of power, knowledge and discourse, and to the question how people’s agency interacts with such structural elements. A case in point is the study of property relations and resource access, which are central to the livelihoods perspective, but arguably better theorized in the political ecology literature, as I noted above.

In Section 2.3.2, I explained how my analysis of livelihoods and conservation in Mù Cang Chải engages with several conceptual and analytical elements that are characteristic of political ecology studies: actor-oriented focus, multi-scalar analysis, governmentality, territorialisation and property relations. Conceptually, I thus understand this thesis as a political ecology study of forest conservation, grounded in an in-depth understanding of local peasant livelihoods. Indeed,

44 much of the social science literature on conservation, which I turn to next, is based on a political ecology perspective.

2.4. The Social Science of Forest Conservation

In this final section of this chapter, I review a broad body of literature on forest conservation, which shares the political ecology premise that social science insights are crucial in developing and interrogating approaches to resource management (Peluso et al. 1995; Bennett and Roth 2015). Conceptually, I find that the analytical approaches of much of this literature on conservation embody a political ecology perspective, even if authors do not identify themselves as political ecologists. Thematically, the topics of conservation governance, including conservation enforcement and PES, fall squarely in the realm of political ecology. In this section, I review academic debates, policy developments and the legacies surrounding different models of forest conservation, all of which are relevant for my analysis of conservation governance in Mù Cang Chải in Chapters 7, 8 and 9.

In Section 2.4.6, I develop my analytical approach for my study of PES governance in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam more broadly (see Chapters 9 and 10). I focus on the literature that considers PES from a justice perspective and, secondly, situate my understanding of PES and Vietnam’s PES policy between common agendas for conservation and for poverty alleviation. A balance between the two objectives is what all conservation tools I review here seek to strike in the international policy landscape that has become increasingly ideological and, arguably, neoliberal. I close this section with a review of the literature on environmentality and explain how I use Agrawal’s environmentality framework to examine how conservation interventions have shaped villagers’ conservation practices and socio-cultural dynamics in two ethnic Hmong buffer zone villages.

2.4.1. The lasting legacy of protected areas (PAs)

The protected area (PA) has traditionally served as the primary model for forest conservation, but has been much contested and amended since the 1990s. International conservation agencies and donors have been instrumental in expanding the PA network in the Global South during the 1980s and 1990s, as curbing global biodiversity loss became a “global social objective” (Ferraro 2001:990). Traditionally, PAs were governed according to a model of ‘fortress conservation’,

45 which justifies the exclusion or even relocation of rural populations with the premise that poverty forces people to adopt environmentally destructive land use and livelihood patterns (Duraiappah 1998; Adger et al. 2001; Angelsen and Wunder 2003; Agrawal and Redford 2009). Such conservationist discourses portray humans living in or around PAs as a latent conservation threat and PAs therefore need to protect the forest from the people.26 In Vietnam, I find that this discourse has been pursued by both non-state conservation actors, builds on a legacy of casting all forms of shifting cultivation as destructive (see Section 4.5).

Political ecology studies refer to forest access restrictions as the social costs of conservation (Brockington and Schmidt-Soltau 2004; West et al. 2006; Adams and Hutton 2007). From this perspective, PAs have been encroaching on human habitat and, moreover, have become vehicles for top-down resource governance and state territorialisation (Peluso 1993; Brockington 2002; Hayes and Ostrom 2005). Since the 1990s, the concept of the PA and alternative models of forest conservation have been fiercely debated, as I will show throughout the following sections.

2.4.2. Contemporary “conservation reality” and paper parks

With the expansion of PAs into human habitat and increasing pressures on forest resources, forest law enforcement became increasingly impossible in many PAs of the Global South (Bennett 2011). Conservationists have had to accept the “conservation reality”, as Robbins et al. (2009:574) call it, that officially illegal forest use continues in many PAs. This is also the premise of my analysis of conservation governance in Mù Cang Chải, which I present in Chapters 7 and 8. Arias (2015) refers to illegal forest use as one of the most wide-spread illegal activities in the world, but this misconstrues the fact that such cases include customary resource harvest by locals for subsistence purposes. Apart from being unable to control resource use, many PAs in the Global South are underfunded and do not have the capacities to undertake conservation activities or forest law enforcement (Geldmann et al. 2015). Such PAs have been

26 While many rural poor may harvest forest products for sale or household use, a larger share of forest resources is often extracted by more opportunistic actors, who harvest forest resources as long as this is economically attractive (Byron and Arnold 1999; Lambin et al. 2003). Levels of forest dependence and extraction are related to many other economic and ecological factors at different levels, and so does the change of forest use patterns in relation to socio- economic development (McSweeney 2002; Coomes et al. 2004). Increased income can thus result in either a reduction of forest use or an intensification of forest clearing, as investments are made in agricultural expansion and logging (Wunder 2001).

46 referred to as so-called ‘paper parks’, as if they only exist on paper and, in reality, hardly qualify as a functioning PA (Corbett 2008; Blackman et al. 2015).

The greatest challenge for many PAs in Southeast Asia, in particular, has been to curb hunting activities by local villagers and outsiders, which has been fuelled by the growing market demand for certain species of forest wildlife or other non-timber forest products (NTFPs) (Corlett 2007; Alves and Rosa 2013). Conservationists have highlighted the conservation impacts of illegal hunting activity in PAs, which has resulted in an “empty forest” that is devoid of most wildlife (Redford 1992; Milner-Gulland and Bennett 2003; Robinson and Bennett 2004; Bennett 2011; Harrison 2011; Wilkie et al. 2011). I examine the Mù Cang Chải PA as such an “empty forest” and track recent changes in hunting practices in the context of local livelihood change and conservation governance by different actors. I seek to shed light on certain social aspects of forest use and forest conservation that I find the literature on conservation enforcement and non- compliance, which I turn to next, does not consider sufficiently.

2.4.3. Conservation behaviour, enforcement and resistance

Previous studies of peasants’ conservation behaviour and attitude in the Global South are often grounded in a conservationist ideology, and rely on large-N surveys of notably simplistic, binary, or leading questions (see, for instance: Newmark et al. 1993; Agrawal 2005; Arjunan et al. 2006; Cao et al. 2010). To interpret such data, some researchers conduct regression analyses to find correlations between people’s attitude and other socio-economic or demographic characteristics (see also: Gibson et al. 2005; Sirivongs and Tsuchiya 2012). In my mind, these studies largely fail to discuss environmental behaviour in the context of culture, local history or politics, which I seek to do in this thesis.

Much of the literature that examines, more specifically, conservation enforcement and non- compliance in PAs, particularly hunting, draws on theories from psychology, sociology and criminology to predict the deterring effect of different fine levels or enforcement practices. Due to the methodological challenges of studying illegal behaviour empirically, they rely on modelling approaches, including for research objectives that are inevitably complex, contextual

47 and anthropological.27 Other studies on conservation enforcement often depoliticize the issue, and simply seek to prove the point that enforcement is essential and effective (Gibson et al. 2005; Hilborn et al. 2006; Wilkie et al. 2011). Moreover, there is a striking lacuna in this literature of livelihood considerations or actor-oriented case studies, which I find essential to understand the idiosyncratic drivers of conservation compliance and non-compliance.

Specifically, employing local villagers for forest patrolling is a common policy option to enhance enforcement in community-based conservation (Pilgrim et al. 2011). This has been done in Mù Cang Chải for over ten years, and I follow an actor-oriented perspective to examine the relationships and local politics that emerge between village patrols, other villagers, and conservation objectives, differentiating within these groups of actors. Interestingly, there are several studies regarding the position of villagers operating as state agents for conservation enforcement, and I draw engage this literature for my analysis in Section 8.5 (cf. Robbins et al. 2007; Pilgrim et al. 2011; Doane 2014). Conceptually, I draw on Scott’s (1976, 1985) concept of “everyday resistance”, which Holmes (2007) also does for his differentiation of resistance to conservation (cf. Holmes 2013, 2014). According to Holmes (2007:193), “implicit resistance” includes, for instance, subsistence resource use in or around PAs that has become illegal, whereas “explicit resistance” is pursued to undermine conservation objectives of PAs, such as through arson (Kull 2004; Agrawal 2005) or the killing of flagship species (Inskip et al. 2014; Mariki et al. 2015).

2.4.4. Alternative models for conservation governance

In the late 1990s, alternative models of conservation governance emerged that sought to institutionalise PA access and participatory PA management (Büscher and Whande 2007; Holmes 2007; Laurance et al. 2012). The International Union for the Conservation of Nature

27 These economic modelling studies aim to evaluate, among other topics, different approaches to conservation governance, including different scenarios of enforcement and their effects on PA budgets and forest use (Clarke et al. 1993; Jachmann 2008; Keane et al. 2008; Albers 2010); the interplay of livelihood development, conservation payments and enforcement (Muller and Albers 2004); the transaction costs of implementing such approaches (Börner et al. 2014); the differential treatment of local and outside forest users (Robinson et al. 2014), as well as how different user groups might respond to such tools of government (Keane et al. 2008; St. John et al. 2015). Keane et al. (2008) highlight the limitations of such modelling approaches, but Hansen et al. (2011) is the only of these studies to suggest that total enforcement is not always feasible. MacKenzie’s (2013) study shows the limitations of conservation enforcement, as she examines illegal extraction from a PA in Uganda by local residents. Her study has s strong livelihood component, but focuses on socio-economic drivers of forest extraction, which are not significant in Mù Cang Chải.

48 (IUCN) has developed a six-tired categorization of PAs within which categories V and VI allow some use of PA resources to facilitate local livelihood and income generation (Dudley et al. 2010; Shafer 2014). As conservation actors increasingly recognized that local support is pivotal to conservation success, participatory approaches started to integrate local knowledge and needs for forest access into conservation governance (Robbins et al. 2006). Central to the accommodation of local people’s needs was the increasing integration of poverty alleviation objectives into conservation planning. PAs and other conservation interventions thus shifted from being supposed drivers of poverty and exclusion to potential vehicles for integration and development (cf. Naughton-Treves et al. 2005; McCool et al. 2013; Corson et al. 2014).

2.4.4.1. The promise and prospects of integrating conservation and development

So-called Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) sought to pair conservation activities with local livelihood development and income generating opportunities, such as agroforestry, ecotourism or livestock domestication (Naughton-Treves et al. 2005).28 However, academics and other critical observers of ICDPs soon found that the anticipated win- win scenarios remained elusive, as trade-offs between conservation and (livelihood) development objectives were inevitable (Wunder 2001; Adams et al. 2004; Adams and Hutton 2007; Upton et al. 2008). Depending on the actors and agendas of the ICDPs, I find it useful to differentiate between projects that seek to achieve ‘conservation through development’ and those that seek ‘development through conservation’, although this is often not that clear-cut. Véron and Fehr (2011) contend that biodiversity conservation remained at the top of the agenda of many ICDPs, and that meaningful development of local residents was rarely fostered. I portray Vietnam’s national forestry programs 327 (1993-1998) and 661 (1998-2010) as nation-scale ICDPs, but find that they arguably prioritized poverty alleviation with the aim to achieve ‘conservation through development’.

In Vietnam and internationally, the premise of ICDPs partly rests on the reverse causality of the environmental Kuznets curve, namely that increasing rural incomes results in decreased

28 Even before the emergence of ICDPs, the commercialisation of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) garnered hopes to sustain both rural livelihoods and forest cover (Neumann and Hirsch 2000). However, the establishment of such schemes did not necessarily lead to a decrease of other forest exploitation (Escobal and Aldana 2003), and the sustainable management and monitoring of NTFPs harvests revealed to be particularly challenging (Arnold and Pérez 2001; Belcher et al. 2005; Belcher and Schreckenberg 2007).

49 environmental degradation (Duraiappah 1998; Mills and Waite 2009). This approach also underlies the concept of conservation payments, which I turn to later. However, both the poverty-environment nexus, as well as poor people’s economic rationale are more complex, as I highlighted in my review of the livelihoods and political ecology literature. Specifically, Coomes (2005:2) argues that integrated approaches to conservation and development have been hampered by “our lack of understanding of the economic logic that underpins the livelihoods of the rural poor”. Therefore, I ground my study of a phase of forest exploitation by Hmong villagers in the 1990s (see Chapter 6) in my analysis of their livelihood pathways and local market developments (see Chapter 5).

2.4.4.2. Community-based conservation and co-management

Apart from socio-economic development objectives, ICDPs often aimed to institute community- based conservation, which became the new mantra in the 1990s and promised to incorporate community participation and co-management into conservation governance (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Shackleton et al. 2010). However, many so-called community-based conservation projects failed to deliver the expected success and the concept started to reveal its flaws (Blaikie 2006; Igoe and Fortwangler 2007; Kamoto et al. 2013). Partly on account of idealistic conceptions of rural or poor communities as small and homogenous social units (cf. Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Berkes 2004; Tsing et al. 2009). Naturally, however, village communities are often divided over conservation and development priorities, and the literature severely lacks attention to community heterogeneities and social dynamics (Dressler et al. 2010). Therefore, I sought to understand the village dynamics of Chế Tạo, and show how different patterns and discourses of conservation compliance and resistance have emerged (see Chapter 8).

Co-management, specifically, refers to state actors including civil society representatives into the management of PAs or other projects (Berkes et al. 1991). While co-management has proven effective in some institutional contexts, scholars attentive to power dynamics have highlighted the risk of co-management becoming a “double-edged process for local people who risk becoming a proxy of state bureaucracy in the implementation of state policy” (Stevenson 2006; Kubo 2008:80; Caruso 2011). Like other conservation and development interventions, co- management forums can thus become vehicles of the “intimate” governance of local communities, as Agrawal (2005) and Kubo (2008) have framed it. Importantly, this assertion of

50 state control can be strengthened, be it inadvertently, by international agencies supporting co- management or community-based conservation (Bryant 2002 ; Dressler 2005, 2006).

Therefore, an actor-oriented analysis needs to differentiate between and within various actor groups involved in conservation interventions. However, few scholars have examined how co- management and its complex power relations work, and to what effects (except for, in particular: Acciaioli 2008b; Robinson 2009; Zanotti 2014). I draw on these studies to examine the efficacy of a co-management forum that has been involved in the management of the Mù Cang Chải PA since 2007, incidentally Vietnam’s oldest co-management initiative. Through this case study and the critical literature on co-management, I could identify some fundamental limitations to meaningful co-management in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam, more generally (see Section 7.4.2).

2.4.5. Decentralization and Recentralization in Conservation

The rise of community-based conservation has, at least in theory, advocated a retreat of the central state in resource governance. As centralized administrations in developing countries have often proven inefficient and ineffective, decentralisation became the new mantra of development advice for both conservation and development sectors in the 1990s (Larson 2004). Within this larger context, the decentralisation of resource governance, specifically, has been pursued through land reforms to advance individual tenure security (Sikor and Müller 2009; Sjaastad and Cousins 2009) and a devolution of management authority to local-level state actors, who are thought to better understand local realities and interests (Tacconi et al. 2006; Agrawal et al. 2008; Ribot et al. 2010).

Nevertheless, several studies have documented how central governments have obstructed meaningful decentralisation and, instead, have harnessed new models of resource governance and financing to re-centralize state control (Ribot et al. 2006; Pulhin and Dressler 2009; Petursson and Vedeld 2015). I show how this is at play in Vietnam’s forestry sector, where reform programs for decentralisation and forestland allocation were initiated in the mid-late 1990s (see Section 4.5.4). Until today, however, land allocations have not been pursued in many locales, including Mù Cang Chải, or only to state-forest companies, which remain powerful players in Vietnam’s forestry sector (To Xuan Phuc et al. 2015).

51 Internationally, a different rationale for the return of state-led and strict conservation governance, according to some conservationists, is the apparent failure of community-based conservation and ICDPs to stem the ongoing biodiversity loss in PAs (Wilshusen et al. 2002; Hutton et al. 2005; Adams and Hutton 2007; Roe 2008). This resurgence of ‘neo-protectionism’ has been challenged by political ecologists and other scholars, resulting in fierce debates about the mandate and effects of PAs (Sullivan 2006; Berghöfer 2010; Fletcher 2010).29 In the context of my case study, I encountered neo-protectionist discourses among both state and non-state actors, despite a strong reliance within state policy on conservation payments, which I turn to next.

2.4.6. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) for conservation and development

In the early 2000s, Ferraro and his collaborators were the first scholars to suggest a system of conservation payments that provides peasants in the Global South with monetary incentives for conservation outcomes (Ferraro 2001; Ferraro and Kiss 2002; Ferraro and Simpson 2002). Their rationale was that this would be more cost-effective than the aim of some ICDPs to achieve ‘conservation through development’, which had proven too complex and ineffective (cf. Sükamäki and Layton 2007; Forsyth and Walker 2008; Milne and Niesten 2009; Fisher 2012). The concept of payments for ecosystem services (PES) emerged and garnered much hope among conservationists and policy makers, as it promised to achieve both poverty alleviation and conservation objectives more directly by simply paying poor people to protect the environment (Muradian et al. 2010; Fisher and Brown 2014; Wunder 2015). In this section, I identify key debates in the PES literature, highlight remaining gaps, and outline the scholarly contributions I seek to make with my analysis of PES in Mù Cang Chải, and Vietnam more broadly.

2.4.6.1. The emergence of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

This development of conservation payments became subsumed in the so-called neoliberalisation of conservation, which commonly describes the growing entanglement of conservation policy and practice with local and international market economies (Sullivan 2006; Bakker 2010; Büscher et al. 2012; Dempsey and Robertson 2012; Büscher et al. 2014). One important aspect

29 The debate whether the global need to protect biodiversity justifies its local costs has become increasingly polarized over recent years and has arguably reached a stalemate (Büscher and Dressler 2007; Miller et al.). An increasing number of conservation critics embody an ideology of “post-conservation”, which holds that the concept of biodiversity conservation (at least in the vicinity of forest-dependent peoples) needs to be reconsidered, as it has proven not viable and has done more harm than good (Fletcher 2010; cf. Dempsey 2015)

52 of this development is the growing prominence of market-oriented conservation financing mechanisms, such as PES (Igoe 2007).30 PES policies allow governments to levy fees from industrial and private sector actors for their use of ecosystem services (ES).31 These funds can be invested into either environmental conservation activities that maintain the provisioning of ES, or into livelihood development and poverty alleviation activities, as they do in Vietnam. biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and watershed protection (water conservation and erosion control).32 From an ecological economics perspective, these ecosystem services are positive externalities that should be internalized in market-based exchanges; this could generate funds that can be invested into conservation or, more directly, used as conservation payments for to incentivize land owners to maintain certain forms of land use that provide these ecosystem services (Van Hecken and Bastiaensen 2010).33

Specifically, the concept of PES requires actors who benefit from forest ecosystem services to compensate forest owners for providing these services, either directly or by contributing to a state-managed fund.34 Hydro-power companies, for instance, rely on reservoir watersheds to be forested to avert siltation of the reservoir (Huang et al. 2009). The subsequent policy question is how to use these funds to achieve environmental conservation that maintains these watershed

30 Roth and Dressler (2012) remind us, however, that the neoliberalisation of conservation in the Global South has its roots in market-oriented conservation strategies, such as the reliance of many ICDPs on developing ecotourism, commercial NTFP harvests, and other income opportunities (Igoe 2007). The intensification of this neoliberalisation of nature, more generally, has sparked a multitude of concerns, including the inabilities of markets to regulate access to natural resources (Humphreys 2009), the capitalist enclosure of nature (Heynen and Robbins 2005), and the loss of society’s connection with nature (Borgström Hansson and Wackernagel 1999). 31 Ecosystem services are defined as 32 Most authors use the terms environmental services and ecosystem services interchangeably (Muradian et al. 2010). Muradian et al. (2010) usefully distinguishes between the two, defining ecosystem services as the benefits humans derive from “natural” ecosystems, such as a forest; whereas the benefits from agricultural or other anthropogenic landscapes should be referred to as environmental services (see also Matzdorf et al. 2013). Following this distinction, I refer throughout this dissertation to ecosystem services, as I only refer to the ecosystem services provided by forest areas. 33 The concept of PES is an application of the so-called Coase theorem and therefore assumes that if both the provider and the user of an ecosystem service can find price per unit for the service that provides a monetary incentive for both so support the provisioning of ecosystem services (Coase 1960). The assumption is that transaction costs are low and property rights are clearly defined, although Coase (1937) had already noted that transaction costs cannot be neglected. In reality, transaction costs and the lack of tenure security have proven to be two principle challenges to the implementation of PES, as I will show in the case of Vietnam. 34 According to Wunder’s (2005:3) commonly cited early definition, a PES is “a voluntary transaction where a well- defined ES [ecosystem service] (or a land-use likely to secure that service) is being ‘bought’ by an ES buyer from an ES provider if and only if the ES provider secures ES provision (conditionality)”. Given, however, that the two key conditions of voluntaryness and conditionality are often not implemented and monitored, especially in large-scale PES projects in the developing world, most authors have widened the definition, although Wunder’s (2015) revised definition still refers to conditionality as an essential aspect of PES in his updated definition.

53 services. A common approach, which also underlies Vietnam’s PES program, is to pay peasants living in the watershed to protect local forests. Such PES seek to compensate forest owners either for their labour or their opportunity costs, which relate to their potential revenues from logging the forest or converting it to agriculture, for instance. However, many studies have shown that the opportunity costs of logging or cash crop conversion often far outweigh PES levels (Kosoy et al. 2007; Engel and Palmer 2008). Even if forest use is not lucrative, PES recipients may value the socio-cultural value of certain forms of forest use, as I found in the case of hunting in Chế Tạo (see Section 9.5.2).

As a novel conservation financing mechanism, PES policies seek to tap into new sources of funding and, for instance, have transformed the financing of Vietnam’s forestry sector (see Section 4.6.2). Globally, however, actual PES funds are still dwarfed by traditional non-market funding streams for forest conservation (Hein et al. 2013). PES schemes have been established in numerous countries of the Global South, which I focus on here, but they differ vastly in their mechanisms for commodifying ecosystem services, collecting user fees and distributing PES (Sattler and Matzdorf 2013). They range from project-level PES schemes to national-scale PES policies that resemble government subsidy programs, such as in China, Costa Rica and Vietnam, for instance (Huang et al. 2009; Fletcher and Breitling 2012; Suhardiman et al. 2013). Academic studies of PES schemes often emphasize how they are not neoliberal and differ from the supposed ideal model of market-oriented and performance-based PES as proposed by Wunder (2005:3) (see Footnote 34). In my mind, this misses the point of examining how emerging PES schemes are financed, governed and conceived in their national institutional contexts, which is one objective of my case study of PES in Mù Cang Chải.

2.4.6.2. Evaluating the justice of PES

The concept of PES and its variable implementation give rise to multiple concerns, which a growing body of academic studies has documented since the inception of PES.35 Concerns remain over the practical and political challenges to implement and govern PES programs (McAfee and Shapiro 2010; Muradian and Rival 2012; Matzdorf et al. 2013). More specifically,

35 Apart from the concerns I review here, numerous scholars have critiqued the concept of ecosystem services and the mechanism of PES on more fundamental, ecological and philosophical grounds, but these discussions are not central to my analysis of PES in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam (see, for instance: Spangenberg and Settele 2010; Muradian et al. 2013; Barnaud and Antona 2014; Kull et al. 2015; Lyytimäki 2015).

54 the potential of PES schemes to contribute to poverty alleviation is unclear, and supposedly ‘pro- poor’ PES projects have shown very mixed results (van Noordwijk et al. 2012; Fisher et al. 2013). In many cases, payments have been distributed unfairly or inefficiently, resulting in increased inequality and conflict, which I also find in Mù Cang Chải (cf. Larson 2011; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Fisher et al. 2014). However, Leimona et al. (2015:16) argue that a trade-off between fair and efficient payment distribution in PES governance is inevitable (cf. van Noordwijk et al. 2012; Hejnowicz et al. 2014; Calvet-Mir et al. 2015; Le Ngoc Dung et al. 2016). More fundamentally, few authors remind us that the concept of PES is not necessarily conducive to equitable benefit distribution, as forest owners of high quality forest may receive more money than owners of degraded forest that does not provide watershed services as effectively. Therefore, I contend that policy makers need to strike a balance between targeted and equitable payment distribution. I will show that Vietnam’s PES policies have little targeting but seek to distribute payments equitably.

Numerous authors have examined PES concepts and case studies through different frameworks of equity and justice (Sikor 2013; Pascual et al. 2014; Wegner 2015). While the terms equity and justice are often used interchangeably, few authors define these terms or their empirical approaches sufficiently. For my evaluation of PES in Mù Cang Chải, I adopt a three-pronged conception of justice that includes distributive, procedural and contextual justice (Forsyth and Sikor 2013; McDermott et al. 2013; Sikor 2013). These authors refer to these dimensions of justice in various terms, but with equivalent meaning and scope, which I will briefly outline to highlight two more ways in which I seek to contribute to that literature.

With regards to their empirical scope, most studies examining the justice of PES schemes identify macro-level limitations to equity and poverty alleviation, particularly the exclusion of certain groups of beneficiaries (contextual justice); a lack of public participation in PES governance (procedural justice); or an unjust distribution of benefits (distributive justice). One of the most-cited prerequisites for a functioning and supposedly fair PES scheme are well-defined property relations that allow forest owners to be identified and paid (Clements et al. 2010; Agrawal and Adhikari 2013; Sunderlin et al. 2014). Conceptually, individual land tenure and PES go hand-in-hand, but I find that many authors portray tenure security as paramount without

55 evaluating whether this is useful and feasible in a given institutional context.36 In Vietnam, for instance, PES policy seeks to expand household forestland tenure (see Section 4.6.2), but my analysis of PES in Mù Cang Chải suggests that individual land tenure is not conducive to equitable PES distribution.

2.4.6.3. Gaps in the social science literature on PES

Overall, however, there are several gaps within the emerging PES literature that I seek to address in this thesis. Most generally, I contend that the PES literature concerned with distributive justice and poverty alleviation, two key foci of my PES analysis, has focussed on institutional aspects of policy and governance, but has paid too little attention to the position and perspective of PES recipients (Brockington 2010, van Hecken et al. 2018).37 In many cases, this has prevented a rigorous examination of PES outcomes, including the socio-economic effects of household payments (Milder et al. 2010; Suich et al. 2015). Therefore, I examine how PES distribution unfolds at the village level; how PES is received by different actors in terms of distributive justice; and the role of PES in recipients’ livelihoods. I seek to examine these aspects by grounding my study of PES distribution in my analysis of household livelihoods (see Chapters 5 and 6) and conservation behaviour (see Chapter 8).

If there can be justice in PES distribution, then on whose terms? Most authors seem to imply that equitable payments are “most just”, but this may not always be feasible or logical, and understandings of distributive justice vary significantly, as I found in Mù Cang Chải. Sikor et al. (2014) highlight that PES distribution may be fair or just in terms of either equality, need, merit or deservedness. In light of this, I address the question whether, for instance, households with differing opportunity costs or monetary need should receive the same PES. I further consider the justice of PES distribution within the watershed across administrative boundaries, as small differences of how Mù Cang Chải’s communes distribute PES has resulted in large variances of household PES levels. This may be the case elsewhere in Vietnam, but due to lack of multi-sited

36 Agrawal and Adhikari (2013) for instance, review PES schemes in 11 countries and contend that well-defined property rights and tenure security are of central importance, but they do not consider how different formal and informal property regimes over forestland are in the different countries studied, nor to what extent tenure reforms would be feasible or beneficial (cf. Adhikari and Boag 2013). 37 One anthropological angle that has been examined is people’s motivation in participating in PES schemes, but this relates largely to voluntary schemes, and is not relevant to Vietnam, where all residents of PES watersheds receive PES (see, in particular: Petheram and Campbell 2010; Fisher 2012; Bremer et al. 2014; Kwayu et al. 2014; Figueroa et al. 2016).

56 case studies of PES distribution, we do not know how significantly PES levels and their contribution to household livelihoods vary in other locales. Overall, the context of recipient livelihoods receives too little consideration in PES studies and requires actor-oriented approaches to be understood (van Hecken et al. 2018; Shapiro-Garza et al. forthcoming).

A key aspect related to PES governance and efficacy is that recipients need to trust that they will continue to receive payments for them to invest their labour into forest protection or land-use change. While Neef et al. (2009) mention this, aspects of trust remain under-examined both empirically and theoretically in the PES literature, partly because it is a complex, subjective variable to investigate. I find that villager’s conservation attitude and compliance, which I examine in terms of environmentality (see below), can be undermined by a lack of trust in local PES governance, such as suspicions about the embezzlement of PES funds (see Section 9.4). To understand the effects of PES, we therefore have to examine not only PES policy, but also local implementation and how recipients conceive of policy, governance and justice. While few PES studies address these aspects empirically, my interviews with villagers suggested that PES implementation had shaped their environmentality beyond PES policy objectives (see Section 9.5.2).

2.4.6.4. The (in)ability of PES to fund biodiversity conservation

In theory, PES promise win-win outcomes for both conservation and development objectives, but several authors have long argued that trade-offs are inevitable (Phelps, Friess, et al. 2012; Muradian et al. 2013). Yet, my impression of the PES literature is that too many studies still examine the effects of a certain PES scheme with regards to either conservation or livelihoods outcomes, but neither holistically nor in the context of national and local institutions, which I attempt to do in Mù Cang Chải.

From a policy perspective, it is often easier to conceive of and implement a PES program for poverty reduction than for environmental conservation, which I also find in my analysis of Vietnam’s PES framework. For the financing of any PES scheme, watershed services have proven relatively easier to commodify than biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration, the two other forest ecosystem services that are most relevant to PES debates (Ingram et al.

57 2014; Sandbrook and Burgess 2015).38 The monitoring, reporting and verification (commonly known as MRV) of these ecosystem services are often prohibitively complex, particularly for carbon sequestration (Corbera and Schroeder 2011; Palmer Fry 2011; Sommerville et al. 2011; Gupta et al. 2012; Ziegler et al. 2013; Wells et al. 2017). Nevertheless, even without accurate quantification, PES schemes can operate, as long as buyers of ecosystem services can be enlisted. In ongoing PES programs in the global South, watershed services have become the ecosystem service most often commodified (Huang et al. 2009; Goldman-Benner et al. 2012; Kolinjivadi et al. 2014), because hydro-power operators constitute viable buyers, particularly in Vietnam.

More generally, PES schemes based on watershed services, such as Vietnam’s PES scheme, do not value other ecosystem services and hence provide no incentive to protect forest biodiversity, or enhance carbon sequestration, for instance (Putz and Redford 2009; Brockington 2010; Grabowski and Chazdon 2012; Phelps, Webb, et al. 2012; Visseren-Hamakers et al. 2012). PES recipients may help provide multiple ecosystem services, but are only paid for watershed services (Van Hecken and Bastiaensen 2010). Nevertheless, I found that PES had enhanced recipients’ conservation attitudes and behaviours, but I see a lack in the PES literature of actor- oriented studies that examine these links (cf. Hayes 2012). I try to understand the multi-faceted and idiosyncratic effects of how PES interacts with villagers’ environmental attitudes and identities in terms of Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework, which I turn to in the following section.

In this section, I have reviewed the conceptual literature of PES that is relevant to my analysis of PES in Vietnam. I have highlighted the conceptual approaches I will draw on and the scholarly contributions I seek to make. Apart from PES, I examine, in Chapters 7 and 8, how prior initiatives for forest conservation were institutionalised and to what effects, partly employing a governmentality perspective.

38 As a PES model that seeks to commodify carbon sequestration, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) has attracted sustained global attention by academics, conservationists and policy makers, also in Vietnam. This, however, is not relevant to my case studies, but I will, in Chapter 10, draw some conclusion on the potential of REDD in Vietnam from my study of watershed PES.

58 2.4.7. From governmentality to environmentality

A governmentality perspective on conservation interventions, such as PES schemes, leads us to examine how they are implemented and seek to change environmental behaviour. In the ‘Birth of Biopolitics’, Foucault (2008:260) differentiates between ‘neoliberal governmentality’ and ‘disciplinary governmentality’, which I find useful for my analysis of shifting approaches to conservation governance in Vietnam. Conservation rules, regulations and propaganda, for instance, are tools of a disciplinary governmentality that “operates through the internalisation of social norms and ethical standards” (Fletcher 2010:173). In turn, conservation payments, including PES, employ the approach of neoliberal governmentality that “seeks to create external incentive structures” to motivate behavioural change (Fletcher 2010:173). Apart from characterizing the governmentality of different conservation interventions, I want to understand if and how they have affected villagers’ behaviour and agency, as previous governmentality studies have been critiqued for being “too hasty in accepting the power of official discourse to mould people’s behaviour” (Rose 1999; Watts 2001; Mathews 2005:799).39 To this end, I found Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework useful to study the effects of conservation governance and shifts in villagers’ conservation attitude, more generally, as I explain next.40

Agrawal (2005) studied how state-led forest conservation in India was decentralized, infiltrated village communities, and sought to enlist villagers in so-called forest councils for joint forest patrolling. He examines how some villagers became ‘environmental subjects’ as they participated in the forest councils and adopted conservation attitudes, behaviours and identities in support of forest conservation (Agrawal 2005). He further examines how this affected community dynamics and village politics. His study has three analytical foci, which I adopt: The institutionalisation of conservation; the ensuing village politics; and environmental subject formation. However, he neither considers villagers’ livelihoods nor socio-cultural, contextual or

39 Mathews (2005) also levies this critique against Scott’s (1998) study of state governance, although the micro- politics of governance was not the focus of his 1998 book, and his earlier work had brought the latency and discrete strategies of peasant resistance to the fore (Scott 1976, 1985, 1990). 40 While the term environmentality was first coined by Luke (1995), Agrawal (2005:166) develops “framework of understanding in which technologies of self and power are involved in the creation of new subjects concerned about the environment”. The concept of environmentality has received increased scholarly attention, although different authors use it slightly differently (cf. Snodgrass et al. 2008; Sullivan 2010; Forsyth and Walker 2014; Adams 2015; McGregor et al. 2015).

59 idiosyncratic factors that seem integral to shaping both individual subjectivities and village politics surrounding forest conservation (cf. Acciaioli 2008a; Cepek 2011; Singh 2013).

Like Agrawal (2005), my study seeks to elucidate how forest conservation is institutionalised at a village level and how this affects village politics and villagers’ agency. I use his concepts of environmentality and environmental subjects, as I find that they effectively capture the goal of community-oriented conservation interventions, namely to foster conservation awareness and behaviour. I find that my actor-oriented study of environmentality usefully advances Agrawal’s (2005) empirical approach, which relies on a large-N survey of 279 villagers in seven villages, asking them three simple questions about their attitude to forest conservation. I ground my environmentality study among Hmong villagers in my understanding of their livelihoods and the shifting importance of forest use. I aim to investigate whether and how some Hmong villagers have become environmental subjects supporting forest or biodiversity conservation, while others have not. However, I caution that the question of intentionality is critical when interpreting people’s agency, as I noted for the study of resistance, for instance (see Section 2.2.3.4).

The benefit of using Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework for my study is that its attention to village politics and subject formation opens up my analysis to both the intended and unintended effects of different conservation interventions, including PES. Chapters 7 and 9 examine how forest conservation and PES, respectively, have been institutionalised in Mù Cang Chải; Chapter 8 focuses on the village politics surrounding hunting and forest patrolling, while both Chapters 8 and 9 examine how various institutions have shaped villagers’ environmentalities. The environmentality framework thus fruitfully interacts with other aspects of my overall conceptual framework for this thesis, as I explain in Section 2.5.

2.4.8. Summary: This thesis as a conservation study

In this Section 2.4 I have reviewed the literature that has developed and debated different approaches to governing forest conservation in the Global South. I have reviewed different debates and alternative models that seek to reform the PA model, which carries a legacy of excluding local people from vital forest resources. All proposals I review here, namely ICDPs, community-based conservation, and co-management, promise win-win outcomes for

60 conservation and development objectives. They have all been pursued in Mù Cang Chải and met some of the limitations that the above literature identifies.

Remarkably, the literature that advocates for accommodating local people’s needs and participation largely focuses on the political and institutional structures of conservation with little analysis and theorization of how local people react, adapt and resist. Their subjective and collective agency in the face of conservation interventions receives markedly little theoretical attention, let alone empirical study. I emphasize this shortcoming in the literature on conservation enforcement and resistance (see Section 2.4.3) and within the PES literature, both of which seek to affect people’s conservation behaviour.

Much PES literature revolves around participation and justice, but few studies seek to empirically study people’s conceptions of distributive justice and the socio-political effects of PES distribution, which are very relevant in Mù Cang Chải. Therefore, I frame my study of conservation governance and its effects in Mù Cang Chải through Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework: I study the institutionalisation of conservation with a focus on different actors and their agendas (see Chapter 7), particularly the latest state project of PES (see Chapter 9); in Chapter 8, I examine the village politics that have ensued since community-based forest patrol groups were established; and finally, in Chapters 7 and 9, I seek to elucidate how villagers have or have not become environmental subjects.

2.5. Conclusion: Synthesis of the conceptual framework for this thesis

In the course of this chapter, I have reviewed three intersecting bodies of scholarly literature: livelihood studies, political ecology and social science literature on forest conservation. In Figure 2.2, I provide a diagram of the conceptual and analytical elements most salient to my thesis.

A political ecology perspective and a critical realist ontology serve as a scholarly umbrella for my conceptual approach. Overall, my joint analysis of livelihoods and conservation issues falls squarely within the mandate that political ecologists set for the field in the 1990s. Throughout the three main sections of this chapter and their summaries, I have indicated how I use these elements for my analysis in the course of Chapters 5-9. I conclusion, I here synthesize my conceptual framework that I assemble from these different perspectives by explaining how they support each other to fill analytical gaps and thus provide a strong framework when combined.

61 Overall, a political ecology perspective and a critical realist ontology provide a scholarly umbrella for my conceptual approach.

Political ecology Provides analytical, methodological and ontological framework:

 Analytical focus  Ontology  Power and structure  Critical realism  Governmentality  Methodology  State resource governance  Disaggregate actors  Property relations  Multi-scalar analysis

Through this political ecology lens, I examine the nexus of livelihoods and forest conservation, drawing on the following elements of scholarly literature:

Livelihood studies Social science of conservation

 Sustainable Livelihoods  Conservation governance  Access to assets and opportunities  The conservation reality of paper parks  Institutions and  Co-management, participation social capital and co-option  Socio-economic differentiation  Conservation enforcement and resistance/non-compliance  Livelihood change  Payments for ecosystem services (PES)  Livelihood pathways  Allocation, distribution and justice of PES  Livelihood trajectories  Watershed services vs. biodiversity  Livelihood identities  Environmentality  Structuration of livelihoods and agency  Institutionalisation of conservation  Variety and meanings of livelihood assets  Village politics  Different conceptions of wealth  Environmental subject formation  Actors shaping social structure (conservation attitudes, behaviour, discourse)  Livelihoods as intimate government

Figure 2.2: Overview of conceptual and analytical ideas drawn from the literature

In Section 2.2, I first developed a livelihoods perspective that expands the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) and attends to the agency of social actors, to the social and cultural meanings they attach to different aspects of their livelihoods, and to the role of social institutions and social capital in how they negotiate their livelihoods and structural contexts. This situated and differentiated understanding of livelihoods, assets and opportunities I use to enhance the actor

62 focus of my political ecology approach. Both political ecology and the conservation literature often concern poor peoples’ livelihood and aim to inform poverty alleviation, but I argued in my review that much of the social science literature on conservation and PES lacks theoretical and empirical treatment of people’s aspirations and agency, which I seek to overcome by situating my study of conservation behaviour in my understanding of people’s livelihoods.

While the livelihood literature provides me with several useful analytical approaches, there are some aspects that I find are better theorized within the political ecology literature (see Section 2.3.2). This includes the study of property relations, which are salient to all my results chapters; and, secondly, the conceptualisation of state power and governance, which helps me to frame state interventions that have provided important structural parameters for villagers’ livelihoods. I argue that much of literature on forest conservation could benefit from a more differentiated conception of actors, power and property, which I seek to achieve through a grounding in political ecology.

Within the social science literature on conservation that I reviewed, Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework usefully combines analytical attention to institutional structure, village politics and subject formation. His focus on subjectivity provides an effective framing to the study of agency and allows for a consideration of cultural, social and political drivers of how people shape their opinions and behaviours. At the same time, Agrawal’s (2005) most severe omission, in my mind, is his lack of analytical consideration of how villagers’ livelihoods shape their environmental agency, which I seek to address through an actor-oriented livelihoods approach.

By keeping this final section purely conceptual, I want to show how each of the bodies of literature I draw on has its omissions, but how they can be usefully combined to mediate their shortcomings and form a strong framework. This framework lends itself well to my study of conservation and livelihood in two Hmong villages in upland Vietnam, but is transferable to other locales and studies of forest conservation in the Global South.

63 Chapter 3 Methodology and politics of access, positionality and power

3.1. Introduction

In this chapter, I provide a detailed account of my methodological approaches to fieldwork, data collection and data analysis. I start by outlining my fieldwork itinerary and then dedicate two sections to analysing how I negotiated field access through formal and informal gatekeepers (see Section 4.3); and, secondly, how my positionality and that of my assistants cum translators affected power dynamics, relationships and data collection in the field, particularly with Hmong villagers and officials (see Section 4.4). Subsequently, I discuss ethical considerations and procedures (see Section 4.5) to then outline my case study approach and the methods I employed for data collection and analysis (see Section 4.6).

3.2. An iterative itinerary of inductive research

Prior to proposing PhD research in Vietnam, I knew very little about the country, let alone its ethnic diversity or political development. During my first year in the program, I undertook a reconnaissance trip in May/June 2010 and visited Hà Giang Province and Hmong villages around Sa Pa (Lào Cai Province), where I got an introduction into Hmong history and livelihoods from my supervisor and colleagues. I was already considering the protected areas in Văn Bàn district (Lào Cai Province) and Mù Cang Chải district as potential field sites and undertook a scoping trip there.

Starting in November 2011, I conducted my fieldwork over six trips, totalling 12 months, spread out over a two-and-a-half-year period (see Table 3.1). I did this primarily to avoid longer times of absence from my family, but this iterative approach to fieldwork also proved quite valuable methodologically for three reasons: Firstly, I could use the time in between the field trips to transcribe, code and reflect on my data, and to plan the next steps of data collection. Secondly, my repeated returns to Mù Cang Chải were conducive to building rapport with local villagers and officials, as relationships seemed to strengthen each time I returned. Thirdly, it minimized, for both me and my main assistant Pha, the experience of fieldwork fatigue that other researchers report (Mandel 2003; Svensson 2006; Heller et al. 2011). Each time I returned to Vietnam, I had fresh energy and ideas, and we could maximize the time we spent on data collection. However,

64 the administrative work load, particularly for my host institute, of obtaining provincial research permits each time, as well as two research visas, was substantial. Such an elongated fieldwork schedule of was new to my interlocutors in Vietnam and required some extra negotiations. However, I found an iterative itinerary to data collection very conducive to my inductive approach of conducting qualitative fieldwork (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003; Bowen 2005). I could incorporate additional aspects into my inquiry that emerged during fieldwork and thus aimed to address relevant and current topics in my research.

As I indicate in Table 3.1, I spent my first trip to Vietnam (November 2011–February 2012) mostly in Hanoi, learning Vietnamese, organizing institutional affiliation and a research visa for future trips; building up a network of key informants; and scoping out potential research topics of relevance in Vietnam. Importantly, I also spent several weeks in Sa Pa, a highland tourist town that is surrounded by Hmong and other ethnic minority villages, in order to recruit potential research assistants from among the ethnic Hmong tourist guides there. One of them was Pha, and we conducted a scoping trip to Chế Tạo, which was very promising.41

The main objective of my second trip (June–July 2012), the first that required an official research visa, was a more in-depth scoping trip to both Văn Bàn and Mù Cang Chải districts to select case study villages and probe the relevance of my proposed research questions. I wanted to establish relationships with district and commune-level officials in both locales and therefore decided to hire a Kinh (Vietnam’s ethnic majority) tourist guide, Mr Binh, who had proven very capable of relating to both state officials and villagers when I first worked with him in 2010. While my first formal introduction to state officials in Mù Cang Chải was very promising, state surveillance and regulations of my fieldwork in Văn Bàn by the Lào Cai provincial authorities was quite restrictive. I subsequently decided to abandon my proposed idea of working in both Văn Bàn and Mù Cang Chải and instead including Nả Hàng B as a second case study village in Mù Cang Chải, which proved very fruitful.

The next three trips focussed on interviewing villagers and local officials in Mù Cang Chải, for which I worked exclusively with Pha, my Hmong assistant. These trips were my most intense

41 My primary research assistant Pha is the only person I refer to in this thesis by his real name, as he agreed to this. The names I use for all other persons are pseudonyms, as I explain in Section 3.5.

65 phases of data collection and were marked by methodologically interesting developments of access, positionalities and relationships, as I will analyse in Sections 4.3 and 4.4.

During my sixth and last trip, I returned to Mù Cang Chải to interview a number of district officials and other key informants. As most of them are ethnic Kinh, I hired Mr. Binh again as my translator and assistant.

Table 3.1: Itinerary of fieldwork trips and activities Time frame Locations Primary activities  Negotiate affiliation with host institute;  Apply for research visa for future trips; Hanoi  Vietnamese language study 20/11/2011-  Meet key informants and scope out research interests 20/02/2012  Recruitment of ethnic Hmong research assistants Sa Pa  Preliminary visits to prospective research sites in Yên Bái and Lào Cai province  Establish base and office space at host institute; library research Hanoi  Continued Vietnamese language study 15/06/-  Key informant interviews 31/07/2012  First official visits to prospective research sites in Yên Bái Lào Cai, and Lào Cai province, accompanied by vice director of host Yên Bái institute  Interviews with state officials  Key informant interviews in Mù Cang Chải district (1 week) 20/10- Mù Cang Chải  First village study in Chế Tạo commune (5 weeks). 19/12/2012 Household surveys; conversational interviews with commune-level officials 03/07-  Second village study in Chế Tạo commune (4 weeks) Mù Cang Chải 23/08/2013  First village study in Púng Luông commune (2 weeks) 16/10-  Second village study in Púng Luông commune (5 weeks) Mù Cang Chải 18/12/2013  Third village study in Chế Tạo commune (2 weeks)  Final series of interviews with district and commune-level officials in Mù Cang Chải (2 weeks) Mù Cang  Key informant interviews in Hanoi 16/05- Chải; Hanoi 12/06/2014  Library research at host institute  Three presentations of research findings at host institute, at the VASS Institute of Cultural research, and at PanNature, a conservation NGO.

66 3.3. Actors mediating access: Formal and informal gatekeepers

In this section, I explain how a range of state actors mediated my access to field sites in Mù Cang Chải and to what extent different institutions of surveillance monitored or affected my data collection. Several local gatekeepers also became important key informants, as I explain. These included officers (Cán bộ, which I also refer to as cadre) at the district-level Forest Protection Department (FPD, Kiểm lâm), which houses the protected area management board, as well as at the Commune People’s Committees (CPC), which implements state policy at the village level. In addition, each village has a village head, who reports to the CPC. The village head of Chế Tạo proved to be a challenging gate keeper to negotiate initially, while the village head of Nả Hàng B became a very reliable informant.42

3.3.1. Institutional affiliation and formal gatekeepers

International researchers in Vietnam need to be affiliated with a host institute to obtain a research visa and provincial permission to undertake fieldwork. The host institute typically has little leverage over provincial or lower-level officials, who are free to decline or restrict any research proposal. The head of the host institute and other staff involved also carry a sense of responsibility for the researcher’s good conduct in the field and are accountable to local authorities who directly monitor researchers’ activities. This kind of responsibility is not taken lightly and often felt like a burden, as some staff members of my host institute, as well as my district-level minders (see below) conveyed to me. The twin tasks of supporting and policing international researchers thus rest upon multiple actors within Vietnam’s administrative system, who are themselves intertwined in institutional hierarchies. My host institute was the Institute of Anthropology (Viện Dân tộc học), one of 35 research institutes within the state-run Vietnam Academy of Social Science (Viện Khoa học xã hội Việt Nam), and it played a key role in facilitating my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải, as I briefly outline here.

42 In Vietnam, the village (known as thôn, bản or làng, depending on context) is the lowest of four administrative levels, and each village has an elected village head. The monthly salary of a village head was, in 2013, a mere VND 40,000 (2 USD) and thus only a fraction of the salary of commune cadres, which range between 1 and 10 million VND, depending on seniority. This reflects the seemingly limited practical authority village heads have, which in Hmong villages may also stem from the fact that the village is not a traditional political unit. Nevertheless, I got the impression from observation and villagers’ accounts that the village head in Nả Hàng B is well-respected, while the one in Chế Tạo is not.

67 Once the Yên Bái Provincial People’s Committee (PPC, Ủy ban nhân dân cấp tỉnh) approved my research proposal and itinerary (kế hoạch nghiên cứu), translated and submitted by my host institute, it issued a letter of endorsement to district authorities in Mù Cang Chải to facilitate my access to the proposed research sites and informants. During each of my five visits to Mù Cang Chải, I checked in with one of the deputy leaders of the District People’s Committee (DPC, Ủy ban nhân dân cấp huyện). Through their staff, I obtained a document of introduction (giấy giơi thiệu), which allowed me to visit the district and commune offices in accordance with the itinerary I prepared for each trip. Each time I started a phase of field work in either Chế Tạo or Púng Luông commune, I had to register with the commune-level police (công an xã) and often report back upon the end of a trip. These processes were handled more formally in Púng Luông than in Chế Tạo, but this did not compromise my field access. In both locales, commune-level officials became my most prominent gatekeepers, and often important key informants, as well.

Within the strictly hierarchical processes of gaining formal field access in Vietnam, I found that, in reality, my access to field sites and data often remained a matter of negotiation with local officials, as other researchers in Vietnam have also noted (cf. Sowerwine 2004a; Bonnin 2011; Salemink 2013). This also meant that I had to invest more in my relations with local gatekeepers than with provincial gatekeepers in Yên Bái, for instance, whom I rarely interacted with after a brief introductory visit in July 2012. During the preceding six-month process of obtaining approval from provincial authorities, I had to reduce the number of communes in Mù Cang Chải I proposed to work in from five to two. However, due to a level of trust that I gained with district officials in Mù Cang Chải, I was able, during my last visit, to informally request permission to work in three additional communes, the names of which were simply added in between the lines of the all-important giấy giơi thiệu (see Figure 3.1). Apart from these different state officials who served as formal gatekeepers mediating access to my field sites, there were different overt and covert agents who were tasked to monitor my activities in the field and report back to district- level authorities. This is not uncommon for international researchers in Vietnam to be under surveillance, for which there are different levels, typically starting at the host institute.

68

Figure 3.1: Document of introduction by district authorities

3.3.2. Mind the researcher: The range of surveillance and assistance

A Vietnamese institution hosting international researchers often lets one of its staff members accompany the research during field work to serve as an assistant or translator. This provides staff with opportunities for additional income and professional development. Furthermore, such assistants may also be tasked with monitoring the conduct of international researchers (Scott et al. 2006; Turner 2010b, 2013a). Several authors report very mixed experiences with ethnic Kinh assistants from state host institutes, as these lacked research training and cross-cultural social skills, specifically in relation to ethnic minority informants (cf. Sowerwine 2004a; Scott et al. 2006; Bonnin 2011). Therefore, I sought permission from my host institute to conduct my field work in Mù Cang Chải with a Hmong translator of my choice. I argued that it was essential for anthropological research to conduct interviews in Hmong language, and my host institute agreed, albeit reluctantly. While I could operate quite freely with a Hmong assistant in Hmong villages, my fieldwork was still subject to surveillance by other state institutions.

69 As my host institute did not supply a field assistant for me, it requested district authorities in Mù Cang Chải to designate one officer to accompany me, at my expense. For my five official trips to Mù Cang Chải, Pao or Sinh, two ethnic Hmong officers of the district-level Forest Protection Department (FPD), alternated in serving as my official government minder. They played their role of monitoring my activities very differently, but not seriously enough to accompany Pha and me to any household visits. At times, both of them asked Pha to report on what we had been doing, and what kind of questions I was asking villagers. Neither of them ever stayed with us for more than a few days at a time, as they regularly had to return to Mù Cang Chải for work duties.

As government minders, Pao and Sinh were further tasked to introduce us to commune officials, convene welcoming and farewell dinners, and take overall responsibility for my conduct and safety. They were also required to be on ‘stand-by’ and regularly report to the district-level police on my activities. Therefore, they both expected to be paid for each day I spent in Mù Cang Chải, but we settled on a lower amount. Most valuable to me was that they were both from Chế Tạo commune, had been working with the FPD since before the PA was established, and were therefore very knowledgeable about local forest use, forest patrolling and PA management. They were both happy to share their knowledge, and became valuable key informants for my research.

Whenever I was in the district town of Mù Cang Chải, in between village visits to Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, I would often spend time at the local FPD (Hạt Kiểm lâm Mù Cang Chải), socializing with junior FPD staff, both ethnic Kinh and Hmong.43 The FPD station also houses the Management Board of the protected area, and one of its members, a very knowledgeable local Hmong, became another important key informant for many questions concerning contemporary and historical forest use and forest management in Mù Cang Chải.

I was initially surprised that Pao and Sinh did not exert closer surveillance of my research, as I thought their role was to detect politically sensitive information in my questions or villagers’ answers. Early on, I was told at my host institute that my research concerning forestry issues in

43 Six of the seven permanent officers at the FPD station in Mù Cang Chải are ethnic Kinh, one is a local Hmong. In the commune-level FPD station in Púng Luông (Trạm Kiểm lâm Púng Luông), there are a two local Hmong and three Kinh officers. All patrol staff throughout the PA are ethnic Hmong. The majority of the Kinh officers in both stations are in their early 20s and on their first job posting within the FPD. They are enticed to serve in upland locales for several years, as they receive a bonus on top of their meagre starting salary of around 2 million VND (100 USD) per month and are later more likely to obtain positions in their home province.

70 the northern highlands and in relation to Hmong people touches on three very sensitive topics in Vietnam. In Mù Cang Chải, however, these are everyday topics, and I did not get the impression that my topic was considered as too sensitive by local officials.

Apart from the overt roles of minders from the host institute or local government agencies, international researchers in Vietnam are, at times, subject to another, covert level of surveillance, which experienced researchers like Salemink (2013) may also be subject to in Vietnam. In my case, there were two district-level police officers, both ethnic Hmong, who would periodically appear, seemingly to investigate what we were doing. We could easily identify them, and one of them often slept in our hotel room in Ngã Ba Kim or appeared around meal time at the restaurant there. He would remind us to leave Nả Hàng B before nightfall, but otherwise exerted little control.

More interestingly, the undercover police officer who appeared twice while we were in Chế Tạo, asked Pha to filter my questions in interviews, but provided no further instructions.44 Overall, he reminded Pha of the importance of “keeping senior officers happy” (ua rau puab cov hau kub sab). This was also in my interest and could easily be achieved by regularly hosting commune officials and other villagers for meals at the house I rented in Chế Tạo, always providing ample meat and alcohol. At the end of each of my three stays in Chế Tạo, a larger meal at the commune centre was in order that required me to buy a whole pig. Each time, I extended the invitation to other villagers we had met, also because I was concerned about my positionality being conceived of as too close the commune leadership. Much like Lentz (2014:2), I feared that “[m]y position as researcher embedded me in the same fraught political relations that interest me analytically”. Indeed, the politics of who attended these meals provided some insight into these relations. In any case, villagers knew I needed to relate to local cadres, and this did not stop them from sharing their suspicions about the local leadership with me, which I analyse in several different contexts.

44 He said to Pha, literally: “[he] asks a lot, but [you] limit the answer” (cav ntau tab mas hais trawg), which Pha understood as a request to not translate every question or every answer. Pha did not follow this request, and did not seem bothered by this officer, who was always exceedingly friendly to us. However, he may have been inconvenienced by us staying in Chế Tạo, according to Pha’s interpretation. Pha once overheard him talking to commune officials and referring to us as a “tiger bite” (tsuv tum), one of the strongest curses in Hmong language, also noted by Tungittiplakorn (1998).

71 While these different institutions of surveillance may have covertly investigated what I was doing more thoroughly than I am aware of, I was never accompanied when interviewing villagers. Throughout my time in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I could thus move around the villages very freely, visit any household and ask any questions. Therefore, the processes of building relationships with and interviewing villagers largely depended on my assistants and me, specifically on our relationships, positionalities and personalities, as I will analyse in the following section. This will suggest that my assistants also had a gatekeeper effect, as they mediated my relations to informants and access to data.

3.4. Actors mediating data collection: My assistants and our positionalities

I next provide a reflective analysis of how my research was shaped by my field assistants cum translators. I focus on Pha’s positionality in Chế Tạo and its effects, which illustrate how important relationships in the field are. I split this section into five sub-sections and provide, first, a brief introduction to the concept of reflexivity; then I explain my language proficiency and some limitations of working with translators. In Section 3.4.4, I examine Pha’s positionality in Chế Tạo and its implications for our research. Later, throughout Section 3.6, I add additional reflections on how my positionality affected my data collection in relation to specific methods and informants.

3.4.1. Reflexivity and Relativity

During my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải, I could experience every day how collecting qualitative data through interviews is a complex interpersonal process that is fraught with difficulties, particularly if interviewing cross-culturally or with the help of a translator (Valentine 2005; Davies and Dwyer 2007; Caretta 2014). Similarly, writing an account of such research is a delicate act of representation, which was problematized by relativist critiques of anthropology in the 1960s (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In response, some ethnographers took a “reflexive turn” and helped deconstruct the prior dogma of objectivity in anthropological research and representation (Salzman 2002; Venkatesh 2013:3). Within geography, for instance, feminist geographers were among the first to reflect on how their ontology, positionality and multiple power relations in the field affected their research process (McDowell 1992; England 1994; Kobayashi 1994). Haraway (1988:575) argued that any data researchers collect and any knowledge they represent are inevitably “situated” within the

72 idiosyncratic research relationships and thus “partial”, forming merely one of multiple subjective perspectives (cf. Rose 1997).

In this section, I next reflect on how my positionality, and the fact that I worked through translators, shaped my research process in Mù Cang Chải. As many authors have practiced a somewhat superficial reflexivity, Moser (2008:386) criticizes that often the declared “positionality is a highly selective version of oneself that usually serves to keep academic authority intact”. Indeed, I can identify myself as an early-thirties, male, white, middle-class, Caucasian PhD student of average physicality, but this may not be what other actors involved in my fieldwork saw in me. Furthermore, I cannot fully understand how my positionality affected our relationships and my research process, and my reflexivity is therefore limited, as much as I attempt to provide “realistic self-awareness and honest disclosure” (cf. Rose 1997; Salzman 2002:810). Integral to self-awareness, but often omitted, is the role of personality (Stocking 1986; Moser 2008). Personality and social capital shape the “social psychology of access” to research sites and informants, as Harrington (2003:592) calls it. This will become evident in the following sections, when I reflect on how my and my assistants’ personalities affected our positionalities and relationships in the field.

3.4.2. My language proficiency and positionality

The fact that there are many anthropologists who are reliant on a translator is possibly the “dirty little secret of the discipline” (Gupta 2014:398). I knew I would always be reliant on a translator for interviews, particularly in Hmong language, but soon found that for all other aspects of fieldwork, every bit of language proficiency is very helpful.45 I therefore learned enough Vietnamese to engage in informal conversations; introduce myself and my research; participate in meals and crack the odd joke; and, by the end, hold a formal presentation about my research at my host institute, although I could not have managed the question period without an interpreter. In interviews held in Vietnamese through translation, I could partially follow the exchange and

45 During my first trip to Vietnam, I took approximately 40 hours of one-on-one Vietnamese language lessions at the Institute of Linguistics (Viện Ngôn ngữ học), which is, like my host institute, part of the Vietnam Academy of Social Science (Viện Khoa học xã hội Việt Nam). Subsequently, I was able to practice and expand my language proficiency through the following means: Vietnamese language learning partners in Hanoi, the study of Vietnamese reports and documents related to my field sites, informal teaching by both my assistants, staff from my host institute, and, of course, conversing with acquaintances and informants in Mù Cang Chải, Hanoi and on the road. I found listening comprehension to be the most difficult aspect of learning Vietnamese, and the most important for interviewing independently.

73 interject with clarifying questions, which was very useful. In interviews with some of the Vietnamese informants that I conducted in Hanoi in English, I found it helpful to switch to Vietnamese occasionally for certain terms and clarifications.

I started learning Hmong by listening to recordings I had made of Hmong acquaintances reading lists of words and phrases that we devised together.46 I expanded my vocabulary during my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải, but my abilities never exceeded basic exchanges needed around the table or fireplace to introduce myself, inquire about family relations, express gratitude, or ask some introductory questions from my interview guide. For further conversations in the villages I resorted to Vietnamese, in which most males were fully proficient. For linguistic and socio- cultural reasons, however, it was much more difficult to relate to female villagers, as I explain in Section 3.6.3.4. Given the nature of my research, my inability to understand the Hmong language remains one of the most significant methodological limitations of my fieldwork.47

Transcending our language barrier, villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B were heart- warmingly open and welcoming, and I learned how to show appreciation and respect through non-verbal communication and a few Hmong phrases. Such interactions with elderly villagers, including with women, were short but particularly rewarding. In turn, younger males were often keen to relate to me more closely. For all villagers, I seemed to be a bit of a novelty, as I was the first foreigner who had come to either village, apart from international conservationists and adventure motorcycle tourists (mostly lowland Vietnamese), who occasionally passed through Chế Tạo. My impression was that villagers much appreciated that I had come to learn about their lives, and they were often very generous with their time and insights they shared in interviews.

3.4.3. The limitations of translation

Central to my positionality and methodology was that I conducted all interviews in Mù Cang Chải with either Pha or Binh as my interpreter. This is methodologically problematic, given the

46 In turn, I personally found pronouncing and memorizing Hmong language much more difficult than learning Vietnamese. Hmong language has more tones than Vietnamese (eight compared to five), as well as numerous consonant and vowel sounds that I found hard to distinguish and pronounce. 47 Naturally, I could have collected much more data, more immediately and on more occasions if I had been fluent in Hmong or Vietnamese language. This would have also let me connect very differently to Hmong people, but would have also affected my social environment differently if villagers knew I understand what was being said. While I could have used Vietnamese with most Hmong informants, this would have limited the ability to convey many aspects of Hmong culture.

74 linguistic and interpretive challenge of translation (Temple 1997; Temple and Young 2004). Binh had some and Pha had no experience working as an interpreter for qualitative interviews, and I took much time to explain to both of them how I would like to conduct interviews. They both had an impressive ability to retain information and relay it to me, and learned remarkably quickly what kind of data was valuable to me. I found their English proficiency to be less of a limiting factor than I had thought, but I cannot fully assess to what extent their translation from Hmong filtered out cultural meaning and depth in the data, much like MacKenzie (2015) notes.

Previous PhD researchers working with ethnic Kinh translators in Vietnam have all reported that these translators seek to direct the interview process or occasionally answer questions instead of translating them (cf. Sowerwine 2004a; Scott et al. 2006; Bonnin 2011). This was also the case with Pha, whom I often had to remind of the methodological value of triangulation or rhetorical questions. However, I had to understand that his positionality at times restricted him from asking certain questions. Pha’s concern was that he would be perceived as stupid or offend respondents if he translated questions that could be perceived as naïve, self-evident or culturally inappropriate. This may be a generic risk of working with local translators that I have not seen analysed in the literature. In turn, independently working, foreign researchers can ask a greater range of questions and are free to manage the interview on their terms. I could have asked questions that Pha could not have, but Pha could also prevent me from committing any blunders of cross-cultural communication.

3.4.4. Assistant positionalities

Over the next two sections, I reflect on how my assistants, and Pha in particular, experience and shaped our fieldwork and my data collection in Mù Cang Chải. I first review how qualitative fieldworkers have come to acknowledge the roles of their assistants. Translators affect the interview process not only through translation, as I outlined above, but also through their presence and their relation to the researcher (Gottlieb 1995; Deane and Stevano 2015). The sensitive relationship between interviewer and interviewee thus becomes a matter of “triple subjectivity” (Temple and Edwards 2002). Not all scholars, however, reflect on this in their written accounts, and Sanjek (1993:16) was among the first to suggest that ethnographers had long “disciplinarily silenced” their assistants to maintain their scholarly authority and identity

75 (cf. Gottlieb 1995; Borchgrevink 2003; Gupta 2014; Middleton and Cons 2014).48 More recently, the role of field assistants and translators in fieldwork has been increasingly acknowledged by some researchers, and has itself become the topic of some scholarship: Some authors have reflected on the personality of “these shadowy figures” (Borchgrevink 2003:102; cf. Cons 2014; Gent 2014); on their relationships to their assistants (Molony and Hammett 2007); while Turner (2013c) and MacKenzie (2015) have also let assistants themselves reflect on their role. I will here aim to represent Pha’s experience, which he often reflected on in the field. Some of the scholarly work on translators also aims to deconstruct supposed methodological or epistemic deficiencies of ethnographic research conducted through translation (Middleton and Cons 2014).

Pha and Binh have very different personalities, which worked very well in different interview settings. Binh is an extroverted tour guide from Hanoi in his late thirties, and he can relate to state officials, both Kinh and Hmong, remarkably well. He works tirelessly, and I employed him for my first and last trip to Mù Cang Chải, when my objective was to interview several officials and other key informants per day.49 In turn, Pha was initially uncomfortable in the presence of ethnic Kinh state officials, such as when we had to obtain our permit papers from district offices. However, he was particularly capable of relating to Hmong villagers and officials of all ages, although he was only in his mid-twenties.

Pha is a young Hmong rice and cardamom farmer from a village near the tourist town of Sa Pa (Lào Cai Province). He lives in his parents’ household with his wife and two young children, which gave him time to attend an English language school for Hmong youth in Sa Pa and work as a tourist guide for 10-20 days per month (for an average monthly salary of VND 5 million (USD 250), including tips). When I first met Pha in December 2011, he and his older brother were the only male Hmong around Sa Pa who could speak English well enough to work with me. Pha liked the idea of spending extended times in a Hmong village in Mù Cang Chải, and I could offer him guaranteed work for several weeks at a time for VND 400,000 (20 USD) per day, plus

48 Interestingly, Sanjek (1993) cites several 1970s ethnographers who have written book-length biographies of their field assistants, including after having discussed their reliance on translators only fleetingly in their landmark ethnographies. 49 During our first trip to Mù Cang Chải, we also undertook a four-day visit to Chế Tạo, where several villagers perceived Binh as quite arrogant, as I later learned. As Binh’s personality and positionality in Chế Tạo made me uncomfortable at times, I started telling villagers and commune officials that I would be returning to Chế Tạo for several longer stays with a Hmong translator from Sa Pa, also to distance myself from Binh.

76 expenses. This initially seemed more lucrative to him than it sometimes did in Chế Tạo, when he was stressed by his job as a translator, his positionality, and the absence from his family. I think that the latter point is the most significant aspect we had in common, as we both felt some guilt about being away from our children while in the field. For me, this was a necessary sacrifice of fieldwork, and I actually appreciated the opportunity of undertaking six intense trips to Vietnam without family obligations. For Pha, however, this seemed to be the worst aspect of working with me, but there were local sources of emotional stress, as well, which I turn to next.

3.4.5. Our relationships and dependencies

While Pha was remarkably capable of managing long conversational interviews, including the social practice that surrounded our household visits and relations with villagers, he found negotiating his positionality within the village more challenging. He built many close friendships in both Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, but in Chế Tạo he also faced some jealousy. This largely stemmed from the fact that Pha came from a privileged village around Sa Pa and knew enough English to work as my translator for a good wage. Some villagers went further to question if Pha was an authentic Hmong, which offended him greatly.50 “I even play the flute!” he once exclaimed to me in frustration, and the fact that he knew many traditional tunes on the Hmong bamboo flute did enable him to assert his cultural identity and build social capital.

Ironically, it was easier for me to be an outsider in a Hmong village than it was for Pha, whose social and cultural conduct was under much more scrutiny than mine. He would often reflect on certain villagers’ behaviour towards himself or us, which helped me understand the importance and the subtleties of certain social relations in Hmong culture. Based on his perception, Pha concluded over time that the villagers of Nả Hàng B were “more poor but more generous”, and

50 An incident on one of our last evenings in Chế Tạo illustrates the different ways that Pha was under scrutiny, surprisingly also from a well respected villager in his 60s who had been one of my most reliable informants. He hosted us for another generous meal, but later, as we sat around the fire, he challenged Pha, seemingly to offend him. The host asked Pha how he would translate the term for a certain Hmong cultural concept into English. “Uncle, I am too young to understand this concept enough to put it into English” Pha replied humbly, but the host only wanted to scoff at him: “Now I know that you cannot do your job right!” he said, possibly implying that he Pha lacked knowledge of Hmong culture or of the English language or was simply not worth the salary he received from me.

77 “less jealous and greedy” than their counterparts in Chế Tạo. He partly based this on how often we were invited to stay for a meal when we visited a house.51

I could not help Pha negotiate his positionality, but it also affected mine. At times I felt that I was too much in Pha’s shadow, implicated in his positionality, as if I had lost my own persona or agency, much like Pasquini (2004) experienced. During our second visit to Chế Tạo, I therefore began socializing independently or accepting dinner invitations that Pha declined. Villagers seemed to appreciate this, and I could build up my own social relations, although meaningful exchange and data collection was limited by our language barrier. Therefore, this did not change the dilemma that my research was subject to Pha’s positionality and his relations to villagers and gatekeepers. Moreover, I was crucially aware that Pha was the only Hmong person I knew who spoke good enough English and was willing to work in Mù Cang Chải. We were both dependent on each other in multiple ways, and our financial relationship complicated our friendship, as other researchers have also noted (cf. Molony and Hammett 2007; Bonnin 2011).

As different as Pha and I are, we still grew remarkably close and shared many memorable experiences. While I personally found interviewing Hmong villagers and learning about their culture, livelihoods and forest use to be fascinating, and fieldwork in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B very rewarding, there were also plenty of difficult situations and relationships to manage. This burden was much greater for Pha than for me, although the stakes for me and my project were arguably higher. In any case, I found fieldwork in a village community to be “intensely social”, but also a humbling experience that required much patience and adaptability, as other researchers have found (Moser 2008:385; see also: Heller et al. 2011).

3.5. Maintaining ethical research protocols and relationships

For researchers to reflect on their positionality and acknowledge how they and other actors shaped the research process is of both methodological and ethical importance (Lynch 2000).

51 To spontaneously invite guests to stay for a meal, slaughter a chicken and share many shots of distilled rice alcohol (known as caw in Hmong) is an important gesture of hospitality in Hmong culture. This happened many times in both Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo. According to Hmong custom, we were never asked if we had the time to stay and drink and could never have refused an invitation. We tried to avoid the impression of inviting ourselves by not visiting any households around meal time. Nevertheless, more than once, a meal was prepared for us, although the hosts had just finished lunch. On only one occasion no rice alcohol was served, as the host had no money to buy any, which seemed to trouble him greatly. Apart from most breakfasts and the occasional meal between me and Pha, that was the only meal during four months of fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải we did not consume any rice alcohol.

78 Furthermore, I followed institutional requirements for ethical conduct and obtained approval from the McGill Ethics Committee, the institutional review board (IRB) of my university. Following IRB requirements and common norms of ethical research practice, I obtained informed consent from each interviewee. I did this orally, as seeking written consent from often illiterate villagers may have been too invasive. While obtaining informed consent from research participants is not common within Vietnamese research institutions (Thi Quynh Trang Nguyen 2015), it fitted well into the usual introductions we held with new interviewees.52 In Hmong culture, personal introductions are particularly important and would often take ten to twenty minutes. For many participants, personal details about ourselves, our family situation, and Pha’s kinship ties seemed to be more important than information about my research.

In the literature on research ethics, much debate surrounds the question of how to compensate participants for their time (Lemmens and Elliott 1999; Head 2009). Pha and local government minders suggested that small cash payments were the most appropriate way to do so with villagers. I therefore compensated each household I visited with VND 50,000 (USD 2.50), which was equivalent to a half-day of wage labour.53 In reflection, I do not think that offering monetary compensation compromised the quality of my research, as it could in other research settings. Some authors warn that it can skew both the sample of respondents and the data they provide, as certain participants may be more inclined to participate in a study or compelled to provide information they think the researcher wants to hear (cf. Molony and Hammett 2007; Head 2009). Independent of monetary incentives, I was concerned that interviewees could they mistake me for a conservationist and misrepresent the extent of illegal forest use or their conservation attitude, for instance by downplaying conservation threats, conflicts or resistance (cf. Robbins et

52 Before commencing any interview with a person with whom we had not yet spoken, Pha or Binh would introduce us and explain the reason for our visit. They would outline the nature of my research, and how I intended to use the data I obtained. They explained that any data and people’s identity would be treated confidentially, and that respondents could choose to not answer any question or abort the interview at any time. 53 Interviewees invariably reacted with gratitude and some surprise upon receiving monetary compensation at the end of an interview. When we were invited to stay for a meal, I would always compensate the host financially, making sure to give in excess of the market value of the meat and rice alcohol that was consumed, which was typically between VND 100.000 and VND 200.000 (USD 5-10) I also observed villagers visiting relatives’ houses, especially on formal occasions, often give money to the hosts’ children, who promptly give it to their parents. I adopted this practice where possible, splitting the money I would give to the host to the children of the house, which was always very well received by the parents. At times, I also adopted the locally common practice of bringing candy for the children, as my concerns over dental health or feeding children sweets before meal time were seemingly not shared. I brought healthy snacks or fruit where possible, although this was not an option in Chế Tạo.

79 al. 2006). I sought to overcome this uncertainty by asking question strategically and triangulating data from different sources and observations. With time, much like Robbins et al. (2009:572) reflect, I increasingly trusted villagers’ discourse, partly because I received many “remarkably candid responses” to sensitive questions (see Chapter 8).

The fact that I became privy to potentially sensitive information entailed the common ethical dilemma of how to balance research and engagement, which both political ecologists and anthropologists have grappled with (Bryant and Jarosz 2004; Jarosz 2004; West 2005; Skidmore 2006). I was surprised how many Chế Tạo villagers voiced suspicions about the integrity of local state officials or the forest patrol teams. Some respondents reminded me to keep what they told me confidential. To do so, I use either pseudonyms or attributive codes to refer to informants throughout this thesis (see Appendix 2). Furthermore, I avoid providing information about informants that could compromise their anonymity. When I report on illegal activities, I take additional measures to conceal the identity of people and places involved. Therefore, I use Chế Vượn as a pseudonym for a certain village that is known among locals for illegal forest use. Otherwise, I identify all villages by their actual name, as I do not foresee this entailing negative consequences for local villagers or officials. One photo featured in this thesis shows the faces of two villagers, who gave me permission to use this photo. On other photos of people and household lists I have blurred faces and names to protect the confidentiality of villagers’ identity. All photos were taken by me during my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải, unless noted otherwise.

Several villagers who reported allegations about illegal activities expressly requested me to report these to commune or district officials. However, I decided not to do so, as I could not always verify these allegations, and reporting them could have put different actors at risk. In my analysis, I rather try to understand the formation of how villagers’ scepticism and allegations, which I found to be an important aspect of village politics (see Sections 8.5.4 and 9.4).

3.6. My methods of data collection and analysis

3.6.1. The case study approach

The qualitative case study has been historically the methodological modus operandi of ethnographers. However, scholars relying on large sample sizes, deductive methodologies and quantative data have challenged the epistemological use-value of case studies, asserting that case

80 study insights are not replicable and objective enough to be of scientific validity (Small 2009; Baxter 2010; Duneier 2011; Lichterman and Reed 2014; Simons 2015). In fact, all qualitative social science has been portrayed as compromised by the researcher’s subjective decisions (of methodology and interpretation) and thus not meeting the scientific hallmark of objectivity (Crang 2003; Davies and Dwyer 2007). From this positivist standpoint, case studies are “disarmingly singular”, and their insights are merely ideographic (Goslinga and Frank 2007:xi). In turn, for qualitative social scientists it may be self-evident that an insightful case study could yield a useful contribution to our knowledge (Berg 2001).

My research shows that case studies are inherently idiosyncratic and contingent upon contextual factors. As I emphasize in the preceding section, any data I collect and interpretations I derive from them are inevitably subjective and “partial”. My studies are neither objective nor replicable, as any other researcher would have a different experience, acquire different data and possibly arrive at different interpretations than I did (cf. Mansvelt and Berg 2005; Baxter 2010). Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to elucidate my methodological approach and reflect on the research process to make my representation more transparent and rigorous (Bradshaw and Stratford 2005). In my final chapter, in particular, I offer interpretations of my findings that illustrate how my case study can advance our understanding of forest governance and ethnic minority livelihoods in Vietnam beyond the case study locales (see Chapter 10).

3.6.2. Selection of case study sites

The protected area in Mù Cang Chải district caught my interest after reviewing FFI reports on their early conservation activities in Chế Tạo village. After abandoning a different PA in Lào Cai province as a second field site (see Section 4.2), I decided to find a second case study village in a different commune in Mù Cang Chải. I selected the Hmong village of Nả Hàng B in Púng Luông commune, divided from Chế Tạo by a mountain ridge, as this promised to provide an insightful contrast to Chế Tạo for the following reasons.

Located at the end of a 35-kilometre dirt road from the district town, Chế Tạo is the most remote commune in Mù Cang Chải district. In contrast, the village of Nả Hàng B is the closest in Púng Luông commune to the roadside town of Ngã Ba Kim (6 kilometres for most households). I presumed that better market access would give villagers of Nả Hàng B access to more diverse

81 livelihood opportunities for income generation, possibly both today and historically (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, I knew from published reports that FFI had concentrated its early conservation interventions on Chế Tạo (see Chapter 7), which seemed to make it an interesting locale to study conservation awareness and behaviour (see Chapter 8).

Through my fieldwork in both places I gradually discovered that there is more nuance to each of the above aspects, as well as some more interesting differences between Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo that I could not have foreseen when selecting my study sites. In several ways, the two villages I selected turned out to be more insightful field sites than I could have imagined, including for the study of PES and conservation enforcement, which became central tenets of my inquiry in the course of my fieldwork.

Gupta and Ferguson (1997) critically remark that anthropologists often justify their site selection in methodological terms, omitting a-scientific factors of subjective preference, logistics or serendipity. In addition to the factors noted above, I was also attracted to the idea of fieldwork in a remote village like Chế Tạo, romanticizing the appeal of immersion and personal sacrifice that Gupta and Ferguson (1997) highlight. More strategically, I was also hopeful that the lack of amenities in Chế Tạo, particularly electricity, would appeal much less to any government minder that I feared my host institute or district authorities would try to send along with me. In any case, I speculated that I would be allowed to stay in Chế Tạo village simply because the nearest guesthouse is too far away for authorities to expect me to sleep there and commute to the village and back each day. This is the typical way for foreigners to work in ethnic minority villages in Vietnam (Hy Van Luong 2006; Salemink 2013; Lentz 2014).54 Alternatively, in case working in Chế Tạo would prove more difficult than I had hoped, a second study village in Púng Luông commune would be an easy commute from the small market town of Ngã Ba Kim. In addition, I knew that the commune head of Púng Luông was of the same Hmong clan as my translator Pha,

54 The only contemporary international researchers of whom I know that they were able to live in an ethnic minority village in Vietnam while conducting research are Sowerwine (2004a), who was able to stay at the medical centre of an ethnic Yao village in Lào Cai province; Wode (2000), who conducted doctoral research among the Halang and Jarai in remote parts of Sa Thầy district, Kon Tum province; and Salemink (1999), who has, since his doctoral fieldwork, spent ample time in ethnic minority villages in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Other examples include much earlier researchers and missionaries, such as Condominas (1977), Dournes (1977, 1978), and Hickey (1982a, 1982b), whom I introduce in Section 4.2.3.

82 and I surmised that this would allow us to build good rapport with him and grant me better access to government data than I had in Chế Tạo, which fortunately proved very true.

3.6.3. Data collection methods

3.6.3.1. Overview of methods, informants and language proficiency

I collected primarily qualitative data through conversational interviews with Hmong villagers and diverse key informants, including commune and district-level state officials in Mù Cang Chải, NTFP traders and bank staff in Mù Cang Chải, as well as Vietnamese and international conservation and development personnel, who were largely based in Hanoi. In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I also conducted semi-structured interviews within stratified samples of households. In addition, I collected secondary data in form of official reports and directives from all four levels of government, as well as non-governmental reports and project documents. In the subsequent sections, I detail these data types and sources in more detail.

The table in Appendix 2 provides an overview of my informants of the above categories, further differentiated by commune and village name, along with the codes I use to identify them when referring to or quoting them. I interviewed a total of 193 persons, including 113 villagers, 43 state officials and 37 NGO staff or other key informants. Nearly half of them I interviewed more than once, and with some key informants and villagers I had more regular conversations. Selected informants whom I quote repeatedly, I identify by pseudonym, which gives them a personality the reader can identify with while maintaining the confidentiality of their identity.

3.6.3.2. Conversational interviews

I started my time in Chế Tạo with a series of in-depth conversational interviews on the history of land-use, forest-use, monetary income and other livelihood activities, in order to acquire a basic understanding of local livelihood transitions since the ban of shifting cultivation (1990s). I also required additional insight to make my interview guide and sampling strategy for semi-structured interviews, which I explain below, as locally relevant as possible. Throughout my time in the villages, I regularly conducted conversational interviews, and I maintained a list of villagers whom I wanted to visit with certain questions in mind or because I knew of their specific expertise or involvement in something of interest to me.

83 In addition to these conversational interviews in people’s homes (see Figure 3.2), which rarely lasted less than an hour, I had ample informal exchanges with villagers and local officials on an everyday basis. When meeting in public, I rarely asked research-related questions out of context, and rather arranged to meet later for a more focussed conversation, which is culturally more appropriate, as Pha explained. I thus collected the vast majority of my data during one-on-one interviews, with the help of my assistant, although other family members present would chime in at times.

Figure 3.2: Author conducting household interview in Nả Hàng B (December 2013, photo blurred)

3.6.3.3. Semi-structured interviews and sampling strategies

I used semi-structured interviews to collect both qualitative and quantitative data on household composition, monetary household income and expenditures, as well as how livestock holdings, rice and corn yields and other livelihood variables and practices had changed over time. In addition, I asked about livelihood change, economic decision-making, livelihood and food security, forest product use, as well as opinions and conceptions regarding forest conservation, enforcement and Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). I conducted these conversations as

84 semi-structured interviews, following an interview guide of questions (DiCicco-Bloom and Crabtree 2006), in order to collect certain data from all respondents. I chose semi-structured interviews because, unlike structured interviews or surveys, they offer the flexibility to ask clarifying or probing questions to obtain further qualitative insights (Valentine 2005). By collecting quantitative data on certain variables, I could easily identify extreme values and ask why a household has, for instance, more buffalo or less cardamom income than others. I was thus not only investigating the range of a variable across my sample, but also seeking to explain key aspects of household differentiation and endogenous markers of wealth and poverty. In many instances, the questions from my interview guide thus served as conversation starters, and many semi-structured interviews evolved into conversational interviews. These interviews took between one and two-and-a-half hours, at times over two visits to the respondents’ homes, or we returned at a later date with follow-up questions.

I conducted such semi-structured interviews with 35 households in Chế Tạo (43 per cent of 82 households living in the village in 2012), and 32 households in Nả Hàng B (59 per cent of 54 households). I initially started with convenience sampling and, as my sample grew, I sampled purposefully to obtain stratified samples described below (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003). In this process, I could sometimes use snowball sampling to identify households known for high cardamom income, low land holdings, or for having multiple sons, for instance (Patton 2002; Valentine 2005). To aid my sampling, I used official household lists, including publically available lists of outstanding household bank loans (see Section 6.5.3), which enabled me to select households that seemed to usefully complement my sample.

In order to investigate drivers of socio-economic differentiation, I sought to stratify my sample to cover the range of household livelihood portfolios and asset endowments. My sample was thus, following Small (2009), a strategic selection of cases that is representative of the village in qualitative terms, but not in terms of how any variables are distributed across the village (cf. Patton 2002; Suri 2011). For instance, I sampled both Nả Hàng B households that have extremely high cardamom income, which helped me understand why they do so, but this means they are overrepresented in my household sample. Therefore, I could not extrapolate from my sample, which was not my intention, but I could understand the range of livelihood portfolios in

85 each village. Any generalisations I draw from my sample are therefore based on logical inference, not statistical inference (Small 2009).

I transcribed quantitative data from semi-structured interviews into an Excel spreadsheet and found that they did not lend themselves to quantitative or statistical analysis that would add meaning to my representation of household livelihoods. Many variables of household production, assets, income and expenditure are too contextual and idiosyncratic to meaningfully be compared between households, let alone across the two villages. I could, however, usefully represent selected variables in their range, or relative to each other. For instance, I show that households spend between 2 and 10 million VND (100-500 USD) per year on fertilizer and that this is, for most of them, the second-largest annual expenditure after the costs of the New Year’s festivities (see Section 5.4.3).

3.6.3.4. Gender bias and access to female informants

With few exceptions, I was limited to conducting both conversational and semi-structured interviews in the villages with the male household head or one of his sons. This constitutes an unfortunate gender bias in my sources of interview data, related to Hmong social structure and cultural customs. Outside of interview situations, I had ample opportunity to socialize and build rapport with male villagers, particularly in Chế Tạo, but much less interaction with women. My assistant Pha explained that it would be culturally inappropriate for us to enter a house and interview women present if the household head was not at home. I did not find that this limitation hindered me from addressing my research objectives, but I could not investigate certain gendered aspects of household economics, for instance, which would have required the perspectives of more female respondents.

Fisher et al. (2010) contend that in their field sites in Africa it is insufficient to interview only the household head on questions of household economics, as men often could not supply reliable data on their wives’ economic activities. However, male villagers I interviewed were often quick to say that women “don’t know” about a particular topic, which was also McAllister’s (2013) and Symonds’ (2004) initial experience, who, being female themselves, were trying to interview women in an ethnic Khmu village in Laos and a Hmong village in Thailand, respectively.

86 Under certain circumstances, we did manage to interview several female villagers, which all proved to be very insightful conversations. Contrary to the male discourse I encountered several times that women “do not know about money”, the four women we interviewed in Chế Tạo were all very knowledgeable about their household economics. Three of them still suggested that we come again when their husbands are home for further details, while the other woman said she handled all monetary household issues. Interestingly, a woman in Nả Hàng B used to provide significant household income through regional textile trade, and we could interview her in the presence of her husband. An 82-year old woman we interviewed in Nả Hàng B could provide us with ample historical data, including on the emergence of monetary currency.

These few exchanges with female villagers encouraged me to seek further interviews with women, but opportunities to do so were very limited due to cultural barriers and the fact that women invariably appeared more occupied with household chores than men. While men were often willing to put their tasks aside and sit down with us, I could not have requested to instead interview any women present, particularly given the gendered hierarchy of the Hmong household (see Section 4.3.3).

3.6.3.5. Participant observation

Although I consider that interviews were my most significant source of data, Pinsky (2015:281) argues that they can be limited to “incidental ethnographic encounters” and therefore recommends spending more time with informants than just during the interview. Indeed, I often found that subsequent encounters with interviewees proved very insightful or added vital context to the livelihood data they had provided. Particularly joint meals in the household, following a formal interview, were a prime opportunity for me to reflect on some of the data, understand certain specificities to this household, or ask clarifying questions.

Apart from interviewing, I thus collected ample observational data during, after, and outside of interview situations, which Salzman (2002:810-811) calls “empirical triangulation” (cf. Bryman 2006). This included participant observation, which has become the “trademark method” and primary source of data for ethnographic fieldwork (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Goslinga and

87 Frank 2007).55 Particularly in Chế Tạo, we spent, on most days, several hours socializing with different groups of villagers and local officials, often over meals and evening drinks. In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, we attended several weddings, funerals and shamanistic rituals, which are very social events in Hmong culture, and provided ample opportunities for participant observation and building rapport with villagers. Particularly insightful for data collection were days when we accompanied villagers to the forest to check on their cardamom; get firewood; transport construction timber out; check trap lines; and go hunting.

In addition, these were opportunities for Pha to socialize and build relationships, as villagers had many more ways to connect with him than with me. He was also instrumental in facilitating my participation in social events and my observations, by adding explanations and, inevitably, his own perspective. He was keen to explain all aspects of Hmong life and culture to me and, being a rice and cardamom farmer himself, he became an important source of contextual data for me. We spent countless evenings talking about Hmong culture, livelihood and land-use, or debriefing the events of the day, as also described by Freed (1988).

3.6.3.6. Interviews with commune and district-level officials

Apart from villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I interviewed numerous state officials who held senior positions in the Commune People’s Committees (CPC) of Chế Tạo or Púng Luông, the district-level Forest Protection Department (FPD) or other district-level offices in Mù Cang Chải. All commune officials were local Hmong, as were most of the FPD staff to whom I related.56 The majority of the staff at other district offices in Mù Cang Chải were ethnic Kinh, but several officers, including some high-ranking officials, were ethnic Hmong, many from Chế Tạo commune, who had acquired much-desired government positions (see Section 6.5.1). These notably include two women, whom I also interviewed.

Apart from contextual data on the implementation of state policy and programs, I often sought official documents and reports from state officials, as these contained useful quantitative data and qualitative insights into state policies and discourse. The hierarchical administrative system

55 Participant observation was initially popularized by Malinowski (1984 [1922]), who advocated for researchers to not only observe, but participate in mundane everyday activities of villagers in order to build rapport. 56 As an aside, my understanding is that membership with the CPV is typically only required for senior positions at the commune level, such as the commune leader (Chủ tịch xã) and the local party secretary (Bí thư Đảng ủy xã).

88 in Vietnam produces a multitude of official directives and regular reports, and I gradually got to understand what kinds of data are available in what form from which offices. Most state officials had plenty of documents potentially interesting to me stored on their computers, and several officials at both the commune and district level, even at our first meeting, readily copied multiple files onto my USB drive. In general, obtaining official reports from Chế Tạo was more difficult, partly because the commune leadership maintains offices in both Chế Tạo village and Mù Cang Chải town, which are not regularly staffed with officials who were inclined or authorized to share electronic data with me. In turn, the commune headman of Púng Luông went to considerable effort several times to give me various lists and reports for which I asked.

Interestingly, what might appear sensitive to me, some of my informants would share quite readily. FPD officers, for instance, would readily let me see a list of their salaries; or show me the names and pictures of Hmong villagers whom they caught hunting or logging; and commune officials would be happy for me to photograph the long lists of villagers’ outstanding bank loans, which are publically displayed in every commune centre (see Figure 6.2). On the other hand, obtaining a map of Mù Cang Chải or the PA proved near impossible until my last field visit, which correlates with other researchers’ experiences that maps are considered sensitive data in Vietnam (Sowerwine 2004a).57

57 On my final trip to Mù Cang Chải, senior officers at both the Mù Cang Chải FPD and the Púng Luông CPC instructed some of their staff to look out some rolled up, wall-size maps and hold them up for me to take detailed photos of. Unfortunately, these photos were too unclear to use as maps in this thesis.

89

Figure 3.3: Author conducting interview with forestry official (July 2012, photo blurred)

3.6.3.7. Key informant interviews in Hanoi

During my first two visits to Vietnam, before travelling to Mù Cang Chải, I started building up a network of key informants in Hanoi, consisting of Vietnamese and international personnel working at conservation and development agencies. Some of them had been involved with the Mù Cang Chải PA directly and could share first-hand insights or unpublished reports. Others provided important contextual data on forest governance and PA management in Vietnam, more generally.

With some key informants in Hanoi, whom I met several times throughout the two-and-a-half years I was working in Vietnam, I noticed a shift in my positionality in relation to them. Initially, I approached them as a student researcher seeking their insights and experience. During my last trips, I had something to share myself, and they were interested in what I had found in Mù Cang Chải, particularly regarding the implantation of PES. FFI staff I met after I started working in Chế Tạo were particularly interested in my insights into local environmentalities, including the village politics and anecdotal insights surrounding villagers’ forest use and forest patrolling (see Chapter 7). After all, FFI had been investing in Mù Cang Chải for over ten years, but their ways of monitoring and reporting on FFI-related activities and results there were limited by the

90 positionality of their own consultants, as I argue in Section 7.2. In turn, I had a greater range of access to informants and data, as I had the benefits of my independent positionality (not affiliated with FFI), a Hmong translator, and a longitudinal approach to fieldwork.

3.6.4. Recording, coding and analysis of qualitative data

The above methods of data collection provided different types of data, which I recorded and coded as follows. During the semi-structured interviews, I had my interview guide on a clipboard and wrote down all responses, often filling the back of the sheets with additional information in response to probing questions or further conversations.58 During most other interviews, I used a small notebook, but during some conversations or observations I did not take any notes, if I thought this may interrupt the event of be uncomfortable for some participants. Following all interviews, observations or events, I recorded my notes on a voice recorder, often adding additional impressions and references to other informants, my research questions, the literature, or other data I had collected. During or after this recording process, I would often clarify some aspects with my assistants, asking them open questions to see if they had any more data or impressions to add to mine (cf. Freed 1988). In addition, I would take regular field notes on observations, events or analytical thoughts on my voice recorder, notebook or computer. As for most qualitative researchers, these field notes became a both a prime method of reflection and a valuable source of data (Sanjek 1990; Emerson et al. 2011; Heller et al. 2011).

I transcribed my audio notes, often adding data or contextual information and undertaking some initial coding, highlighting certain themes. This partly started in the field during interviews, subsequent note-taking or debriefing with my assistant, as I often flagged certain questions to later look up in secondary data sources or address with other informants, thus triangulating data from different sources. This cross-checking of information and interpretations from different sources serves to enhance the reliability of data and the rigour of qualitative research (Baxter and Eyles 1997; Bryman 2006).

The formal coding I undertook in MAXQDA, a Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) package, which enables multi-level coding and cross-referencing of

58 I had initially feared that villagers might perceive this as invasive, but I soon gained the impression that they were familiar with this kind of inquiry. Some respondents noted that Vietnamese researchers or census enumerators had previously come to survey their households.

91 transcript segments, field notes, reports or other files. Following Cope (2010), I coded my interview transcripts using thematic coding, initially looking for a number of a priori codes and sub-codes, which stemmed directly from my research questions or the conceptual literature. I used this process to find and code additional themes that were salient to my data, for which I devised so-called a posteriori codes (Saldaña 2013). With time I could then string together certain codes, sub-codes and other supporting pieces of data to so-called axial codes, which are most closely related to my findings (Corbin and Strauss 2008; Wicks 2010).

This iterative process of data collection and coding in the field builds on Glaser’s (1965) method of constant comparative analysis (cf. Maykut and Morehouse 1994). I did this both on a daily basis during data collection and in between my field trips when transcribing and coding data (see Section 4.2). My iterative approach to fieldwork thus proved to be conducive to my inductive way of finding and addressing issues of local relevance (Bowen 2005).

3.7. Conclusion

In this Chapter, I have documented how I conducted my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải, which was a challenging but very rewarding experience. I provided a reflective analysis of two key issues of access. In Section 4.3, I illustrated how different layers of state control mediated my access to field sites in Mù Cang Chải. I emphasized that I was, nevertheless, able to move around, and collect interview data quite freely in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. Secondly, in Section 4.4, I reflected on how the positionalities of my two translators and myself shaped my access and relationships in the field, focussing on my time with my Hmong assistant Pha. Our processes of data collection gave rise to several ethical issues, which I discussed in Section 4.5. Finally, I document my sampling strategies and methods for data collection, coding and analysis (see Section 4.6). I provide an overview of informants in Appendix 2.

92 Chapter 4 The context of Hmong livelihoods and forest governance in Vietnam

4.1. Introduction

Complementing previous chapters on the theory and methodology underlying my research, this chapter provides the context to understand key issues I examine in this thesis. After highlighting the ethnic diversity of the Southeast Asian highlands (see Section 4.2), Sections 4.3 and 4.4 focus on selected issues of Hmong culture, social structure and land use that are most relevant to my thesis. I aim to avoid an essentialized representation of these aspects and illustrate some of the diversity and cultural change I observed in Mù Cang Chải. Nevertheless, there are numerous elements of Hmong culture that have been shared across generations and among different Hmong groups in Asia, and I explain those most relevant to my study of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải.

The latter two sections of this chapter cover historical and contemporary developments of forest governance in Vietnam. In Section 4.5, I track the colonial and socialist legacies of state policies towards shifting cultivation and ethnic minorities, and further outline the reforms that have taken place in Vietnam’s forestry sector since the 1990s, focussing on the roles of forestland tenure, forest protection and conservation payments (see Sections 4.5.4 and 4.5.5). This context is essential to appreciate the more recent developments of policies for forest conservation and PES, which I outline in Section 4.6, while adding further contextual information in the course of my results chapters.

4.2. The Southeast Asian highlands and its ethnic peoples

I commence this chapter by briefly situating my study area of Mù Cang Chải district in the broader physical and human geography of the Southeast Asian highlands. I do this to highlight the local ethnic diversity and the previous scholarship on the many upland ethnic minority groups in Vietnam and in neighbouring countries.

4.2.1. My field site in the Southeast Asian Massif

The upland district of Mù Cang Chải is located in the southern reaches of the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range, which runs west of the Red River (Sông Hồng) through parts of Lào Cai and Yên Bái

93 province. The Black River (also known as Da River, Sông Đà) flows west of the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range to join the Red River further south (see Figure 2). While the Red River valley has been an important economic corridor since colonial times, the Black River has gained economic importance more recently, as it feeds two of Southeast Asia’s largest hydro-electric power plants in Hòa Bình (installed in 1994) and Sơn La (2012) (Nga Dao 2011). As most of Mù Cang Chải lies in the watershed of the Black River, the district has been receiving substantial funds from Vietnam’s nascent program for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) (see Section 4.6.2).

Remote, rugged and rich in ethnic minority culture, Mù Cang Chải district is typical of the so- called Southeast Asian Massif, a vast mountainous area that occupies and connects the northern parts of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, as well as eastern Myanmar and large parts of southwest China (see Figure 4.1). I adopt the term Southeast Asian Massif, which was coined by Michaud (1997, 2000b, 2006), from a growing body of literature that studies the remarkable ethnic diversity across this region, often with a focus on how ethnic minority livelihoods have evolved with structural and environmental change (Formoso 2010; Michaud and Forsyth 2011; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). I next provide some context to the complex human geography of the Massif, to then focus on the Hmong, specifically.

94

Figure 4.1: Map of greater Southeast Asia and the extent of the Southeast Asian Massif (Source: Michaud 2010:205)

4.2.2. Diversity and settlement of ethnic minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif

The Southeast Asian Massif is home to a rich diversity of ethnic minority peoples which can be grouped into five ethno-linguistic families, namely the Austro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Miao-Yao and Austronesian speakers (McKinnon 1997). These ethnic minority people do not identify as belonging to the respective ethnic majority groups, namely the Han (in China), Viet (Vietnam, where they are known as Kinh), Lao (Laos), Khmer (Cambodia), Thai (Thailand) or Burmese (Burma) (cf. Michaud 2006). Given their linguistic and ethnic diversity, Michaud (2009b) estimates that there are over one thousand distinct ethnic groups living throughout the Massif. However, state governments of the region officially recognize much fewer ethnic minority groups. Within each country, the ethnic minorities account for only five to ten per cent

95 of the total population, and most ethnic minority groups individually for less than one per cent. Nevertheless, the Hmong and some other trans-national ethnic groups each total several million people across the region.59

Most ethnic minority groups in the Massif are not indigenous to where they dwell today, but migrated from Southwest China, predominantly between the 16th and 19th century, fleeing famine and prosecution by the Han Chinese majority (Michaud 2006).60 However, the majority of most ethnic groups stayed within China, which is still home to around 60 per cent of the ethnic minority people in the Massif (Michaud et al. 2016). As different ethnic minority groups left China and settled in different parts of the Massif, an ethnic stratification with elevation, partly linked to land-use and social organization, unfolded in many parts of the Massif. The differentiation between highland and lowland ethnic groups goes back to colonial times, and has since served to negate interaction, adaptation and migration between different groups (Leach 1964; Salemink 2003; Sowerwine 2011). Nevertheless, it is useful to highlight some differences between the Hmong and the Thái, the ethnic groups most relevant to this thesis.

Tai-Kadai speaking groups have traditionally been wet rice cultivators and typically settled in the valleys and lower highlands, where they lived in feudal regimes known as muang (Michaud 2006).61 A small group of elite families would govern a muang, a territorial entity of fields and forests, in which they controlled land-use by a large group of peasants who paid them tribute (Hoang Cam 2009).62 Their privileged positions vis-à-vis highland ethnic groups allowed feudal

59 This relationship is less significant in Laos, where close to half of the population are ethnic minority people (Ovesen 2004; Tappe 2015). 60 However, several smaller ethnic groups found in the Massif today are indigenous, although their histories are not free of migrations and disturbances. In Vietnam, most indigenous groups live in the Annam Cordillera and speak Austronesian or Mon-Khmer languages (Michaud 2006). 61 The Tai-Kadai ethno-linguistic family includes, among the Lao and many other ethnic groups, the White, Black and Red Tai, who settled in north-western Vietnam, among other places, and are referred to in Vietnam as Thái. They are neither to be confused with the ethnic majority of Thailand, which are commonly referred to as Thai; nor with the Tày, the most numerous ethnic minority group of Vietnam. The Tày are linguistically and culturally closely related to the ethnic Nùng, and both these ethnic groups are most common in the country’s north-eastern provinces, often living in close proximity (Michaud 2006). To avoid such confusion, I follow Lentz (2014) and use the Vietnamese ethnonym Thái to refer to the Tai people living in present-day Sơn La and Yên Bái Provinces. 62 During imperial (pre-colonial) times, twelve Thái muang in North-west Vietnam formed a powerful alliance known as Sip Song Chau Tai (Mười hai xứ Thái in Vietnamese), which were granted a special status by both the French colonial administration as the Tai Federation (Fédération Taï) and by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as one of two autonomous regions (Khu tự trị) of ethnic minority groups. Consequently, during the First Indochina War, many of the Thái sided with the French, whereas some of the local highland groups, including some Hmong, aligned with the Viet Minh (Michaud 2000a). Most elders I interviewed in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B were

96 Thái rulers to serve as intermediaries in upland-lowland trade relationships (Turner 2010a). In turn, ethnic groups of the Austronesian and Miao-Yao family (including the Hmong) were primarily shifting cultivators and lived in acephalous (non-hierarchical) lineage societies, less organized and territorial than feudal groups. They typically settled in higher elevations, and Scott (2009) argues that, historically, their social organization, their non-permanent forms of agriculture, and their often semi-nomadic way of life were conducive to evading control, taxation or attacks by lowland rulers and ethnic groups, including colonial administrations.

According to Vietnam’s most recent census, 86 per cent of Vietnam’s nearly 86 million citizens are ethnic Vietnamese, referred to as ethnic Kinh, and the remaining 12.2 million citizens belong to one of the 53 officially recognized ethnic minorities, known in Vietnam as dân tộc thiểu số (GSO 2009). Throughout imperial and colonial times (prior to 1954), Vietnam’s narrow coastal plains were quite densely populated with predominantly ethnic Kinh, while the northern and central highlands (the south-eastern reaches of the Massif, see Figure 4.1) were the domain of many different ethnic minority groups.

4.2.3. State classification and scholarly study of ethnic minorities in the Massif

Throughout the Southeast Asian Massif, colonial administrations and successive state governments established different systems and institutions to classify ethnic minority groups (Pelley 1998; Tapp 2002; Taylor 2008). This has often led to arbitrary and inaccurate divisions between ethnic groups that conflate some of the ethnic diversity on the ground. In the three socialist states of China, Laos and Vietnam, policies toward ethnic minorities were guided by a strong national discourse of unity, and by pejorative representation of ethnic minority cultures as backward, often citing Marxist-Leninist ideology and social Darwinism (Litzinger 2000; Hoang Cam 2009; Michaud 2009a).63 During the latter half of the 20th century, various state programs for rural development were implemented throughout the Southeast Asian Massif to assimilate and modernize the supposedly primitive highland ethnic minorities, many of whom relied on adamant that none of the Hmong living in Mù Cang Chải supported the French, unlike some Hmong groups living east of the Red River (McElwee 2004a). 63 State classifications of ethnic minority groups have been revised several times since, and currently the governments of Vietnam, China and Laos, for instance, recognize 54, 55 and 48 distinct ethnic groups, respectively, including national majorities. In the case of China, Tapp (2002) argues that common critiques of the ethnic classification project fail to consider how it has, inadvertently, strengthened ethnic minority identities, specifically by invoking essentialist exonyms that cluster different sub-groups. An exonym is a name for an ethnic group (an ethnonym) that is assigned by outsiders (Michaud 2006).

97 extensive forms of shifting cultivation (Fox et al. 2009). In addition, certain cultural rituals and spiritual practices were partly prohibited, such as shamanism, animal sacrifice and certain funeral rites (Michaud 2009b).64

Although state rural development increased agricultural productivity and expanded infrastructural development across the Massif, many ethnic minority groups are still marginalized and suffer from high levels of poverty and food insecurity, as well as limited access to health and educational services (Duncan 2004; Michaud 2006; Baulch et al. 2007; Friederichsen and Neef 2010). A key objective of my analysis in Chapters 5 and 6 is to examine how the Vietnamese state has implemented programs for rural development in my study locale, and how Hmong livelihoods have changed in response.

Until the 1990s, there was relatively little independent anthropological research undertaken on the ethnic minority peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif. Earlier research by European missionaries, colonialists and local state governments was often ideologically biased and not extensive, although it has provided important raw data for recent scholarly analyses (Michaud 2007; Culas 2008, 2009; Michaud 2015; Michaud and Turner 2016). The socialist states of China, Vietnam and Laos, in particular, largely restricted research in ethnic minority areas until the 1990s (van Schendel 2002; Taylor 2008; Turner 2013b). Thailand, however, was less restrictive, and its northern highlands became the locus of a considerable body of anthropological research from the 1960s onwards, including most early studies of the Hmong (Bernatzik 1970 [1947]; Chindarsi 1976; Geddes 1976; Grandstaff 1976; Keen 1978; Kunstadter and Chapman 1978; Cooper 1980, 1984; Tapp 1989). Early researchers who, nevertheless, were able to conduct anthropological fieldwork among ethnic minorities in southern and central Vietnam include the Vietnam-born Georges Condominas (1977), the French missionary Jacques Dournes

64 At the same time, Vietnam and China, in particular, have also pursued policies of selective cultural preservation, which have promoted seemingly benign aspects of ethnic minority cultures, such as traditional architecture, clothing, songs and dances (Oakes 1999; Salemink 2000; Michaud 2009a; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). These aspects have been commodified to display the aesthetic side of cultural diversity that the socialist administrations have been claiming to preserve. This approach is still maintained today and has lead to so-called minority tourism, where both domestic and international tourists are served state-selected glimpses into ethnic minority cultures (Schein 2000; Yang et al. 2008; Cornet 2015).

98 (1977, 1978; see also: Dournes and Hardy 2015) as well as the American anthropologists Gerald Hickey (1982a, 1982b) and Frank LeBar (cf. LeBar et al. 1964).65

4.3. Hmong people and culture in Southeast Asia

Turning to the Hmong people, specifically, I here introduce key features of Hmong culture, social structure and gender relations, and illustrate these with some observations from Mù Cang Chải, including some evidence of cultural change and inter-generational conflict. As a preface, the first subsection outlines the history of Hmong migrations, Hmong scholarship, and the classification of different Hmong sub-groups. I limit my coverage to the elements most relevant to my study of Hmong livelihoods.

4.3.1. The scholarly literature on different Hmong groups

With approximately four million individuals living throughout the Massif, and just over one million in Vietnam (GSO 2009), the Hmong are one of the largest highland ethnic minority groups, and they belong to the Miao-Yao ethno-linguistic group. Traditionally, they mainly lived in Guizhou Province and other parts of Southwest China, where they are officially known, with three related groups, as the Miao (Tapp 2001). In the second half of the 18th century, resource scarcity, epidemics and encroachment by ethnic Han Chinese forced an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of the Hmong living in China to migrate to the Southeast Asian peninsula and settle in the northern highlands of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand (Culas 2000; Culas and Michaud 2004).66 More recently, in the latter half of the 20th century, land scarcity in Vietnam’s northern highlands compelled some Hmong families to move south to Vietnam’s central highlands, particularly Đăk Lăk province, where now several ten thousand Hmong live (Corlin 2004). In Vietnamese, the Hmong are often referred to as H’Mông, and in the most common transliteration of Hmong language, Hmong is spelled Hmoob.67

65 Gerald Hickey and Frank LeBar were among those commissioned to help edit a compendium entitled Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia (cf. LeBar et al. 1964). This was followed by Kunstadter’s (1967) “less exhaustive though more analytical” edited collection of studies on Southeast Asian tribes, minorities, and nations in two volumes (Michaud 2006:274). Another case of early and influential anthropological work among ethnic minorities in the Massive was Leach’s (1964) work in Myanmar. 66 Smaller Hmong populations are also found in Myanmar and have, most recently, migrated from Vietnam to Cambodia (Lemoine 2005; Michaud 2006). 67 Hmong is considered a strictly oral culture with no traditional script, although some Hmong legends suggest that there used to be a Hmong script long before Hmong started leaving China (Tapp 2004; Ngo Thi Thanh Tam 2016). As recently as the early 1950s, the American missionaries Barney and Smalley devised the first modern transcription

99

Figure 4.2: Distribution of Hmong people in mainland Southeast Asia (source: Turner et al. 2015:21)

The Hmong are one of the most-studied ethnic minority groups in the Massif. Michaud (2006) explains that this goes back to colonial and missionary observers, and is due to the international Hmong literature that concerns the large Hmong diaspora in Western countries, primarily the United States, Australia and France (Tapp 2010).68 Notable early scholarly studies on the Hmong

of Hmong language while working among Hmong groups in Thailand. This system is known as the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) and is widely used in Thailand, Laos, among the Hmong diaspora and by Hmong scholars. In the RPA, the final consonant denotes one of the eight tones that the Hmong language can have. Vietnamese linguists have devised a different Hmong script that partly uses Vietnamese diacritics, which is used by some Vietnamese scholars and within the school system in Hmong areas, including in Mù Cang Chải. In this thesis, however, I rely on the widely used RPA system. 68 The Hmong, as well as other ethnic minority groups, in Vietnam and Laos played important roles in both the First and Second Indochina wars, and this has been subject to a considerable body of literature (Culas 2000; Michaud

100 in Asia include the classic ethnographies by Geddes (1976), Cooper (1984) and Tapp (1986b), research on Hmong land use by Grandstaff (1976), Keen (1978), Mischung (1980), and Tungittiplakorn (1998), as well as Kunstadter‘s (1983; 1985) research on Hmong health and economy, all based in northern Thailand. In addition, Lemoine (1972) and Yang Dao (1975) worked among the Hmong in Laos prior to socialist rule there, and more recent international studies on Hmong groups in China include those by Tapp (2001), Schein (2000) and Symonds (1991, 1993, 2004).

In Vietnam, specifically, the Hmong have been studied by colonial and missionary authors, including Abadie (1924) and Bonifacy (1919), as well as by Vietnamese ethnographers, including Vuong Xuan Tinh (2001, 2002) and Nguyen Van Thang (2007) (cf. Culas 2009). Since the 1990s, research on the Hmong throughout the Massif has proliferated (Tapp 2004). International scholarly studies of the Hmong in Vietnam are comparably recent and include, most relevant to this thesis, the livelihoods-focused work by Turner, Michaud and collaborators (Turner 2007b, 2011; Bonnin and Turner 2012; Michaud 2012; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015), and by several of their students (Schoenberger and Turner 2008; Tugault-Lafleur and Turner 2009; Delisle 2014; Trincsi et al. 2014; Kyeyune 2015). Vietnamese scholars have produced international dissertation research on protestant conversion among Hmong (Ngo Thi Thanh Tam 2011) and the engagement of Hmong in Sa Pa’s tourist sector (Duong Bich Hanh 2008). With the exception of Kyeyune and Turner’s (2016) work in Hà Giang province, most of the international scholarly work on the Hmong in Vietnam has focused on different Hmong groups in Lào Cai province. The district of Mù Cang Chải, located approximately 70 kilometres further south along the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range (see Figure 2), has an exceptionally high proportion of Hmong population (91 per cent), but has not received any international scholarly attention.

There are multiple subgroups of the Hmong, which likely were not in contact in China, maintain distinct languages, and settled in distinct places (Geddes 1976; Tapp 2006). However, the terms for these subgroups are not consistently applied and often do not correlate with the groups Hmong self-identity with (Tapp 2006). For instance, White Hmong (known in the RPA as

2000a; Culas and Michaud 2004; McElwee 2004a). After 1975, an estimated 30 per cent of Hmong living in Laos fled the country, as they were persecuted by the newly established communist government, which gave rise to a global Hmong diaspora, most significantly in the United States, Australia and France (Tapp 2010; Yia Lee and Tapp 2010).

101 Hmoob Dawb) and the less-common Green Hmong (Hmoob Ntsuab/Leeg) are two mutually intelligible Hmong dialects that are often used as sub-ethnic categories. Overall, Hmong culture is lived and interpreted differently in different contexts, and Tapp (2006) suggests that the divisions between different sub-groups are less clear in Vietnam than in Thailand or Laos. Vietnamese scholars recognize six different subgroups, but Culas (2009) notes that he has encountered 15 different subgroups with which Hmong in Vietnam self-identify. Hmong villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo self-identify as Hmong Shi and those in Púng Luông and neighbouring communes as Hmong Leng.69 Apart from slight differences in some rituals and in the pronunciation of selected words, respondents did not note any further differences between the two groups. Unlike between other Hmong subgroups, there are no characteristic differences between the traditional clothing of Hmong from Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, all of which is much less ornate than among Hmong groups in Lào Cai Province, including Hmong Leng groups there. In any case, Culas (2009) contends that the differentiation by ethnic sub-group is of more interest to outside scholars than to most Hmong themselves. Indeed, Hmong scholars agree that for the social organization of the Hmong the system of different ancestral clans is of utmost importance, which I turn to next.

4.3.2. Hmong spirituality and social structure

Hmong society is patrilineal, with lineage and clan relations traced through male ancestries. A lineage consists of a group of people with a known common ancestor, whereas a clan (xeem) consists of a cluster of lineages whose members believe that they share common ancestry, often in the distant past (Tapp 2001; Michaud 2006).70 These clan names also serve as surnames, and Hmong of the same clan share a latent connection and can rely on each other for support, even if they do not know each other. A strict incest taboo requires that Hmong spouses are of different clans (clanic exogamy), which extends their social networks beyond their clan (Ngo Thi Thanh

69 I here spell the terms Hmong Leng and Hmong Shi phonetically, following Tapp (2006). According to the Romanized Popular Alphabet (see footnote above), these group names are spelt Hmoob Lees or Leeg and Hmoob Sib, respectively. In Vietnam, the term Hmong Leng (typically spelled Lềnh) is often used as synonymous with the more common term Hmông Hoa (Flower Hmong) (Ngo Thi Thanh Tam 2016). The Hmông Hoa (Flower Hmong), are one of the six Hmong sub-groups commonly acknowledged by Vietnamese scholars, along with the Hmông Ðen (Black Hmong), Hmông Trắng (White Hmong), Hmông Xanh (Green Hmong), Hmông Ðỏ (Red Hmong) and Na Miẻo, although the latter do not self-identify as Hmong (Nguyen Van Thang 2007). In turn, the Hmong Shi are a smaller, self-identified sub-group, which is sometimes conflated with Hmong Leng (Tapp 2006). 70 Hmong creation myths assume there were (a minimum of) twelve ancestral Hmong who formed twelve Hmong clans. Amongst Hmong scholars there is some uncertainty over the exact number of Hmong clans, but most assume that there are 18 Hmong clans in Asia and within the diaspora (Cooper 1998; Corlin 2004; Symonds 2004).

102 Tam 2016). The Hmong clan system is based on patrilineage, which means that a man’s wife and children become members of his lineage (the patriline). Women are therefore destined to leave their natal clan, but only fully enter their husband’s clan after death through rebirth (Cooper 1998; Yia Lee n.d.-a). Therefore, only sons are able to carry forth their parental lineage and worship their parents’ souls after death (Yia Lee and Tapp 2010). Nevertheless, Symonds (1991, 2004), emphasizes that women also have powerful spiritual roles, particularly during funerals, when gender roles are partially reversed. Considering that a person’s soul is reborn into alternating male and female bodies, she argues that the patriline is maintained by both men and women.

The Hmong typically practice strict patrilocality, which means that, after marriage, the young couple moves into the husband’s parental household. Hmong couples typically have their first one or two children there and establish their own household once they have the time and resources to build their own house. Building a house is a communal effort and remains an important milestone for a young Hmong man. In families with several sons, however, the parents select one of them (often the youngest) to remain in their household with his wife and children. If a family has no sons, customs may be modified for one of the daughters to remain in her parents’ household with her husband and children.71 Spiritually, the problem remains that only sons can conduct the spiritual rituals to “feed the ancestors” in their afterlife (Symonds 2004:160). “Who will bury me?” said a villager who has two daughters, but no sons (CT villager 15 28-11-2012).

In the context of Hmong animist spirituality, the increasing Protestant conversion within some Hmong communities in Vietnam since the 1990s, particularly in Lào Cai province and the central highlands, has caused much societal and political conflict (Ngo Thi Thanh Tam 2016). In Mù Cang Chải, Hmong villagers and officials often inquired whether I was a Christian missionary. They were adamant that no Hmong from Mù Cang Chải had converted to Christianity, which they saw as a threat to their culture. Traditional spirituality is central to the Hmong way of life, and we often heard or observed shamanistic rituals taking place, particularly in Chế Tạo. At each of the major life events (birth, marriage and death), there are a number of fascinating customs and rituals to ensure that an ancestor’s soul is reborn in the body of an

71 A Chế Tạo villager with four daughters but no sons suggested that this would be an option, subject to approval of the daughter’s in-laws, of course (CT villager 66 07-12-2013).

103 infant; that at marriage the wife is spiritually accepted into her husband’s clan; and that the souls of the deceased can be reborn again.72 Nevertheless, I also sought to understand how Hmong culture is changing, which I exemplify with the following observations.

4.3.3. Hmong gender roles and cultural change

Hmong society is commonly portrayed as male-dominated, leaving Hmong women confined by strict expectations and limited choices. However, the contributors to a recent volume on Hmong women argue that this portrayal is dated, at least in the Hmong diaspora (Vang et al. 2016). In addition, recent research around Sa Pa (Lào Cai province) shows that some Hmong women there have become economically active and socially independent (Duong Bich Hanh 2008; Bonnin and Turner 2013; Le Thi Dan Dung 2015; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). Nevertheless, my impression from Mù Cang Chải is that traditional gender roles are very prominent there, and Hmong women have very limited opportunities to be economically active or independent, for instance. However, I could not collect women’s perspectives on this and could only observe that women do much of the household chores, child care and food preparation, including caring for cattle and livestock. In addition, Hmong women and girls spend ample time preparing a new set of traditional clothing for each household member for the annual New Year’s festivities. In most households, women are also responsible for collecting firewood and buffalo fodder. Furthermore, women are active in the field, particularly during labour-intense times of rice transplanting and harvest.73

An important institution in Hmong culture that partly shapes gender relations is the traditional practice that the groom’s parents pay the bride’s a negotiated bride wealth when she marries and moves into her husband’s household (Yia Lee and Tapp 2010). While silver coins or bars were traditionally used for this exchange and for other transactions (cf. Michaud and Turner 2016), Hmong villagers in Nả Hàng B remember shifting to cash around the year 2000 to pay for the bride wealth (NHB villager 15 08-08-2013). Since then, common levels of bride wealth have

72 In my findings chapters, I will provide contextual information on specific cultural practices as pertinent to my analysis. Otherwise, I can refer to Lemoine (1972), Tapp (2001), Postert (2003) and Symonds (2004), among others, for in-depth observations and analyses of Hmong life events. 73 I could briefly interview several women about gender relations while we spent a morning helping them carry heavy timbers out of the forest. They suggested that women actually do all the work in the field, while the men in the village manage to keep both their hands and their feet clean. While men we interviewed insisted that agricultural labour is shared, this exchange illustrated that women in Chế Tạo are possibly resisting traditional gender roles.

104 risen sharply and are now in excess of 20 million VND (1000 USD) in Mù Cang Chải, according to villagers’ accounts (see Section 6.6.2).74

Getting married and having children is integral to maintaining the Hmong cycle of life. Children are valued both for their labour and for spiritual reasons, and Hmong have traditionally favoured having many children (Kunstadter et al. 1992). Nowadays, they are one of the ethnic minority groups with the highest birth rates in Vietnam (Vuong Xuan Tinh 2002), although the government has instituted a formal two-child policy since the early 1990s (Goodkind 1995). While a young household may consist of three or four people, large, multi-generational households of ten or more people are also common in Hmong societies, as I could observe in Mù Cang Chải. My livelihoods study finds that, nowadays, child-rich households are more vulnerable than they used to (see Section 5.4.1), while certain ways of distributing Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) may encourage large families, despite an official policy to the contrary (see Section 6.4.2).

When a Hmong son leaves his parents’ household, he inherits part of their assets in order to maintain a livelihood for his own family. Most importantly, this concerns paddy land and livestock, but possibly also forestland and cardamom land (see Chapters 5 and 6). To facilitate the sharing of resources and family ties, Hmong sons typically build their houses in the vicinity of their parents’ houses. This has traditionally resulted in Hmong households of the same family line (and thus clan) living in clusters, known as hamlets.75 In Section 5.5.2, I show that this is partly changing in Nả Hàng B, a village of four different clans and growing land scarcity. In Mù Cang Chải, a Hmong village typically consists of several hamlets or between 20 and 100 households.

Within a hamlet or wider kinship group, family or clan elders may have some informal authority, but otherwise, Hmong social structure is acephalous (non-hierarchical), as in most lineage societies (Symonds 2004). Therefore, the household (tsev) is the primary economic and social unit in Hmong societies (Cooper 1998; Vuong Duy Quang 2004). While bonding social capital

74 In addition, several villagers emphasized that the bride’s parents have also been facing increasing costs, which could total 10 million VND (500 USD) in Mù Cang Chải in 2013. This includes costs for a celebration that takes place at the bride’s home, as well as some valuable gifts that women are increasingly expected to bring into the marriage (CT villager 36 25-07-2013). 75 Some Vietnamese authors refer to Hmong villages, as a whole, as hamlets, which I consider a misnomer.

105 within social and kinship-based networks is often very strong, my impression is that assistance for relatives in need is often limited to in-kind support or loans of grain or money. “Every farmer has their own family” (leej twg nyam muaj tsev nyam drav nyam xwb) a villager explained, who cannot rely on the support of his better-off brothers (NHB villager 32 11-11-2013). To me, this illustrated the extent to which the Hmong household is an independent economic unit. In Chapters 5 and 6, I also present several cases of powerful villagers exploiting or excluding their relatives, which shows that the clan-based system does not preclude the emergence of what Putnam (2000:220) calls “negative social capital”.

Traditionally, the oldest male is the head of a Hmong household, but I saw some evidence that this is changing to some extent. The monetization of peasant livelihoods has made financial planning crucial for most households. In Section 3.6.3.4, I noted that the few female villagers I interviewed were very aware of their household economics. Indeed, several household heads I interviewed stated that they make monetary decisions in consultation with their wives. However, at least four elderly men I interviewed in Chế Tạo lamented that they had lost control of monetary flows, while their sons were taking over much of the economic decision making, spending excessive amounts on new motorbikes, for instance. Unfortunately, it was not within the scope of this thesis to further investigate the effects of monetization on Hmong gender roles or social structure. However, I surmise that it takes more than the introduction of monetary currency to challenge the social authority of elders, which was Bohannan’s (1959) lasting thesis about monetization among the ethnic Tiv in Africa. From my partial insights into Hmong culture and household dynamics, I suggest that a more comprehensive study of this topic in Hmong societies would have to collect perspectives from female community members. This could also contribute to our understanding of the agency of Hmong women, more generally (cf. Vang et al. 2016).

4.4. History of Hmong land use, land degradation and opium cultivation

After introducing key aspects of Hmong settlement, culture and spirituality, I next provide a historical overview of Hmong land use in the Massif. My main objective is to show that land use and livelihoods of the Hmong in Mù Cang Chải have been very different from those of other Hmong groups. Specifically, I will clarify some confusion I find in the literature about shifting cultivation, land degradation and opium cultivation by Hmong groups in Thailand. I do this also

106 to explain why the Hmong, as a whole, have been portrayed as “forest destroyers”, a term I take from Forsyth and Walker’s (2008) book on ethnic minority forest use in Thailand, entitled Forest guardians, forest destroyers.

4.4.1. Differentiation and stigma in Hmong land use

When Hmong peasants left China less than 200 years ago, the northern highlands of present-day Vietnam were probably among the first places they settled. Michaud (2006:105) suggests that Hmong settlements resembled an “archipelago” of high-lying, often forested places, as did those of other shifting cultivators. While Postert (2003) contends that the Hmong sought to settle in higher elevations for spiritual reasons, others argue that they did so because the valleys and lower highlands were already occupied by prior settlers, or to evade their control, as noted above (Culas 2000; Scott 2009). In any case, Hmong settlers developed distinctly different land-use systems in parts of Vietnam than they did in Thailand, and these differences are important for understanding the historical context of Hmong livelihoods in my study locales, as well as common stereotypes that surround the Hmong in Southeast Asia.

From their time of settlement until the 1990s, when Vietnam’s government enforced a ban on shifting cultivation, Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải practiced rotational shifting cultivation of upland rice and maize, as well as paddy cultivation (see Chapter 5). Similarly, Hmong peasants who settled around present-day Sa Pa (Lào Cai Province), further north along the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range, have been practicing both paddy and shifting cultivation (Corlin 2004; Leisz et al. 2005; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). I refer to this land-use system as “composite swiddening”, as it compares to that of some low-land Tày groups in Hòa Bình province described by Tran Duc Vien et al. (2006:192).

In turn, Hmong peasants who settled in present-day Thailand and Laos historically did not cultivate wet rice, but were pioneer shifting cultivators of primarily maize and opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) (Kanjunt 2007; Schmidt-Vogt 2007). Much like other pioneer swiddeners, such as the ethnic Lahu, Yao, Akha, H’tin, and Lisu, they cultivated their swiddens until the soils were exhausted and then cleared new swidden plots. They did not return to prior swiddens after a fallow period, like rotational swiddeners do. This explains why Mischung (1980) reports that Hmong groups in Thailand burnt the fallow vegetation repeatedly to

107 maximize the growth of grasses as grazing fodder (cf. Andrews 1983). Consequently, the deep- rooting, fire-resistant imperata grasses were eventually the only grasses to survive there, effectively halting the succession of secondary forests (Kanjunt 2007; Potter and Lee 2007). Such extensive land use was feasible for migratory pioneer swiddeners, as long as they could clear and cultivate additional forestland (Lamb 2010).

The composite swiddening of Hmong peasants around Mù Cang Chải and Sa Pa has allowed them to maintain sedentary livelihoods. Therefore, they maintained fallow periods of several years and burned the fallow vegetation only once, prior to re-cultivating the swiddens, as villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B confirmed. Nowadays, twenty years after the end of shifting cultivation, their former swidden areas are largely covered in thick, secondary forest, as I could observe. As rotational shifting cultivators, the Hmong of Mù Cang Chải knew to avoid land degradation, as this would have been detrimental to their sedentary livelihoods.76

Nowadays, the infamous imperata grasslands still cover significant parts of the Massif and have been portrayed as testimony that shifting cultivation leads to land degradation. This discourse became what Forsyth (2003:37) calls an “environmental orthodoxy”, which has served to justify sedentarisation, agricultural intensification and reforestation programs in Vietnam and other countries (Schmidt-Vogt 1998; Cairns 2007; McElwee 2009; Mertz et al. 2009). Garrity et al. (1996) found that, in the mid-1990s, approximately nine per cent of Vietnam’s territory was covered by imperata, but this is typically at elevations below 700m above sea level (Vu Tan Phuong 2011). Therefore, these grasslands cannot be the result of shifting cultivation by Hmong peasants, but are associated with other processes of forest degradation, including logging and warfare (McNamara et al. 2006; Lamb 2010).

Due to their history of pioneer shifting cultivation in Thailand, the Hmong have been portrayed as “forest destroyers” throughout Southeast Asia (Vuong Xuan Tinh 2002; Forsyth and Walker

76 On the question if Hmong peasants in Vietnam practiced pioneer or rotational swiddening, Pham Quan Hoan (1994:1) claims that “the bulk of Hmong people, particularly those in the north-western and western parts of Nghệ An province, still mainly rely on a pioneering type of slash-and-burn cultivation”. This may have been the case at the author’s time of writing for Hmong in Nghệ An, given that they only relocated there in the course of the 20th century and hence may have been forced to adopt pioneering. In turn, Vuong Duy Quang (2004), a Vietnamese Hmong who works for the Vietnamese state as a researcher, suggests that Hmong in northern Vietnam traditionally maintained sustainable systems of rotational shifting cultivation. Together with the evidence I cite above from Mù Cang Chải and Sa Pa, this shows that generic statements about Hmong land use are not differentiated enough, and that different Hmong groups developed locally specific land-use systems and livelihoods.

108 2008). This discourse has also pervaded the portrayal of Hmong forest use in Mù Cang Chải by state and international commentators (see Chapter 7), but I have emphasized that Hmong land- use in Mù Cang Chải has been very different than elsewhere. This is also due to opium cultivation, which I turn to next.

4.4.2. The role of opium in Hmong land use

The cultivation of opium was integral to the historical livelihoods of many Hmong groups living in the Massif, which has contributed to the portrayal of Hmong as villains (Forsyth and Walker 2008).77 This discourse, however, conflates certain processes, areas and causal links surrounding opium, land degradation and historical Hmong livelihoods. In this section, I seek to provide some clarification, also drawing on the history of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải.

A rich body of anthropological research shows how Hmong peasants in northern Thailand were specialized in opium cultivation to the extent that they relied on opium revenues to purchase the majority of their subsistence grains (Geddes 1976; Cooper 1984; Tapp 1986b). Many Hmong households could even afford to employ wage labour on their opium fields, typically ethnic Karen opium addicts, whom they would pay in opium (Cooper 1984; Forsyth 2008; Fukushima et al. 2008).78 The extent of their opium cultivation, intercropped with maize, left them with a surplus of maize with which they could raise pigs for sale. In Geddes’ (1976) field site, for instance, maize and opium cultivation occupied 87 per cent of the cultivated area, leaving only 13 per cent for subsistence production.

Some scholars on Hmong land use and shifting cultivation have suggested that opium cultivation per se was responsible for the emergence of imperata grasslands (see, for instance: Cooper 1998; Cramb et al. 2009). The ecological causal link, however, has never been documented.79 In turn,

77 Many Hmong groups and other swiddeners across the Massif had been growing opium customarily, but in the latter half of the 19th century expanded production dramatically to produce surplus opium for sale to British and French colonial administrations, who had gained access to the Chinese opium market though the opium wars (1838– 1842 and 1856–1858) (Michaud 2006). Several authors wager that these the opium wars contributed to the migration of Hmong and other highland ethnic minority groups from Southwest China to other parts of the Massif, where they expanded opium cultivation (Tapp 1986b; Culas 2000; Kunstadter 2000; Michaud 2000b; Yia Lee n.d.-b). 78 Durrenberger (1992) notes that the ethnic Lisu also employed Karen wage labour for their opium production (cf. Hinton 1983; Cohen 1985). The Karen are traditionally rotational shifting cultivators and, as such, have been portrayed as “forest guardians” in policy discourse in Thailand, in juxtaposition to the Hmong (Kanjunt and Oberhauser 1994; Forsyth and Walker 2008). 79 There are numerous ecological studies examining fallow vegetation and forest recovery in former swiddens and opium fields in northern Thailand (Kunstadter et al. 1978; Kanjunt and Oberhauser 1994; Fukushima et al. 2008;

109 villagers in Nả Hàng B remember intercropping opium and maize for up to seven years and recultivating the same plots after several years of fallowing (NHB village head 11-08-2013). Furthermore, several studies of Hmong land use in Thailand specify that the Hmong cultivated opium for up to 15 years on the same plot until the soil was exhausted, but maize only for two to three years (Grandstaff 1976; Keen 1978; Cooper 1984). This suggests that opium cultivation was not a driver of land degradation. Rather, research on the ecology of imperata grasslands suggests that the specific practice of repeatedly burning fallow vegetation, as Mischung (1980) observed among some Hmong groups, eventually resulted in imperata grasslands as climax vegetation (Andrews 1983; Potter and Lee 2007).

Unlike in Nả Hàng B, only very few households in Chế Tạo used to cultivate surplus opium for sale, chiefly because of limited market access. The Hmong of Chế Tạo therefore have a relatively short history of market integration and monetization. Instead of cultivating opium, they kept large herds of buffalo, which they could readily sell to Thái people from Sơn La province (see Section 5.2.2). Several respondents from Chế Tạo remembered burning more forestland than needed for swiddens in order to encourage grass growth as grazing lands. However, they did not burn these grass lands but let them regenerate into forest, which provided more biomass to be burned in later years prior to re-cultivating.

4.4.3. Hmong spirituality and property relations surrounding forest use

Until today, both economic and spiritual considerations guide Hmong land and forest use (Corlin 2004). In the animist Hmong cosmology, the natural world is inhabited by spirits, which are often personified (Symonds 2004). Nevertheless, the accounts of several elderly villagers and two shamans I interviewed in Chế Tạo suggest that spiritual practices surrounding forest use, specifically, have greatly decreased compared to the times of composite swiddening. This is plausible, as villagers spend less time in the forest than they used to. Villagers in Chế Tạo could also confirm that they used to maintain non-spiritual practices of watershed conservation by not clearing forest on the ridges or around water sources. Corlin (2004:306) also observed this among Hmong groups in Lào Cai province, who established rules and sanctions for misuse of these forest areas in “an annual oath-taking ceremony” called Nao Sung. Pham Quan Hoan

Karthik et al. 2009; Delang and Li 2012; Podong and Poolsiri 2013). However, none of these authors suggest that imperata grasslands are the result of past opium cultivation.

110 (1994:6) gives a similar account of this ceremony, which he claims was “still retained in many Hmong areas” in northern Vietnam at the time of writing. However, Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed in 2013 confirmed that such a ceremony was no longer practiced.80

Interestingly, Forsyth and Walker (2008) suggest that, after many years of being stigmatized as “forest destroyers“, Hmong are being increasingly green-washed by environmental groups. Similarly, a UNDP publication stylizes the Hmong as natural forest guardians, precisely because they are forest dependent: “For the Hmong, resource management is closely linked with their dependence on the forest and its resources. Such close dependency fosters respect and reverence for natural resources that provides for its proper use and management” (Leake 2007: 253, emphasis added). This not only presumes that Hmong have a Western-like resource ethic, but also that this is fostered by their forest dependence. Ironically, this is contrary to the more common theory that the Hmong or other shifting cultivators are a threat to the forest precisely because they are forest dependent.81 Given the context of Hmong livelihoods, I use the term ‘forest dependent’ to refer to swidden livelihoods that rely on the forest as a source of both agricultural land and subsistence food resources. Based on how Hmong villagers I interviewed talked about forest dependence, this is what defined Hmong livelihoods during the era of shifting cultivation, when forest wildlife and forest plants constituted a vital part of the diet, and that is what villagers were proud to overcome with the transition to paddy cultivation (see Section 5.2.4).

Central to the study of Hmong forest use is also an understanding of customary property relations over wild and cultivated lands. As in most swidden societies, the Hmong regard undeveloped forestland typically as ‘open-access’ (Kunstadter and Chapman 1978). This is partly why Hmong are thought to have a “low emotional attachment” to land, and a poor conservation ethic (Tomforde 2003:357). In turn, any cultivated land, including agricultural land,

80 The Hmong ntoo xeeb ritual has also ceased to be practiced in Mù Cang Chải. An official from the Forest Protection Department in Mù Cang Chải told me that there used to be two trees in Mù Cang Chải that were ascribed spiritual significance as the homes of thwv tim, the “greatest local spirit” (cf. Leepreecha 2004:342). However, he claimed that the trees were both cut by local Thái people in the 1990s, which many local Hmong thought had brought great misfortune (MCC FPD Sinh 14-08-2013). 81 This is also what Newton et al. (2016) find in their review of studies on forest dependence, although different scholars apply very different definitions of the term ‘forest dependent’. This arguably makes sense, since the livelihood contexts varied strongly, and Newton et al. (2016) recommend that locally appropriate definitions should be chosen. I add that such definitions should be based on both livelihood practices and discursive practices, i.e. how different actors use the term.

111 swiddens and fallow land, become individual property and can be passed on through inheritance (Cooper 1998; Corlin 2004). I found that villagers also maintain individual property regimes over cardamom fields and pơ mu trees they had cut in the past (see Sections 6.2 and 6.3.1). 82 This is contrary to Lemoine’s observation among the Hmong in Laos that “[a] piece of land has no permanent value in a mobile society – it is rather a loan from Nature for some years.” (Lemoine 1972:163, as quoted in Corlin 2004:305). I found that traditional property regimes over forest products are still important in shaping forest use and conservation behaviour, as I show particularly in Chapters 7 and 8.

4.5. The history of forest and ethnic minority development in northern Vietnam

Moving from the history of Hmong forest use to that of forest governance in Vietnam, I start this section with an historical overview of French colonial forest administration in present-day Vietnam. This highlights some historical roots of forest governance during the subsequent command economy, which I outline in Section 4.5.2. I emphasize how socialist conceptions of ethnic minorities and nation-building shaped programs for population redistribution, sedentarisation and collectivisation in the newly independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). After reunification with the South, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) dismantled agricultural collectives in the early 1980s and introduced a series of reforms after 1986 (see Section 4.5.4). Between 1993 and 2010, two large reforestation programs dominated Vietnam’s forestry sector, which established important precedents for the emergence of conservation governance and PES, which I turn to in Section 4.6.

4.5.1. Forest governance during French colonial times (1885-1954)

French colonial forestry in Indochina followed Western silvicultural science and established management plans and institutions to maximize timber yields and tax revenues (Thomas 1998; McElwee 2003; Sowerwine 2004a). Starting in the early 20th century, timber-rich forest areas were designated as forest reserves for exploitation, and barren hills for reforestation.83 The French did not establish systems of national parks or local forest management, as, for instance,

82 The pơ mu tree, as it is known in Vietnamese (pronounced similar to per mu), is internationally known as the Fujian Cypress and commonly classified as Fokienia hodginsii; it used to grow in many parts of Vietnam’s northern and central highlands, as well as in Yunnan Province, China (Nguyen Phi Truyen and Osborn 2006). 83 The French forestry service was established in 1901 and, by 1905, had gazetted 69 forest reserves covering an area of 155,434 hectares (Amelot et al. 2006).

112 the British famously did in India and Africa.84 Nevertheless, I here review other French colonial forest management institutions that help understand post-colonial forest governance in Vietnam.

The first colonial forest protection law was enacted in Indochina in 1891. It expressly prohibited shifting cultivation, but granted local forest users limited access to low-value timber species and free access to most non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in exchange for unpaid labour (corvée) (Sowerwine 2004a).85 A system of forest patrols and check points was established to monitor the harvest of forest products, collect taxes, and levy fines for non-compliance or over-harvest (Thomas 2000). The colonial forestry service, however, remained understaffed and only enforced its policies in 15 per cent of the forest reserves it established (McElwee 2003). The rest were thus what we may nowadays call paper parks (see Section 2.4.2).

The French colonialists soon became concerned that subsistence hunting was diminishing forest wildlife populations to the detriment of colonial hunting parties, which were attracted by the abundance of big game in Indochina’s forests (McElwee 2003). A 1909 law privileged colonial over subsistence hunting, but the latter was difficult to control, and, by the 1930s, Hanoi featured an active market for wildlife from the provinces (McElwee 2003). Until today, hunting has proven particularly difficult to control and, despite restrictions, feeds an open market for forest wildlife in Vietnam, as I explain below.

In 1919, the French botanist Auguste Chevalier drew attention to the deforestation caused by colonial large-scale logging in Tonkin, today’s northern Vietnam. However, he erroneously assumed that Tonkin had been entirely forested during imperial (pre-colonial) times, and he therefore may have overestimated the extent of colonial deforestation (Sowerwine 2004a). Nevertheless, decreasing reserves of valuable timber became a growing concern for the colonial administration, and its subsequent studies in the 1930s increasingly blamed this on the shifting cultivation practices of highland ethnic groups (McElwee 2003; Sowerwine 2004a). This shift in colonial narratives reflected a generally pejorative representation of ethnic minorities by colonial

84 Colonial forestry in Indochina has been most extensively studied by Thomas (1998, 1999, 2000), McElwee (2003) and Sowerwine (2004a). In this section, I draw particularly on the latter two sources, two outstanding dissertations, which examine archival material on French colonial forestry in Vietnam. Both authors suggest that the French had a more “hands off” approach compared to British and Dutch colonial forestry elsewhere. More recently, McElwee (2016) published a monograph on the history of forest governance in Vietnam, upon which I regularly draw. 85 French colonial territory in Indochina covered present-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and was divided into four protectorates (Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia and Laos).

113 observers, administrators and missionaries, despite some exceptions (Salemink 2003; Michaud 2007). Colonial discourses typically portrayed ethnic cultures, livelihoods and land-use, particularly in the highlands, as primitive and backward (Sowerwine 2004a; Salemink 2011). Thomas (1998:59) argues that colonial forestry discourses in Indochina increasingly engaged an ecological rhetoric in which “ecology was a subtle malleable weapon of imperialism” (cf. McElwee 2003). Shifting cultivation was demonized as destructive, which helped justify the territorialisation of the highlands, while colonial logging was justified for revenue generation.86 This therefore marks the origin of the anti-swiddening discourse, which is still evident in contemporary forest policy.

4.5.2. The territorialisation of the highlands in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1954-1975)

After gaining independence from French colonial rule in 1954, the central administration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, 1954-1975) gradually established the hierarchical system of provinces, district and communes throughout the country, partly adopting French administrative boundaries (Chapuis 2000; Nguyen Quang Tan 2008).87 In the Northwest, however, the DRV government proclaimed the Thái-Meo Autonomous Region (Khu tự trị Thái - Mèo), which encompassed a third of its total territory, including today’s Mù Cang Chải (Lentz 2011). Despite war-time promises, this autonomous region arguably provided little tangible autonomy to the region’s ethnic minorities, which included Hmong, Thái and many other ethnicities (Michaud 2009a). Subsequent policies of the DRV sought to assimilate ethnic minorities, and built on colonial approaches to highland development, albeit within the context of socialist ideology and central planning (McElwee 2003; Salemink 2003; Sowerwine 2004a).

86 Subsequent colonial, as well as contemporary studies of deforestation in Vietnam often refer to a map by Paul Maurand (1943) that shows national forest cover in 1943 at 43 per cent. However, Thomas (1999, 2000) finds that Maurand’s (1943) map was actually produced in 1930, when forest cover must have been significantly higher. Therefore, studies that attribute forest cover loss since 1943 primarily to upland shifting cultivation have significantly overestimated the rate of deforestation and the role of ethnic minority swiddening in this. This is therefore a similar case of overestimating deforestation to that of Auguste Chevalier in 1919, noted above. 87 This system remains firmly in place, and each unit has a Peoples’ Committee, which serves as the hub of local governance, subordinate to upper levels. At the provincial and district level, there are departments of key ministries, as well as local chapters of the traditional mass organisations, which serve as an extension of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) (Kerkvliet 2001). Several administrative boundaries have been revised over time, and the district of Mù Cang Chải, for instance, was part of Hoàng Liên Province until this was divided into Lào Cai and Yên Bái Provinces in 1992.

114 During its first years of independence, the DRV established centrally-planned forest management institutions and nationalized all forest resources (Sikor 1998; Nguyen Quang Tan 2008). Throughout the 1960s, the government established State Forest Enterprises (SFEs, known as Lâm trường) in the highlands, which operated as state-owned logging companies. The system of SFEs was integral to the centrally-planned forestry sector, which was governed by often unsustainable quotas of timber exploitation (McElwee 2004b; Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012).88 The system of SFEs also served to consolidate state territorial control in the northern highlands. The geopolitical sensitivity of Vietnam’s northern borderlands added to the impetus to establish control over highland ethnic minority groups, particularly as some had allied with colonial forces (Pelley 1998; Turner 2010a). Leninist ideology conceived of ethnic minorities as backward and primitive, but also free of capitalist influences and hence capable of becoming full members of a socialist society (McElwee 2004a). Therefore, socialist nation-building efforts sought to assimilate ethnic minorities into the Vietnamese cultural fabric, which centred on the culture and history of the ethnic Kinh (Salemink 2003; Taylor 2008). Nevertheless, Vietnam’s ethnic diversity was embraced in superficial ways, and policies of selective cultural preservation selectively commoditized ethnic dresses, dances and music, an approach that is still evident today (Messier and Michaud 2012). Other aspects of ethnic minority culture were curtailed, such as shamanistic rituals and socio-cultural practices that were deemed too exotic or suspect (McElwee 2004a). This practice has also continued, and in Section 6.6.2 I examine the effects of contemporary government limits to bride wealth and funeral sacrifices.

Central to early socialist state-making in the DRV were three linked programs. An infamous land reform was carried out between 1954 and 1956 to redistribute agricultural land, but largely in the lowlands and not in Mù Cang Chải or other highland areas of shifting cultivation (Moise 1983). Subsequently, the forced collectivization of agricultural production was implemented very rapidly in the lowlands, but was short-lived in Mù Cang Chải and other highland locales, as I detail in Section 5.3.1 (Boothroyd and Pham Xuan Nam 2000; Lentz 2011). More relevant in Mù

88 While primarily responsible for forest exploitation, SFEs also conducted some reforestation activities, starting in the mid 1950s (in the DRV), and by 1985 had planted five million hectares of forest throughout the country (Sikor 1998; de Jong et al. 2006). Reforestation is defined as tree planting in areas that were forested during the past 50 years. Planting activities where there was no forest in the past are termed afforestation, while the generic term afforesation/reforestation (A/R) is also common (Thomas et al. 2010). Most of Vietnam’s A/R activities are technically reforestation and I will therefore use this term only.

115 Cang Chải was the third initiative, namely a program for large-scale population redistribution (known as di dân đồng bằng miền núi) from the lowlands to the highlands (De Koninck 2000; Hardy 2005). Between 1961 and 1966, the government directed approximately one million lowlanders, mostly ethnic Kinh, to relocate to the northern highlands (Hardy 2000). Aiming to alleviate growing population pressure in the coastal lowlands, this program also facilitated the acculturation of ethnic minorities and the territorialisation of the northern highlands, with Kinh migrants essentially serving as “territorial spearheads” of the state (De Koninck 1996:231; Pelley 1998; McElwee 2008). These included both peasants, who were often allocated agricultural land in the highlands, and government employees to staff the local state administrations and institutions, including government shops and SFEs (Hoang Cam 2009). In Section 5.3, I document how the centrally-planned economy was implemented in Mù Cang Chải, where no lowland peasants, but approximately 200 government staff had settled by 1968 (MCC official 4 22-05-2014).

The arguably most direct intervention in the livelihoods of highland ethnic minorities under the DRV government started in 1968 with the program for sedentarisation (định canh định cư, commonly translated as fixed cultivation and settlement). This program sought to ban shifting cultivation and the nomadic livelihoods of highland swiddeners, relocating many of them to permanent villages (Nguyen Van Chinh 2008). In Mù Cang Chải and other places, the state instructed the expansion of paddy cultivation, which was portrayed as more modern and productive than shifting cultivation (McElwee 2004b). The theory that shifting cultivation is primitive and wasteful tied in with the socialist discourse that many ethnic minority cultures were backward (Sowerwine 2004a). This portrayal thus built on prior colonial policies, and it continues to hold a lot of sway in contemporary Vietnam (Pelley 1998; McElwee 1999, 2016). I found this to be the case in Mù Cang Chải, where local Hmong are still portrayed by state forest policy discourse as forest dependent shifting cultivators, whose livelihood practices are thus a threat to the forest, although they have long given up swiddening. In Mù Cang Chải, the ban on shifting cultivation was not enforced until the 1980s and early 1990s, when it coincided with the 1992 ban on opium cultivation and the first national programs for forest conservation, which I turn to next. The state bans on shifting cultivation and opium production required a fundamental shift in land- and forest use of Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải, and I examine on how village livelihoods have since evolved (see Chapters 5 and 6).

116 4.5.3. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the emergence of reforms (1980s)

Following reunification of Vietnam after the Second Indochina War (1963-1975), the newly formed Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) extended programs for population redistribution, sedentarisation of ethnic minorities, as well as the collectivization of agriculture into the South of the country, where they partly took on different political meanings and had very mixed effects (cf. Déry 2000; Hy Van Luong 2003; McElwee 2004b; Taylor 2008). The system of SFEs was similarly expanded into the South and focused on timber production for post-war reconstruction and economic recovery (Sikor 1998; McElwee 2016). Consequently, Vietnam’s forest cover dropped to 30 per cent by 1985, but state discourse continued to blame shifting cultivation and logging practices of highland minorities (De Koninck 1999).

In the dramatic era of post-war economic and political despair in Vietnam, low paddy yields, food insecurity and growing resistance challenged the system of agricultural collectives. Kerkvliet (2005) shows how peasants’ everyday resistance to forced collectivization eventually forced Vietnam’s government and Communist Party to decollectivize agriculture, starting in the early 1980s (cf. Kerkvliet 1995). This was the beginning of the end for the centrally-planned economy, which, starting around 1986, was partially liberalized in a series of economic reforms that became known as Đổi Mới (typically translated as renovation). Among other effects, economic and trade liberalisation led to a growing market demand for, and exploitation of, pơ mu timber, cardamom and other forest products from the northern highlands (Sowerwine 2004a; Hoang Cam 2009). Politically, Vietnam has remained a socialist state under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). Nevertheless, there were a number of important reforms to land tenure and forest governance in Vietnam, which I examine next, again focusing on those aspects most relevant to my thesis.

4.5.4. Vietnam’s forest policy reform (post 1986)

The national extent of deforestation and forest degradation had become increasingly apparent since the 1980s, and, during the 1990s, Vietnam’s forest policy agenda shifted from forest exploitation to reforestation and forest protection (Sunderlin and Huynh Thu Ba 2005; Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012). To this end, rural peasants were contracted to protect existing forests or plant trees on forestland that was allocated or leased to them (as detailed below), essentially marking a strategic shift from “State Forestry to Household Forestry” (Sikor 1998:19). The

117 Forest Protection and Development Law of 1992 introduced three different classifications of forest and their management regimes.89 Accordingly, ‘production forests’ (rừng sản xuất) are managed primarily for the extraction of timber and NTFPs; ‘protection forests’ (rừng phòng hộ) are off-limits for commercial exploitation, as they fulfill important environmental services, especially water conservation; and ‘special-use forests’ (rừng đặc dụng) serve as protected areas (PAs) for the conservation of landscapes, biodiversity and cultural values (Nguyen Quang Tan 2008). In addition, forest governance was partly decentralized, as provinces were granted the authority to classify forests according to the three management regimes (Clement and Amezaga 2009).90

These policy reforms were in line with the restructuring agenda of Đổi Mới and with international approaches of sustainable forest management, decentralization and devolution (Larson 2004; Nguyen Quang Tan 2006a; Sikor and Müller 2009; Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012). The policy shift away from forest exploitation was consolidated with a provisional export ban on raw timber in 1993 and a subsequent logging ban in 1997 (Nguyen Quang Tan 2008). This made Vietnam’s State Forest Enterprises (SFEs) in the form of logging companies largely obsolete, but their anticipated privatization proved difficult (Clement and Amezaga 2009). Most SFEs have been transformed into forest management boards and continue to be important state actors in forest governance, including in Mù Cang Chải (To Xuan Phuc, Tran Huu Nghi, et al. 2014; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2015).

89 The 1992 Forest Protection and Development Law defines forest (rừng) as an “ecological system … of forest fauna and flora, … of which timber trees and bamboo … constitute the major components with a canopy cover of 0.1 or more", which is in line with the international FAO (2012) definition of forest. While any land with such tree cover thus qualifies as forest, Vietnam’s system of land classification is separate and includes a category of forestry land (đất lâm nghiệp). This refers to land that is either forested or designated to be forested, but can include degraded and bare lands, which may be under agricultural use, particularly shifting cultivation (McElwee 2009). While rừng is a native Vietnamese word that has connotations of wilderness (such as in động vật rừng, forest wildlife, and thịt rừng, forest meat), lâm is a Chinese loan word, typically referring to the use value of forest products, such as lâm sản phụ (minor forest products) or lâm nghiệp (forestry) (cf. McElwee 2016). (Hmong language does not have such a distinction, and the forest is referred to as hav zoov.) While this issues is of little relevance to my research, it is part of the overarching problem that the two ministries MARD and MONRE maintain different systems of land classification (and definitions of biodiversity), which has hampered legal and policy development. Successive forest protection projects by the German development agency GIZ have sought to enhance coordination between MARD and MONRE, but with limited success, as key informants noted (NGO 15 07-06-2014). 90 The management of special-use forests was devolved to provincial governments in 2001, except for eight National Parks that continue to be managed by the Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), the national ministry for forest management (ICEM 2003).

118 Central to these forest governance reforms was the process of forestland allocation (FLA). While all forestland still remains under formal state ownership, the 1991 Law on Forest Protection and Development, as well as the revised Land Law of 1993 introduced 20-50-year land-use certificates (in Vietnam commonly known as Red Book Certificates (RBCs)) to individuals, groups of households, SFEs and other state organizations (Nguyen Quang Tan 2006b). These RBCs granted exclusive but limited use rights over an allocated plot of forest and could be used as collateral for bank loans, but left villagers with little forest management authority (Pettenella 2001; Sikor and Tran Ngoc Thanh 2007).91

Processes of FLA often disrupted customary property relations, disadvantaged certain forest user groups and often led to village-level resistance and conflicts over forest access (Gomiero et al. 2000; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2013). On the other hand, several studies report local authorities bending the rules of FLA and granting some villagers RBCs for forestland that they had held in customary property regimes, effectively legitimizing these (Sikor 2001a, 2004; Castella et al. 2006; Sikor 2012b). While FLA was not pursued in Mù Cang Chải, similar conflicts between formal and informal property relations over forestland and forest products have emerged. Similarly, the large-scale forestry Programs 327 and 661, which I turn to next, were not implemented in Mù Cang Chải as they were in other parts of the highlands, but they set the context for forest governance in Vietnam, including for the more recent Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES).

4.5.5. Vietnam’s forest transition and conservation payments (since 1990s)

In 1992, when Vietnam’s forest cover was at the historical low point of 25 per cent, Decree 327/CP/1992 launched the “Greening the Barren Hills Program” (1993-98). Program 327, as it became known, sought to eradicate shifting cultivation by reforesting swidden lands, while providing an income to poor peasants (McElwee 2016).92 The Program either allocated production forestland, often prior swidden land, to peasant households with an RBC, or

91 Several studies also show that the actual FLA process was inflexible, arbitrary and unfair, leading to misinterpretations, social differentiation, and conflicts within villages (Pettenella 2001; Sikor and Nguyễn Quang Tân 2007). The process was prone to elite capture and often excluded ethnic minorities (Scott 2000; Sowerwine 2004b; Sunderlin and Huynh Thu Ba 2005; Tran Ngoc Thanh and Sikor 2006; Clement and Amezaga 2009). 92 Various independent analyses of Program 327 report differing data on the costs, funding sources and achievements of the Program. The total budget of the five-year program was likely in the order of USD 213 million (de Jong et al. 2006), of which state funds covered approximately 40 per cent (Fortech 1998).

119 employed them as labourers on the plantations of the local SFE, as it was done in parts of Mù Cang Chải (cf. Hobley et al. 1998).93 While state sources portray Program 327 as a success, international commentators have criticized it for failing to meet its goals of reforestation and livelihood improvements (Ohlsson et al. 2005; Sunderlin and Huynh Thu Ba 2005). Commonly noted shortcomings include the reliance on fast-growing, exotic species for reforestation (such as Eucalyptus, Acacia and Pine species), as well as top-down governance, which often did not consider local ecological conditions or livelihood contexts (Fortech 1998; Lang and World Rainforest Movement. 2002; McElwee 2016).

Despite the apparent shortcomings of Program 327, the government pursued a similar approach with the ambitious Five Million Hectare Reforestation Program (1998-2010), which became better known as the 661 Program and boosted a total budget of USD 1.5 billion (MARD, 2011; SRV, 2011). Its prominent goal was to increase, by 2010, Vietnam's forest cover to the supposed 1945 level of 43 per cent that Maurand (1943) had assumed, as noted above (Ohlsson et al. 2005). Despite notoriously poor survival rates of tree seedlings, national forest cover increased during the 661 Program from 32 to 39.5 per cent, making Vietnam one of few tropical countries to achieve a forest transition (Meyfroidt 2009; SRV 2011).94

Vietnam’s significant forest cover increase has shaped a national policy discourse of “forest transition as triumphalism”, suggesting Vietnam’s forests have recovered from past deforestation (McElwee 2016:168). Indeed, Figure 4.3 shows that Vietnam’s forest cover indeed increased with growing population density, unlike in other countries of the region. In international reports, much contention remains about how Vietnam’s forest transition was achieved, but official reports pay little attention to the quality of the regenerated and newly planted forest (Cochard et al. 2017).95 While government reports state that the 661 Program was “highly appreciated” and

93 In 1995, following Decree 556-TTg, Program 327 shifted its focus radically from sedentarisation and production forestry to enrichment planting (and some reforestation) in protection forests and SUFs (Morrison and Dubois 1998; de Jong et al. 2006). Decree 556 formally replaced Program 327 and renamed it to “National Programme to Create and Protect Watershed Protection and Special Use Forests” (Morrison and Dubois 1998), although many authors and forestry officials in Vietnam continue to refer to pursuing activities as being under Program 327. 94 A forest transition is underway when a trend of deforestation is reversed by reforestation, afforestation and natural regeneration, cumulatively resulting in a net increase in forest cover. This is often associated with an increase in secondary (or plantation) forest and continued deforestation of primary forests, which was also the case in Vietnam (Rudel et al. 2005; Meyfroidt 2009; Barbier et al. 2010). 95 While Vietnam’s net forest increase was achieved with low-value plantation forests, it also masked continued forest degradation and illegal logging, including of old-growth forests. Even government sources admit that the

120 “provides actual benefits to people” (SRV 2011:24), they say little more about the social implications for the over one million households that received land allocations, reforestation contracts or forest protection contracts, or those that lost agricultural or swidden land to reforestation (McElwee 2016; Kirchhoff and Apel n.d.). My impression is that Vietnam’s forest policy has remained obsessed with national forest cover, which prominently features in MARD reports and plans, most recently with 41 per cent in 2013 (MARD 2014).

Figure 4.3: Vietnam’s historical forest cover increase relative to population density in regional comparison (Lamb 2010:61)

Of primary interest for my thesis is the precedent that the 12-year long 661 Program set for forest governance, as forest protection and reforestation contracts have since given peasant households a prominent role in state forest management. These contracts typically give households exclusive access to a delineated forest area (often between 0.5 and 2 hectares), but also the responsibility to patrol their forest area and report any forest law violations. Initially, payments for forest protection were VND 50,000 (2.50 USD) per hectare per year, but these doubled in 2006 (SRV 2011). These payment levels likely remained financially insignificant in most cases (Wunder et planned logging quota (of 150.000-200.000 m3 per year) was exceeded by nearly 100 per cent throughout the duration of the 661 Program (SRV 2011). During the same time, Vietnam’s burgeoning wood processing industry increased its annual export turnover 15-fold to USD 3.55 billion (MARD 2013b), partly supplied by illegal imports, which had been increasing since Vietnam’s 1997 logging ban (EIA 2011).

121 al. 2005), although no studies exist that investigated how forest protection payments affected household livelihood or people’s conservation attitudes.

In Section 6.4.1, I examine the monetary significance of conservation payments for Hmong villagers and find that they were quite significant in parts of Mù Cang Chải, particularly after Program 30a increased payment rates to VND 200,000 (10 USD) per hectare per year in 2008 and continued the payments beyond the end of the 661 Program (SRV 2011). In January of 2012, a successor to Program 661 was launched, following Decision 57/2012/QĐ-TTg, which further continued the payments, but, like Program 30a, only in the 64 poorest districts of the country, including Mù Cang Chải (MARD 1 10-06-2014; UN-REDD 2013). In theory, payments were conditional on the respective forest area being not affected by forest fire or illegal logging. In practice, however, conditionality was not enforced, which I later argue helped establish similar expectations for PES schemes in Vietnam (see Chapter 9).

Overall, however, the focus of the 661 Program was on productive forestry, and investments in special-use forests, forest protection and biodiversity remained relatively low (Sunderlin and Huynh Thu Ba 2005; Sikor 2012b; McElwee 2016). Nevertheless, McElwee (2016) shows how the 661 Program integrated objectives of forest conservation and livelihood development, and thus managed to enlist 25 donor agencies to help fund the Program, effectively green-washing Vietnam’s reforestation frenzy. The role of international agencies in the 661 Program reflects differing international and national agendas for forest policy in Vietnam, which I examine in Chapters 7 and 9 in the context of biodiversity conservation and PES, respectively. In the following two sections I provide some essential context on state approaches to conservation governance (see Section 4.7) and to PES policy development (see Section 4.8).

4.6. Contemporary forest and conservation governance in Vietnam

The recent history of Vietnam’s forest policy reform covered above provides the backdrop for the emergence of contemporary approaches to biodiversity conservation and PES, which I explain in more detail in the following two sub-sections. This provides the national policy context of my analysis of forest conservation and PES in Chapters 7 to 9.

122 4.6.1. Policies for biodiversity conservation and protected areas (PAs)

While Programs 327 and 661 were primarily implemented in production and protection forest, the Vietnamese government also increased its efforts in biodiversity conservation in special-use forests (SUF) after Đổi Mới (Zingerli 2005). The discovery of several new mammal species in Vietnam’s forests during the 1990s made Vietnam a global biodiversity hotspot (Sterling et al. 2006 McElwee , 2007 #1202).96 During the 1990s, the “open door policy of Đổi Mới” enabled international conservation agencies to settle in Vietnam and lobby for a stronger conservation agenda, and they were joined by a growing number of national conservation organisations (Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012:36). International NGOs were instrumental in surveying Vietnam’s forests and expanding the network of protected areas (PAs, classified as special-use forests) from 73 in 1986 to 163 today (ICEM 2003). The governance of Vietnam’s PAs follows a model of strict conservation and prohibits any use of PA resources (Swan 2010). This is contrary to international trends of accommodating local livelihoods and participation, as noted in Section 2.4.4 (Stolton et al. 2004).97 Therefore, in the early 2000s, national and international observers, including conservationists, started lobbying for buffer zone residents to have some form of forestland tenure or rights within PAs (Zingerli 2005). In Chapter 7, I examine how Fauna & Flora International (FFI) helped establish the PA in Mù Cang Chải and subsequently sought to introduce co-management, community-based patrolling and villagers’ use rights to the PA.

Stolton et al. (2004) argue that the classification of PAs in Vietnam is based on economic rather than ecological consideration. Since the rise of biodiversity conservation in Vietnam, authors have found that the PAs of the National Park category, for instance, are well funded, but spend much of their funds on infrastructure development (Emerton et al. 2003; McElwee 2016). If this is in the name of so-called eco-tourism (du lịch sinh thái), the construction of tourist infrastructure and amenities is explicitly allowed within national PA policies (MONRE 2011,

96 During the 1990s, Vietnam also became a member of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in 1993, joined several international conventions on biodiversity conservation, including the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) in 1994 and the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance in 1995 (Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012). 97 Since 2001, there are three categories of special-use forests, namely National Parks (Vườn quốc gia), Nature conservation zones (Khu bảo tồn thiên nhiên), including the Species and Habitat Conservation Area (Khu bảo tồn loài và sinh cảnh) like the PA in Mù Cang Chải; and Cultural, historical and environmental forests (Khu rừng văn hóa-lịch sử-môi trường). This classification is based on the six-tiered typology of PAs developed by IUCN, based on a continuum of strict protection to regulated resource use. While the National Parks in Vietnam are equivalent to the most strict IUCN category I, there is no equivalent to categories V and VI, which allow some forms of PA resource use (Stolton et al. 2004).

123 2012). In Vietnam, the entire PA is known as the core zone (vùng lõi), and most PAs have a buffer zone (vùng đệm) around PAs. Although policy documents for biodiversity conservation from the 1990s emphasized the ecological function of buffer zones, they often simply cover the communes surrounding the core zone in their entirety, as is the case in Mù Cang Chải (UNDP 2010; Coe 2016).

In the early 2000s, Vietnam’s government issued several policy and legal directives that sought to enhance the management of PAs in Vietnam (SRV 2003; UNDP 2010), even before the 2008 Law on Biodiversity sought to mainstream biodiversity conservation into PA management. The Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF) was the largest multilateral initiative to enhance biodiversity conservation and PA management in Vietnam, and it operated between 2005 and 2013.98 The VCF provided grants to 72 of Vietnam’s PAs to build PA management capacities and, most importantly, pilot arrangements for subsistence use of PA resources. The latter component could have potentially transformed conservation governance in Vietnam, and the PA in Mù Cang Chải was supposed to be one of six pilot PAs to regulate local forest access (Bechstedt et al. 2010; Swan 2010). However, in Section 7.4.1, I show how this did not eventuate, and call into question the efficacy of VCF-funded activities, more generally, also based on further accounts of key informants (NGO 20 11-06-2014; NGO 14 22-02-2012).

In general, several scholars and practitioners have argued that biodiversity conservation has remained a low priority for MARD policy makers (Zingerli 2005; Brunner 2013; Van Hien 2013; McElwee 2016). Similarly, most expatriate key informants I interviewed criticized Vietnam’s government and forestry apparatus for failing to protect the country’s dwindling forest resources and biodiversity. They raised concerns about local capacities for PA management; a lack of funding for conservation activities; and notoriously ineffective forest law enforcement in Vietnam. A former FFI staff, for instance, spoke candidly of a general “lack of institutional memory” and “embryonic capacity” for biodiversity conservation in Vietnam, amounting to a “perfect storm of incompetence” (NGO 15 07-06-2014). Among international conservationists, the emblematic death of the ‘last rhino’ (Rhinoceros sondaicus) was largely blamed on poor cooperation between protected area managers and international partners (Brook et al. 2014). This

98 The VCF was funded by the World Bank-led Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the multi-lateral Trust Fund for Forests (TFF, explained in footnote below) and the European Commission (EC).

124 incident served to highlight the risks underlying the conservation of charismatic mammals in Vietnam, such as Mù Cang Chải’s gibbons (Pedrono et al. 2009).99

My impression from interviewing key informants is that parts of the conservation community was anticipating that Vietnam’s nascent policy of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), a market-oriented conservation financing mechanism (see Section 2.4.6), would bring increased funding to Vietnam’s PA network. Concerns about PA financing are very relevant in Mù Cang Chải, and I address them in Chapters 7, 9 and 10. I next provide some background to PES policy development and will add further contextualisation and analysis in Chapter 9, when examining PES in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam more broadly.

4.6.2. The development of Forest PES in Vietnam

Policy makers within Vietnam’s Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), which manages all forestry issues, were able to relatively quickly develop a framework of PES policies and finance a national PES scheme, known as Payments for Forest Ecosystem Services (PFES, Chi trả dịch vụ môi trường rừng in Vietnamese). This is partly because MARD was anticipating a decline of international funding after the end of the 661 Program in 2010, which, together with Vietnam’s rise to a middle-income country in 2009, marked the end of many donors’ involvement in Vietnam’s forestry sector (McElwee 2015). PES provided a new source of funding for Vietnam’s forestry sector and decreased its burden on the state budget (NGO 16 10-06-2014; MARD 2013a).

Implemented with substantial international funding, a two-year pilot phase in two provinces (Lâm Đồng and Sơn La, 2008-2010) implemented PES in different watersheds, which was up- scaled to a national PES policy in 2010, based on Decree 99/2010/NĐ-CP. Subsequent policy directives regulate how user fees and payment rates are calculated, how PES funds are distributed across the watershed, allocated to administrative units, and disbursed to forest owners and households. Accordingly, all hydropower operators have to pay 20 VND (0.1 US cent) per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, and water companies pay 40 VND per cubic meter of water they supply. These user fees acknowledge that hydropower production and the supply of

99 The Javan rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) was the flagship species of Cát Tiên National Park (Đồng Nai Province), where it was found shot with its horn removed in April 2010 (Brook et al. 2012).

125 clean water rely on the watershed services that forests provide, primarily water conservation and erosion control.100 These uniform user fees were adopted from the PES pilot phase and are collected by national and provincial Forest Protection and Development Funds (FPDFs).101 Importantly, this fee structure stands in no relation to the value of watershed services for different users in different locations (McElwee 2016).

By 2012, a mere four years after the start of the pilot phase, user fees collected under PES policy amounted to an annual 59 million USD, ninety-eight per cent of which are paid by state-owned and private hydropower operators (Dat Viet 2013; Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013).102 In each of the three years after PES became national policy in 2010, electricity prices in Vietnam increased, on average, by 13 per cent or 163 VND/kWh per year, which dwarfs the annual PFES fee of 20 VND/kWh that power companies have had to pay. Vietnam’s PES system has thus been paid for by the consumers of Vietnam’s growing electricity demand. In November 2016, Decree 147/2016/NĐ-CP revised several articles of Decree 99 and increased fee levels for hydropower and water companies by 80 and 30 per cent, respectively. These new user fees will apply once

100 According to Decree 99, tourism companies are also required to pay between one and two per cent of their annual revenues in recognition for a more elusive ecosystem service that forests provide, namely landscape aesthetics. However, by mid-2013, only 36 tourism companies (34 of which are in Lào Cai and Lâm Đồng provinces) had signed contracts committing to pay user fees, and their total contributions of 43,577 USD amounted to less than 0.1 per cent of all user fees in 2012. In turn, the 50 water companies enlisted in PES schemes contributed over 845,000 USD in 2012, accounting for 1.4 per cent of national PES funds (VNFF 2013). 101 If a hydropower reservoir’s or water company’s catchment crosses provincial boundaries, as is the case for most large dams in Vietnam, the operators pay their fees to the national Forest Protection and Development Fund (VNFF, known in Vietnam as Quỹ Bảo vệ và Phát triển rừng Việt Nam), which distributes the funds (minus 0.5 per cent for administrative purposes) to the relevant provincial Forest Protection and Development Funds (FPDFs), depending on how much of the reservoir’s catchment is in a given province. The total funds that any provincial FPDF receives is therefore a sum of different operators’ payments, of which they can keep ten per cent to cover their administrative costs and five per cent for their contingency funds (VNFF 2013). In 2013, PES revenues dropped to 1096 billion VND (54.8 million USD) and, since 2014, have stabilized around 1300 billion VND (54.8 million USD), reaching 1335, 1327, and an estimated 1319 billion VND in 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively (Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh 2016). The fluctuations are likely due to variations in compliance and hydropower production. 102 While state-owned hydropower companies could be enlisted to pay PES user fees by decree, while private companies could be after a brief inter-ministerial power struggle. Long before PES was on the horizon, many private hydropower operators signed 25-50 year contracts with Electricity Vietnam (EVN) for the supply of electricity at set rates, following Decision 18/2008/QĐ-BCT. In order to enlist them in PES schemes without jeopardizing their economic viability, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) revised this Decision and EVN was required to revise its contracts with electricity suppliers and provide them with additional funds for them to make their contributions to PES funds for 2012 and subsequent years (Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013). EVN is a state-owned company, which has a monopoly on providing electricity to the national grid. It acts as an intermediary between private and state-owned companies that operate power plants and the MoIT.

126 electricity prices are raised again in 2018 and will significantly increase PES funds flowing to FPDFs and all groups of PES recipients (Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh 2016).

By 2016, 5.3 million hectares of watershed forest, or 38 per cent of Vietnam’s forest area, received PES funds (Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh 2016). While hydropower operations are notorious for their downstream ecological and livelihood effects, downstream residents do not receive any PES in compensation, and neither do forest areas outside of the catchments of hydropower operators or clean water suppliers (Suhardiman et al. 2013). Although Vietnam’s PES policy provides substantial and sustainable funding for the forestry sector, many areas and actors are left out or receive very low payment levels, which vary vastly between watersheds. In Mù Cang Chải, I found that household payment rates can also vary significantly between neighbouring communes or even within a village.

Underlying my analysis of PES in Vietnam is the question how effectively PES funds are used and distributed. Vietnam’s PES policy framework requires PES funds to be distributed to forest owners, which can be state organisations (primarily forest management boards and state forest companies), communes, or households with either forestland use rights (certified through the so- called Redbook Certificates, RBC) or forest protection contracts. Importantly, two thirds of all the forest area for which state organisations receive PES is contracted to (groups of) households for forest protection, which is also the case for all forestland in Mù Cang Chải, where no households are formal forest owners (see Table 4). This means that households and communes receive PES for 77 per cent of the 5.3 million hectares of forest under PES schemes (Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh 2016). This does not necessarily correspond to 77 per cent of the total PES funds, as payment rates differ between watersheds, but official data on actual monetary flows is not available.

In total, over 506,000 households and communes receive PES, and the latter largely distribute these funds to households, although this is poorly regulated. Therefore, the total number of households receiving PES is likely understated, as noted by Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh (2016), two consultants contracted by VNFF to review PES in Vietnam. The authors also suggest that PES contributes to poverty alleviation among ethnic minority households, which official policy discourse commonly states. However, there are few data available about PES

127 recipients and their payment levels, and it is not known how many of the recipient households are ethnic minority households. Nevertheless, this proportion is likely very significant, as Vietnam’s rural, upland areas are home to a large proportion of both the country’s ethnic minorities and watershed forests. Given that both household PES rates and poverty rates are likely to be higher in remote areas, as it is the case in Mù Cang Chải, Vietnam’s PES program has much potential to contribute to poverty alleviation. Based on my case study of PES in Mù Cang Chải, I will reflect on the potential socio-economic outcomes of the program in Section 10.5.2.

Table 4.1: Overview of PES recipients and forest areas under Vietnam’s PES scheme Forest State Households mngt Forest Other state (allocated boards Companies organisations forestland) Communes Total Number of PES 199 84 650 506,298 recipients

PES area [ha] 2,570,012 724,897 420,466 1,174,708 409,711 5,299,795

Per cent of total 48% 14% 8% 22% 8% 100% Forest area contracted 2,491,837 ha (67% of PES forest allocated 47% to households to state organisations Total PES to households and 4,076,256 ha (either allocated or contracted) 77% communes

(Data compiled from Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh (2016))

While state forest management boards and state forest companies only keep roughly one third the PES funds they receive, households “can use this payment for forest protection management and life improvement”.103 State policy thus presumes that PES improve household livelihoods, while providing no regulations on whether and how households use PES funds for forest protection activities. Although PES recipients may have forest protection contracts and be required to patrol a designated forest area, there are no policy provisions to make PES conditional upon conservation performance or outcomes. Therefore, the premise of my analysis is that PES in Vietnam are primarily “livelihood subsidies”, as I will call them, similar to the concept of direct conservation payments (cf. Ferraro and Kiss 2002; Swart 2003). PES are thus governed very similarly to forest protection payments under the prior 661 Program (1998-2010, see above),

103 According to Joint Circular No. 62/2012/TTLT-BNNPTNT-BTC entitled: Instructions on the mechanism of managing and using the payment for forest environment services.

128 which arguably provided the precedence of disbursing conservation payments without any conditionality (NGO 20 11-06-2014; NGO 9 18-12-2012). Secondly, the (smaller) part of PES funds that remains with state organizations funds their operations without clear provisions on how these funds could contribute to forest protection. Therefore, Vietnam’s PES system arguably continues a secondary function of the prior 661 and 327 Programs to provide a “life-line” for state forest companies (Lang and World Rainforest Movement. 2002:101; see also: Clement and Amezaga 2009).

I contend that the only links of Vietnam’s PES system to forest conservation are the Kuznet-like assumptions that poverty is a primary driver of forest degradation and that, secondly, increasing poor peasants’ incomes will decrease conservation pressure they exert on the forest (see Section 2.4.1). In Vietnam, such theories go back to colonial representations of shifting cultivation and more recent discourses that justified sedentarisation, as I explained in Section 4.5. Nevertheless, both MARD’s policy discourse and international observers portray PES in Vietnam as a conservation financing mechanism that contributes to forest protection (Bui Dung The and Hong Bich Ngoc 2008), whereas I argue that PES is actually posed to undermine Vietnam’s prior advances in biodiversity conservation, specifically (see Chapters 9 and 10). Given that PES in Vietnam is more likely to contribute to peasant incomes than to forest conservation, I focus my study on how PES are distributed in five communes of Mù Cang Chải, including Chế Tạo commune, where household PES rates are higher than in any other documented case in Vietnam. In Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I examine the significance of PES for household livelihoods, more directly.

4.6.3. My contribution to the study of forest governance in Vietnam

So far, the scholarly literature on Vietnam’s PES experience has emphasized a disconnect between international PES models and Vietnam’s PES scheme, identifying the latter as a government subsidy scheme comparable to similar schemes in China, Mexico and Ecuador (Suhardiman et al. 2013; McElwee et al. 2014). These authors note that PES in Vietnam is not a market-oriented financing mechanism of performance-based conservation payments, and relies on continued state forest governance (cf. McElwee 2012). They also argue that the lack of household forestland tenure poses a fundamental limitation to equitable PES distribution (cf. Wertz-Kanounnikoff and Rankine 2008; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Bayrak 2015). This concern

129 is common with PES schemes in the Global South (Huang et al. 2009; Sunderlin et al. 2014), but does not necessarily apply to Vietnam, as I find in my analysis of PES in Mù Cang Chải (see Section 9.6.2).104 Most PES studies in Vietnam have focused on the PES pilot phase in Lâm Đồng and Sơn La, with few exceptions (Jourdain et al. 2009; Dam Viet Bac et al. 2014; Simelton and Dam Viet Bac 2014; McElwee 2016). In addition, numerous NGOs have published on Vietnam’s PES system from a policy perspective, and offer useful details that I reference in parts of my analysis, but there are few case study accounts of PES implementation and governance. Furthermore, key aspects concerning the outcomes and effects of PES in Vietnam, including how PES may affect recipients’ livelihoods and conservation attitudes or behaviour, have so far remained unexamined.

My case study of PES in Mù Cang Chải examines the allocation and distribution of PES fees in five different communes. Within a watershed, payment rates per hectare of forest are consistent, but payment rates per household can vary significantly, depending on the ratio of forest area to population in a given province, district or commune. In addition, I find that PES distribution is poorly regulated at the sub-provincial level, which has allowed different communes in Mù Cang Chải to distribute their PES funds very differently. At the household level, I show the significance of PES for peasant livelihoods in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, but this differs significantly from commune to commune due to differences in both household livelihoods and PES rates. Therefore, I seek to understand how villagers and local officials conceive of these differences, and I encountered different conceptions of distributive justice (see Section 9.4). Lastly, I examine how PES relate to villagers’ opportunity costs of forest conservation, as well as to their conceptions of forest use and conservation (see Section 9.5). This latter angle addresses the effects of PES on environmentality, which I find to be surprisingly significant, given that this is not the objective of Vietnam’s PES framework. Importantly, through my actor-oriented approach, I am able to provide new insights into these aspects of PES distribution and their effects, including how PES affect livelihoods and conservation attitudes. Furthermore, these questions have received too little empirical treatment in the international PES literature, which

104 According to state policy discourse, PES will further allocations of forestland to households. Decision 2284/QD- TTg, for instance, which provides guidance on the implementation of the PES Decree 99/2010/ND-CP, aims to “[t]o properly implement the policy on socialization of forest protection and development work, strongly and thoroughly allocate forest land and assign and contract forest use rights in a stable and permanent manner to organizations, households and village communities”.

130 too often focuses on policy and governance of PES, as I argued in Section 2.4.6. In Section 9.6 and in conclusion of this thesis, I offer further interpretations of what my case study of PES in Mù Cang Chải means for the prospects of PES and forest governance in Vietnam, particularly regarding biodiversity conservation, protected area management, and forestland tenure.

4.7. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have situated my thesis in the context of Hmong livelihood studies and forest governance in Vietnam. I introduced the regional context of the Southeast Asian Massif and its ethnic diversity to then focus on key aspects of Hmong culture, society and land use, drawing partly on prior studies of Hmong groups in Thailand (see Sections 4.3 and 4.4). These groups were largely pioneer shifting cultivators who relied heavily on opium cultivation, which contributed to the common portrayal of Hmong as ‘forest destroyers’. I emphasized that the livelihood patterns of the Hmong in Mù Cang Chải have been quite different, as they traditionally practiced paddy cultivation and rotational shifting cultivaton. In the following chapter, I provide an analysis of how their livelihoods have changed since abandoning shifting cultivation.

In the latter half of this chapter, I provided the national policy context for my analysis of forest governance, forest conservation and PES. My first objective in Section 4.5 was to track how, since colonial times, environmental orthodoxies about shifting cultivation and discourses about ethnic minorities have been co-produced in Vietnam (cf. Forsyth 2003). I then provided an overview of Vietnam’s forest policy reforms since the 1990s, which sought to decentralise forest governance, allocate forestland to households, and increase forest cover. While Vietnam’s significant forest transition remains a source of much pride and propaganda, I emphasize that this has been masked by continued forest degradation, unequal forestland tenure, and a persistent status quo of state forest governance (see Sections 4.5.4 and 4.5.5).

The poor state of forest conservation in Vietnam is particularly evident in my analysis of conservation governance and PES in Chapters 7 to 9, for which I provide vital context in Section 4.6. I emphasize the troubled history of biodiversity conservation and the more recent emergence of PES, which provides little perspective for biodiversity conservation in Vietnam, as I argue in Chapters 9 and 10. Vietnam’s PES system is primarily a poverty reduction program that

131 disburses over 60 million USD per year to over 500,000 rural households. Nevertheless, key aspects of Vietnam’s PES scheme remain under-examined and under-regulated, including how payments are distributed, how they affect household livelihoods, and how they interact with different agendas for forest conservation. My study can address these gaps because it is grounded in a livelihood analysis, which I develop in the following two chapters. Overall, I find it remarkable how rapidly both Hmong livelihoods and state forest policies have developed, although both are still grounded in traditional socio-cultural and socio-political institutions.

132 Chapter 5 State development and Hmong livelihood transitions in Mù Cang Chải

5.1. Introduction

In this first of five results chapters, I provide an analytical account of historical and contemporary livelihoods of Hmong villagers in two case study villages, following my first research question: Since 1954, how have state actors pursued rural development in Mù Cang Chải, and how has this affected livelihood practices and socio-economic differentiation in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B?

State interventions started in Mù Cang Chải in the 1960s during the subsidy period (see Section 5.3), but did not affect village livelihoods in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B substantially until sedentarisation programs enforced the ban on shifting cultivation and agricultural intensification in the late 1980s and 1990s. Central to this chapter are the livelihood transitions that ensued, as villagers abandoned their customary swidden lands and expanded terraced paddy cultivation (see Section 5.4). In Section 5.5, I illustrate how local patterns and endogenous conceptions of wealth, poverty and socio-economic differentiation have shifted, and how they relate to contemporary state poverty metrics.

Conceptually, I draw on elements of livelihoods studies and political ecology, as I examine how both state and endogenous institutions, including property relations and social capital, mediate access to livelihood assets and opportunities. I illustrate the contemporary relevance of customary property relations regarding swidden fields, paddy land and forest products, and how they intersect with statutory property regimes. I track shifting patterns of how village households access and depend on different livelihood assets, including land, labour and forest resources. In this context, I illustrate the shifting social and cultural meanings that certain assets and commodities have for Hmong households, following another analytical tenant from the livelihoods studies literature (see Section 2.2.3.1).

In the context of my overall thesis, this chapter provides an analytical overview of historical and contemporary livelihoods, examining the ban on shifting cultivation and its effects. I further track common patterns and processes of household differentiation, and establish the premise for the subsequent Chapter 6, where I examine the growing role of economic capital in villagers’

133 livelihoods. This chapter also provides the backdrop for Chapters 7, 8 and 9, which investigate conservation governance and forest use in the context of local Hmong livelihoods.

5.2. Hmong livelihoods and land use under shifting cultivation (pre-1990s)

During my first few weeks in Chế Tạo, I often interviewed villagers about the history of local livelihoods. I base this section largely on the data they provided, as well as my understanding of local history that I gradually acquired throughout my time in the field.

5.2.1. Migration and settlement of Hmong in Mù Cang Chải

Hmong settlement in present-day Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B likely dates back to the late 19th century, as village elders could recall up to four generations of ancestors, who had lived there. Respondents could further confirm that their ancestors moved there from China, which suggests that Mù Cang Chải was one of the later destinations of the main stream of Hmong migrants, who migrated from China in the mid-late 18th century (cf. Culas 2000; Culas and Michaud 2004). Several respondents recounted that their ancestors must have “followed the forest” and, encountering an abundance of forest wildlife, settled on the flanks of the ridgeline that nowadays constitutes the core zone of the Mù Cang Chải protected area (CT villager 18 02-12-2012; CT villager 22 14-12-2012).

Respondents could confirm that the villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, like other Hmong villages in Mù Cang Chải, have always been inhabited exclusively by ethnic Hmong, who have since maintained trade relationships with several Thái villages located around present-day Nghĩa Lộ town (Yên Bái Province) and Mường La district (Sơn La Province, see Figure 1).105 Hmong elders from Chế Tạo village remember trekking to Nghĩa Lộ to buy or barter essential household materials, chiefly salt, lamp oil, metal for tool making and silver for jewellery making. The most sellable commodities that Hmong swiddeners could produce were opium and livestock, particularly buffalo. Until today, water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) play an essential cultural and economic role in the lives of Hmong villagers as ploughing animals, ritualistic sacrifice and as economic assets for sale and trade. In addition, Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải have also raised pigs and chicken, primarily for subsistence, ever since they settled there. Historically,

105 In north-western Vietnam there were at least twelve so-called muang, territorial centres of feudal Thái societies (see Footnote 61, Section 4.2). The current place names Nghĩa Lộ and Mường La originate from the names of the former Thái muang Muang Lo and Muang La, respectively (Hoang Cam 2009).

134 most households also had one or more horses, which were essential pack animals until they were gradually replaced by motorcycles as recently as the early 2000s (MCC official 4 22-05-2014).

The main village of Chế Tạo, nowadays the largest village and administrative centre of the commune, was originally a resting place for villagers from nearby villages en route to Nghĩa Lộ or Mù Cang Chải. Over time, some villagers planted beans there and built a small hut, which gave the place the Hmong name tse tao, meaning “house of beans”, which was later transliterated into Vietnamese as Chế Tạo (CT official 3 12-11-2012). The name Mù Cang Chải derives from the Hmong term kab cuam, a wooden frame with straps to carry large amounts of grass or firewood on the back. The term muas kab cuam (sell carrying frame) was transliterated as Mù Cang Chải, which has no other meaning in Vietnamese.

5.2.2. The roles of opium and cattle as economic capital (pre-1990s)

Traditionally, villagers in Chế Tạo and Púng Luông practiced “composite swiddening” (cf. Tran Duc Vien et al. 2009), growing upland rice, maize and tubers, while maintaining small areas of terraced rice land, much like Hmong peasants around Sa Pa did in the past (see Section 4.4.1).106 The Hmong saying “the buffalo ahead, the farmer behind” (nyuj tom ntej tuab neeg tom qab) aptly reflects the centrality of paddy cultivation and the importance of the buffalo, which I turn to later. Relying partly on paddy cultivation has also allowed the Hmong in Mù Cang Chải to maintain sedentary livelihoods, largely in contemporary village locations (CT villager 23 10-12- 2012). The scarcity of suitable land and water precluded further expansion of paddy cultivation until government development projects constructed irrigation infrastructure in the 1990s (CT official 4 14-11-2012).

While most households in both study villages used to cultivate opium for social, ceremonial and medicinal use, only few Chế Tạo households did so cultivated surplus opium for sale. Villagers I interviewed explained that the five-day trek to bring opium to Nghĩa Lộ for sale was typically undertaken alone and hence was too dangerous, citing the fear of tiger attacks (CT villager 7 15- 11-2012). In turn, the village head of Nả Hàng B remembers that groups of three to five

106 Attesting to the presence of paddy cultivation prior to state sedentarisation, Nguyen Anh Ngoc (1989) cites government estimates that there were around 100 hectares of terraced rice land in Mù Cang Chải before the 1980s, providing an estimated 50 to 60 per cent of dietary requirements of local Hmong. In turn, Nả Hàng B villagers I interviewed suggest that this was much less than 50 per cent, but this would have varied across the district.

135 households used to grow opium as an informal collective and transport their annual opium harvest, typically around fifty kilograms, to Nghĩa Lộ on horseback (NHB village head 11-08- 2013). From further interviews I understand that opium cultivation must have constituted the most stable and significant source of financial capital for most households in Nả Hàng B, until it was banned in the mid 1990s (following Resolution 06/1993/CP).

Compared to their counterparts in Púng Luông, villagers in Chế Tạo had poor access to opium markets and were less reliant on opium cultivation as a source of financial capital. They had access to more extensive grazing lands, and all household heads I interviewed in Chế Tạo confirmed that they or their ancestors used to raise buffalo and cows for sale. Market access was facilitated by Thái traders from Sơn La, who regularly came to Chế Tạo to buy buffalo, possibly acting as intermediaries for the sale of livestock to the lowlands.107 Villagers’ accounts suggest that the extensive rearing of free-grazing cattle was less labour-intensive than opium cultivation and constituted an income opportunity that was equally accessible to most households in Chế Tạo. Independent of state control and taxation, I understand that cattle rearing was their most significant source of financial capital, until state sedentarisation programs were enforced in the mid 1990s with a strict ban on burning fallow vegetation. This prevented the seasonal succession of grasslands that had provided ample fodder for the large herds of free-grazing cattle, which gradually perishing of hunger and cold weather within a few years, as elderly respondents in Chế Tạo vividly remember (CT villager 10 21-11-2012).

As a result of the two bans on shifting cultivation and opium cultivation, villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B lost their only significant and reliable sources of monetary income in the mid-1990s. The pressing need for new sources of income forms the premise of Chapter 6.

5.2.3. Food security and labour requirements of “composite swiddening”

Reflecting on the long era of shifting cultivation, villagers I interviewed commonly emphasized that their families were “always hungry” and preoccupied with maintaining their “subsistence security” (cf. Scott 1976:35). None of the households in Chế Tạo or Nả Hàng B were rice self-

107 Comparing my understanding of buffalo trade around Chế Tạo with other, published accounts, it seems to me that Chế Tạo village was known as a ‘buffalo village’ up until the 1990s, much like some Hmong villages in Lào Cai Province are still known today, where many households specialize in rearing buffalo for sale (Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). At times, Chế Tạo villagers also brought buffalo to markets in Nghĩa Lộ, although typically fetching slightly lower prices (CT villager 7 15-11-2012).

136 sufficient, and one older villager remembers that “if you didn’t bring your own rice, no-one would feed you” (yog koj tsi coj ntsab tsi muaj neeg pub koj noj) (NHB villager 2 16-11-2013). Given the lack of rice, villagers’ diet consisted of a seasonal mix of cultivated and wild foods, depending on how long supplies lasted. Most highly valued and eaten first was the rice from the small areas of paddy field, which lasted most households only two to five months (NHB villager 15 08-08-2013). After that, they substituted rice with corn, tubers cultivated in the forest and gardens, and wild forest foods. The Hmong, in general, are said to value rice higher than maize as a dietary staple, and multiple species of rice are imbued with cultural meanings (Vuong Xuan Tinh 2002; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). Of particular significance is glutinous sticky rice, which most Hmong households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B still cultivate for New Year’s festivities and other rituals. Villagers’ accounts suggest that most households relied on their paddy fields for rice and used their upland swidden fields primarily for maize cultivation.108

In general, a household yield’s from shifting cultivation depended largely on its endowment with labour, given that most households had similar access to land and other necessary livelihood assets. In terms of the returns on their labour, wet rice cultivation was more efficient than shifting cultivation, while the collection of wild foods was the most labour-intensive way to source food, although the latter could be combined with the collection of firewood or other non- timber forest products (NTFPs).

Reflecting on the past, many older villagers I interviewed emphasized that the annual cycle of shifting cultivation, household chores, and cultural obligations left them with no time to rest. Compared to nowadays, more labour was invested into preparations to celebrate the new lunar year, including the making of new clothes for each household member. Intricate embroidery adorns women’s skirts and blouses, which today still requires several months of labour. All clothing was made from hand-loomed hemp fabric, dyed with indigo, and sewn by hand. Industrial cotton and sewing machines only became accessible to villagers in Mù Cang Chải in the 1970s (MCC official 4 22-05-2014). Nowadays, skirts are the only clothing item still

108 Maize has lower soil requirements, but yields more calories per area than upland rice (Gibson and Kim 2013). Those households that could afford the extra labour also grew different varieties of upland rice, maintaining a diverse upland seed stock. Hmong households in Chế Tạo typically produced up to one tonne of rice from both upland and paddy fields and around two tons of maize each year; most households used approximately half of their maize as livestock feed, while the rest was boiled and eaten if harvested when still young, or dried and ground into maize flour (NHB villager 15 08-08-2013; CT official 5 10-11-2012; CT villager 7 15-11-2012).

137 commonly made out of hemp fibre in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B (CT villager 33 15-12-2012a). Men’s traditional shirts are also still home-made, but are remarkably simple and feature no embroidery (see Figure 5.1), unlike those of Hmong men living around Sa Pa, for instance.

Figure 5.1: Traditional clothing of Hmong villagers in Nả Hàng B

5.2.4. Customary forest dependence and hunting practices

During the era of shifting cultivation, Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải were highly dependent on the forest, not only for arable land, but also for food and other NTFPs for household use and medicinal purposes (cf. Buckingham et al. 2002). The knowledge of where to find and how to use forest foods and other NTFPs was widely shared, except for the vast realm of medicinal NTFPs, which largely remained the purview of dedicated herbalists and shamans. In addition to NTFPs, there were enough mighty pơ mu (Fokienia hodginsii) trees close enough to both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B for house-building, at least until the 1990s (see Section 6.2.2). The dense, resinous timber of the tall pơ mu tree is rot- and pest-resistant. It has been the most

138 favoured wood for house construction and coffin making by the Hmong and other ethnic groups in Vietnam and China (Nguyen Phi Truyen and Osborn 2006) (Hoang Cam 2009).

Villagers’ access to forests and agricultural land was governed by socio-cultural institutions of property relations and inheritance, which still hold currency today and are comparable to those documented of other Hmong groups and swidden societies in the Massif (Cooper 1998; Poffenberger 1998; Corlin 2004; Vuong Duy Quang 2004). Most forestland and resources were under open-access and thus did “not belong to anyone” (tsi muaj neeg li), as villagers in Chế Tạo put it. Respondents also confirmed that there were no forest areas under common property regimes, which refer to management by endogenous institutions (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop 1975; Bromley 1992). However, certain areas were off-limits to all villagers due to their spiritual significance or for the protection of watersheds (CT villager 10 21-11-2012). Importantly, whoever cleared a plot of forest for cultivation could assume individual ownership over any crops grown there and over the land itself, including during fallowing periods. This allowed households to rotate their swidden plots under cultivation, without regularly needing to clear additional old forest. I learned that villagers have been respecting these individual property relations over formerly used upland fields (swiddens) even after abandoning shifting cultivation in the 1990s. “My soil cannot be touched” (tsi lo kov kuv av) a villager said to emphasize that these customary property relations still persist today (CT villager 26 19-07-2013). Therefore, many households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B were able to plant cardamom in their prior swiddens in the early 2000s, if these provided the micro-climate for cardamom to grow.

Up until the 1980s, the hunting and trapping of wild boars, chickens and monkeys around swidden fields was essential to control crop raiding, and this also provided an important source of meat. Villagers hunted using locally made muskets, which Hmong blacksmiths in Mù Cang Chải have been renowned for (Hải Anh 2010). Since these muskets were only reluctantly shared, as villagers recounted, owning one was an important indicator of wealth at that time, and households that did not own a gun had to rely on trapping wildlife and chasing them away with the noise of split bamboo canes (CT villager 47 13-07-2013). Bears and tigers were widely feared and occasionally trapped to avert conflict with humans and livestock.109

109 Sightings of bears or tigers, or their attacks on buffalo, occurred at least annually in Chế Tạo until the last bear was killed in the early 1990s (MCC official 4 22-05-2014; Phan Thi Anh Dao 2002). While bears and tigers have

139 Further afield from human settlements and cultivation, other forest wildlife was also abundant during the era of shifting cultivation, and villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B keenly remember going on extended hunting trips.110 They frame these as a social practice that was undertaken after the harvest season, as time permitted. Respondents estimated that between 50 and 80 per cent of the meat their households used to consume was hunted, the rest being from raised chickens and pigs. The majority of the wild meat was hunted and trapped around swidden fields throughout the year, while seasonal hunting trips deeper into the forest yielded relatively less. These two hunting practices had very different social and cultural meanings, and the differentiation is important, but rarely made in the literature about Hmong hunting culture. At least for Chế Tạo villagers, the hunting and trapping of pigs around their swidden fields was more significant in livelihood terms than dedicated hunting trips, which had more cultural significance and social appeal. This suggests that Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải were never entirely dependent on hunting for subsistence. Nevertheless, respondents acknowledged that they and their ancestors were keen hunters, as ethnographers of other Hmong groups have long noted (see, in particular: Bernatzik 1970 [1947]; Tungittiplakorn 1998).

Villagers’ accounts led me to believe that hunting practices and overall forest dependence declined in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B during the 1990s with the decline in shifting cultivation and increased consumption of raised pigs and chickens. Around the same time, forest wildlife also declined markedly, reportedly due to over-hunting by both local villagers and outsiders. This particularly affected larger species of forest wildlife around Chế Tạo, where the remaining local hunters nowadays only find rodents and some monkey species (see Chapter 8). Importantly, the decline in forest wildlife occurred before state actors enforced hunting restrictions and gun confiscations in the early 2000s, which came too late to curb local forest exploitation, as I show in more detail in Chapter 7. been the most highly-priced animals for the medicinal use of specific body parts (Drury 2011), market demand for them only emerged in Mù Cang Chải in the 1980s or 1990s, when they had become quite rare (MCC official 4 22- 05-2014). Therefore none of the villagers I asked remembers bears or tigers being hunted for consumption or sale, also because this is a dangerous undertaking requiring at least five villagers with guns and several hunting dogs (MCC FPD Sinh 22-11-2013). 110 Villagers in Chế Tạo explained that hunting was typically done in larger groups of five or more people, often for several days at a time. The catch of such a hunting party would typically include 40 or more civets, of which several species were then abundant, whereas larger species of game were also sought after but encountered less regularly (CT villager 48 01-12-2013). Certain monkey species were hunted for medicinal purposes, as they still are today, whereas the then-common black gibbon, today’s endangered flagship species of the PA, was not valued and rarely hunted (MCC official 4 22-05-2014).

140 5.3. Mù Cang Chải during the subsidy period (1954-1980s)

In the following sections, I illustrate how Mù Cang Chải was gradually incorporated into the centrally-planned economy and subsidy system (thời bao cấp) during the 1970s and 80s. This particularly affected Hmong livelihoods in Púng Luông, where tax collection was more rigorously, and emerging economic opportunities were more significant than in Chế Tạo.

5.3.1. Tax collection, tax evasion and collectivization in Mù Cang Chải

Mù Cang Chải was incorporated as a district in 1957, but could then be reached only via a very rough road from Nghĩa Lộ. The construction of a new road between 1966 and 1969 catalyzed the development of Mù Cang Chải as a district centre (MCC official 4 22-05-2014). By 1968, as a result of state relocation programs (see Section 4.5.2), there were approximately 200 ethnic Kinh people living in Mù Cang Chải, and there were four government-run shops, one of which was managed by Mr. Hang (who I refer to here as MCC official 4). He also worked as a tax collector and, like other government workers at the time, had to learn the Hmong language and walk to the villages to collect taxes in cooperation with local commune cadres. Hmong peasants had to annually submit 100 kilograms of rice per 1,000 square meters of paddy land they cultivated, as well as a portion of their opium harvest. In addition, until 1986, each household was required to sell fifteen kilograms of meat per year to the government shops at a nominal price, typically a fifth of government buying rate for meat (MCC official 4 29-05-2014).111 In 2001, upland peasants were formally exempted from all tax requirements in the course of state programs for rural development and poverty alleviation (Nguyen Huu Thang 2002).

Mr. Hang was rather vague about Hmong villagers’ compliance with tax payments and admitted that there were whole villages that would sometimes refuse to pay any tax. Few villagers I spoke with remember details about taxation, but some respondents suggested that there were many loopholes to (full) payment, especially under-reporting of yields. Overall, the tax system

111 This requirement stems from the fact that during the era of central planning, districts had to submit set amounts of grain, meat, timber and other resources to their respective province. For instance, Mr. Hang explained that Mù Cang Chải had to supply twenty tons of meat a year, which were collected from villagers through this system of mandatory sales. In addition, villagers could sell any further surplus of meat to the government shops at their regular buying rate, but Hmong households typically did not raise livestock for sale at that time, with the exception of buffalo and cows, particularly in Chế Tạo. However, Mr. Hang remembers that many households had monkeys to sell that they had trapped around their swidden fields, and that for some time monkey meat was cheaper to buy than chicken meat (MCC official 4 29-05-2014), likely because Hmong households typically raised the latter primarily for subsistence and ritual sacrifice.

141 primarily targeted low-land paddy cultivators, and Hmong villagers had to submit only a few kilograms of rice for their small areas of terraced rice land (MCC official 4 29-05-2014).

Much like taxation, agricultural collectivization also proved difficult to enforce in many upland locales (Corlin 2004; Raymond 2008; Michaud 2009b). Collectivization of paddy cultivation was not imposed in Mù Cang Chải until after 1968, when the road from Nghĩa Lộ facilitated access (CT official 1 29-11-2013). Villagers who could provide details on this period confirmed that paddy yields decreased significantly after collectivization. The most-cited reason by both villagers and commune officials for the failure of collectivization was that too many villagers were “lazy”, often attributed to then-common opium consumption (CT villager 33 22-07-2013; MCC official 4 29-05-2014). According to commune officials, villagers abandoned collective agriculture after only three or four years in both Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, and villagers reclaimed their individual property relations over prior paddy land (PL official 2 27-05-2014; CT official 1 29-11-2013). The fact that this took place over twenty years the gradual decollectivization in the early 1980s may reflect the lack of control that district officials had over village affairs (cf. Pingali and Vo-Tong Xuan 1992; Beresford 2003; Kerkvliet 2005).

5.3.2. Centrally-planned market integration in Púng Luông (1970s)

Apart from taxation and collectivization, the DRV government also expanded its centrally- planned economy into Mù Cang Chải in the 1970s, which made villagers’ long treks to markets in Nghĩa Lộ and Mường La largely obsolete. Villagers in Púng Luông could sell their opium to a government-run shop and purchase a growing range of commodities and tools there, which made their lives easier, as villagers commonly emphasized. From their accounts, it seems that most villagers’ early market engagement was limited by a lack of cash flow. Much of their economic capital, chiefly derived from selling opium and livestock, they used to purchase rice for several months of the year to supplement their subsistence production.

Apart from opium, Mr. Hang explained that villagers could freely collect and sell selected NTFPs to government shops in Mù Cang Chải.112 Not nearly as lucrative as cultivating opium,

112 These NTFPs were limited to: ‘Poor man’s ginseng’ (Codonopsis pilosula, still commonly known in Vietnam as Đẳng sâm), which was processed in a factory in Yên Bái; ‘Job’s tears’ (Coix lachryma jobi, ý dĩ in Vietnamese), a tall, grain-bearing grass with medicinal properties, as well as wild apples. Notably, government shops in Mù Cang

142 villagers I interviewed do not remember selling these NTFPs as a significant source of income. This changed markedly in the 1990s in the process of economic liberalisation, when a free market for NTFPs emerged, and the range of sellable forest products greatly expanded (see Section 6.2.1). Until then, the two most significant sources of income for some villages in Púng Luông commune were the production of pine resin and tea, although the former had no relevance to Nả Hàng B villagers. Both pine resin and tea production illustrate typical approaches to centrally-planned rural development and are still relevant to contemporary livelihoods, as I briefly outline here.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, extensive pine plantations were established in Púng Luông commune by the local State Forest Enterprise (SFE) (Lâm Trương Púng Luông), the only one in Mù Cang Chải district (MCC official 3 14-08-2013). Hmong villagers were employed for planting, and received ninety kilograms of rice per hectare they planted (PL official 1 02-08- 2013). The pine trees were planted partly on fallowing upland rice fields, which did not cause any land conflicts at the time, as there was still enough land to expand both upland fields and rice terraces (Nả Háng Tâu villager 1 12-08-2013).113 The objective of the plantation was to produce pine resin for the industrial production of lacquers, paints, glues and other products.

The production and sale of resin was initially centrally-planned and locally managed by the SFE, which served as the sole purchaser of the resin. In the process of the decentralization in the early 2000s (see Section 4.5.4), the SFE became the Management Board for Protection Forest (Ban quản lý Rừng phòng hộ Mù Cang Chải) and still holds a formal monopoly on the purchase of pine resin, which is not uncommon (Le Thi Phi et al. 2004).114 In turn, Hmong villagers maintain individual and customary entitlements to tap the trees of a specific area. These property relations were negotiated among villagers when they started tapping the pine trees several decades ago, and are passed on through inheritance much like Hmong property regimes over agricultural land or forestland. Since opium cultivation was prohibited in the early 1990s, tapping pine resin has

Chải did not buy cardamom during the subsidy period, as was the case in Lào Cai Province, for instance (Sowerwine 2004a). Cardamom cultivation only started in Mù Cang Chải in the early 2000s (see Section 6.3.1). 113 Problems arose, however, after the ban on shifting cultivation required further uphill expansion of the rice terraces toward the pine trees. This resulted in decreased yields in the higher elevated rice fields, possibly because pine needle foliage can lead to soil acidification. Recognizing this problem, the district government allowed affected farmers to clear all pine trees within 30 metres of their fields (Mý Háng Tâu village head 01-11-2013). 114 Nowadays, most villagers seem to sell their pine resin to non-state market traders, who offer up to 20 per cent higher prices than the Management Board (Mý Háng Tâu villager 27-10-2013).

143 provided the most significant and stable income opportunity for the majority of villagers in the road-side villages of Nả Háng Tâu and Mý Háng Tâu (Púng Luông commune), where access to market opportunities and forestland for cardamom cultivation have been very limited (Nả Háng Tâu villager 1 12-08-2013; Chế Vượn village head 12-12-2012).

While there were no pine plantations established around Nả Hàng B, tea plantations and processing facilities were established there in the 1970s. This provided the first formal wage labour opportunity for villagers of Nả Hàng B, although this only lasted around five years (NHB villager 1 11-08-2013). Workers typically chose to be paid in rice, as most households lacked rice for several months each year. Earning up to thirty kilograms of rice per day, many households could double their annual paddy yield, which rarely exceeded 500 kilograms (NHB villager 1 11-08-2013).115 The price of tea was relatively higher than today, and working for the tea estate provided a year-round source of income for villagers.116 In most households, this was still lower than annual opium incomes, but provided a vital substitute. The state-owned tea company was dismantled in 1978, and tea land was allocated to village households according to their number of adult members. Most households received between 0.2 and 0.7 hectares and established fences or dredges to delineate their tea land (PL official 2 16-08-2013). Throughout the 1980 and 1990s, most households in Nả Hàng B continued to harvest tea and could sell it to local traders, likely to government-set prices, although more lucrative opportunities for forest income emerged in the 1990s, which I examine in Chapter 6.

115 A Nả Hàng B villager in his 70s, who worked on the tea estate as a manager of 18 households for eight years, provided much of the data represented in this paragraph, which correlates well with recollections of other villagers. He also remembers the payment modalities to a remarkable level of detail: During the first three years of establishing the plantation, all adults of Nả Hàng B had to contribute three person-days of labour without any pay. Subsequently, villagers could choose to either carry buffalo dung from the surrounding grazing lands to the tea estate and were compensated with 7kg of rice per 100kg of dung delivered; or harvest tea to earn 10kg of rice per kilogram of tea (dry weight considered). One person would typically carry 180-190kg of dung per day or harvest between two and 2.5kg of tea, but the former was considered easier, as long as there was dung in the vicinity of the tea plantation. Workers could have chosen to be paid in cash, but all households were short of rice and there was limited opportunity to spend money locally before the emergence of Ngã Ba Kim town. After 1975, roughly five years after planting, there was no more need for fertilization with dung, and villagers could continue harvesting tea at the above rate, or choose full-time employment of 40 hours per week for 150kg of rice. The latter, however, conflicted with agricultural labour requirements and was rarely chosen. 116 The ratio of the price of rice to that of tea has increased from 1/70 in the 1970s to around 1/12 in 2014 (from 100/7000 to 6000/70000, all values being prices in VND per kilogram), and tea is thus relatively less valuable today than it was when the tea estate in Púng Luông was established (NHB villager 1 11-08-2013).

144 The more recent developments surrounding property relations over tea land illustrate how land allocations, market forces and village politics combined to exclude most households in Nả Hàng B from tea cultivation. When agricultural land allocation to households was piloted in Púng Luông commune in the early 2000s, the previously informal property regimes over each household’s tea land were formalized, and most households in Nả Hàng B received Red Book Certificates (RBCs) for their tea land (see Figure 5.2). However, around the same time, the price of tea fell in Vietnam, and the yields from the tea plantations in Púng Luông dwindled, as they typically do approximately 30 years after planting (cf. OECD 2015). Given the relatively low tea price of 70,000 VND/kg, most households I interviewed in 2013 considered it not worthwhile to harvest tea and had abandoned their tea land. The RBCs limit land use to tea cultivation, which prohibits villagers from converting their tea land to cash crop or subsistence cultivation. To continue earning money from tea cultivation, the planting of new tea bushes would be required, but I only know of three households within my sample of Nả Hàng B households that have replanted tea with some success.117 More commonly, respondents explained that they did not have access to the required bank loans or had lost trust in tea cultivation as a livelihood opportunity. Furthermore, two villagers reported that they had effectively lost their tea land, despite formal land tenure, to a commune official who replanted tea on their tea plots without any compensation.

117 The key informant and former tea estate worker who provided much of the above data did replant tea on his land in 2007, which has proven to be an excellent investment. To pay for the new tea plants, fertilizer and rented labour, he took a bank loan of 10 million VND and, by 2012, could earn around 2 million VND per year from tea cultivation, making this his most significant and stable source of income.

145

Figure 5.2: Villager’s Red-book certificate over tea plantation in Nả Hàng B (details blurred)

Tea cultivation and pine resin tapping are two means of obtaining financial capital that were introduced in the 1970s during the era of central planning, from which some villagers in Púng Luông still benefit today. Compared to Púng Luông and other communes closer to the towns of Mù Cang Chải and Ngã Ba Kim, the legacy of the subsidy period is much less visible in the landscape and livelihood trajectories of Chế Tạo villagers. They remained relatively isolated until the current 35-kilometre dirt road connecting Chế Tạo with Mù Cang Chải was completed in 1998. Respondents invariably referred to this as a beneficial development that catalyzed livelihood change (CT official 5 23-11-2012).118 Until then, their primary source of financial

118 Until the road was built, Chế Tạo villagers could walk to Mù Cang Chải, and young people would often do the 70-kilometre return trip within a day, leaving several hours before dawn, as one villager recounted (CT villager 4 26-11-2013). The new road allowed villagers to transport goods on horseback, walk livestock to the market, and it

146 capital continued to be selling livestock to Thái traders from Sơn La province (CT villager 47 13-07-2013).

5.4. Livelihood and land-use change following sedentarisation

Much like state programs of collectivization, sedentarisation programs were implemented relatively late in Mù Cang Chải. The ban of shifting cultivation, the core objective of sedentarisation, was not enforced in Púng Luông commune until 1985, and in Chế Tạo only in the early 1990s (CT official 4 14-11-2012). Subsequently, agricultural extension services introduced chemical fertilizer and new high-yield seed varieties, which boosted agricultural productivity. Most households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B attained rice self-sufficiency within five to ten years after expanding paddy cultivation, and this section examines how this took place and to what effects.

This phase of agricultural intensification brought substantial livelihood changes and new patterns of household differentiation, as other studies in the wider region have also found (Cramb et al. 2009). Pursuing an actor oriented approach (see Section 2.2.3), I examine why households have performed so differently during the specialisation from composite swiddening to paddy cultivation. The adoption of high-input paddy cultivation has also resulted in new dependencies on monetary income and government assistance, as I will explain.

5.4.1. The cultural dynamics of agricultural intensification

The ban of shifting agriculture was communicated through state propaganda (tuyên truyền) at regular village meetings, which instructed villagers to abandon their swiddens and expand paddy cultivation, which required all households to establish additional rice terraces. In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, it took several years after the official ban until all households abandoned shifting cultivation, as many were not able to meet their food requirements until they had established enough irrigated rice land (CT official 7 02-12-2012).119 Villagers who continued cultivating or expanding their swidden fields could be punished with forced labour in construction of community infrastructure, but respondents remember no concrete cases of such

enabled trucks to bring cement to Chế Tạo for the building of the current school (2004) and health centre (between 2006 and 2007) (CT official 5 23-11-2012). 119 It also typically takes up to five years for a newly established rice terrace to produce its potential yield (CT villager 47 29-11-2012).

147 enforcement (NHB villager 2 02-08-2013). Even nowadays, occasionally land-poor villagers are found clearing forest for permanent maize cultivation, but local forest rangers knew of no case of the official fine of 3,000 VND (0.15 USD) per square meter ever being collected (MCC FPD Pao 15-07-2012; MCC FPD 12 15-11-2013). In hindsight, villagers I interviewed spoke overwhelmingly positively about the adoption of high-input paddy cultivation, but several respondents mentioned that the imposed livelihood transition resulted in initial resistance and grain shortages in both villages (NHB villager 5 01-08-2013; CT villager 26 19-07-2013).

As far as I understand from villagers’ accounts, government officials and extension workers did little to facilitate the primary task of expanding terraced rice land, leaving it up to villagers’ initiative to claim suitable land according to customary access regimes. Some households could terrace the land immediately above their established rice terraces (NHB villager 2 03-08-2013). This land is referred to in Hmong as Hauv laj, and customary ownership over it guarantees farmers access their rice terraces for ploughing (CT villager 26 19-07-2013). Villagers’ prior swidden fields were typically too dry and off-limits for conversion to paddy cultivation, but other suitable land was under open access until converted to rice terraces. This resulted in a temporary ‘race’ for the best land in both Nả Hàng B (in the late 1980s) and in Chế Tạo (in the early-mid- 1990s), during which households who were well-endowed with labour could attain relative wealth in paddy land that has remained in their families since.120 This initial phase of agricultural expansion and intensification was thus crucial, and it took me many interviews with villagers and officials to understand the dynamics and nuances of these processes in both locales.

Villagers explained that household labour for the construction of rice terraces, a laborious task typically undertaken by groups of men, was shared within kinship and social groups in reciprocal ways.121 Therefore, both human capital and bonding social capital were important assets, and some households with relatively less labour to share fell behind in the race for the best land. On the other hand, due to Hmong practices of inheritance (see Section 4.3.2), households endowed with several sons had to make enough rice terraces for each son to feed their families in a future without shifting cultivation. Importantly, suitable land for terracing and growing irrigated rice

120 I am here employing common concepts of the livelihoods literature (see Chapter 2), in which endowment refers to having (access to) certain livelihood assets and also being able to employ them (cf. Sen 1981; Sen 1997; Bebbington 1999). 121 I could also observe such work parties for the contemporary conversion of permanent maize land to terraced rice land in Nả Hàng B, which some households have needed to do to meet increase their rice yields.

148 was limited in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, and villagers claimed and converted most of it over a period of five to ten years (by the late 1990s). Since then, population growth has exacerbated paddy land scarcity, particularly in Nả Hàng B, where some households have been converting steep maize fields into paddy fields, although this yields narrow terraces that can barely be ploughed with a buffalo (see Figure 5.3).122

Figure 5.3: Prior maize land converted to very narrow rice terraces in Nả Hàng B

Apart from households’ endowments with labour and land, a limiting factor for rice terrace expansion was the availability of sufficient water to irrigate the new fields. This had also prevented villagers from expanding paddy cultivation prior to state directives of sedentarisation, as government projects did not construct concrete irrigation channels until the 1990s (NHB

122 Ironically, Mù Cang Chải has, since around 2007, been promoted as a tourist destination with its primary attraction being the extensive rice terraces along the main valley and its ‘ethnic minority culture’. Beyond the view from the scenic Highway 32, however, the distribution of paddy land and grain yields are very unequal across the district, and many Hmong households in Púng Luông, for instance, still lack several months of rice.

149 villager 2 03-08-2013; CT villager 7 15-11-2012).123 This opened up additional land for terracing in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, which the commune leaderships allocated to households (CT official 4 14-11-2012). However, I could not assess to what extent this exacerbated or alleviated inequalities in land holdings that had developed.

The customary land-use system of composite swiddening was adaptive to population growth, as forest could periodically be cleared for additional swidden fields. However, this socio-ecological adaptability was lost with the ban on shifting cultivation, as were customary systems of resilience, agro-biodiversity and associated knowledge, which I do not examine in detail. Following the ban, households’ need and ability to claim and expand terraced rice land in the 1990s depended on their endowments with human, social and natural capital. Since then, households with several sons have had to divide their land more often than others. These processes of inheritance, and thus household size and composition, nowadays have a greater impact on household differentiation in land holdings and grain production than they did during the era of shifting cultivation, as far as I understand. Some households have been forced to sell some of their precious paddy fields. I recorded four cases in Nả Hàng B (but none in Chế Tạo) of households who either traded paddy land for a buffalo they needed as a funeral sacrifice or sold some of their land to finance their opium addiction after the 1992 ban on opium cultivation. In each case, loosing paddy land has been detrimental to the livelihoods of the household and its sons, as there is no further land around Nả Hàng B to expand paddy cultivation on.

As a result of these different processes of acquiring and losing paddy land, up to ten of the 84 households in Chế Tạo are not rice self-sufficient. In Nả Hàng B, it is around half of the 54 households who need to buy rice for up to six months of the year, according to local officials and my household interviews. Meanwhile, around half of the Chế Tạo households, but only three or four in Nả Hàng B, have an annual surplus of rice, which is considered an important endogenous proxy for wealth (CT official 1 14-07-2012; NHB village head 16-07-2012). In both villages, respondents confirmed that these differences in household production were unheard of during swidden times, but I encountered different explanations for this differentiation.

123 In Chế Tạo the first concrete irrigation structures were built in 1992 and required the blasting of rocks, as the commune-level agricultural extension officer noted (CT official 4 14-11-2012). This helps explain why villagers could not, in collective action, expand paddy cultivation prior to sedentarisation. Some households did construct small-scale irrigation features made from bamboo, but only state initiative could provide the material needed for larger expansion of irrigation, while villagers provided free labour (NHB villager 2 03-08-2013).

150 5.4.2. Emerging patterns of socio-economic differentiation

I thought I had understood, in theory, how household composition, labour availability, access to land, and processes of inheritance, among other factors, shape household land holdings in a Hmong society. However, I was surprised that most relatively well-off villagers blamed other land-poor villagers for simply being “lazy” (lav kiv), often specifying that they did not work hard enough to establish enough rice terraces to feed their households. Even when I probed for the importance of other factors, many respondents, both villagers and commune officials, insisted that laziness had been the primary driver of socio-economic differentiation. Some of them cited cases of multiple brothers who have all done well, which I also encountered in both Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo.

However, conducting semi-structured interviews in relatively poor households often sparked extensive conversation that revealed their idiosyncratic causes of poverty. I heard many sad stories of misfortune, including from the four households in Nả Hàng B that had to sell off some of their paddy land. Other households had been marginalized by family members and were less well off than their brothers, for instance. In all cases, however, I found more profound reasons for relative poverty than the common discourse of laziness presumes.124

5.4.3. The reliance on fertilizer and hybrid seeds

I next analyse some effects of agricultural extension services and social assistance programs, that sought to modernize villagers’ livelihoods and alleviate poverty after the ban on shifting cultivation. To facilitate the goals of the sedentarisation program, national policy makers started instituting large-scale rural development programs, most notably Program 135 (Phase II, 1997- 2010) and Program 30a (2008-2020), which provided district and commune governments with frameworks and funds for poverty alleviation, including forms of direct assistance (hỗ trợ) and subsidized agricultural inputs to poor households. Following the ban on shifting cultivation, all households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B received a set amount of rice per household member,

124 Regarding the related discourse that shifting cultivators, in general, are lazy, Michaud (2015) notes that some missionary observers also judged the land use of shifting cultivators to be both wasteful and lazy, while Condominas (2009) claims, in a keynote address that highlighted the advantages of shifting cultivation, that some swiddeners portray paddy cultivators as lazy.

151 which in Chế Tạo was phased out in the mid-1990s when most households reached rice self- sufficiency.125

Apart from temporary food aid, which is still given in times of crises, state actors sought to intensify agriculture by introducing and subsidizing chemical fertilizer and high-yielding rice and maize seed varieties, and by facilitating domesticated animal husbandry to replace free grazing. Fertilizer was introduced in Púng Luông in 1985 or 1986 with the ban on shifting cultivation, and in Chế Tạo once the dirt road from Mù Cang Chải was completed in 1998 (MCC official 1 16-07-2012; PL official 2 16-08-2013). Previously, only few households had used buffalo dung as organic fertilizer if their fields were conveniently located downstream of their buffalo stables (NHB villager 5 01-08-2013).

In the 1990s, Vietnam was striving to increase its rice production and food security by mainstreaming high-yielding seed varieties for both rice and maize, initially relying on seeds imported from China (Kuyek 2000; Hossain et al. 2003; Tran Duc Vien and Nguyen Thi Duong Nga 2009).126 Hybrid rice seeds were introduced in both Púng Luông and Chế Tạo commune between 1995 and 1996, and hybrid maize varieties followed 2-3 years later (MCC official 1 16- 07-2012; PL official 2 16-08-2013). Fertilizer and hybrid seeds greatly increased yields on expanding paddy land and were instrumental in many households attaining rice self-sufficiency within a few years after their introduction, except for those households that did not have enough paddy land.

Subsidies for agricultural inputs were central to state efforts towards sedentarisation and increased grain production in the uplands. For the first five years, fertilizer was free in both Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, although villagers in Chế Tạo had to purchase and transport it back from Mù Cang Chải themselves (CT official 4 14-11-2012). Since then, the cost of fertilizer has

125 By then, some villagers in Chế Tạo were selling the rice they received as government assistance, mostly to rice- poor households within Chế Tạo village or neighbouring villages (CT official 1 14-07-2012). After three years, this form of food aid was re-introduced for the poorest households, and is nowadays more common in Nả Hàng B than in Chế Tạo (CT official 5 20-07-2013; PL official 2 27-05-2014). 126 High-yield seed varieties are derived from cross-breeding two seed varieties and offer increased yields. However, the crop derived from planting such hybrid seeds cannot be used as seed stock, and hence new hybrid seeds need to be used for each growing season (Xie and Hardy 2009; Kyeyune and Turner 2016). The domestic production of both hybrid seeds and fertilizer, the latter derived partly from Vietnam’s extensive lime stone reserves, has greatly increased since the 1990s. Nowadays, the most commonly used hybrid rice seed in Mù Cang Chải is the Nhị ưu 838 variety produced by state-owned Vinaseed, the national leader in hybrid rice seeds (OECD 2015).

152 increased significantly and accounts for between 10 and 30 per cent of annual household expenditures in all Nả Hàng B households I surveyed, with exception of rich households that have significant employment or cardamom income. In turn, hybrid seeds are still subsidised, and most households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B received between five and six kilograms of rice seeds per year in 2012 and 2013 (CT official 5 10-11-2012). Households that are challenged to produce enough rice for the year typically use hybrid seeds on most of their paddy land and apply as much fertilizer as they can afford (NHB village head 31-07-2013). They buy up to five kilograms of additional rice seed for around VND 70,000 (3.50 USD) per kilogram, but typically spend 2-3 million VND (100-150 USD) on fertilizer, which I put into context in Section 6.4.127 This reliance on agricultural inputs is more pronounced in Nả Hàng B than in Chế Tạo, where households typically have more paddy land, and where expenditures on seeds and fertilizer are offset by higher cash incomes (see Section 6.3).

In both study villages, households with sufficient paddy land only use as much hybrid seed as they need to attain self-sufficiency, and they plant traditional varieties on the rest of their land (CT official 5 10-11-2012; NHB village head 12-11-2013). Households who do produce surplus rice use this as animal feed and for the production of rice alcohol. Some of the land-rich households in Chế Tạo produce up to one tonne of surplus rice, which they cannot sell due to the high costs of transporting it to Mù Cang Chải (CT official 5 10-11-2012). Even land-poor households keep at least a small area of paddy land for the cultivation of non-hybrid sticky rice, which is still of high cultural importance. Some of the paddy land in Nả Hàng B and neighbouring villages is good enough to support a second crop of paddy in the Winter/Spring, for which the government has been supplying all the required hybrid seeds and fertilizer since 2011 (PL official 2 16-08-2013). Those households who owned or claimed the best paddy land during the ‘race’ of expanding paddy cultivation in late 1980s have thus been able to increase their yields further, but mostly by no more than ten to twenty per cent. The introduction of the second crop thus increased aggregate yields, but also exacerbated household differentiation of yields.

127 In 2013, NPK fertilizers (consisting to various ratios of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium) were sold in Mù Cang Chải for VND 250,000 per 50kg sack and UREA fertilizer, a pure nitrogen fertilizer that only some households use, for VND 470,000 (NHB villager 7 04-08-2013). These data correlate with prices collected around the same time in Ha Giang province by Kyeyune (2015).

153 In general, I gained the impression that villagers preferred the taste of traditional rice varieties (cf. Bonnin and Turner 2012), but they appreciated that hybrid varieties are essential for food security. This reliance, however, incurs a novel vulnerability to occasional failure of hybrid seeds, as it happened with 30 per cent of the rice crop in Nả Hàng B during my final field season (PL official 1 22-11-2013). As villagers had come to rely on government food aid in such cases, none of those I asked was considering shifting back to the “old seeds” (noob qub), also because most of them depended on the increased yields of hybrid seeds, which they still refer to as “Chinese seeds” (noob tsoob kuj). Interestingly, some villagers of Nả Hàng B had experimented with different hybrid seed varieties in the hope for even better results. Similarly, a few of the land-rich households in Nả Hàng B that used primarily traditional seeds had obtained alternative seed varieties from their kin in Sa Pa and Điện Biên. However, most poorer households could not afford such experiments.

Hybrid rice and maize seeds do not only require more fertilizer than traditional varieties (Tran Duc Vien and Nguyen Thi Duong Nga 2009), but they ideally require pesticides, which state agricultural extension services have also promoted and subsidized (cf. Kyeyune and Turner 2016). In 2013, pesticides were still free to households in Púng Luông commune that were classified as ‘poor’ (see Section 5.5.1), while most Chế Tạo households did not spend more than 200,000 VND (under 10 USD) a year, which was not very significant in their household budgets. My impression was that agricultural extension services focussed on providing access to agricultural inputs, and less on the safe and effective use of fertilizer and pesticides.128 The ecological implications of fertilizer use in Vietnam’s highlands have received markedly little study, and are well outside of the scope of this thesis. Further research on this question would have to examine state agricultural extension programs, as well as peasant household budgets and agricultural decision making, which both drive the use of agricultural inputs.

128 Although most villagers knew when and how to best apply fertilizer, several respondents presumed that they could increase yields continuously with increased application of fertilizer. They were amongst those who stated they typically purchased as much fertilizer as they could afford, but limited cash flow may prevent them from over- fertilizing their crops. None of the respondents who could provide reliable quantitative data on rice land, seed varieties and fertilizer use, seemed to exceed the seed manufacturer’s recommended fertilization rates. Of these data, the size of rice land, the area under cultivation with hybrid seeds and the amount of fertilizer used on hybrid rice (or relative to that used on maize and non-hybrid rice), were the most unreliable variables, as villagers would not typically collect these data.

154 5.4.4. Shaping livelihood identities and discourses of sedentarisation

Nowadays, “agricultural extension workers come [to ethnic minority peasants] as friends, as teachers, but also as students” the head of the Mù Cang Chải agricultural extension office proudly said at the beginning of our first meeting (MCC official 1 16-07-2012).129 He was keen to explain that extension workers also had something to learn from peasants, reiterating a discourse of participatory development and co-management, which we also find in contemporary development and forestry policy discourse in Vietnam (Nguyen Ngoc De et al. 2005; Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012; OECD 2015). In turn, other observers have found that agricultural extension in Vietnam is based on a “command-and-follow mentality” (Schad et al. 2011:85) and a disregard for the specificities concerning ethnic minority livelihoods in both policy and practice (Turner, Kettig, et al. 2015). Throughout most of the 1990s, agricultural extension workers were integral to enforcing the ban on shifting cultivation and subsequent agricultural intensification (MCC official 1 16-07-2012). At that time, the state discourse justifying sedentarisation did not suggest that ethnic minority peasants had a participatory role or something to teach to agricultural extension workers, as the modern discourse of participation discourse does. Therefore, I sought to understand how villagers perceived state agents and reflected on the enforcement of the ban on shifting cultivation.

In response to my routine question what villagers remember as the most significant structural change in their lifetimes, an 82-year-old woman of Nả Hàng B remembered when “the government came and taught us how to grow food” after the ban on shifting cultivation in the early 1990s. “Had you not been growing food beforehand?” I asked. “Yes, but they told us to plant [wet] rice earlier [in the season] and showed us how to use fertilizer. Now we still don’t have enough to share, but at least enough to eat” (NHB villager 15 08-08-2013). Other respondents in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B typically cited the end of shifting cultivation and specialisation on paddy cultivation as the most significant change in their lives.130 In further

129 The agricultural extension office (Trạm Khuyến nông) is a unit within the district-level Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (Phòng Nông nghiệp và Phát triển nông thôn). Most of the agricultural extension agents that would have been working with Hmong villagers in the 1990s were ethnic Kinh (MCC official 4 22-05-2014). This is also true for most of the office staff today, unlike in the district-level Forest Protection Department (Hạt Kiểm lâm), where more officers are local Hmong (see Chapter 8). 130 Interestingly, Turner et al. (2015) note that the most significant change mentioned by Hmong villagers around Sa Pa (Lào Cai Province) had been the demise of the opium economy. This makes sense, as they had higher levels of

155 conversations, many of them gave government agents much credit for helping them to intensify rice cultivation and increase their yields. In turn, the initial hardship and resistance following the ban on shifting cultivation did not feature in most peoples’ recollections (at least in their conversation with me). Much more prominent in their discourse was the fact that they nowadays enjoy better food security than they ever had when practicing shifting cultivation.

Villagers invariably framed shifting cultivation as laborious and destructive, often remembering how, every year, the surrounding mountain ridges were clouded in smoke for a week when villagers were burning their fallows. Some added that the forest areas that had regenerated on prior swiddens helped provide water for their paddies and have lessened the frequency of landslides. Their narrative thus resembles the state discourse that justified sedentarisation and called for reforestation of the barren highlands. The rationale that upland forests provide water conservation for lowland agriculture, however, is what Forsyth (1998, 2003) calls an “environmental orthodoxy” that has been commonly employed in Vietnam and beyond to justify banning upland agriculture (cf. Forsyth and Walker 2014). I will further examine villagers’ discourse regarding their benefits from forest conservation in Chapter 8 in the context of forest wildlife.

5.5. Contemporary dynamics and discourses of wealth and poverty

Apart from agricultural intensification, Hmong villagers have also adopted other elements of the state modernization agenda into their livelihoods, although this has not always been to their benefit, as I observed. After focussing primarily on agricultural production in this chapter, so far, I next examine villagers’ contemporary challenges in house construction and livestock rearing, both central to Hmong livelihoods. In light of how state programs for poverty alleviation have sought to modernize Hmong livelihoods, I further examine shifts in villagers’ livelihood aspirations, conceptions of wealth, and patterns of household differentiation. I illustrate these processes and the relevance of customary socio-cultural institutions by integrating case studies of specific households.

opium income than households in Chế Tạo, while Nả Hàng B households were relatively less affected by their loss of opium income, as they subsequently harvested NTFPs and pơ mu timber for sale (see Section 6.2).

156 5.5.1. State poverty metrics and benefits for “poor households” (hộ nghèo)

While the reduction of aggregate poverty levels in Vietnam since the 1990s has been heralded as a success story of state development (Kozel 2014), Mù Cang Chải remains one of the poorest districts in the country (Lanjouw et al. 2013). Different state agencies and international development actors employ a confusing array of poverty data and indicators, which has been discussed elsewhere (Swinkels and Turk, Poverty Mapping in Vietnam). Most relevant for the discussions in this chapter are the poverty metrics to determine eligibility for social assistance. While calculating household incomes is difficult in subsistence economies (cf. Niimi et al. 2004; Lanjouw et al. 2013), the livelihoods of Hmong peasants in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B illustrate several shortcomings of national poverty metrics, as I will explain in this section.

Throughout rural Vietnam, households that fall under a state-determined poverty line receive preferential access to social assistance, subsidised healthcare and education, and, since 2003, are eligible for low interest bank loans (see Section 6.5.3). The poverty line is applied across rural Vietnam and is adjusted every five years (Kozel 2014). Following Decision 09/2011/QĐ-TTg, rural households whose livestock holdings of pigs and buffalo and annual yields of rice and maize are equivalent (at market prices) to less than 400kg of rice per person, or between 400 and 500kg, were deemed poor (nghèo) or “near poor” (cận nghèo), respectively (CT official 5 20-07- 2013).

Triangulating primary and secondary data from selected communes and villages in mcc suggests that state poverty metrics fail to capture the livelihood realities that villagers I interviewed conveyed and remembered. In 2012, 55 of the 84 households in Chế Tạo were deemed ‘poor’, whereas in Nả Hàng B only 5 of 54 households were not poor (CT official 1 14-07-2012) (NHB village head 16-07-2012).

Bar chart with poverty rates. 2006 and 2011?

2006 2011 2013

Poor Near Near Poor Poor poor poor

Chế Tạo village 18 58 11 65

157 Chế Tạo commune, average 48 68 13

Nả Hàng B village 49 87 8

Pl commune, average 58 68 8

The leadership of any commune typically has an interest in regularly lifting some households out of poverty to report progress on poverty reduction “for the commune to have a good reputation” (ua rau xã lo koob meej) (PL official 1 02-08-2013). On the other hand, some households in Chế Tạo and elsewhere in Vietnam (cf. Phuong Nguyen n.d.) try to hide or understate their harvest yields or household assets in order to remain eligible for government assistance (CT official 1 29-11-2013).131 Loosing the status of a “poor household” can have important implications, as the following case of Ly, a 22-year old household head in Nả Hàng B, illustrates (GSO 2007, 2012).

Because Ly’s father died early, Ly is the head of a household of eight people, which includes his grandmother, mother, aunt and sister, as well as his wife and two children. Because of this, he inherited more rice land than his five younger brothers, some of whom have moved away. His household is one of four in Nả Hàng B that typically have a surplus yield of rice (of five sacks or 220kg in 2012), and thus stands out amongst the seven other households of the Hang clan in Nả Hàng B. He therefore has social obligation to periodically support his “cousins” (kwv tij), as all close relatives are referred to in Hmong language.

Given Ly’s relative wealth, he was encouraged by the commune leadership to join the Communist Party, build a large, modern house, as he said, and forego his “poor” status in favour of being “near poor”. Ly agreed and became the sixth ‘near poor’ household in Nả Hàng B and the third villager to join the Communist Party (PL official 2 27-05-2014). From Party membership he expects his children to have better access to educational and career opportunities, but from his loss of statutory poverty he fears his household may fall outside the safety net of government assistance. Indeed, in 2012, when seeking a bank loan to build his new house, he could not afford to take a regular loan for “near poor” households from the Bank of Social

131 This is not necessarily easy in a close-knit community, where village heads, who annually verify households’ poverty status, typically know quite well which households are below, above and close to the poverty line due to common knowledge of households’ land and livestock holdings (NHB village head 18-11-2013).

158 Policies, as its interest rate of 8.64 per cent per year is nearly three times higher than that of loans offered to “poor” households for house construction (MCC bank staff 3 22-05-2014).

5.5.2. The economics of Hmong house construction

I will next illustrate how young families in Nả Hàng B have become dependent on bank loans to build their own houses, a culturally important rite for young Hmong men. In 2003, the Vietnam Bank of Social Policies (BSP) introduced loans for poor households to (re)build or improve their houses at a preferential interest rate of three per cent per year (more recently governed by Decision 167/2008//QĐ-TTg). Since then, all but 2-3 of the 54 houses in Nả Hàng B have been rebuilt, replacing the traditional roofs made from split pơ mu shingles with corrugated asbestos- cement roofing sheets, which are ubiquitous in Vietnam (NHB village head 31-07-2013).132 Apart from a cement roof, a concrete floor has become the hallmark of a modern Hmong house in Nả Hàng B, replacing the traditional dirt floor. However, because Ly (introduced above) could not get a loan for house building, his new house is one of three houses I know of in Nả Hàng B without a concrete floor.

Interestingly, in Chế Tạo, the BSP loans for house building were not promoted by the commune, and none of the 35 households in my sample had taken out such a loan. Most houses in Chế Tạo are visibly older than those in Nả Hàng B, although more than half of the pơ mu roofs have been replaced with cement roofing sheets, which the government supported poorer households to do. In conversations about their houses, money, and livelihood aspirations, many villagers in Chế Tạo expressed their desire for a concrete floor. However, the costs of transporting building materials to Chế Tạo are prohibitively high, although one family, in 2013, took out a substantial bank loan of 60 million VND (3,000 USD) to build the first house in Chế Tạo with a concrete

132 While asbestos-free roofing sheets are also produced in Vietnam, these are largely designated for export, and their production is dwarfed by that of asbestos-containing roofing sheets. Vietnam remains the world-wide sixth- largest consumer of asbestos and its use will be allowed until 2020 (following Decision 121/2008/QĐ-TTG), despite government policies to ban the use of asbestos, dating back to 2001 (Van Hai Pham et al. 2013). The authors note that awareness of the health risks associated with asbestos are very low in related industry sectors in Vietnam. Therefore, it might be no surprise that none of the Hmong villagers I asked had ever heard about any health risks associated with the roofing sheets commonly used.

159 floor, which “everyone wants”, as the 52-year-old household head emphasized (CT villager 4 26- 11-2013).133

Since the early 2000s, cement has become the novel material for roofing and flooring and the primary expense of house construction in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, particularly for those families who do not rent labour. Traditionally, lumber, land and labour were readily available and communally shared, respondents in both villages explained that this is changing. Not all villagers nowadays have the time and means to do the tree felling, lumber milling and joinery involved in preparing the posts and beams for a traditional Hmong house, which is still the norm in Mù Cang Chải, as I could observe. Therefore, renting the labour of fellow villagers is not uncommon, and the costs for this can easily outweigh those of a cement roof and a concrete floor, which, in Nả Hàng B, add up to approximately 6 million VND (300 USD) each, depending on the size of the house.134 Nevertheless, for all houses that were built during my fieldwork (one in Chế Tạo and two in Nả Hàng B), I could observe numerous villagers contributing some of their time, following customary practices of reciprocal labour exchange. Figure 5.4 below shows only some of the villagers who were involved in the final assembly of Mr. Ly’s house, and also shows the traditional structure of Hmong houses, as mentioned in Section 1.1.

133 This household spent 100 million VND (nearly 5,000 USD) for the purchase and transport of five truck loads of sand and cement, as well as for rented labour, to make the first concrete floor in Chế Tạo village, and likely in the entire commune of Chế Tạo. Interestingly, this is not a particularly wealthy household by any standards. The only other concrete structure in Chế Tạo that was built by a household is a very solid six-bay pig sty, for which an old shaman, rather than using the usual materials of bamboo and scrap wood, invested 18 million VND (900 USD) in 2013. This is more than most villagers in Nả Hàng B could ever spend on their entire house, but the shaman’s household has ample rice land and two sons who each bring home a teacher’s salary of 6-8 million VND per month (300-400 USD). 134 With regards to the cost of labour, some villagers in Chế Tạo who own a chainsaw (of which there are at least seven in the village) rent out their own labour for the milling of house posts and wall boards for a substantial 500,000 VND per day (250 USD). Villagers who relied on rented labour for their house construction therefore reported spending up to twenty million VND on rented labour. The falling, hauling and preparing of the wood, as well as the assembly and raising of the timber frame require several work parties, and enlisting enough villagers and feeding them respondents considered the major challenge of house construction.

160

Figure 5.4: Final assembly of a traditional Hmong house in Nả Hàng B

The recent modernization and monetization of Hmong house construction could arguably not have emerged without government assistance and specific low-interest bank loans, which may become increasingly necessary for young Hmong families to build their own house. Since 2015, however, Hmong villagers throughout Vietnam may have had to build their houses without the help of a bank loan, as new regulations require recipients to have lived as a separate household for five years and own a RBC for the land they are building on.135 Even in places where the latter is the case, the former requirement excludes young Hmong families, as well as other ethnic minority groups practicing patrilocality, who traditionally build their own house when they move out of the husband’s parents’ house. They are left to use generic loans at higher interest rates or fall back on traditional sources of economic capital, such as informal loans from relatives or selling livestock (see Section 5.5.4).

135 According to Decision 33/2015/QĐ-TTg, which governs the second phase of the loan program for house construction, which was first introduced with Decision 167/2008//QĐ-TTg.

161 5.5.3. From property to economic capital

Villagers’ expenses for house construction and their need to go into debt to build their first house may increase in future years, particularly as villagers in Nả Hàng B envision the further commoditization of the two forms of natural capital most central to house construction, namely land and timber. Some respondents speculate how much they could sell a tree from their firewood plots for or how much they might have to pay for their sons to buy land to build their houses on. However, when I asked further they suggested that potential transfers among villagers of the same Hmong clan might remain free or incur only a nominal price. In turn, for sales between villagers of different clans, in particular for land in Nả Hàng B, respondents expect market rates to apply before long.136 Due to the scarcity of suitable land for house construction, which also has to fulfill certain requirements of traditional Hmong geomancy (cf. Tapp 1986a; Cooper 1998), the traditional Hmong way of living in close proximity of clanic relatives in so- called hamlets is changing. This is more evident in Nả Hàng B than in Chế Tạo, as Nả Hàng B is made up of households from four different Hmong clans, who nowadays live quite intermingled, except for on the periphery of the village, according to my observations.

The expectation that villagers could sell or buy trees or land that they do not formally own exemplifies how villagers can effectively legitimize the customary property regimes they maintain over these forms of natural capital (cf. Sikor and Lund 2009). This continued practice of informal property and access rights is particularly evident in the pluralisation of property relations over Vietnam’s forestland, meaning that competing formal and informal rules co-exist. In other parts of Vietnam’s highlands, this has been found to be the case following state land allocation or access restrictions, but local residents maintain customary access and use (Sowerwine 2004b; McElwee 2011; Sikor 2012a; To Xuan Phuc 2012). My understanding from conversations with multiple villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B is that they continue to

136 An insightful example was a relatively poor Nả Hàng B household head, one of six brothers of the Hang clan who all suffer from a lack of rice for several months of the year. He had built his house on very marginal land, which regularly flooded and was vulnerable to landslides. He wanted to relocate his house elsewhere, but none of the other Hang households had any land he could move to (NHB villager 22 16-08-2013). Luckily he had a friend from the Lu clan who (informally) owned suitable land. Otherwise, he suggested he would have to pay between 15 and 20 million VND (750-1000 USD) for land informally held by a different household. Like other villagers I asked, he was only aware of one case of informal land sale in Nả Hàng B, in which somebody of the Lu clan had bought land off of a clan relative for a symbolic price of one million VND (50 USD). For some villagers, this case seemed to foreshadow the commoditization of land for house construction in Nả Hàng B.

162 practice and thus legitimize customary property relations, regardless of whether they contravene statutory state ownership of lands and forests.

In 2013, the commune leadership of Púng Luông was allocating RBCs for residential land (PL official 1 02-08-2013; PL official 2 16-08-2013). However, none of the Nả Hàng B villagers I asked about this anticipated any benefits from having formal tenure over the land they live on, as their ownership over it was uncontested. I noted above that formal allocation of tea land did little to enhance villagers’ access to or benefits from their tea land, as they lacked the economic capital and entrepreneurial drive to invest in tea cultivation. Similarly, I noted how villagers have been trading and selling paddy land in times of crises since long before the Vietnamese state allocated agricultural land to households. In the subsequent chapter, I will present several more cases of villagers capitalizing on forest resources over which they have no formal ownership, namely cardamom fields and previously cut pơ mu trees.

5.5.4. Cattle as economic and cultural capital

During my conversations with villagers, I got to understand that buffalo and other livestock still constituted a key source of financial capital to many households. In 2013, a healthy adult buffalo could readily be sold for around 20 and up to 30 million VND (1000-1500 USD). Having more buffalo than are needed for ploughing provides insurance in cases of family tragedies or emergencies, when a buffalo needs to serve as a ritual sacrifice or economic capital (NHB villager 8 04-08-2013). More than half of all Chế Tạo households have more than one buffalo, but only few households in Nả Hàng B do (CT official 5 20-07-2013). The young Mr. Ly from Nả Hàng B, for instance, had five buffalo, which allowed him to support his less well-off brothers and sell one of them to build his house without going into debt.

Since the demise of shifting cultivation and free grazing, buffalo need to be kept in stables, and cultivated fodder or wild grass needs to be harvested every day.137 According to villagers’ accounts, this requires at least one to two hours per buffalo per day and is primarily the duty of women and children (CT villager 10 21-11-2012). Land for the cultivation of Elephant grass

137 It is also common practice in Nả Hàng B to let buffalo graze around houses and fields, but this has led to increased cases of crop raiding in gardens and maize fields, as I heard at a village meeting and during several interviews. In all cases, the buffalo owner is expected to pay reparations at market value of the crop loss, as arbitrated by the village head (NHB village head 18-11-2013).

163 (Pennisetum purpureum), commonly referred to as buffalo grass, had become limited in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, primarily because villagers were not allowed to clear forest areas (NHB villager 8 04-08-2013; CT villager 34 22-07-2013; FFI 2007a). As a result, households differed not only in how many buffalo they had, but also in how they could feed them and how much labour this required. My impression was that women have borne the brunt of the shift from free-grazing to domesticated cattle, as Bonnin and Turner (2013) have suggested for agricultural intensification more broadly.

5.5.5. The economic risk of raising animals

While the ban on free grazing cattle was enforced to allow for forest recovery, a second governmental argument for keeping buffalo in the stable was to reduce the risk of infectious diseases (MCC official 1 16-07-2012). While Chế Tạo villagers suggested that more buffalo used to die from the cold than from diseases, infections had more recently affected many pigs and chickens in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. This had become a common threat with severe livelihood impacts, which some households were more vulnerable to than others.

To prevent disease outbreaks, which regularly kill a household’s whole stock of chickens, agricultural extension services have been providing vaccinations for buffalo, pigs and chickens, but not all households have equal access to this service. In Chế Tạo, several households have “never” received vaccinations for their livestock, whereas others do every year. The officer responsible for vaccinating livestock in Nả Hàng B readily admitted that he only has around sixty per cent of the vials necessary to treat all animals in the village, and that he therefore serves his kin and friends first (NHB villager 28 06-11-2013). Incidentally, he, his parents and his brother live rather secluded, several hundred meters downhill from the rest of the village, which has so far prevented any of their animals from getting infected. Most other households in Nả Hàng B live with the latent threat of periodically losing livestock to disease. This undermines villagers’ ability to manage their livestock as economic assets and particularly affects money- poor households who rely on selling chickens.

Villagers in Nả Hàng B noted that the commune leadership typically provided relief aid, often in form of new breeding stock, to households who lost some livestock. Nevertheless, the latent threat of infectious diseases had also compromised the success of government programs

164 supplying livestock for poverty alleviation.138 Furthermore, several Chế Tạo villagers voiced their discontent with the governance of such programs in the past, claiming that buffalo were granted not to households in need, but to those affiliated with the commune leadership.

In Púng Luông commune, government livestock programs have possibly been implemented more transparently and fairly, judging from the accounts of both officials and villagers. In 2012, all Nả Hàng B households received 20 young ducks through an internationally funded project for livelihood development. This project sought to develop an additional income opportunity, given that villager could readily sell a duck to one of the restaurants in Ngã Ba Kim (NHB village head 16-07-2012). However, villagers I interviewed invariably portrayed the ducks they received as government food aid or as compensation for their opportunity costs of hunting restrictions. They conceived of the ducks as a source of subsistence rather than economic capital. Many respondents admitted that they had long eaten their 20 ducks, and I am aware of only few households who managed to maintain a viable breeding stock for more than a year. Although disease outbreaks among ducks have not been as common and detrimental as with chickens, the perceived risk of diseases seemed to have compelled some respondents to eat their ducks before they got sick. This also makes sense considering the cultural importance of eating meat, which I turn to next as a final example of how livelihood assets have important symbolic meanings that may shift over time (cf. Bebbington 2000; de Haan 2003; Carr 2013; see also Section 2.2.3.1).

5.5.6. The cultural importance of eating meat

As traditional hunters, Hmong people across Southeast Asia have traditionally valued eating meat (Cooper 1998, see also Section 8.3.2). Eating pork, specifically, is closely associated with Hmong New Year’s festivities and considered a sign of wealth (Scripter and Yang 2009). No Hmong household I visited would go without having any meat to offer to spirits and guests over the New Year period, but I found that many households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B can only afford to eat meat on few other culturally important occasions throughout the year. These occasions include birth, wedding, and funeral celebrations, guests visiting, as well as shamanistic rituals, which require the sacrifice of at least one chicken.

138 Dating back to the 1960s, as one Chế Tạo villager remembers, some households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have periodically received free or subsidized buffalo or other livestock through different state programs for rural development, most recently in 2012 through Program 30a.

165 In Hmong society, eating meat is a social practice, as it usually involves eating with guests and drinking copious amounts of rice alcohol. According to my observations, men participate in such social gatherings much more frequently than women. This suggests that the frequency and meaning of meat consumption is partly gendered, but my impression was that eating meat is no less valued by women than it is by men.139 In other interviews, food-poor villagers in Chế Tạo similarly volunteered estimates of how often commune cadres, better-off villagers, or myself as a wealthy foreigner might eat meat. Indeed, better-off households I interviewed regularly purchased pork when they went to town and emphasized that they ate meat several times a week, one of them suggesting that: “I can’t just eat rice and vegetables” (yog zaub hab mov xwb tsi muaj qraij kuv noj tsi lo) (NHB villager 13 04-08-2013).

Given the cultural importance of eating meat, I tried to understand patterns of meat consumption in the era of shifting cultivation, when forest wildlife and free-grazing cattle were common in both Chế Tạo and surrounding communes. While some Chế Tạo villagers were keen to state that hunting provided ready access to meat, others noted that the intense labour requirements of swiddening left little time for hunting, and that most households suffered from food insecurity. Some respondents argued that domesticated livestock nowadays provides a more reliable and accessible source of meat than hunting used to do, although livestock holdings vary greatly between households, of course. Although households used to have many more cows and buffalo than nowadays, these were not raised as a source of meat, but were more important as economic and cultural assets than they are today, and they were sacrificed more frequently. Many villagers noted that, in the past, each son had been expected to contribute one buffalo to their father’s funeral, but a government directive in 2004 sought to limit this to one head of cattle per funeral, although this is not strictly enforced (PL official 2 27-05-2014). I attended two funerals of former commune cadres, both of whose social status commanded the sacrifice of two buffalo, but

139 Incidentally, I got to hold several conversational interviews on eating meat with female villagers in Chế Tạo, all of whom emphasized how rarely their households ate meat. Interviewing two astute females of approximately my age, my usual question of how often their households eat meat sparked a very animated conversation, during which they suggested that I surely eat meat “ten times a week”. I explained that I rarely eat meat in my house, as my wife was vegetarian. I emphasized, without meaning to proselytize, that this is not uncommon amongst Westerners and that eating meat is not necessarily a symbol of wealth in the West. This seemed to upset their common image of a wealthy Western household, but gave one of them the following idea: “Go and tell your wife that we miss meat very much here. She should put all the meat that she does not eat aside and you can bring it here the next time you come”. More common, however, was their next question of how big the pig would be that both villagers and commune cadres expected me to buy for a leaving party at the end of my three four-to-six week research stays in Chế Tạo.

166 nowadays most Hmong families in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B could not afford to do so. Therefore, many villagers I interviewed framed state restrictions on buffalo sacrifices, as well as official limits on bride wealth (see Section 6.6.2), as a welcome relief from costly cultural obligations.

As with other endogenous markers of wealth, such as grain yields and livestock holdings, I got to understand from villagers’ accounts that there must have been less variability in households’ meat consumption throughout the era of shifting cultivation, than I found in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B in 2012 and 2013. Since the ban on shifting cultivation and the decline of hunting activity, households no longer have equal access to wild meat, and their meat consumption depends on, firstly, how many pigs and chicken they have, which is partly linked to how much maize they can grow, and, secondly, on how much money they can spend to purchase meat. Villagers confirmed that eating meat has traditionally been a symbol of wealth in Hmong culture. From talking to villagers about how meat consumption has changed, it seemed that eating meat had additionally become a marker of monetary household wealth in the process of livelihood monetization.

Throughout this Section 5.5, I have examined the shifting roles of different household assets in villagers’ livelihoods and the modern socio-cultural meanings that some assets and activities have come to bear. This has exemplified the significance of livelihood processes that lie beyond agricultural production and material assets, and how added meanings are shaped and maintained by villagers’ livelihood practice (cf. Bebbington 2000; de Haan 2003; Carr 2013). These embedded aspects have traditionally received little analytical attention in the livelihoods literature, as I demonstrated in Section 2.2.3.1. In turn, the modern state poverty metrics, with which I opened this section, greatly simplify both the measurement and the alleviation of poverty. This partly explains why some development interventions have had rather mixed effects on Hmong villagers and their livelihoods, with the emergence of new patterns of household differentiation.

5.6. Conclusion: Intensification and differentiation of peasant livelihoods

The purpose of this chapter has been to analyse how patterns of livelihood activities, wealth and poverty have changed in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B since the era of shifting cultivation and following the adoption of high-input paddy cultivation. I have illustrated how Hmong villagers in

167 Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B were differently implicated in the centrally-planned economy of the 1970s, were differently affected by the sedentarisation program of the 1980s and 1990s, and thereafter have achieved rice self-sufficiency on slightly different “livelihood trajectories” (de Haan and Zoomers 2005:42). This has resulted in shifting patterns of household differentiation within and between the two villages.

During the long era of shifting cultivation, socio-economic differentiation was primarily marked by variability in households’ cattle holdings and opium production, which were then their main forms of economic capital. Otherwise, households’ livelihood portfolios were less diversified than they are today. As I understand villagers’ historical accounts, all households were similarly preoccupied with their “subsistence security” (cf. Scott 1976:35), and their economic capital served as a safety net.

Once state sedentarisation programs imposed a ban on shifting cultivation and the expansion of paddy cultivation, novel patterns of socio-economic differentiation emerged, which are still relevant today, albeit to different degrees in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. This started with households’ differential endowment with assets (human and social capital) and opportunities (access to suitable land for terracing) to compete in the initial race for potential paddy land. Following Hmong practices of inheritance, paddy land has since been divided within family lineages. This has resulted in shifting patterns of land distribution within each village, shaped by the effects of household composition and family legacies, as some households have been forced to sell or trade some of their precious paddy land.

Hmong livelihoods are about more than agricultural production though, and livelihood assets other than land and labour have always been important. In the final section of this chapter, I therefore highlighted the cultural importance and contemporary challenges of house construction and animal husbandry, explaining how different natural resources and livelihood assets have acquired new economic or symbolic values. This has resulted in new patterns of household differentiation and dependence on government assistance. Throughout this chapter, I have sought to elucidate the often mixed effects of state initiatives for livelihood development, which is a line of inquiry that I continue in subsequent chapters.

168 Chapter 6 From forest income to micro-credit: Access to financial capital

6.1. Introduction

In the preceding chapter I showed that state-led sedentarisation programs largely achieved their objective of eradicating shifting cultivation in Mù Cang Chải and enhancing agricultural production. However, the adoption of high-input paddy cultivation contributed to the gradual monetization of peasant livelihoods that has left many villagers dependent on governmental assistance and monetary income. In this chapter, I examine the processes of monetization and their implications by addressing my second research question: Since the 1990s, how have villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B engaged with emerging opportunities to obtain financial capital, and how has this affected household expenditures?

In the following sections, I analyse the emergence and significance of different sources of financial capital, namely the sale of wild NTFPs and pơ mu timber, cardamom cultivation, and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). I examine how villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have accessed and engaged with these opportunities, illustrating the role of customary property relations over forest products and of specific forms of social capital. I then turn to other sources of financial capital that are not related to forest exploitation or conservation, namely formal employment and micro-credit bank loans. To put household incomes into context, I outline how different Hmong household budgets for a range of household expenditures and the increasing costs of New Year’s festivities, weddings and funerals.

The purpose of this chapter is thus to provide an analytical account of how rapid processes of monetization have affected the semi-subsistence livelihoods of Hmong villagers with attention to contemporary patterns of household incomes, expenditure and differentiation. With regard to my overall thesis, this chapter complements my study of livelihood trajectories (see Chapter 5) and establishes the vital context of contemporary livelihoods, which I ground by analysis of hunting practices (see Chapter 8) and Payments for Ecosystem Services (see Chapter 9).

169 6.2. Successive patterns of forest income from NTFPs and pơ mu timber

In the preceding chapter I noted that during the subsidy period (1970s-1980s) there was no market demand for timber or NTFPs in Mù Cang Chải. This only changed in the late 1980s and 1990s, following economic liberalisation. Soon, growing market demand from China for specific NTFPs, including orchids, resulted in their rampant exploitation.

6.2.1. The exploitation of NTFPs (from late 1980s)

The first NTFP trader in Mù Cang Chải was Mr Che, who settled in Ngã Ba Kim in 1974 to work for the Púng Luông State Forest Enterprise (SFE) as a truck driver. Despite being employed in the planned economy, Mr Che established a profitable private business as the foremost local trader of tea (after the state-own tea company was dismantled in 1978), pơ mu timber (in the 1990s, see below), as well as a number of NTFPs, all of which local Hmong villagers harvested and sold to him.140 In 1987 or 1988, notably several years before trade liberalisation with China greatly increased the market demand for various forest products (see below), Mr Che started privately buying four different NTFPs, as well as wild apples, and selling them to wholesalers in Lào Cai.141 The most lucrative product for Mr Che and Hmong villagers, however, were wild orchids, which became popular in both China and Vietnam as ornamental flowers in the 1990s. As some Hmong villagers supplied several hundred kilograms of orchids at a time, Mr. Che could buy up to one tonne of orchids a day and brought them to Sa Pa by the truck load, two tons at a time. After two to three years, the natural supply of the most sought- after orchid species started declining, but orchid traders and collectors could shift to different species. The local orchid trade was rife until the early 2000s, had declined significantly by around 2005, and nowadays consists largely of cultivated orchids, as a second local orchid trader confirmed (MCC NTFP trader 6 30-05-2014).

140 During the subsidy period, it was not uncommon for localized black markets to emerge alongside the strictly planned economy (Fforde and De Vylder 1996). Mr. Che’s business expanded quickly, and he was the owner of the first motorbike in Mù Cang Chải (in 1987) and the first private truck. He had an eventful life of gains and losses, which he openly shared with me over two long conversations, providing much of the data I include here and in later references to his trading activities. 141 The first four NTFPs that Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải could collect for sale to Mr. Che were: ‘Poor man’s ginseng’ Đẳng sâm (Codonopsis pilosula) and ‘Job’s tears’ (Coix lachryma jobi), which the government shop had also been buying (MCC official 4 29-05-2014), as well as Vietnamese ginseng (Panax vietnamensis, Sâm Ngọc Linh), which has become near-extinct and fetches prices of up to 30 million VND (1500 USD)/kg (Nguyen Van Song 2008); as well as cỏ nhung, commonly known as Perfume Grass in English, which is a small leafy plant known for its antibacterial and stimulant properties (Sterling et al. 2006), which has become extremely rare and expensive in Mù Cang Chải, as I detail below.

170 Several villagers in Nả Hàng B described the ‘tragedy of the commons’ of orchids and other NTFP species that were extirpated (locally extinct) within a few years, followed by the collection of different species in subsequent years. Villagers had no customary institutions to manage these novel forms of forest extraction sustainably, as these forest products had no customary role in their subsistence livelihoods (CT villager 33 15-12-2012a; MCC NTFP trader Che 24-05-2014). This exploitation of numerous NTFPs persisted throughout the 1990s and provided vital cash income many Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải, who were affected by the 1993 opium ban (see Chapter 5). Most households in Nả Hàng B and neighbouring villages contributed to this, as they lost their primary source of cash income after the 1992 opium ban. This was not the case in Chế Tạo, where villagers had limited access to NTFP markets until the road was completed in 1998 (NHB villager Tong 07-11-2013; NHB village head 11-08-2013).

Apart from this commercial NTFP exploitation of the 1990s, Hmong villagers and herbalists throughout Mù Cang Chải have always collected certain medicinal NTFPs for traditional use, but in a much smaller scale. Although villagers have never maintained customary management practices or property relations over medicinal NTFPs, respondents in Chế Tạo confirmed that they could still access most NTFPs they needed in the forest. The customary harvest of medicinal NTFPs had therefore neither been affected by the commercial exploitation of high-value NTFPs, nor by recent restrictions on harvesting NTFPs. In fact, both Hmong villagers and forestry officials I interviewed condemned the commercial collection of NTFPs, but support NTFP harvest for household use (see Chapter 8). In 2013, some NTFPs of commercial value could still be found in the forests around Chế Tạo, but harvesting had become less attractive for villagers since other income opportunities had emerged.

6.2.2. How villagers in Nả Hàng B sold the last of their pơ mu trees (mid-1990s)

While the natural supplies of NTFPs dwindled, a more lucrative opportunity to cut and sell pơ mu (Fokienia hodginsii) timber emerged in the mid-1990s.142 This played out very differently in

142 Historically, pơ mu wood was traded across the region, and supplied by some Hmong and other upland minorities who had access to pơ mu timber (Michaud 2006; Nguyen Phi Truyen and Osborn 2006; Turner 2010a). However, early caravan traders of the 19th century could not have come through Mù Cang Chải, which remained cut off until the road from Nghĩa Lộ was completed in 1968, and villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B do not know of any sales of pơ mu wood until the 1990s. Market demand for pơ mu timber expanded significantly in the 1990s, when it became an attractive choice amongst wealthy lowlanders in Vietnam for high-end furniture-making, indoor panelling and finish carpentry, partly due to

171 Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo, as I explain in the next two sections. In Ngã Ba Kim, Mr Che became the key local intermediary between Hmong villagers and Chinese or Vietnamese wholesalers of pơ mu timber. He remembered that his profit margin after costs (principally gasoline and bribes) had been between 20 and 30 per cent, compared to 20 per cent when selling orchids (MCC NTFP trader Che 24-05-2014).

Between 1993 and 1996, most villagers in Nả Hàng B, as respondents there confirmed, went to the forest to cut and mill pơ mu trees to specific dimensions for sale, primarily to Mr Che. He had supplied villagers with tape measures and explained how Vietnamese wholesalers wanted the wood cut.143 Most villagers went to the forest once or twice a year to cut pơ mu timber, typically 10-12 pieces per household (NHB village head 11-08-2013, 16-07-2012). Apart from buying rice or other household essentials, pơ mu cutting revenues allowed many households to purchase a micro-hydro generator, which was highly desirable before Nả Hàng B was connected to the national electricity grid in the late 1990s (NHB villager 13 04-08-2013).

Respondents recalled further that, once all local pơ mu had been logged, some villagers from Nả Hàng B and neighbouring villages crossed the ridgeline into Chế Tạo commune to cut pơ mu trees there (NHB villager 24 26-10-2013). Soon, however, the Chế Tạo commune leadership intervened. To my knowledge, this was the first time that Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải invoked administrative boundaries to assert territorial claims over forest resources, which I also noticed in other contexts.144

Villagers’ accounts suggest that the temporary cutting of pơ mu lumber for sale did not last as long as the collection of NTFPs for sale (see above), but was more profitable. After the demise of the local opium economy in 1993, selling NTFPs and pơ mu timber were the most significant and accessible income opportunities for Nả Hàng B villagers. Interestingly, this forest income was distributed quite evenly and did not increase socio-economic differentiation, also because the pleasant scent of its aromatic oils. This surge in demand expedited the exploitation of Vietnam’s remaining pơ mu stands in the 1990s and early 2000s, including in Sơn La (Hoang Cam 2009) and Hà Tĩnh Provinces (Timmins and Trinh Viet Cuong 2011). 143 Interestingly, villagers also remembered very similar dimensions and prices. Initially, villagers hand-cut wide pơ mu boards of 120x60x6 cm, for which they received VND 30,000 per piece. These dimensions later shifted, likely once trees yielding 60cm wide boards had been decimated, to short, massive timbers of 17x27x70cm. 144 In subsequent chapters, I document how Chế Tạo villagers similarly sought to exclude outsiders from hunting in Chế Tạo commune (see Chapter 8), and how issues of PES distribution have invoked territorial discourses based on commune boundaries (see Chapter 9).

172 villagers typically only cut as much pơ mu wood or collected as many NTFPs as they needed to supply their immediate monetary needs (NHB village head 11-08-2013). As I understand it, this actually slowed the exploitation of pơ mu in the mid-1990s, when the priority for most households in Nả Hàng B was the expansion of terraced rice land, and monetary needs were still limited, as fertilizer was still subsidized. The eventual demise of sellable forest products was due to their limited supply and the lack of sustainable management of the harvest. I found no evidence that the commercial exploitation of certain NTFPs and pơ mu timber was accelerated by Hmong villagers seeking to maximize their profits or accumulate surplus income.

In the mid-1990s, the Forest Protection Department (FPD) and SFE increased their efforts to control the exploitation of pơ mu timber, but failed to curb local pơ mu exploitation (MCC official 3 27-05-2014). Prior to this, there had been very little state control of the informal collection and trade of timber, orchids and other NTFPs, and there would have been limited legal grounds to do so prior to the 1994 forest protection law (MCC NTFP trader Che 26-05-2014). Vietnam’s 1993 ban on the export of raw logs therefore neither affected Hmong livelihoods nor the exploitation of pơ mu timber in Mù Cang Chải. The 1997 general logging ban, which was enforced more vigorously, came too late to curb the illegal pơ mu trade in Mù Cang Chải (MCC official 3 27-05-2014). Although laws and policies for forest protection were being passed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and the Prime Minister, SFEs in neighbouring Sơn La continued logging pơ mu extensively until supplies there declined in the early 2000s (Hoang Cam 2009).

In the following chapters, I will show that the 2006 establishment of the protected area around Chế Tạo similarly came too late to protect the remaining forest wildlife in Chế Tạo. Nowadays, the pơ mu stands that have remained in particularly remote locales have been attracting dedicated illegal loggers to Chế Tạo, which local Hmong villagers condemn (see Chapter 7). Because national and international interventions for forest conservation, which I cover in the next chapter, arrived in Mù Cang Chải after the market demand for NTFPs and pơ mu timber emerged in the 1990s, forest conservation and the PA incurred low opportunity costs for Hmong villagers in Púng Luông. In turn, Chế Tạo villagers did not have access to the market opportunities of the 1990s, and managed the harvest of pơ mu trees quite differently, which illustrates the contemporary significance of customary property relations.

173 6.2.3. How villagers in Chế Tạo managed to keep (and sell) some of their pơ mu trees

Unlike villagers in Púng Luông and neighbouring communes, villagers across the ridgeline in Chế Tạo did not cut pơ mu timber for sale, as hauling timber across the ridge would have been too arduous. Compared to villagers in Nả Hàng B, they also had faced less land scarcity, food insecurity and dependency on monetary income while expanding paddy cultivation in the 1990s, as I explained in the preceding chapter. However, Chế Tạo villagers were also facing dwindling supplies of pơ mu in the 1990s, and most of those I interviewed remembered some households engaging in a race for the last pơ mu trees, which they cut for future use in house construction. This final rush on the pơ mu lasted for up to four years in the mid-late 1990s, as villagers variously remember, keeping in mind that some households had also cut pơ mu trees to keep before then. The households who engaged in this race were mostly those with multiple sons and typically cut three to four trees for each son who would have to build a house in the future.145 Most of these trees have since been used, but 11 of the 35 households I interviewed in Chế Tạo still kept a few pơ mu trees in the forest, 15 to 20 years after falling them. Villagers who cut pơ mu trees for future use could assume individual property over them, without needing to worry that others would steel them (CT villager 34 22-07-2013).

Owning several pơ mu trees, some Chế Tạo households held a valuable form of natural capital but had no way of converting it to financial capital, until the 35-kilometre dirt road to Chế Tạo was completed in 1998. Being a protected species, the sale of pơ mu timber is illegal in Vietnam, but there is a large black market fuelled by high prices for the rare wood. Villagers suggested that, if sawn into slabs of typical dimensions, each pơ mu tree could be worth up to 160 million VND (8000 USD), which correlates with timber prices I heard about. This equates to more than three times the average annual cash income (from PES and cardamom, see below) of the 35 Chế Tạo households I collected income data from. Interestingly, the greatest challenge of bringing pơ

145 Of the villagers I asked if they engaged in the race for pơ mu, some explained that they did not. Most of them cited either a lack of time and labour at the time, if they had several young children, for instance, or because they only had one son and hence did not have the need to cut pơ mu for future use, as one son typically remains in his parental household in Hmong societies (see Chapter 4). Interestingly, I only heard of very few villagers engaging in this race to cut pơ mu tree with future coffin making in mind, possibly because they would have needed to be less selective in the choice of tree than those who were seeking to claim the best trees for house building. The latter requires particularly straight and clear trunks that split easily for making roofing shingles and wall boards. In turn, the four pơ mu slabs, often 10cm thick, which are traditionally used for a coffin, are typically sawn or hewn, and therefore virtually any pơ mu tree could be used for that. Nevertheless, of course some of the pơ mu trees cut in advance by Chế Tạo villagers during the 1990s could have been intended for coffin making.

174 mu timber to the market would not necessarily be smuggling the timber through the busy roadside town of Mù Cang Chải and past the district-level Forest Protection Department (FPD). Villagers could obtain a permit for the transport of pơ mu timbers to a different Hmong village if the wood is intended for coffin making (MCC FPD Tua 22-05-2014). The FPD official cited explained this after I told him that, on one of my drives to Chế Tạo, I saw a group of eight motorbikes, each of them transporting a long slab of pơ mu wood.146 The informal policy of allowing Hmong villagers to transport coffin wood is one example of Hmong FPD officials sidestepping national forest protection legislation to accommodate Hmong cultural and livelihood needs (see also Chapter 8). However, it could facilitate the illegal sale of pơ mu wood. Therefore, I tried to find out if Chế Tạo villagers had been able to or inclined to sell pơ mu some of their timber.

Most Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed seemed to value the cultural value of their pơ mu reserves more than their potential monetary value. Some respondents suggested they could not sell any pơ mu lumber due to formal restrictions. Others stated that they would rather keep the trees for future use than rely on other timber species for house construction, which has been the norm in Nả Hàng B since the late 1990s (see above). One villager, who still has nine pơ mu trees (more than any other household I know of) and no sons who will need to build a house, expressed some hope for the government to lift the ban on selling pơ mu wood (CT villager 27 20-07-2013). Interestingly, he also talked about whole truck loads of pơ mu timber being transported to Mù Cang Chải in the past, which would have been highly illegal. Another villager, who became close friends with my assistant Pha, told Pha that he had driven some of these trucks. He further recounted how his truck was once stopped by two FPD officers, whom we also knew well, but this did not stop him, as he could wield some linking social capital to senior officials. Without even needing to wind down the window to negotiate with them, as he emphasized, he supposedly called a district official, who called one of the FPD officers to instruct him to let our friend and his truck pass. Our friend suggested that the official who intervened knew of his plan of

146 One of the drivers was from Chế Tạo village and greeted me by name, but the others were from a different village in Chế Tạo, as was the owner of the wood. I never found out if the timber was intended for sale or for the making of (two) coffins. Judging by their dimensions, they could have been either (MCC NTFP trader 3 26-05- 2014). One key informant in Ngã Ba Kim reported he had bought two such pieces of timber for 16 million dong (800 USD) several years prior (MCC NTFP trader 3 26-05-2014).

175 transporting the wood and later received a share of the substantial profit that would have been made by selling a truck load of pơ mu timber.147

Although I could not confirm whether whole truck loads of pơ mu timber ever left Chế Tạo, our friend’s story, even if entirely fabricated, illustrates how appealing the idea is to bring villagers’ valuable pơ mu reserves to the market. His story’s specifics of passing through roadside checkpoints with a truckload of illegal timber and colluding with officials by wielding social capital mirror published accounts of illegal logging in Vietnam (Hoang Cam 2011; Sikor and To Xuan Phuc 2011; To Xuan Phuc, Mahanty, et al. 2014; To Xuan Phuc 2015). Such accounts illustrate that “corruption is an institutionalized system … forged from state authority and moulded around local social power through systems of social capital” as Robbins (2000:423) finds about corruption in India’s forest protection agencies.

The different contexts of Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo show that market access is but one factor required for villagers to benefit from forest income opportunities, as many villagers were seemingly not inclined to sell their pơ mu reserves. For those who were, the road from Mù Cang Chải to Chế Tạo provided market access at the right time. Given that this was shortly after the supply of pơ mu from Púng Luông had ended (around 1996), it is plausible that pơ mu traders and intermediaries (typically ethnic Kinh) started targeting Chế Tạo as a source region. Taking into account our friend’s age and life history, any transport of pơ mu wood from Chế Tạo that he drove must have taken place after the year 2000, possibly much more recently. This would have likely required the collusion with FPD officials, given that interventions and awareness for forest conservation started to build from the early 2000s (see Chapter 7). In the following section, I show that this did not stop Mù Cang Chải from seemingly becoming a significant node in the regional illegal trade of NTFPs, apparently in collusion with local FPD officials.

147 What makes this story somewhat plausible is that our friend from Chế Tạo has been working as a truck driver since 2008 and previously worked as a driver for district officials. During that time he established, in collusion with police officials, a lucrative scheme to help many Hmong villagers from Mù Cang Chải, many of whom were illiterate, to pass the written test for a drivers licence. Collecting around 1 million VND (50 USD) from each villager, he was able to accumulate significant monetary wealth over several years. He also shared other stories of how he earned and lost vast amounts of money, and how he could wield his social capital towards police officials on other occasions, although I could never be sure how much of his stories was true.

176 6.2.4. Contemporary NTFP trade in Mù Cang Chải

Despite increasing forest law enforcement in Vietnam, the illegal harvest of NTFPs for export to China poses increasing pressure on Vietnam’s forests and provides lucrative income opportunities to dedicated NTFP traders and collectors (Morris and An Van Bay 2002; Völker and Waibel 2010). The local NTFP economy in Mù Cang Chải has changed markedly since the 1990s, ironically now involving fewer local collectors and NTFPs, but much greater volumes of forest products that are sourced from elsewhere and pass through the small town. I will here provide my insights into this contemporary NTFPs trade, which helps set the stage for my further analysis of local forest governance in Chapter 7.

In Section 6.2.1, I recounted how Mr Che became the local NTFP intermediary and, according to his accounts, the richest man in Mù Cang Chải, until his business dissipated with the local decline of forest products in the late 1990s. The volume of his NTFP trade, however, is dwarfed by that of a young couple, also ethnic Kinh, who settled in Mù Cang Chải in 2008 and have since become significant NTFP wholesalers for the wider region of north-western Vietnam. Compared to Mr Che, they have established a much wider network of NTFP suppliers, who send their products on public buses from as far away as Nghệ An Province, over 500km from Mù Cang Chải. They have been buying several hundred tons of different roots, leaves, grasses, mushrooms and fungi each year (see Figure 6.1), which they transport to Lao Cai and sell to Chinese wholesalers there (MCC NTFP trader 1 23-05-2014).

Figure 6.1: Some of the NTFPs for sale in Mù Cang Chải (in May 2014)

According to the NTFP-trading couple, Chinese market demand had been dictating the range of NTFPs that are exploited in Vietnam, adding several new species each year. They emphasized

177 that the prices their Chinese buyers pay fluctuate unpredictably, and that they are more vulnerable to market forces than local villagers collecting NTFPs, to whom they offer more stable prices. The intermediaries do, of course, reap greater profits than actors below them in the commodity chain.

Over the past five years, the young NTFP traders have witnessed several NTFPs becoming rare or unavailable due to over-harvesting, and the total annual volume of NTFPs they trade has been declining, although their network of suppliers has been expanding. The husband highlighted the so-called perfume grass (Cỏ nhung) as the most rare and most valuable species he and his wife buy, paying 150,000 VND per gram (equivalent to an astounding 7500 USD/kg).148 Mr Che started buying this tiny leafy plant from local villagers in the early 1990s (see above), and some Chế Tạo villagers collected it around 2001, but it was not nearly as valuable as it is today, even in relative monetary terms (CT villager 33 15-12-2012a). Mang, one of few Chế Tạo villagers who still regularly collects NTFPs to sell, has found perfume grass in the remote forests around Chế Tạo, but noted that there are only few NTFP and orchid species that he can find and sell. He looks out for them whenever he’s in the forest and, per year, he typically sells approximately 6-7 million VND (300-350 USD) worth of NTFPs to the young couple (CT villager Mang 28-11- 2013). They noted that Mang is one of their few local suppliers, but not the largest (MCC NTFP trader 1 23-05-2014).149

As one of Chế Tạo’s poorest households, Mang barely has enough rice for the year, very little corn land, few livestock, and a low cardamom income of around 4 million VND (200 USD) per year (CT villager Mang 09-12-2012). Therefore, collecting NTFPs constitutes a vital source of monetary income for his household. Mang noted that most villagers in Chế Tạo know which NTFPs can be sold and where in the forest they can be found, but suggested that few others regularly collect NTFPs to sell. This is in line with accounts of other villagers and commune officials (CT official 1 14-07-2012). As I noted in the preceding chapter, I got the impression that many villagers, both in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, associate selling NTFPs and eating forest

148 Perfume grass (Cỏ nhung) from the Hoàng Liên Sơn range has been noted in Vietnamese media for being particularly hard to find and fetching prices of over 100 million VND/kg (5000 USD) (VTC 2012) 149 As another example, the wife mentioned a man from Nậm Khắt commune (neighbouring Púng Luông and also bordering on the protected area, from whom she had recently bought 30kg of a valuable fungus species for 1.5 million VND/kg. His total revenue of 45 million VND (2250 USD), even if shared with fellow collectors, is very substantial compared to typical household earnings in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B.

178 foods with the difficult era of swiddening and forest dependence. Respondents commonly noted that they collected NTFPs in the past, and their accounts suggest that there was a common rush to extract specific NTFPs in the early 2000s, once the road to Mù Cang Chải provided market access. However, the natural supply of these species quickly declined, much like it happened in the 1990s in Púng Luông.

In Nả Hàng B, villagers confirmed that there were no NTFPs left in the local forests that could be harvested for sale. The exception is a small apple-like fruit, known in Vietnam as ‘Hmong apple’ (táo mèo) or Sơn tra (Docynia indica), which grows mostly outside the forest around Nả Hàng B and elsewhere in the region.150 Since villagers maintain no property relations over the wild trees, there is an annual rush to pick the apples each year. Interestingly, the commune leadership in Púng Luông manages the harvest by prohibiting villagers from harvesting the fruit prematurely (NHB villager 22 16-08-2013). Villagers who participate in the annual apple harvest can earn between 100,000 and 250,000 VND (5-12.5 USD) for two to three days of picking apples, which most villagers I asked consider barely worth their labour.

A provincial initiative has been planning to expand the cultivation of this apple species in Mù Cang Chải (Viet Nam News 2015), and a pilot project gave two households in Nả Hàng B enough tree seedlings to each establish two hectares of apple trees (NHB village head 13-08- 2013). As several villagers confirmed that suitable land is limited, any expansion of apple cultivation will require a trade-off in land use between conservation and livelihood objectives.

6.2.5. The tenuous links between forest degradation and forest income

In summary, throughout this section I have shown how the dynamics of natural supply, market demand, as well as villagers’ market access and dependence on forest income, largely in this order of significance, have shaped successive patterns NTFP and pơ mu harvest and sale in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. Following sedentarisation, Hmong villagers became dependent on government hand-outs and monetary income and therefore returned to the forest in the 1990s to harvest NTFPs for sale. Forest resources thus temporarily shifted from being natural capital to becoming economic capital in Hmong livelihoods. My understanding from villagers’ accounts is

150 These wild apples were one of four NTFPs villagers could sell to government shops during the subsidy period (see Chapter 5). Nowadays, they sell the fruit to Kinh traders in Ngã Ba Kim, who either use them to make the popular “Hmong apple wine” (rượu táo mèo) or sell them to industrial distilleries in the lowlands.

179 that this short era of forest exploitation ironically caused more forest degradation than the vilified practices of composite swidden agriculture did over multiple generations. However, comparing forest degradation that resulted from these different phases of forest use is methodologically problematic and ontologically contentious, as it requires a valuation of forest quality beyond material properties. Similarly contentious is the evaluation of cardamom cultivation, as well as the valuation of forest quality for the governance of payments for ecosystem services (PES), which I illustrate in the following section and in Chapter 9, respectively.

The shifting patters of forest exploitation partially confirm two common theories of environmental degradation, namely that rural roads can provide market and forest access and can thus facilitate the commercial exploitation of previously inaccessible forest areas (Laurance et al. 2009; Rudel et al. 2009). Secondly, villagers’ forest use suggests that forest exploitation decreases with increasing incomes, as per the theory of the Kuznet curve (cf. Duraiappah 1998; Mills and Waite 2009). The 1998 completion of the road to Chế Tạo initially facilitated the exploitation of NTFPs, but rising household incomes and decreasing forest dependence prevented a whole-sale exploitation of Chế Tạo’s reserves of timber and NTFPs. Prior to that, throughout the 1990s, forest exploitation was mostly driven by local villagers’ need for forest income, particularly in areas with better market access than Chế Tạo, such as in Púng Luông.

Regarding access to forest income opportunity and their effects on household differentiation, households in Nả Hàng B benefitted similarly from the sale of wild NTFPs, according to villagers’ accounts, partly because NTFPs and pơ mu trees were under open access. On the other side of the ridgeline, villagers in Chế Tạo participated very differently in the local race for the last pơ mu trees, and households’ endowment with pơ mu reserves was very variable. While some households own several pơ mu trees of substantial market value, only few of them are inclined and able to bring them to Mù Cang Chải for sale. Regardless of how feasible and common it has been for villagers to transport pơ mu timber by motorbike or by truck to Mù Cang Chải, not all of them would have the specific forms of linking and bonding social capital to FPD officials, timber traders and fellow villagers to organize the transport and sale of illegal pơ mu timber. From a livelihoods perspective, selling the valuable pơ mu timber may be a rational choice. However, partly due to the cultural importance of pơ mu wood and the challenges involved in its illegal selling, nearly a third of the households in my sample had been keeping

180 their pơ mu trees and valuing them for future use. From a conservation perspective, the milling and sale of pơ mu trees that have long been cut arguably does not further forest degradation (since the damage has been done), unlike past and contemporary practices of harvesting increasingly rare NTFPs.

The young ethnic Kinh couple, who have made Mù Cang Chải a regional thoroughfare for the illegal NTFP trade, only established their business in 2008, when local supplies and sales of NTFPs had largely declined. Although they had been expanding their network of suppliers and the range of products they buy, their overall trade volume had been declining, as noted. Their business had benefited from the demise of some of the last wild NTFPs from the forests of the north-western highlands, which they were well aware of. Nevertheless, when I asked them about the future prospects of their wholesale trade, they showed more concern that their trade links to Chinese wholesalers could collapse than that the natural supply of NTFPs might decline. Neither did they worry about a crack-down on their operation by local enforcement agencies, as they rely on to regular kick-back payments to local FPD officials to operate their business (MCC NTFP trader 1 18-05-2014, 23-05-2014).151

This case of a wholesale NTFP trader operating unimpededly and moving hundreds of tons of illegal NTFPs through Mù Cang Chải illustrates that corruption is not due to an absence of institutions or control, but is itself a remarkably stable institution built on interdependence of colluding actors. In this case of NTFP trade, corruption “puts selective pressure on some elements of a natural system while bypassing others”, as most NTFP species had not been affected (Robbins 2000:423). Notably, it seems that Chinese market demand has not fuelled the exploitation of the many NTFPs typically used by Hmong herbalists and shamans in Chế Tạo, who confirmed that they can still readily be found in the wild (CT villager 51 17-07-2013; CT villager 10 21-11-2012; CT villager 37 25-07-2013).

Nowadays, only very few households in Chế Tạo harvest the remaining NTFPs, as cardamom cultivation, conservation payments and government employment provide higher and more

151 The wife explained that a specific officer from the FPD station periodically stops by their shop to demand payment, which she portrayed as more of a nuisance than a threat. They both felt safe enough to provide me with ample insights into their business, well aware that I was affiliated with the local FPD. One of my contacts there noted that he was aware of the illegal NTFP trade passing through Mù Cang Chải. He suggested that several attempts had been made to shut their business down, but offered no explanation as to why it was still operating.

181 dependable incomes. I will cover these three primary sources of income, as well as others, over the three next sections. I will highlight that villagers’ access to these new forms of income had not been equitable, which had resulted in greater socio-economic differentiation in Chế Tạo than prior revenues from selling open access resources, such as NTFPs and pơ mu wood in the 1990s.

6.3. Cardamom cultivation as the final frontier of forest income

Villagers’ opportunities of selling wild NTFPs and pơ mu timber that emerged in the 1990s in Mù Cang Chải were informal and short-lived. The only forest product that contributes substantially to household incomes in Nả Hàng B nowadays, and much more so in Chế Tạo, is black cardamom (Amomum aromaticum Roxb., known in Vietnamese as thảo quả and in Hmong as haws). Cardamom is a shade-loving, herbaceous plant that grows under the forest canopy in specific montane forest environments (see Chapter 4). As villagers actively cultivate and manage their cardamom fields in the forest, over which they hold customary property regimes, cardamom cultivation differs fundamentally from the collection of wild NTFPs discussed above. Here, I examine how some villagers have engaged in cardamom cultivation and represent their assessment of its sustainability. In the context of prior patterns of forest use, cardamom cultivation has become the final frontier of forest income for Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải and is tolerated by forest law enforcement (see Chapter 8).

6.3.1. Property relations for cardamom cultivation

Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải have only been cultivating cardamom since the early 2000s, as cardamom was not produced in Mù Cang Chải during the centrally-planned economy of the 1970s (see Section 5.4.2). Following trade liberalisation with China in the 1990s, market demand and informal cardamom cultivation expanded significantly, particularly in the northern reaches of the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range, such as around Sa Pa district (Lào Cai Province) (de Beer 1993; Sowerwine 2004a; Turner 2010a). In the late 1990s, several provincial governments promoted cardamom as a cash crop and opium substitution crop for poverty-ridden highlands (NGO 6 19- 12-2012). In 1997, the district government of Mù Cang Chải offered cardamom seedlings to

182 volunteering households in Chế Tạo village, as well as other communes, but provided insufficient guidance on how to cultivate them (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013).152

In 2001, a charismatic and well-off villager obtained fresh cardamom seedlings from his in-laws in La Pán Tẩn commune (Mù Cang Chải district), who had also participated in the government trial (CT villager 33 22-07-2013). Building on their experience, he planted the cardamom in the old-growth forest while tending to his indigo field there. Once the bushes started bearing fruit, he and his cousin expanded cardamom cultivation significantly, and they now produce more cardamom than any other household in Chế Tạo. A second pioneer of cardamom cultivation in Mù Cang Chải is a Hmong flute maker from Nả Háng Tâu village (Púng Luông commune), who planted cardamom plants he had received from relatives in Sa Pa district in 2001 (Nả Háng Tâu villager 1 12-08-2013).153 These processes illustrate that bonding social capital within kinship networks endowed these villagers with the necessary assets to become, to my knowledge, Mù Cang Chải’s first successful cardamom growers. Once the seeds and the knowledge to grow cardamom had become more common a few years later, access to suitable land, as well as labour availability, became the key assets to enable other villagers to grow cardamom as well.

Initially, villagers assumed that cardamom grows best in the old growth forest, which more readily provides the cool and moist microclimate that cardamom requires (CT villager 35 22-07- 2013). Once the first plantings showed promising success, a race ensued for the most accessible and promising places to plant cardamom in the old forest, which had always been under open access. In the early 2000s, villagers used the old forest occasionally to harvest rattan, medicinal NTFPs or to periodically collect specific NTFPs to sell. However, the rush on the best places to plant cardamom brought more villagers back to the old forest, as some respondents in Chế Tạo suggested. Following Hmong customs, they claimed individual property over their newly planted

152 The five participating households in Chế Tạo planted their seedlings in home gardens, where cardamom bushes, if they survive the exposure to the sun, do not produce any fruit. To grow well and bear fruit, cardamom requires a cool and damp microclimate in the shade of the forest canopy, often found along stream gullies (Buckingham 2004). 153 In 2001, he delivered a flute to a relative in Nam Cong commune in southern Sa Pa District (Lào Cai Province), who gave him cardamom seedlings and the vital knowledge of how to grow them. He planted extensively and with great success in the higher elevated and cold forests around Khau Phạ Pass, on the boarder to Văn Chấn District. He now harvests up to five tons of fresh cardamom a year, which makes him one of the biggest growers in Mù Cang Chải, to my knowledge. He subsequently shared his knowledge quite selectively with his kin in his village, where he estimates that forty per cent of all households grow cardamom (Nả Háng Tâu villager 1 12-08-2013). In addition to cardamom income of approximately 100 million VND per year (5000 USD), his skill as a renowned flute maker provided him with a second lucrative source of income. He estimated that he made around 50 flutes per year, which he sold for 2 million VND (100 USD) each, doubling his household income from cardamom cultivation.

183 fields, just as they had in the past over swidden fields. With time, villagers also started planting cardamom in less than ideal places in the old forest, as well as in their former swidden fields, which had regenerated to mixed secondary forests.

Although villagers had not used their old swidden land for ten to fifteen years, customary property regimes still prevailed, as I noted in the preceding chapter. During the era of shifting cultivation, swidden fields had been selected for the cultivation of upland maize and rice, and only some households had been lucky that their prior swiddens lended themselves to cardamom cultivation. Their previously unused swidden lands had thus become valuable assets, and even if they did not plant cardamom on it, their customary tenure over the land was still respected by other villagers, as several anecdotes I collected in Chế Tạo illustrate.154

Once a cardamom field is established, regardless whether in primary or secondary forest, it becomes an asset of natural capital that can even be sold within or beyond village boundaries, although I only know of one such case in Nả Hàng B. In this case, a villager from neighbouring Mý Háng Tâu village was in urgent need for money to pay a district-sanctioned compensation of 20 million VND (1000 USD) to a family whose child he had hit with his motorcycle, breaking her leg. His most valuable household asset, apart from his rice land, was a sizable cardamom field in the old forest, which he sold for 11 million VND (550 USD) to a villager in Nả Hàng B, whom I got to know well. Pha and I accompanied the two men to investigate the cardamom field, as did another villager who they recruited as a witness for the transfer of property. I could observe that boundary lines between different villagers’ cardamom fields can be elusive, and the seller showed the extent of his cardamom field by pointing out singular cardamom bushes that marked the boundary.

These cases of villagers asking about, borrowing or buying fellow villagers’ cardamom land illustrate how customary property regimes maintain their socio-political legitimacy as long as they are sanctioned by social practice (cf. Sikor and Lund 2009). I have illustrated how customary Hmong property relations have been adapted to different forest products, enabling villagers to buy and sell cardamom fields, pơ mu trees, construction timber from household

154 For instance, a female interviewee in Chế Tạo mentioned that other villagers regularly ask to plant cardamom on her household’s unused swidden land, but she and her husband prefer to keep the land and the opportunity for their sons to capitalize on in future (CT villager 29 21-07-2013).

184 firewood plots, as well as paddy land. Since villagers commonly legitimized these property relations, it did not matter that these forest resources were within the PA or its buffer zone and thus under formal state ownership. Similarly, the fact that cultivation and extraction of forest products was formally illegal had not stopped villagers from investing labour into their cardamom fields. While they could rely on an informal policy of lenient forest law enforcement by village patrol teams (see Chapter 7), they needed to protect their cardamom crops themselves. The theft of near-ripe cardamom was a latent threat that villagers managed by either harvesting their crop prematurely or, if they grew a lot of cardamom, by sleeping in the forests for several weeks prior to harvest time.155 Every year there had been cases of cardamom theft in Nả Hàng B and neighbouring villages (NHB villager 17 09-08-2013; NHB village head 15-08-2013; Nả Hàng A village head 17-11-2013), but less often in Chế Tạo, partly because social cohesion within the village was higher, as some villagers explained (CT villager 35 22-07-2013).

As long as villagers do not have to protect their cardamom crops against theft, cardamom cultivation requires relatively little labour, which fits well into a typical agricultural labour calendar (CT villager 33 15-12-2012a; cf. Tugault-Lafleur and Turner 2009). However, some hard labour needs to be invested in clearing the understory of the forest to establish a cardamom plantation. Therefore, the lack of available household labour during the race for cardamom land was the most cited reason why some villagers did not have any cardamom.156 Even among the households who grew cardamom, I found that their yields and incomes differ significantly for multiple reasons, and cardamom incomes had introduced a novel parameter of household differentiation.

155 The former strategy, harvesting and selling cardamom before it is fully ripe, incurs a loss of yield and revenue, also because smaller, pre-mature cardamom typically fetches a lower price than fully ripened fruit, but several villagers I interviewed saw themselves forced to do this. The latter strategy of keeping an eye on the cardamom plants around the clock requires significant labour input, although several households with cardamom close to each others’ can pool their labour and take the patrolling in turn. 156 A household without any sons, for instance, was unlikely to have any cardamom due to a lack of labour. In response to my question if they grew any cardamom, a mother of four daughters was quick to say “No, we don’t have any sons” (CT villager 47 29-11-2012). Other household heads explained that their sons were living outside of the village, attending school when other villagers started planting cardamom (NHB villager 24 26-10-2013). Many respondents who did not have any cardamom simply said that they missed the boat or were initially not convinced that their labour would pay off.

185 6.3.2. The variability and sustainability of cardamom income

In the villages of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, 43 and 85 per cent, respectively, of all households have some cardamom income, according to the village heads and a survey conducted by FPD officers in October 2013.157 Cardamom growers often lamented that both yields and the local sale price of cardamom vary unpredictably due to seasonal climate variability and market forces. In addition, both the productivity of different sites and the stem density vary considerably, particularly as many households have had to plant on marginal land (Buckingham 2004; Killeen 2012). Therefore, a household’s area of cardamom cultivation, which the FPD survey sought to collect, is a poor predictor for its cardamom income. I rather asked household heads for their cardamom yield in weight and their cardamom income, which respondents could provide more confidently. I also collected villagers’ conceptions and concerns surrounding cardamom production in the context of their livelihoods, which I often found more insightful than quantitative data.

In Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, there were six and three households, respectively, that grew significantly more cardamom than others, because they were amongst the first villagers to stake the most promising growing spots in the old growth forest, which had been customarily open- access.158 Once villagers had claimed most of them (within two to three seasons), villagers started planting cardamom in their former swidden areas, only some of which are suitable for cardamom cultivation. Due to the dynamics of villagers claiming cardamom land, and because the productivity of cardamom sites varies significantly, household cardamom incomes vary

157 Two officers from the FPD were sent to survey all households in all buffer zone villagers and document which households planted how many hectares of cardamom, in which years, and in which section of the PA. However, from my experience collecting data on cardamom cultivation, I cannot imagine that survey respondents could confidently know the spatial extent of their cardamom fields or where on a map these are located, although the FPD officer conducting the survey in Chế Tạo suggested that they do. I further suspect that some respondents underreported both how much cardamom they grow and how long they have been growing it, given significant deviations from the data I collected in several specific households, which are identified by name in the government survey results. I consider the most reliable data from these surveys to be the number of households per village that cultivate cardamom. 158 Seeking a qualitative understanding of the emergence and variability of cardamom income and its role in household livelihoods, I stratified my household samples in each village to include all of these ‘high-yielding’ cardamom households, where interviews on cardamom were often particularly insightful. Therefore, I do not represent statistical measures of cardamom income from my samples, as these are not representative of the sample population. Nevertheless, reflective of the general differences between the two locales is that the mean cardamom income of my sampled households in 2012 was 2.2 million VND in Chế Tạo and a mere 210,000 VND in Nả Hàng B (110 USD and 10.50 USD). Household cardamom incomes ranged up to 60 million VND (3000 USD) in Chế Tạo and up to 90 million VND (4500 USD) in Nả Hàng B, in the case of Mr Tong’s household, which I will return to later.

186 hugely and have thus contributed to new patterns of socio-economic differentiation in both villages; particularly so in Chế Tạo, where 57 per cent of households do not grow any cardamom, but most of those who do, have much higher yields than cardamom growers in Nả Hàng B.

Although cardamom cultivation quickly became an important source of income for many Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải, both cardamom growers and FPD officials have their doubts if it is a sustainable livelihood practice. Many emphasize that the forests around Chế Tạo are not as good for growing cardamom as those further north. Indeed, the southern reaches of the Hoàng Liên Sơn Range are lower in elevation, hotter and dryer than the cool and misty forests around Sa Pa, for instance (Buckingham 2004). Not only are yields per area lower in Mù Cang Chải, but cardamom bushes around Chế Tạo seem to have a shorter productive lifespan than under ideal conditions. Some villagers have noticed their yields decline after only seven years, even in good locales (MCC FPD Sinh 14-08-2013).

Another concern that some cardamom growers mentioned is that it had become increasingly difficult to find enough firewood around their cardamom fields to dry their crop in the forest.159 This, however, can be compensated for with additional labour by gathering firewood from further away or carrying out the harvest in fresh weight, if need be. The forest degradation from drying cardamom in situ is one of several ecological impacts of cardamom cultivation, alongside the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services of the understory, which is extensively cleared and replaced with cardamom bushes (Sowerwine 2004a; Pham Thu Huong and Dao Ngoc Tien 2007Ducourtieux, 2006 #2336). Both published accounts by conservation organizations, as well as several key informants I interviewed invariably portray cardamom cultivation as ecologically highly destructive and unsustainable, often with little regard to its significance for local livelihoods (Buckingham 2004; Swan and O'Reilly 2004; Eames and Mahood 2011). The case of cardamom cultivation thus sits at the nexus of different conservation and development agendas for Mù Cang Chải, which I discuss in the subsequent chapter.

159 Villagers who have enough cardamom to make it worth drying it before carrying it out of the forest typically dry the freshly harvested cardamom fruit spread out over a bamboo grid or wire mesh suspended several feet above a low fire for up to six days. Most Chế Tạo cardamom growers but only few in Nả Hàng B harvest enough cardamom to make it worth drying it in the forest.

187 Interestingly, most cardamom growers I interviewed in Chế Tạo were more concerned about the economic sustainability of their cardamom cultivation than its ecological impacts or sustainability. Several respondents were concerned that the export link to China might cease to exist one day, much like the young NTFP traders in Mù Cang Chải suggested, who may have inspired this concern among villagers. Other villagers had come to see cardamom revenues as less attractive and dependable than other sources of income, particularly conservation payments, which had more recently become a significant source of income for many households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, albeit with important differences between the two locales. I examine the emergence of conservation payments in the following section before turning to other sources of monetary income.

6.4. From forest income to conservation payments

Predating cardamom cultivation by several years, the precursor to current Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) were forest protection payments under Programs 327 and 661, which were implemented in the wake of state sedentarisation programs (see Sections 4.5 and 4.6). I here track the rising levels of conservation payments in the context of villagers’ other income opportunities. What is of primary interest to my analysis are villagers’ conceptions and the monetary significance of their early involvement in state forest management.

6.4.1. Conservation payments under Programs 327 and 661

Starting in 1993, Program 327 was implemented in four communes of Mù Cang Chải (including in Púng Luông, but not in Chế Tạo) (MCC official 3 14-08-2013). The national Program provided forest protection payments and reforestation contracts, which constituted the first regular state payments that all households received, regardless of whether they fell below the state poverty line or not. However, villagers in Nả Hàng B conceived of their brief employment for tree planting as a mandatory contribution to a state project, as they receive low payments and were not allocated the reforested land, as was the case elsewhere (Sikor 2001b) (To Xuan Phuc, Tran Huu Nghi, et al. 2014). In 1993, for instance, the 19 households of Nả Hàng B each planted between 0.4 and 1.5 hectares of trees (with 2200 trees per hectare), receiving 36,000 VND (or 90 kg of rice) per hectare (NHB village head 15-08-2013). Further planting activities took place in 1996 and 1997, but, at the same time, most households of Nả Hàng B earned a minimum of 500,000 VND (25 USD) a year from cutting pơ mu timber, as I detailed above. Ironically, they

188 could earn considerably more money from cutting one old pơ mu tree than from planting a hectare of over 2000 young pine trees.

In both Chế Tạo and Púng Luông, reforestation largely took place on abandoned swidden lands, furthering the objective of sedentarisation policies to increase both forest cover and agricultural productivity in upland areas. As most households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B managed to achieve food security through the expansion of paddy land, reforestation did not infringe as much on local livelihoods as it reportedly did in other highland locales, where villagers lost access to agricultural land that was still under use (Sowerwine 2004b; McElwee 2009; To Xuan Phuc 2009). Only more recently, with increasing population density and land scarcity in Púng Luông, some households in Nả Hàng B have come to bear the opportunity costs of reforestation, as they cannot expand their agricultural areas any further.160

Apart from the reforestation activities, villagers in Mù Cang Chải also received forest protection contracts for two to five hectares of secondary forest under Programs 327 and 661 (see Section 4.5.5). Households received a mere 30,000 VND/ha/year under Program 327, which was increased twice under Program 661 to 50,000 VND/ha in 1998 and 100,000 VND/ha in 2003, and doubled again to 200,000 VND (10 USD)/ha in 2009 under Program 30a (MCC FPD Tua 30-07-2013). In return for limited forest use rights and protection payments, villagers were formally required to regularly patrol their forest areas and report any forest law infractions (MCC FPD Sinh 15-08-2013).

While forest protection payments under Program 661 increased household incomes by only two per cent in some places (Wunder et al. 2005), they constituted villagers’ first regular monetary income in Chế Tạo, considering that prior sales of opium (prior to 1993), livestock and possibly NTFPs had been irregular and not dependable. Payment levels under the 661 Program and subsequent PES have been much higher in all villages of Chế Tạo commune than in surrounding communes, because Chế Tạo has a higher ratio of forestland to population. Payment rates for reforestation were also higher under Program 661 than they had been under Program 327, which had not been implemented in Chế Tạo (MCC official 3 15-07-2012). Only around 770 hectares

160 One land-poor villager I talked to lamented that the only land that he could now potentially convert to additional rice terraces had been used for reforestation. However, he was also quick to highlight the environmental services that the plantations provide, namely water conservation for rice production, as well as the PES villagers now receive for the reforested areas (NHB villager 22 16-08-2013).

189 of trees were planted in Chế Tạo commune under Program 661, which was enough for each household of Chế Tạo village to plant around one hectare in 2003 and 2004, for which they received 1.4 million VND/ha (70 USD) (CT official 5 23-11-2012). Some Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed remember this as being quite lucrative, as their access to alternative income sources was limited to livestock sales and the opportunistic collection of NTFPs. At that time, in the early 2000s, no-one was to know how much money some Chế Tạo households would be earning in subsequent years from cardamom cultivation and, eventually, from contemporary levels of payments for ecosystem services (PES).

6.4.2. Livelihood significance of cardamom income and PES

In 2011, villagers in Mù Cang Chải received their first payments for environmental services (PES), which stemmed from a novel fee paid by downstream hydropower companies operating dams along the Black River and its tributaries. However, payment levels per household and the distribution of payments vary significantly between different communes of Mù Cang Chải, which I examine in Chapter 9. My analytical focus here remains on villagers’ shifting patterns of monetary income and their implications for village livelihoods, but I will briefly explain how PES levels and distribution differ in Chế Tạo and Púng Luông.

The amount of PES funds that any commune receives depends on its forest area, and payment levels per household are therefore related to the ratio of forest area to population in a given commune. With its large forest area and low population density, Chế Tạo commune receives higher PES funds per household than any other locale in Vietnam that has been studied, to my knowledge. Importantly, the commune leadership distributes these PES funds equally across all households and paid, according to officials I interviewed, 1.2, 1.7 and 3 million VND per person per year in 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively (CT official 7 02-12-2012). However, socio- economic differentiation has increased, as large households receive significantly higher PES than smaller, often young households (see Section 9.6.1).

The uniform distribution of PES per person, which only Chế Tạo commune has adopted, also risks to undermine Vietnam’s formal two-child policy (cf. Goodkind 1995), as it provides a

190 incentive to have more than two children.161 While several villagers and commune officials, mostly from outside Chế Tạo, joked about this, I know of no family in Chế Tạo that actually had additional children due to Chế Tạo’s high PES rates per household member. Interestingly, this effect would stand in contrast to the effects that family size and composition had on socio- economic differentiation in the past. Traditionally, having multiple sons had potentially been an economic liability for land-poor households, and this effect has been exacerbated since the end of shifting cultivation, as I discussed in Section 5.4.2.

Relative to Chế Tạo, Púng Luông commune has less forestland and a much higher population. PES funds per household are therefore lower than in Chế Tạo, but distributed more equitably, based on households’ informal forestland holdings.162 In 2013, households in Nả Hàng B received an average of 2.1 million VND (105 USD), while many Chế Tạo households (with seven or more members) received more than ten times as much (NHB village head 15-08-2013). PES thus made a much smaller contribution to household incomes in Nả Hàng B than they did in Chế Tạo, but many households in Nả Hàng B had better access to market-based income opportunities and were therefore less dependent on PES than their counterparts in Chế Tạo. Most Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed, and particularly those who did not have any cardamom income, were crucially aware that they were highly dependent on PES.

6.4.3. Dependency and differentiation with rising incomes

In this chapter, I have so far examined successive forest-based income opportunities that emerged following state sedentarisation. PES and prior payments for forest protection and reforestation stem from state programs that seek to maintain forest cover, but have not, apart from in Chế Tạo, contributed as substantially to household incomes as the sale of NTFPs, pơ mu timber and cardamom. The sustainability of cardamom cultivation in Mù Cang Chải may be limited, but it quickly became a significant source of household income and socio-economic

161 Officially, families in Chế Tạo should only receive PES for their two eldest children, but all households I interviewed who have more than two children have been receiving PES for each child, and several FPD and commune officials were well aware that this two-child-policy is not enforced with regards to PES in Chế Tạo (MCC FPD Tua 22-05-2014) 162 The commune leadership of Púng Luông allocated forestland to households, albeit without the tenure security of Redbook Certificates, when Program 327 introduced forest protection payments on a per-hectare basis in 1993 (PL official 2 16-08-2013). The variability of these informal forestland holdings per household is less than that of household size and therefore PES levels per household are more equitable in Nả Hàng B than in Chế Tạo, for instance.

191 differentiation, particularly in Chế Tạo. The exceptionally high levels of PES in Chế Tạo and their distribution have also contributed to household differentiation with several problematic implications (see Section 9.3.2).

From a perspective of forest conservation, cardamom cultivation and PES are contradictory, but Vietnam’s PES policy framework provides no disincentive to cardamom cultivation or other forms of forest degradation. From a livelihoods perspective and in villagers’ minds, cardamom cultivation and PES are not mutually exclusive, but villagers conceive of them quite differently in terms of income security and sustainability. Some Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed, for instance, portrayed PES as a lasting livelihood subsidy that they felt entitled to as former swiddeners. As far as I can interpret villagers’ subjectivities, their novel role as provider of ecosystem services has become more integral to their livelihood identity, to use Carr’s (2013) term, than cultivating a novel cash crop like cardamom. In Chapter 9, I consider the role of PES in shaping villagers’ environmentalities.

6.5. Formal employment and bank loans: access to non-forest income

I now examine two sources of financial capital that are not related to forest conservation or exploitation, namely bank loans and income from government employment. These are fundamentally different livelihood practices, but have both been integral to the monetization of village livelihoods and to the shaping of contemporary livelihood identities and discourses. The ratio of households benefitting from government employment is particularly high in Chế Tạo, but the distinction between ordinary villagers and commune cadres was also evident in the discourse of respondents in Nả Hàng B. To access career opportunities in government service, Hmong villagers require specific forms of human, social and financial capital, which makes formal employment a rather exclusive livelihood opportunity. Bank loans have provided all households with access to ample financial capital, but their use of loans and the implications for their livelihoods warrant a careful analysis, which I provide in Section 6.5.3.

6.5.1. Government career opportunities for Hmong villagers

Within few years, from around 2008 to 2012, growing cardamom revenues and conservation payments became the two most significant sources of income for many Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải. Some villagers also have obtained formal employment as governmental staff or

192 teachers, which many view as the most desirable form of income. I sought to understand how villagers access formal career opportunities, and how ordinary villagers relate to commune cadres. This also provided insights into villagers’ livelihood aspirations and identities, which I will try to represent here.

Entry-level positions at commune-level only provide a meagre monthly salary of around 1 million VND (50 USD), but also provide upward mobility and income security. A career in government service typically requires a level of education for which Hmong villagers attend secondary school outside Mù Cang Chải for several years. During my household interviews, it became evident that many Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải, and more in Chế Tạo than in Nả Hàng B, have invested substantial amounts of money into their children’s education, invariably privileging their sons.163 While there are different government programs to subsidize schooling for ethnic minority children, most households I interviewed had to borrow the majority of funds through specific loan programs from the state-owned Vietnam Bank for Social Policies (Ngân hàng Chính sách xã hội, abbreviated here to BSP). Their primary goal of investing in education had been for their children to obtain a career as government official or teacher, as there are very few local career opportunities for Hmong villagers in the private sector.164 With starting salaries of around 5 million VND (250 USD) per month, which can increase up to 10 million VND (500 USD) after several years, employment as a teacher is more desirable and requires higher education than positions within commune-level administration (NHB villager 35 13-11-2013).

Apart from several years of expensive education, obtaining a government position also requires further social and economic capital, as well as “one part luck” (ib qhov hmoov zoo hab), as a teacher from Nả Hàng B put it (NHB villager 35 13-11-2013).165 He happens to be the nephew of the most senior commune-level official (the local Party Secretary, known as Bí thư Đảng ủy xã). His father Tong (who was one of the first and now the richest cardamom grower in Nả Hàng B)

163 I am only aware of one daughter who attended school outside of Mù Cang Chải, although she noted that she was not the only Hmong girl from Mù Cang Chải doing so. 164 I know of only five Hmong villagers from all of Mù Cang Chải who have regular, formal, private-sector employment in the towns of Mù Cang Chải or Ngã Ba Kim, only two of whom are from Nả Hàng B (NHB village head 31-07-2013). I offer some explanations in the following section. 165 Interestingly, this reference to luck is also prominent in the discourse of ethnic Kinh university graduates in urban Vietnam, which Thi Tuyet Tran (2013) analyses. She is one of the few scholarly authors I know of who highlights the issue of corruption in Vietnam’s formal job market, as she explains that urban graduates, not unlike Hmong villagers, need more than a good education to obtain a desirable job.

193 invested heavily in the education of his two sons, and the younger son obtained a position as a commune-level officer. This son became a regular acquaintance of my assistant and me in Nả Hàng B and he emphasized that he only got his job because a former officer was removed due to corruption (PL official 3 16-08-2013). He added that this was particularly fortunate for his father, as he did not have to make the usual lump-sum payment to senior district-level officials for his son to receive a job in government service.

From several conversations I had with villagers in Mù Cang Chải and key informants in Hanoi, I understand that one-time payments to enter government careers are common in Vietnam, although rarely acknowledged in the academic literature. Villagers were readily aware of this informal system, such as a Chế Tạo villager, who had taken out multiple loans totalling 45 million VND (2250 USD) for his three sons to attend school outside of Mù Cang Chải and was crucially aware that he will have to invest additional money for them to actually get jobs (CT villager 61 30-11-2013). Few villagers, however, talked to me openly or in detail about how access to formal employment is mediated by corruption, and several group discussions that reached this topic were cut short.166 From the limited insights I could thus glean, it seems that minimum payments of 10 million VND (500 USD) were necessary to obtain a commune-level position, and closer to 20 million VND (1000 USD) for a job as a teacher in Mù Cang Chải.167

Apart from financial capital for both schooling and kick-back payments, human capital (education), and possibly some “luck”, I got to understand that specific forms of social capital are often required to enter government service. In the conversations I had about this topic, the need for social capital was a less sensitive theme than the role of monetary corruption.168 Several

166 This included household interviews and conversational interviews with villagers, as well as a group discussion with several teachers working in Chế Tạo, none of whom were too comfortable talking about this subject, which was quickly switched. In addition to several local Hmong teachers, most teachers in Chế Tạo were ethnic Kinh from lowland districts of Yen Bai Province. Importantly, like any local Hmong graduates, they recounted still having to pay a minimum of 10 million VND (500 USD) to acquire a job. 167 In turn, obtaining a district-level position might cost up to 50 million VND (2500 USD), some respondents wagered, and my impression is that specific forms of social capital become increasingly important for such positions. Interestingly, I know of four district officials in leading positions, three of whom I interviewed, who are Hmong from either Chế Tạo or “Chế Vượn” village. Notably, membership in the Communist Party is not generally required for positions within the commune administration, except for the leadership positions of the head of the CPC and the Party secretary (PL official 1 22-11-2013). 168 Within my sample of 35 Chế Tạo households, only seven (20 per cent) had income from employment at the CPC, but I estimate that they are underrepresented in my sample. Swan (2004) notes that there are 38 paid positions within the Commune People’s Committee (CPC) of Chế Tạo, but this number may have changed since. I could not obtain extensive data on commune employment, but I know of six officers who are from other villages in Chế Tạo

194 villagers I interviewed, who did not have any household members in formal employment, quite openly expressed frustration that they or their children had limited access to government careers. Referring to his lack of bridging social capital with the commune leadership, one respondent lamented that he had “no cousin to pull [his] hand” (tsi muaj kwv tiy qhum tem). Importantly, sharing clan membership or good social relationships with the commune leadership does not guarantee access to available positions. Scholars have noted that hereditary clan membership endows the Hmong, in general, with strong forms of both bonding social capital at the village level and, beyond that, bridging social capital among Hmong of the same clan who do not know each other (Tapp 2001; Michaud 2006, 2012). Gaining some (inevitably limited) insights into clan politics in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I often got to observe the contemporary importance of social capital within Hmong clans, but also its limits and, in some cases, the “dark side of social capital”, also with regard to accessing employment opportunities (cf. Portes and Landlot 2000; Putnam 2000).169

More generally, several Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed questioned the capacity of commune cadres, lamenting that access through social capital serves to put people in positions of responsibility regardless of their capacity. One older household head was quick to assert this in response to a more general question of mine about development in Chế Tạo (CT villager 13 14- 12-2012). Some of these critical respondents were among those I quote in subsequent chapters for voicing allegations about poor governance within the leadership of Chế Tạo, including in the context of forest law enforcement and PES distribution (see Chapters 8 and 9).

6.5.2. The role of agricultural production in Hmong livelihood identity

I sought to understand, and have represented here, some processes and discourses regarding access to government careers, as I found this to be an effective lens into endogenous conceptions of socio-economic differentiation and the common Hmong “livelihood identity” as peasants (cf. Carr 2013). Interestingly, villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B commonly made an commune and my observation is that most of the other officers are from Chế Tạo village. Therefore, presuming that 30 officers are from within Chế Tạo village, 36 per cent of all village households (30 out of 84) benefit from a government salary. 169 A regular acquaintance in Chế Tạo, the young villager who claimed to have transported pơ mu timber to Mù Cang Chải by the truck load, highlighting his linking social capital to district officials (see Section 6.2.3 above), experienced the “dark side of social capital” when he returned from schooling in Hanoi and had some hope for a government career. However, his uncle, who was a senior commune official at the time, was involved in a family dispute, intervened in the hiring process and prevented our friend from getting a job.

195 important distinction between villagers who were merely “peasants” and those who also served as “government people”.170 Despite the formal role and income of commune officials, “government people are also farmers” (tib neeg kuj cuab twj yos pej xeem huv si) and maintain agrarian livelihoods like other villagers, in addition to their formal employment (NHB villager Tong 07-11-2013). Therefore, most positions at the commune level are not always full-time and allow cadres to fulfill their agricultural duties during labour-intensive times of transplanting and harvesting rice. However, they would typically neither have the time nor the need to cultivate cardamom, for instance. Ironically, while formal income from government employment would put any household above the government poverty line, cardamom income is not – and could not – be accounted for in the official poverty metrics I explained in the preceding chapter. Therefore, a household with substantial income from cardamom cultivation may still be classified as a ‘poor household’ (Hộ nghèo).

A regular salary from government employment is nowadays one of the most significant and most valued economic assets, but I am not aware of any Hmong household in Chế Tạo or Nả Hàng B that has given up their agricultural livelihoods to rely on employment income alone. There are, however, several households who can afford to employ rented labour to transplant and harvest their paddy rice. Only selected households in Chế Tạo that have an income from formal employment, often as teachers or commune cadres, do so, typically employing Thái people from Mường La (CT villager 32 22-07-2013). Similarly, I know of four households in Nả Hàng B who employ Thái villagers from Ngọc Chiến (Mường La, Sơn La), who come to Púng Luông during harvest season to sell their labour (NHB villager Tong 07-11-2013).171

While those villagers who employ agricultural wage labour have seemingly transcended the common Hmong “livelihood identity” as peasants, the primacy of subsistence production still seems to shape the livelihood decisions of most other households. For many Hmong villagers,

170 Villagers in Mù Cang Chải referred commune cadres as teb chaws, which literally means “country” or government people. When referring to state officials at district, provincial or national level, they used kuy cuab as a different term for government. Interestingly, they referred to peasants, typically including themselves, as pej xeem xov dawb (literally meaning ‘white yarn people’), although my assistant suggested that Hmong people from his village near Sa Pa would not use this metaphor. 171 Interestingly, a few Chế Tạo households have also started outsourcing the weaving and sowing of women’s hemp skirts to Thái villagers from Mường La (CT villager 32 22-07-2013; CT villager 36 25-07-2013). This is one of the few changes of modernization I encountered that primarily benefits women, apart from the increasing use of industrial cotton and sewing machines in the 1970s and 80s, respectively, which lightened women’s annual work load in most households (MCC official 4 22-05-2014).

196 this seems to translate into a reluctance to work as wage labourers, which is a poorly-regarded livelihood opportunity that most villagers in Nả Hàng B and other villages close to Mù Cang Chải and Ngã Ba Kim have access to. However, although most households in Nả Hàng B are strapped for cash throughout most of the year, there are only two villagers who are in formal employment in Ngã Ba Kim (NHB village head 31-07-2013). In addition, there were four households in my sample that rely on income from occasional wage labour, but rarely more than ten days a year, as they note. In Kim Nọi commune, located a mere ten-minute drive from Mù Cang Chải town, commune officials were adamant that no villagers work in town, to my surprise, although they could readily find informal work there. To illustrate a shared Hmong identity of being highland peasants, one of them explained that “the Hmong people follow the mountain, the Thaí people follow the river and the Vietnamese follow the road” (Kim Nọi official 2 29-05-2014).

To illustrate the economic importance of subsistence production, Mr Tong, the well-off cardamom farmer from Nả Hàng B mentioned above, noted that his brother, the Party Secretary, “still has to come home to be a farmer” (rov lum tsev ua pej xeem) to feed his family and is still reliant on bank loans to send his three children to school.172 Given his brother’s socio-political standing and relative wealth, his children’s employability is likely higher than that of other local graduates, who will need more time or money or “luck” to obtain one of the limited, local jobs. Villagers’ investments in their children’s education is thus often more of a gamble than the loans Mr. Tong and his brother have taken out for their sons’ education. Even more of a financial liability, however, are arguably the bank loans that other less well-off households have taken out to pay for a buffalo, a motorcycle, or their sons’ weddings, as I will explain in the following section.

6.5.3. The debt trap of micro-finance for subsistence livelihoods

I have emphasized above that access to state employment is mediated by several social institutions and livelihood assets, which makes it a very exclusive opportunity. In turn, rising conservation payments and cardamom incomes have been more broadly accessible and

172 This applies to many Hmong commune officials, but, incidentally, less so to Mr Lenh’s brother, as they are two of the four villagers in Nả Hàng B who rent agricultural labour. As noted above, the luxury of renting labour is an important emic indicator for wealth and differentiation between ‘common’ and privileged villagers, and Mr. Tong and his brother may therefore not be viewed as ‘full farmers’ by other villagers.

197 facilitated the monetization of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải since around 2008. An important state-governed institution that predates, but has been fundamental to this monetization, are preferential bank loans, as I illustrated in the context of rising costs of house building in Nả Hàng B (see Section 5.6.2). Since 2003, the Bank for Social Policies (BSP) has been offering different kinds of loans to ‘poor households’ at low interest rates and low requirements for collateral (following Decree No. 78/2002/ND-CP).173 While commercial banks in Vietnam typically require lenders to have a Redbook certificate over agricultural or other land as a collateral, the BSP readily gives loans to poor households on account of rice land held in informal tenure or of other household assets, such as a buffalo (MCC bank staff 3 20-05-2014; Dufhues et al. 2007). In international comparison, such access to credit is high and has been central to Vietnam’s poverty reduction strategy, although the emergence of a private micro-credit market has been curtailed by state regulation (Nguyen Viet Cuong 2008; Sikor 2012b).174

Figure 6.2: Publically displayed lists of outstanding household bank loans in Púng Luông commune

Having several bank loans totalling ten million dong or much more has become common place in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, where 82 and 75 per cent of all households, respectively, had an

173 Apart from the BSP, a second bank in Mù Cang Chải and an alternative for non-poor households is the local branch of the commercial Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (known in Vietnam as Ngân hàng Nông nghiệp và Phát triển Nông thôn Việt Nam or, in short, by its English name Agribank). 174 To facilitate villagers’ access and applications to BSP loans, each village in Vietnam is divided into several groups of households, and each group has several household representatives and possibly local cadres, who assist with the loan application process and collect interest payments (Sikor 2012b). In addition, four important mass organizations play important roles in the administration of loans, including the Women’s Unions (Hội liên hiệp phụ nữ, typically referred to as Hội phụ nữ), which facilitate women’s access to loans from the BSP (MCC bank staff 3 28-05-2014). While this decentralized process seeks to enhance villagers’ access to credit, several villagers I interviewed claimed that it provides for nepotism and exclusion to mediate villagers’ access to credit, particularly to the only interest-free loan program for ethnic households under exceptional difficulties (Hộ dân tộc thiểu số đặc biệt khó khăn) (CT villager 27 20-07-2013).

198 outstanding bank loan in 2014. I became very interested in how villagers access, conceive of, spend and repay their sizable bank loans.175 In 2008, the government launched Program 30a and offered loans that were interest-free for the first five years (following Decision 579/2009/QĐ- TTg), which encouraged many villagers to take out a loan (MCC bank staff 3 20-05-2014). Village-level data provided by the BSP shows that villagers across Chế Tạo commune, where loan levels nearly tripled between 2008 and 2009, much more readily made use of this offer than villagers in Púng Luông commune, where the same variable increased by only 58 per cent. Since then, debt levels in all villages have been steadily increasing, except for in Chế Tạo village, where a small drop in total outstanding loans between 2013 and 2014 suggests that many households were able to repay their loans taken under Program 30a before having to pay interest.176 In 2014, the average debt of households that have outstanding bank loans was 13.6 and 11.1 million VND in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, respectively (680 and 555 USD). As household income sources and levels differ substantially, particularly in my stratified household sample, it is hard to juxtapose these data with representative income data. Based on my understanding of local livelihoods, it would be particularly difficult for indebted households in Nả Hàng B to repay a loan of 10 million VND without selling a buffalo or paddy land, given that income-poor households were those more likely to take out bank loans. Therefore, the question arises how the increase in financial capital and indebtedness, “the inevitable other side of credit”, have affected villagers’ livelihoods (Gerber 2014:729).

Both development theory and commune officials in Chế Tạo and Púng Luông suggest that access to credit allows poor people to invest in livelihood opportunities that can lift them out of poverty (CT official 6 13-12-2013; PL official 1 16-07-2012; Ahlin and Jiang 2008). However, (semi)- subsistence peasants are vulnerable to being trapped in their debt if they invest loaned money into household assets that do not generate income (Bateman and Chang 2012). Therefore, the

175 Concerning the access to the data I draw from in the forthcoming paragraphs and footnotes, it is noteworthy that personal loan data is not treated as confidentially in Vietnam and in Hmong society as it might be in other cultures. Villagers’ outstanding debts are publically posted at every commune People’s Committee (see Figure 6.2); Hmong villagers I interviewed were invariably open about their loans; and bank staff in Mù Cang Chải were very forthcoming and compiled for me the number of loans and their total outstanding value for each village in Chế Tạo and Púng Luông at the end of each year from 2006 to 2014 (values for 2014 as of May 2014). 176 In Chế Tạo village, loan levels increased from 267 to 697 million VND (160 per cent) between 2008 and 2009, largely due to new loans taken out under the 30a Program. By the end of 2012, only 23 per cent of these 30a loans were still outstanding, while this ratio in Nả Hàng B was 90 per cent (158 million VND of 30a loans were outstanding after loans had increased from 220 to 395 million VND between 2008 and 2009).

199 BSP formally only gives loans to poor households to invest in productive practices (MCC bank staff 3 20-05-2014). However, I know of only two households in Chế Tạo and two in Nả Hàng B who have taken out bank loans to invest in income-generating activities (in one case to plant new tea bushes and in the other cases to open small village shops). Otherwise, few villagers have access to such opportunities and the assets required, but many have become dependent on bank loans to cover other expenses.

The single most valuable asset of a Hmong household in Mù Cang Chải has traditionally been a buffalo, and more recently, a motorcycle, which nearly all households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have. The latter only became affordable for Hmong peasants after 2003, when motorcycles manufactured in China became available in Mù Cang Chải – and when the BSP started offering collateral-free loans. Although villagers consider a motorcycle an essential asset, the BSP does not, and the purchase of a motorcycle is not an eligible use of a loan under the ‘poor households’ program (MCC bank staff 3 22-05-2014). However, I learned that villagers commonly take out a BSP loan with the stated purpose of purchasing a buffalo, but use the money to purchase a motorbike. None of the respondents who had done so feared any consequences or that the bank would find out. The more fundamental problem is that neither a motorcycle, and “not even a buffalo”, as a debt-weary Chế Tạo villager added, generates any monetary income, but rather incurs expenses for gasoline and maintenance (CT villager 34 22-07-2013). Another common but equally problematic use of loan money is to help cover the costs of a son’s wedding, which in Mù Cang Chải can easily exceed 30 million VND (1500 USD) due to common levels of bride wealth and cultural obligations to host expensive celebrations (see below).

Given that Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải have very limited opportunities to generate monetary income, many households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have found themselves in a debt trap with limited prospects of servicing their looming debts to the BSP. In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I only encountered eight households who did not currently have an outstanding bank loan. They either thought (erroneously) that they were not eligible or they were crucially aware that they do not generate enough income to repay a loan. Most households I interviewed that did have outstanding loans choose to make only interest payments during the tenure of their loan, which is common practice among Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải (MCC bank staff 1 16-11- 2012). This leaves the entire principle to be repaid when the loan agreement expires, typically

200 after five years, which often requires the sale of livestock and/or the prior saving up of cardamom revenues and, in Chế Tạo, conservation payments.

In the case that villagers default on their loan, the BSP, without much collateral in hand, typically either extends the respective loans, under some programs with increased interest rates, or insists on timely repayment (MCC bank staff 3 28-05-2014; Quynh Anh 2014), which has forced several villagers I interviewed to sell precious livestock or seek informal loans from fellow villagers. The director of the Mù Cang Chải BSP suggested that bank staff evaluate each failure to repay a loan on a case-by-case basis and may temporarily waive interest requirements or, in extenuating circumstances of hardship, offer partial or full debt relief (MCC bank staff 3 28-05-2014). Throughout several interviews, he portrayed the Bank’s operation as humanitarian and an essential contribution to poverty reduction. He further stated that only 0.5 per cent of loans given by the branch (60 million of 116 billion VND) are not recovered. In light of the challenges many Hmong households face servicing their debts, this high recovery rate suggests that many of them have been and will be forced to sell off vital household assets to repay their loans, increasing their livelihood vulnerability and undermining the BSP’s objective of poverty alleviation. As an alternative source of credit, two poor villagers in Chế Tạo explained that wealthier relatives had granted them informal loans to bail them out of formal debt, although my understanding from other villagers is that support within families is often limited to in-kind transfers, such as a chicken or pig required for a shamanistic ritual or a feast.

The developmental discourse put forth by the BSP and some international development actors considers increasing amounts of loans taken by poor households as an indicator for the loan programs’ contributions to poverty alleviation (Nguyen Viet Cuong 2008). In turn, the fact that fewer ‘poor households’ than anticipated have taken out preferential loans offered under the 30a program has been portrayed as an indicator for insufficient access to credit (Poon and D. T. Thai 2010; Quynh Anh 2014). Accordingly, national policy makers have recently directed the BSP to increase the maximum loan size to poor households from 30 to 50 million VND (following Decision 899/2015/QĐ-TTg). However, in view of the indebtedness of Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải, an increase in credit levels risks to exacerbate the debt trap of peasant households in Vietnam, particularly those with limited access to monetary livelihood opportunities.

201 6.6. Seasonal expenditures and the social dynamic of monetization

In this chapter, I have, so far, analysed different ways for Hmong villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B to obtain financial capital since the 1990s, illustrating how significant, accessible and reliable different opportunities are for different households. In this final section, I shift from income opportunities to expenditure. Importantly, the livelihoods of Hmong peasants are marked by an annual cycle of income opportunities and expenditures, which dictates villagers’ economic behaviour, as I will exemplify in this chapter.

6.6.1. The growing expense of subsistence farming

During the long era of shifting cultivation, Hmong households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B had limited needs for financial capital, for which their free-grazing cattle served as a non-monetary bank, as explained in Section 5.2.2. Villagers I interviewed suggested that most households sold one or two cows or buffalo a year, which meant that they could afford periodic expenses and investments, including those required for their sons’ weddings and their parents’ funerals. Nowadays, many households I interviewed reported these cultural institutions, as well as the challenges of house construction, as economic burdens or liabilities, in some cases requiring formal or informal credit or the sale of vital household assets (see Chapter 5). In addition, growing costs of agricultural inputs and decreasing state subsidies have introduced regular, annual costs of maintaining subsistence production, which some households need to supplement with rice they obtain from fellow villagers, commune-level institutions or the free market, often on credit. I have, so far, detailed the processes and institutions underlying this monetization and will here deepen this analysis by showing how villagers rely on different sources of financial capital to pay for the rising costs of their livelihoods in the course of a year.

Nowadays, the most challenging annual expense for most households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B is purchase of fertilizer for both rice and maize, which has become essential but is, unlike high-yield seeds, no longer subsidized (see Chapter 5). The challenge is that fertilizers need to be applied throughout the growing season and purchased in February or March, long before villagers receive their revenues from cardamom cultivation (October) and PES (December). Financially insecure households partly use these revenues, as well as their annual rice harvest (September), to repay informal loans of money or grain taken throughout the year, and most households spend all money they have left at the end of the year on New Year’s

202 festivities. The start of the new lunar year is ritually the most important time of the year for Hmong peasants and customarily requires substantial expenditures (see Chapter 4). Nearly all Chế Tạo households I surveyed spend more money on New Year’s festivities than on fertilizers, while most households in Nả Hàng B (and four of the poorest households in Chế Tạo I interviewed) spend roughly equivalent amounts, typically 2-3 million VND (100-150 USD).177 Even the better-off household heads I interviewed invariably stated that they never have any money left at the beginning of the new lunar year, with only two respondents in Chế Tạo stating that they manage to keep up to 5 million VND (250 USD) for the purchase of fertilizer. Other households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B rely on the sale of pigs and chickens or on informal loans from relatives to purchase fertilizer. Nonetheless, many respondents emphasized that they typically slaughter their biggest pig during the New Year’s celebrations, which decreases their economic assets at the start of the new year.

The annual challenges and seasonal dynamics of monetary income and expenditure are particularly severe for households with little or no income from cardamom cultivation or regular employment. In Chế Tạo, most of these households, except for those with government employment, are fully dependent on PES. Nevertheless, the relatively high levels of PES and rice self-sufficiency (and cardamom income for nearly half of the households) mean that livelihoods in Chế Tạo are financially more secure, relative to Nả Hàng B. In contrast, households in Nả Hàng B receive much less money from cardamom cultivation and PES, and thus share much greater challenges of making ends meet each year, with exception of the three cardamom-rich households I noted above. Living only a short drive or an hour’s walk from Ngã Ba Kim, however, they have access to wage labour and market opportunities there, and the occasional sale

177 The busy weeks leading up to the New Year are the only time of the year for many households to purchase commodities from the markets in town, apart from household essentials. Customarily, all members of a Hmong household receive new shoes and clothing, which is nowadays no longer home-made, except for women’s hemp skirts and men’s cotton shirts and pants, according to my observations and villagers’ explanations (CT villager 33 15-12-2012b). In addition to these and other material purchases, each household prepares generous amounts of food to feed guests and, more ritually, their ancestors and the spirits of the house. Most villagers I interviewed consider it paramount to sacrifice a pig for the New Year, and households that do not have a pig to slaughter, typically consider buying a whole pig or some pork, at least. From the way villagers reported on their spending, I got to understand that having enough money to fulfil material, social and spiritual obligations surrounding the traditional Hmong New Year is culturally very important. Even household heads that reported spending 8 million VND (400 USD) or more on their New Year’s celebrations lamented that this is “never enough” (CT villager 26 19-07-2013).

203 of pigs and chickens has become their primary economic safety net to cover seasonal or extraordinary expenditures.

6.6.2. Modernity at a price: novel expenses and expenditures

In addition to fertilizer, Hmong households face regular and recurrent costs throughout the year, particularly for buying gasoline; grain seeds and pesticides; food stuffs and kitchen supplies; households items and maintenance; monetary gifts when attending weddings and funerals; as well as alcohol and tobacco for household use. Although relatively poor households typically keep all of these expenses to a bare minimum, I found that there is surprisingly little variability in how much households across my samples, and even between Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, spend on these basic items. Comparatively, I found much greater variability, both within and between the two villages, in households’ monetary income, as I have emphasized, and in their spending on motorbikes, cell phones and household furnishings.

A relatively new motorbike, of the type that costs 20 million VND (1000 USD) or more, has become an important symbol of wealth to many villagers in Chế Tạo, as evidenced by their discourse and spending on motorbikes. In turn, few Nả Hàng B households I interviewed had spent more than 12 million VND (600 USD) per motorbike. Secondly, I was intrigued by the symbolic value attributed to large, wooden TV cabinets (see Figure 6.3) or glass-top coffee tables, which nearly half of the households I visited in Chế Tạo had transported up the bumpy 35-kilometre road from Mù Cang Chải. I asked them when, how and why they had purchased a range of ‘big-ticket’ items, which have been attainable since around 2005-2010, at least for Chế Tạo’s cardamom-growing households. These conversations also revealed the social meanings certain pieces of furniture and certain types of motorcycles have acquired as symbols of wealth, which conversations with other villagers who aspired such commodities confirmed. In Nả Hàng B, many fewer households could readily afford, according to my understanding of household budgets, a TV cabinet for 2-3 million VND or a glass-top table for 1-2 million VND (50-100 USD), and I only know of three households that have such furnishings.178 Otherwise, all houses in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B are built in the traditional Hmong way, typically featuring no windows and no furniture apart from home-made beds, stools and maybe a cabinet for kitchen

178 While I conducted most interviews sitting around a smouldering fireplace on low stools, some household heads apologized for not having a table, while those who did seemed proud to use it for the occasion of my visit.

204 utensils. With increasing access to financial capital, particularly bank loans, villagers have added certain elements or assets to their houses that have acquired both utilitarian and symbolic value. This has helped shape villagers’ aspirations for and discourses about modernity and thus illustrates their “indigenization of modernity” (see also: Sahlins 1999; Michaud 2012:1854).179

Figure 6.3: Wooden TV cabinet, as seen in several Hmong houses in Mù Cang Chải

Apart from household essentials, material commodities, and a modern house, Hmong households often need to spend much more money on cultural practices and institutions, including annual New Year’s festivities, funerals and weddings. Since most Hmong households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B nowadays only have one buffalo, the cultural obligation of sacrificing a buffalo at their fathers’ (or both parents’) funerals has required several households in Nả Hàng B to sell paddy land, as I noted in Section 5.4.2. Many villagers I interviewed in Nả Hàng B also lamented the rising costs associated with weddings, which can easily reach 30 million VND (1500

179 Michaud (2012) and his collaborators have described how Hmong and other ethnic minority peasants engage with emic and exogenous drivers of modernity, as noted in previous sections (cf. Forsyth and Michaud 2011; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015).

205 USD).180 Relative to annual household incomes and expenditures, however, the costs of the wedding, including 5-10 million VND for the celebrations at the groom’s parents’ home, increasingly requires households in both Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo to take out a bank loan. In Nả Hàng B, only a handful of households with high incomes from cardamom cultivation or government jobs could afford to pay for their sons’ weddings without taking out a loan or selling a buffalo. This is although the Púng Luông commune leadership has been, since 2011, limiting the bride wealth that the bride’s family can ask for to 20 million VND (1000 USD) for marrying within the commune and 25 million VND (1250 USD) for a bride from a different commune (PL official 2 27-05-2014). While funding their sons’ weddings is paramount for a Hmong households, only some households can afford to invest in their children’s education, which is a three-four-year commitment of 30-40 million VND per year (1500-2000 USD) with uncertain returns (see Section 6.5.1).

The monetization of Hmong livelihood has introduced several novel challenges for Hmong households, which are particularly evident when considering the seasonal dynamics of when they need and when they can earn money. The low-interest bank loans offered by the Bank of Social Policies (BSP) have made additional financial capital very accessible to Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải. However, my findings show that this has resulted in high levels of household indebtedness and a novel budgeting challenge of saving up money to repay the loan, which few households are able to do (cf. Gerber 2014).

6.7. Conclusion: The monetization of peasant livelihoods

In this chapter, I have examined how Hmong villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have gained access to and engaged with different sources of financial capital since the 1990s, addressing my second research question. I elucidated how these opportunities and villagers’ economic agency have been shaped by state institutions and have affected forest resources and their livelihood practices. This is important, because I found in Chapter 5 that the increasing monetization of peasant livelihoods, including the reliance on agricultural inputs, has left many households in both study villages dependent on monetary income. The purpose of this chapter has been to

180 Villagers often remembered quite well how much they had paid for their sons to get married and how much their own wedding had cost their parents. Several respondents compared the level of bride wealth to the price of a buffalo at the time, and in those terms, the value of a typical bride wealth has hardly increased over the past 30-40 years.

206 examine further the process and implications of this monetization, and I have illustrated how rapid and profound livelihood change in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B has been since the 1990s.

This chapter thus completes my study of the cumulative livelihood effects that the transition from composite swiddening to paddy cultivation has entailed. Paying attention to household differentiation, I found that the recent monetization of peasant livelihoods has exacerbated inter- and intra-village inequalities. This is particularly evident when examining how some households are excluded from monetary income opportunities, particularly formal employment (see Section 6.5.1), and vulnerable to the debt trap of micro-finance (see Section 6.5.3). By analysing key household expenditures in Section 6.6, I could illustrate how monetization has shaped contemporary markers of wealth and has made cultural practices, particularly weddings and funerals, a significant economic burden for some households. This is although government decrees have set limits to bride wealth and funeral sacrifices, which most villagers I interviewed had welcomed (see also Section 5.5.6).

Secondly, my analysis of how villagers earn and spend money highlights the significance of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and cardamom cultivation in household livelihoods. Nevertheless, I found here that Chế Tạo households, particularly the 50 per cent that do not have cardamom income, are more dependent on PES than their counterparts in Nả Hàng B. This is largely because the latter have better access to market and informal labour opportunities in Ngã Ba Kim. Overall, both household incomes and socio-economic differentiation are much higher in Chế Tạo, where many households can spend much more on modern livelihood commodities and assets, compared to households in Nả Hàng B (see Chapter 6.6.2).

Together, Chapters 5 and 6 analyse historical and contemporary livelihoods of Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải. In the following three results chapters, I examine how forest conservation has been institutionalized in Mù Cang Chải (see Chapter 7); how villagers’ discourse and practice of customary hunting have changed and intersect with community-based forest patrolling (see Chapter 8); and how PES are governed and distributed in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam more broadly (see Chapter 9).

207 Chapter 7 Conservation governance by national and international actors

7.1. Introduction

Shifting my analytical focus from livelihoods to conservation policy and governance, this chapter examines how forest conservation has been pursued in Mù Cang Chải since the early 2000s. At that time, villagers were no longer dependent on forest conversion and forest income, also because they had already, in the 1990s, harvested much of the accessible and sellable pơ mu timber and NTFPs, with some exceptions (see Chapter 6). This chapter thus complements my livelihoods-focussed analysis of forest use with an analysis of conservation governance in Vietnam.

In this chapter, I examine how different actors have interacted to shape conservation governance in Vietnam, addressing my third research question: Since the early 2000s, how have state- and non-state actors pursued forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải, and how have their agendas intersected? I provide an institutional analysis of conservation governance with attention to different actors and their agendas. In Sections 7.2 and 7.3, I track the community-oriented engagement of Fauna and Flora International (FFI) in Mù Cang Chải and FFI’s role in the establishment of the Mù Cang Chải protected area in 2006. In Section 7.4 I analyse broader international initiatives to institute co-management and villagers’ forest access rights, as well as FFI’s role in them. Based on my data collection and understanding forest the local context, I question how effective FFI’s participatory approach really was. This leads me to examine the feasibility of co-management in Vietnam and the relevance of forest use rights in Mù Cang Chải from a conservation governance and livelihoods perspective.

This chapter further serves as a precursor to the subsequent two findings chapters, where I analyse the contemporary practices and politics surrounding hunting and community-based patrolling (see Chapter 8) and the implementation and effects of Payments for Ecosystem Services (see Chapter 9). In those two chapters I examine how certain approaches to conservation that I highlight in this chapter have been implemented and to what effects.

208 7.2. The agenda of Fauna and Flora International (FFI) in Mù Cang Chải

7.2.1. The agency and attitudes of FFI actors

In the late 1990s, Fauna and Flora International (FFI), the world’s oldest international conservation organisation, established operations in Vietnam, when it became increasingly feasible and popular for international NGOs to do so (cf. Thi Kim Phung Dang et al. 2012). In this chapters, I speak of FFI as a singular actor when a further differentiation is not necessary or possible. I also acknowledge, however, that FFI activities have been implemented by different staff members and shaped by their agendas and interactions with other actors. Therefore, I here introduce three groups of FFI agents and outline how their professional habitus may have shaped their agency in Mù Cang Chải and their discourse about FFI’s conservation interventions. While I highlight diverging positions among FFI actors, I assume that there has been more heterogeneity and debate than I can represent here.

I know of seven expatriate staff members who have, since the early 2000s, been instrumental in conceiving and implementing FFI’s country program. Five of them are British, have natural science backgrounds and often express themselves passionately about biodiversity conservation. Most of them have ten or more years of experience implementing conservation projects in Southeast Asia, and three of them have served as successive country directors of FFI in Vietnam. They have been responsible for devising FFI’s approach to conservation in Mù Cang Chải and acquiring the necessary funding, primarily from North American conservation foundations.181

FFI’s program implementation, reporting and collaboration with local authorities and communities have primarily been handled by its Vietnamese staff, most whom hold natural science degrees from Vietnamese universities, except for one of my key informants (FFI 2), who earned a Masters degree in the UK. A third group of actors, who were not employed by FFI but contracted to produce numerous FFI reports on biophysical and social topics in Mù Cang Chải, include four international and a minimum of nine Vietnamese consultants.

181 FFI’s primary donors for its activities in Mù Cang Chải have been: United States Fish & Wildlife Service (Great Ape Conservation Fund), Darwin Initiative, Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation and Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund, as well as, from 2010, the European Commission’s Programme on Tropical Forests. FFI’s activities have been entirely dependent on external funding, and I highlight the implications of this donor dependence in this chapter. Interestingly, FFI’s country program in Vietnam does not receive any operating budget from FFI’s head office in Cambridge, UK, but has to divert fifteen per cent of external funding to the head office (NGO 15 07-06-2014).

209 From my review of FFI reports and from interviewing and socialising with at least ten FFI staff members, I am not aware of any FFI actors who have been trained in the social sciences and research methodologies. Furthermore, some FFI actors exhibited quite idealistic understandings of the poverty-environment nexus, of conservation governance and ethnic minorities in Vietnam, of the livelihoods of Hmong villagers, and of villagers’ agency as forest guardians or destroyers, to use Forsyth and Walker’s (2008) terms (see Section 4.4). For instance, a young, expatriate FFI staff member asked me once why the Vietnamese government allowed Hmong peasants to continue living, let alone cultivating cardamom, within protected forest areas (FFI 3 07-06- 2010). Also, a senior FFI staff member warned me during our first meeting that the Hmong “are really friendly people, but if your job is to protect the forest, they can’t be your friends” (FFI 1 17-12-2011). As I will illustrate in this chapter, different FFI actors and reports expressed varying opinions regarding the agency of local Hmong villagers and the efficacy of FFI’s interventions.

7.2.2. FFI’s gibbon conservation agenda in Mù Cang Chải

One of FFI’s priorities in Vietnam was to protect the country’s remaining primate populations, some of which were suspected in the lower montane forest of the southern Hoàng Liên Sơn Range (Wilder 2008). In 1999, FFI’s preliminary survey of these forests (for the purposes of a national primate status review) discovered two populations of the critically endangered Western Black-crested Gibbon (nomascus concolor, known in Vietnamese as Vượn đen tuyền Tây Bắc) with an estimated 14 family groups in Văn Bàn district (Lào Cai Province), and, 20 km further South, 39 groups within Chế Tạo commune and the contiguous forests of Mường La district, Sơn La Province (Hardcastle et al. 2001; Rawson et al. 2011). In the latter site, the semi-circular ridge surrounding the commune of Chế Tạo, FFI’s surveys also found other biodiversity of conservation value. This included several bird and monkey species, as well as some of Vietnam’s remaining pơ mu (Fokienia hodginsii) stands, which were too remote to have been cut during the mid-1990s ‘race’ for pơ mu timber in Chế Tạo and neighbouring communes (see Section 0). However, the Black Gibbon became FFI’s flagship species for a protected area (PA) that was eventually established in 2006 to protect Chế Tạo’s forests and their remaining wildlife.

Conservationists remind us that “gibbons are wonderfully charismatic and benign creatures, which do not harm anyone’s livelihoods, but charm us with their beauty, acrobatics and music,

210 and they are our closest relatives in Vietnam” (Rawson et al. 2011:18). Nevertheless, the authors explain that while Vietnam has a high diversity of gibbons, most populations have been decimated and remain threatened by hunting pressure and habitat destruction, although they reside in PAs. Hunting pressure has increased since the 1990s due to a growing demand for primates as live pets or for the preparation of medicinal monkey balm (Workman 2004; Rawson et al. 2011).182 Gibbons are particularly vulnerable to hunting, as they live in family groups, and adult couples perform a characteristic song at dawn. Therefore, a single hunter can easily locate and shoot an entire gibbon family group within a morning (Swan 2006; Rawson et al. 2011).

Given that gibbons are highly arboreal and thus immune to trapping, Rawson (2011) suggests that gibbon populations are a good proxy for the prevalence of hunting or local gun ownership. In the subsequent chapter, I examine local hunting practices and find that despite ongoing hunting practices in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B for socio-cultural reasons, the more specialised hunting of gibbons is much less common and, most likely, pursued by very few local villagers or outside hunters (see Section 8.4). Nevertheless, FFI focussed its early activities in Mù Cang Chải on Chế Tạo commune and on curbing gibbon hunting by local villagers, specifically. Apart from the hunting threat, FFI saw Mù Cang Chải’s gibbons indirectly threatened by habitat destruction due to ongoing pơ mu logging and hydropower dam construction in Mường La, although I find this rationale not fully plausible (FFI 8 17-12-2013; Rawson et al. 2011).183

FFI’s initial activities in Mù Cang Chải were conducted within its regional Hoang Lien Son Project (2002-2005, total budget: 1,219,834 USD), which explicitly aimed to integrate livelihood development and co-management into conservation planning.184 More pragmatically, a strict

182 Vietnam’s primates therefore face similar threats than other species of forest wildlife, which are relentlessly hunted for consumption or to produce medicinal products from specific body parts. Monkey balm (known in Vietnamese as Cao khỉ) is made by boiling the bones and skin of primates or monkeys for eight to nine days (Workman 2004; Rawson et al. 2011). 183 At the end of my field work in Mù Cang Chải (May 2014), there were three hydro-electric dams in development in Mường La (apart from another three in Mù Cang Chải and Than Uyên District, Lai Châu Province), which could have multiple indirect impacts on the gibbons. Some villagers in Mường La have been relocated to higher elevations on the Southern side of the Chế Tạo ridgeline, and many more will be, with the flooding of the reservoir, which will require more forest clearing for agriculture and construction timber. Some direct impacts of dam development on the gibbon populations, as postulated in an FFI report, are less plausible, such as the concern that dam site construction workers might hunt gibbons or buy gibbons from local Hmong (Rawson et al. 2011). However, I can hardly imagine construction workers buying and processing primates or hiking to the most remote corners of the Chế Tạo Range to hunt gibbons. 184 The Hoang Lien Son Project was formally entitled “Community-Based Conservation of the Hoang Lien Mountain Ecosystem”. Its official aim was to “Pilot collaborative and sustainable approaches to biodiversity and

211 approach of ‘fences and fines’ could not have been enforced in Mù Cang Chải, as the forests around Chế Tạo are too remote to patrol effectively. The conservation of the gibbon was therefore reliant on local villagers to voluntarily cease hunting and support FFI’s agenda. Hoping to enhance conservation awareness and compliance, FFI adopted a remarkably community- oriented approach to conservation, but arguably put too much hope into the cooperation of local cadres and villagers, as I suggest in the following review of FFI interventions.185

7.2.3. FFI’s community-based conservation interventions

After its first biodiversity survey in 1999, FFI sought to convey the conservation value of the local forests and the significance of the remaining gibbon populations to Chế Tạo villagers. Always in close collaboration with the commune leadership and the district-level FPD, FFI conducted a supposedly participatory “Gibbon Workshop” in November 2000, which resulted in a Conservation Action Plan for Chế Tạo’s forests and gibbons. An FFI reports claims that this workshop “gave voice to the commune leaders, elders and all hamlet representatives, through H'mong language translation, to talk freely about their commune's needs” (Hardcastle et al. 2001:3). However, I wonder how participatory the meeting and subsequent activities were, given that it was the first and only time, to my knowledge, that the seven village heads from Chế Tạo commune participated in a meeting in the district centre with a number of district and provincial officials. Subsequently, FFI held meetings in each of the seven villages of Chế Tạo commune, during which a brief survey of gibbon knowledge and conservation awareness was conducted, a presentation on gibbons was held, and all of the 193 household heads of Chế Tạo commune signed a gibbon hunting ban. Although most Chế Tạo villagers may not have been sufficiently

landscape conservation of the Hoang Lien Mountain forests, which contribute to enhanced livelihoods of people living in the area”. The Program was funded by FFI’s primary donors noted above, at a time when donors increasingly expected a strong participatory agenda in conservation interventions (see Section 2.4). 185 Apart from the activities I focus on below, FFI implemented several projects in Chế Tạo that sought to improve villagers’ livelihoods and reduce their forest dependence, although these were largely short-lived. These projects included trials of cultivating different grass species as buffalo fodder to decrease grazing pressure on the forest (FFI 2007a); trials of improved bee keeping methods to foster honey production as a livelihood opportunity; as well as a community-based conifer nursery. While an FFI report suggests that none of these interventions brought any lasting effects (Swan 2006), I found that the cultivation of ‘buffalo grass’ is now an integral part of local land-use and livelihoods and has lessened grazing pressure on secondary forests (see Section 6.5.4).

212 literate to understand this agreement, they committed themselves to abstain from hunting and to report any forest law infractions by fellow villagers.186

While this hunting ban would have been impossible to enforce in any meaningful ways, an FFI report states that Chế Tạo village heads “committed themselves to enforcing the ban and reporting transgressions within their jurisdiction” (Hardcastle et al. 2001:21). Apart from the fact that the formal mandate and socio-legal legitimacy of village heads is notoriously limited, as I explain in Chapter 6, the author further presumes that the “strength and persuasiveness of the presentation and rationale behind the agreement” would serve as an incentive to comply, although he already cautions that this “will wear thin as time goes by” (Hardcastle et al. 2001:21). Throughout the remainder of this chapter, I review how the relations between FFI agents, Hmong officials, and Hmong villagers unfolded, and how their differing agendas for forest conservation intersected.

In order to inform its work in Chế Tạo, FFI set out to study Hmong livelihoods and forest use through a series of socio-economic studies in Chế Tạo (and several in Văn Bàn district) between 1999 and 2006. However, their methodology is often unclear or problematic, and the writing of some Vietnamese authors (largely contracted consultants not employed by FFI) is plagued by simplistic conceptions and derogatory representations of Hmong culture, livelihoods and development. Chế Tạo villagers are often portrayed as backward, poor and highly forest dependent, although they had already overcome different phases of forest dependence and exploitation, as I showed in Chapters 5 and 6. On the other hand, some reports on FFI’s early interventions suggest that Chế Tạo villagers had quickly come to support FFI’s agenda of gibbon protection, supposedly because the joint interventions of FFI and local cadres had successfully fostered conservation awareness (FFI 2007b). For instance, some reports highlight the fact that

186 With signing this agreement on protection of the Black Gibbon (Cam kết về việc bảo vệ loài vượn đen), each household head confirmed that he and his family had studied the national Decision Number 18/1992/HĐBT on forest protection; that he had received some education by FFI on the Black Gibbon and understands the importance of protecting the local Gibbons; that his family will abstain from hunting, tree cutting, swiddening and other activities that impact the habitat of forest wildlife that the government had decided needed protection, especially that of the gibbons; that they committed to spreading the message that the Black Gibbon still exists in the forests of Chế Tạo and their protection was of utmost importance; that, interestingly, they are ready to stop any individuals or groups from destroying the forest and hunting forest wildlife, including the black gibbon, and report (actually: denounce, tố cáo) them to the commune leadership and the district-level FPD; and, finally, each household head of Chế Tạo agreed that if his family contravenes the system of protecting the species of fauna and flora listed in Decision 18/1992/HĐBT, they will be punished according to the law on forest protection.

213 all households signed the gibbon hunting ban detailed above as a success, although it may have been the “everyday politics” of feigned compliance, rather than a nascent sense of environmentality that compelled villagers to sign (cf. Kerkvliet 2009:32). Nevertheless, the authors of FFI reports rarely reflect on their positionalities, methodologies, and the credibility of their data. It seems that their authors, as well as FFI actors devising and implementing activities, overestimated the efficacy of FFI interventions and failed to understand the agency of Hmong villagers to affect these, as well as the social meanings and livelihood relevance of local forest use. In my own fieldwork in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I examined some of the same aspects covered in FFI reports, but I benefitted from a very different research approach and positionality compared to the FFI actors and hence aim for a more culturally informed and actor-oriented analysis.

FFI’s most lasting, significant and contested conservation intervention in Mù Cang Chải has been community-based forest patrol teams, which were established in 2003, predating the PA. With the help of commune and FPD authorities, FFI recruited 16 Hmong villagers from Chế Tạo and surrounding communes and trained them in biodiversity monitoring, including in the use of camera traps and, since 2011, GPS equipment (FFI 6 04-06-2014; FFI 4 27-07-2012). These so- called community conservation teams (CCTs or Nhóm Bảo tồn cộng đồng) are still fully funded by FFI and serve as the only enforcement agents for the PA, which was eventually gazetted in 2006. In 2003, employing Hmong villagers as forest patrols was very innovative in Vietnam, but for FFI arguably the only option to maintain a handle on this project site. The CCTs were uniquely positioned to serve as the “eyes and ears” of FFI and the PA management board, monitoring both gibbon population and hunting activities, while fostering conservation awareness amongst villagers (Swan and O'Reilly 2004:48). However, paying selected villagers to police fellow villagers’ forest use has led to a host of unfortunate relations and politics, which I analyse in depth in Section 8.5.

Before FFI started engaging in Mù Cang Chải in the early 2000s, there was a total lack of forest law enforcement, according to the accounts of Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed, who remember freely accessing the forest that “did not belong to anyone (tsi muaj neeg li)”. The district-level Forest Protection Department (FPD) had supported state sedentarisation in the 1980s and 1990s,

214 but had been unable to stem the exploitation of NTFPs in the 1990s (see Chapter 6).187 Elsewhere in Vietnam, wildlife protection had become a national concern by the time Vietnam became a signatory of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) in 1994, and large-scale gun confiscation programs were implemented in other provinces in the 1990s (Sterling et al. 2006; Nguyen Manh Ha et al. 2007).

In both Mù Cang Chải and Mường La, the first gun confiscation initiatives were not conducted until 2004.188 While I could not obtain official records of these confiscation programs, the commune head of Púng Luông remembers 200-300 guns piled up in the local office (PL official 1 02-08-2013), and other sources cite 2618 guns collected in all of Mù Cang Chải (Swan and O'Reilly 2004).189 The 2004 gun confiscations arguably constituted the first substantial conservation intervention by the local FPD and may have removed around half of the hunting guns held by local villagers. However, in Chapter 8 I explain that most of these guns would have been no longer in use, as subsistence hunting had already declined due to livelihood changes and a decline in forest wildlife. Examining contemporary hunting practices, I highlight the differences between customary and gibbon hunting, which has only ever been pursued by very few local villagers (see Chapter 8). Nevertheless, FFI’s activities in Chế Tạo presumed that local villagers remained the greatest threat to the survival of the gibbons.

In an interesting attempt to seemingly win the hearts and minds of Hmong villagers, FFI invested in community development in Chế Vượn village (Chế Tạo commune), which is located close to

187 The longest-serving officer of the FPD remembers occasionally walking to remote villages in the 1990s, such as Chế Tạo, to deliver propaganda (tuyên truyền) for forest protection, calling villagers to stop shifting cultivation, hunting and forest exploitation, highlighting emerging laws, regulations and fine levels (MCC FPD 4 29-05-2014). The FPD, however, had limited capacities to enforce emerging forest protection laws. 188 All villagers were asked to submit their hunting guns to the commune-level leadership without any compensation. If they were later found to still possess a gun, they would risk a fine of 200,000 VND (10 USD) (MCC FPD Pao 13-07-2012). Further confiscations followed in subsequent years, for which local government staff went to specific households which they suspected still had a gun. Officials likely knew which households to target, at least in close-knit village communities of Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B (NHB village head 12-11-2013), although bridging social capital with local officials may have also saved some hunters from submitting their guns (see Chapter 8). 189 In an online news article, a local forestry official is quoted saying that hunting with home-made muskets is common amongst the Hmong, and that the district of Mù Cang Chải with its high Hmong population was renowned for having collected more guns during these confiscation programs than other locales (Hải Anh 2010). However, I find that the number of 2,618 guns is not excessive, considering that the entire district would have had over 6,000 households in 2004, around 90 per cent of which were Hmong living outside of the towns of Mù Cang Chải and Ngã Ba Kim (GSO 2007). If we assume that most of these households (excluding those in the two towns) would have hunted customarily and owned at least one gun, barely half of them submitted their gun in 2004.

215 some remaining gibbon groups, and where FFI suspected more hunting activity than in other villages.190 In May 2005, FFI facilitated and funded the construction of a community house in Na Hang, which, equipped with a TV set, was thought to bring modernity to this remote village and foster support for FFI’s conservation agenda (FFI 2007b). When I visited Chế Vượn in December 2012, villagers told me that the community house had not been used for some time and it appeared dilapidated (cf. Nguyen Huu Dung 2011), while hunting was more rife than in the main village of Chế Tạo (see Chapter 8).

FFI’s most recent attempt to dissuade Chế Tạo villagers from gibbon hunting is a bilingual (Hmong and Vietnamese) booklet that aims to instil notions of empathy for the dwindling gibbon population (Hardcastle and Giang A De, 2014, see Figure 7.1). In 15 graphic drawings and accompanying text, the booklet tells the story of a Hmong hunter who shoots a female gibbon nursing an infant, which is a common strategy of capturing live infant primates for the pet trade (Rawson et al. 2011).191 In the story, the mother expresses some breast milk into a leaf to leave with her infant before she succumbs to the gunshot wound. The hunter is moved to tears by the infant gibbon’s fate and vows to give up his hunting practice, breaking his gun in two, which his wife and children applaud. In December 2013, the new booklet was being distributed in local schools, and its effects will remain to be seen, although local CCT members were not convinced that it would dissuade many local hunters from hunting gibbons (MCC FPD 2, 23-07-2013). Notably, CCT members, FPD officials, and FFI staff I interviewed confirmed that no-one had ever been caught gibbon hunting in Mù Cang Chải. Nevertheless, FFI’s regular gibbon surveys, which I turn to next, indicated a continuous decline of gibbon populations and thus suggest that gibbon hunting had occurred.

190 As noted in Section 3.5, Chế Vượn is a false name I chose for this village to protect the confidentiality of villagers and officials there, as I report on some illegal activities I observed there in the following chapter. In reference to the name of Chế Tạo village, which derives from the Hmong term tse tao, meaning house of beans (see Chapter 5), I call this village the “house of the gibbon (vượn in Vietnamese)”, given its proximity to some of the remaining gibbon groups. 191 In Mù Cang Chải, gibbons are primarily hunted to sell to wildlife traders who produce monkey balm, but elsewhere in Vietnam, infant gibbons are in high demand as urban pets and for export to Thailand, which has partly driven gibbon hunting in lowland PAs (Rawson et al. 2011). The most effective way to capture an infant gibbon is to shoot its mother, who will clutch its infant when it falls out of the tree. If the infant survives the fall, it can be sold for up to five million VND (250 USD) in lowland Vietnam, but likely for less in Mù Cang Chải or Mường La (FFI 8 17-12-2013).

216

Figure 7.1: Excerpts from anti-hunting publication by FFI (source: Hardcastle and Giang A De, 2014)

7.2.4. FFI’s dependence on villagers, donors and gibbons

While I suggest above that some of FFI’s socio-economic studies of Chế Tạo were poorly conceived or executed, FFI invested more expertise and resources in a comprehensive body of 13 ecological studies and biodiversity surveys of Chế Tạo’s forests between 2002 and 2007, as well as regular gibbon surveys after 2006. In May 2006, eight months before the formal gazettement of the PA (see below), FFI conducted its first full census of the gibbon populations in the forests of Mù Cang Chải and Mường La. This was the first census that employed a rigorous methodology that was repeated in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2013, costing FFI over 800 labour days and between $6000 and $8000 each time. This was arguably more frequent than necessary, as the Black Gibbon’s inter-birth intervals of two-three years result in slow population rebound and make annual surveys superfluous, according to a senior FFI staff member (FFI 6 04-06-2014; cf. Le Trong Dat and Le Minh Phong 2010; Rawson et al. 2011). He added that FFI had therefore been somewhat guilty of doing what conservation NGOs are notorious for: investing much effort into documenting biodiversity decline and less into understanding or curbing its root causes (FFI 6 04-06-2014). I contend that the FFI’s surveys have provided credible data to track both the decline and the continued survival of the gibbons, but that FFI did not necessarily understand the nature of gibbon hunting, which I try to do in Section 8.4.

217 The results from FFI’s 2006 gibbon survey (see Figure 7.2 below) indicate that the number of gibbon groups within Chế Tạo commune (denoted in Figure 7.2 as Mù Cang Chải), the focus area of FFI’s interventions, possibly declined by up to 50 per cent (from 23 family groups to 11) between 2000 and 2006.192 In addition, the 14 family groups that FFI’s 1999 survey discovered in neighbouring Văn Bàn district (Lào Cai Province), which was also surveyed in 2006, had been decimated and were considered a no longer viable population (Rawson et al. 2011). Therefore, FFI decided to discontinue activities there and focus on the remaining gibbons in Mù Cang Chải and Mường La, elevating their conservation value as the “last viable population” of this species in the country (Hoang Van Lam et al. 2010; Rawson et al. 2011). FFI had been pursuing a similarly community-oriented approach in Văn Bàn as in Mù Cang Chải, and also instituted local forest patrolling by villagers there. However, their decision to abandon Văn Bàn seems to have been based on an agenda of species conservation that integrates participatory or livelihood elements as a means to achieve conservation objectives, rather than as ends in themselves, which scholars have criticized about integrating conservation and livelihood projects (ICDPs) elsewhere (see Section 2.4.4.1).

The concerning decline in Chế Tạo’s gibbon populations suggested that the most prominent goal of the nascent PA was still under threat from ongoing hunting activities, which neither patrolling by CCTs nor state propaganda for forest conservation and gun confiscations had been able to curb. Nor were the presumably remaining Chế Tạo hunters compelled by FFI’s community- focussed approach, which led some FFI staff to call for more strict conservation and enforcement in Mù Cang Chải (Swan 2006; Hoang Van Lam et al. 2010). This contestation amongst FFI actors reflects the debate in the international literature between ‘neoprotectionists’ and political ecologists and other social scientists, which I review in Section 2.4.2 (cf. Wilshusen et al. 2002; Hutton et al. 2005; Redford 2011). Nevertheless, FFI largely continued its participatory approach after the Mù Cang Chải PA was established, and subsequent surveys suggested that Chế Tạo’s gibbon populations were stabilizing, which provided some confidence (Rawson et al. 2011). FFI’s most recent survey, conducted in June 2013, could only confirm the presence of four and seven gibbon groups in Mường La and Mù Cang Chải, respectively. While this would constitute

192 The gibbon population data from 2000/2001 were compiled from several separate surveys and may have counted some groups twice. Hence the population decline deduced from the 2006 survey may not have been as high as 50 per cent (Hoang Van Lam et al. 2010).

218 a devastating halving of the Chế Tạo population within three years, the authors note that, due to poor weather, the survey may have underestimated the number of gibbon groups (FFI 2013).

Figure 7.2: Numbers of gibbon family groups in Mù Cang Chải and Mường La from successive FFI surveys (source: Rawson et al. 2011:34)

While the gibbon populations in Chế Tạo clearly declined over the first five years of FFI’s engagement there, the smaller population in Mường La interestingly did not (dropping only from 16 to 14 groups), although FFI only started conservation activities there in 2005. An unpublished FFI report attributed this to a lower proportion of ethnic Hmong living in Mường La district compared to Mù Cang Chải or Chế Tạo, although the villages in Mường La closest to the gibbon sites are inhabited exclusively by Hmong.193 The idea that the Hmong of Chế Tạo are the inevitable enemies of any forest conservation project is a significant departure from FFI’s early optimism that Chế Tạo villagers could swiftly become forest guardians and partners in gibbon conservation. Furthermore, FFI’s subsequent surveys suggest that Mường La’s gibbon population did possibly suffer a sudden decline of more than 50 per cent between 2007 and 2008, after a temporary interruption of patrolling by CCTs due to a funding gap after the Hoang Lien Project (FFI 6 04-06-2014; Rawson et al. 2011).

193 Overall, the district of Mường La has sizable population of ethnic Thái people, but they are customary paddy cultivators living in the river plains and, indeed, may be unlikely to climb the Chế Tạo range to hunt or log.

219 Importantly, FFI’s donor dependence highlights how vulnerable FFI’s conservation activities, and thus possibly the gibbon populations, have been to the political economy of conservation financing in Vietnam. FFI has fund-raised its activities in Mù Cang Chải primarily due to the presence of critically endangered Black Gibbons, but has been facing increasing donor fatigue (FFI 8 17-12-2013). In fact, Mù Cang Chải has proven a difficult site to attract species conservation funding for, as there are few endemic species (FFI 6 04-06-2014). The local gibbon populations, for instance, represent only five per cent of the global population, which is largely found in a number of PAs in Yunnan, China (Rawson et al. 2011). Given its donor dependence, FFI could therefore be forced to cease funding the CCTs at the end of any funding cycle. According to both FFI staff and most villagers I asked, this would most likely result in the last gibbons, as well as other wildlife, being hunted. Interestingly, the politics and practices surrounding hunting and patrolling in Chế Tạo have ramifications beyond gibbon conservation, as I show in Chapter 8.

7.3. The protected area of Mù Cang Chải: an internationally funded paper park?

7.3.1. Delineating a protected area in policy and practice

Following discussions with district and provincial authorities about the establishment of a protected area (PA) in Mù Cang Chải, FFI conducted a feasibility study and a participatory land- use survey in 2002 to determine how the PA could best be delineated without infringing upon land use and livelihoods of Chế Tạo villagers (FFI 2002; Wilder 2008). A report by FFI (2007c:3) claims that “[c]ommunities were able to fully participate and were empowered to address concerns with local government during the process”. However, from interviewing Chế Tạo villagers, many of whom well remember the time when FFI actors first came to Chế Tạo, I found that they consulted selected commune officials, but not ordinary villagers, on questions of land-use and PA delineation. Nevertheless, the land-use survey concluded that regulated access to the proposed buffer zone would provide villagers with enough forest resources to “not warrant access to resources inside the reserve” (Parr et al. 2013:68).194 FFI originally proposed the PA to be off limits to buffer zone residents, but later advocated for their right to access PA resources,

194 Indeed, the buffer zone does provide sufficient fire wood for Chế Tạo and some construction timber, but villagers still enjoy open access to construction timber and NTFPs for households use within the core zone (see Section 8.5.2).

220 which reflects a common shift in FFI’s approach and international conservation policy since the early 2000s (see Section 2.4.4), as I further illustrate in the subsequent section.

After four years of FFI’s lobbying, the 20,293 hectare Mù Cang Chải Species and Habitat Conservation Area (SHCA, Khu bảo tồn loài và sinh cảnh Mù Cang Chải) was gazetted in November 2006 as the first of this new category of special-use forests in Vietnam. This area encompasses 61 per cent of Chế Tạo commune, as well as small parts of the four adjacent communes of Púng Luông, Nậm Khắt, Lao Chải and Dế Su Phình, which share an administrative boundary with Chế Tạo along the semi-circular ridgeline (see Figure 7.3). There are no villages located within the core zone, and population densities in the buffer zone villages are low. Compared to other PAs in Vietnam, there is relatively little conservation pressure (NGO 8 17- 12-2013), partly because it is very remote and much of the accessible forest resources had already been depleted before the PA was established, as I document in Chapters 6 and 8.

The Mù Cang Chải PA is arguably symptomatic for poor PA management in Vietnam, including the elusive role of often extensive buffer zones (cf. Gilmour and Nguyen Van San 1999; UNDP 2010; Appleton et al. 2012; Coe 2016). According to some documents, the Mù Cang Chải PA features a buffer zone that extends over the entirety of the five communes noted above, as well as adjacent parts of Sơn La and Lai Châu provinces, totalling 94,325 hectares, according to an Operational Management Plan for the PA produced by FFI. However, the consensus among commune officials, FPD staff, and villagers is that only small parts of the four Mù Cang Chải communes of Púng Luông, Nậm Khắt, Lao Chải and Dế Su Phình share the buffer zone with Chế Tạo. Accordingly, only those villages that are located on the flanks of the ridge that dominates the PA are considered buffer zone villages, namely the seven villages of Chế Tạo and three villages in each of the other four communes (as marked in Figure 7.3 below). Formally, the PA is classified as special-use forest (SUF) and managed by the PA management board (Ban quản lý Khu bảo tồn loài và sinh cảnh Mù Cang Chải). The surrounding areas are largely protection forest and are managed by the Protection Forest Management Board (Ban quản lý Rừng phòng hộ Mù Cang Chải), the former State Forest Enterprise (SFE).

221

Figure 7.3: Map of Mù Cang Chải protected area with surrounding villages (source: Nguyen Huu Dung, 2013:7)

7.3.2. The financing of a paper park

While the Mù Cang Chải PA has been a priority site for FFI since the early 2000s, it appears largely neglected by provincial authorities, and notoriously under-funded. I argue that it could classify as a so-called paper park (see Section 2.4.2), if it were not for FFI’s sustained involvement in funding the CCTs and a co-management scheme (see below), which make this PA quite unique. According to the PA’s first 5-year budget (2008-2012), the management board received an average of 4 billion VND per year (USD 50,000), of which 72.5 per cent were provincially allocated operating funds.195 This equates to a mere 10 USD per hectare per year, which is merely 1.5 per cent of the average funding level of Vietnam’s provincially managed PAs, partly because Yên Bái is a relatively poor province (MCC FPD 1 18-07-2012; Emerton et al. 2003). The management board consists of five members, who all have other responsibilities apart from managing the PA, and is housed within the district-level Forest Protection Department

195 The provincial Decision 1402/2007/QĐ-UBND approved a budget of precisely 20.523416 billion VND for the five-year period. I compare this level of funding to other provincially managed PAs in Vietnam, as the larger PAs managed by MARD directly are much better funded by both national and international contributions.

222 (Hạt kiểm lâm huyện Mù Cang Chải), with a former SFE official, a charismatic Hmong gentleman, serving as director of both institutions (MCC FPD 1 18-07-2012).196

My impression is that the PA’s special-use forest is managed much like other forest areas in the district, the most prominent focus being on forest fire prevention (phòng cháy chữa cháy rừng), which has acquired a curious priority status in Vietnam’s forest policy and PA management (IUCN 2010). In fact, I am not aware of any conservation activities that have been conducted within the Mù Cang Chải PA since its establishment in 2006, except for those funded by FFI and other international initiatives, some of which I evaluate in the following section. This is a common dilemma in Vietnam’s under-funded PAs, as noted in Section 4.6.1 (Emerton et al. 2003; MONRE 2011, 2012).

Although the formal establishment of the Mù Cang Chải PA had seemingly little effects on how state actors managed the forest area, it allowed the PA management board to receive international grants to develop PA management capacities. I will examine the implementation of these activities in the following sections, documenting further how international and national agendas for conservation governance have intersected, which is my line of analysis that weaves through this chapter.

7.4. International agendas for local participation and forest access in protected areas

From its earliest engagement in Mù Cang Chải, FFI sought to institute cooperative PA management and community-based forest patrolling, and the resulting Management Advisory Committee (MAC) and the Community Conservation Teams (CCTs) constitute the two most significant aspects of the PA today, according to my representation. FFI was also instrumental in the Mù Cang Chải PA receiving funds from two well-funded, multi-lateral programs that sought to enhance biodiversity conservation and PA management in Vietnam. The more recent program, funded by the European Commission (EC) and the Ford Foundation, sought to develop co- management and forest patrolling by villagers in three different PAs, while the multilateral Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF) provided funds for capacity building and conservation activities to 72 of Vietnam’s PAs. I will here evaluate the implementation of these international

196 In contrast, the PA in Văn Bàn district (in the relatively wealthy province of Lào Cai), which FFI abandoned as a site for gibbon conservation in 2007 (as noted above), receives much higher provincial funds and features a newly constructed, two-storey building to house the management board.

223 initiatives in Mù Cang Chải and their efficacy in the contexts of national forest policy and local conservation governance. This will broaden my analysis of FFI’s agency, covered in previous sections, to further examine how international and national agendas for forest conservation have interacted in Mù Cang Chải.

7.4.1. Agendas and failures of Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF)

In 2008 and 2010, the Mù Cang Chải PA received two grants of 50,000 and 100,000 USD from the Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF, Quỹ bảo tồn Việt Nam). FFI was instrumental in developing the grant proposals, as well as producing the required Conservation Needs Assessments, Social Screening Report and an Operational Management Plan (for the period 2008-2012). Following VCF guidelines, these documents claim that social safeguards for community consultation and participation, gender equality and livelihoods consideration have been or can be met in Mù Cang Chải. Much like FFI’s prior interventions, the VCF projects relied on the collaboration with commune cadres as community representatives, but also featured extensive data collection and activities in buffer zone villages. However, implementation and results of VCF-funded activities in Mù Cang Chải, as reported in numerous VCF reports, should strike any critical reader as highly dubious, and therefore warrant some interrogation here.197

Most importantly, the Mù Cang Chải PA was initially selected as one of six PAs in Vietnam to pilot agreements for buffer zone residents to harvest NTFPs from special-use forests, which VCF documents refer to as a benefit sharing mechanism (BSM) to compensate buffer zone residents for lost access to protected forest areas. The first step to this novel process in Mù Cang Chải was, according to VCF reports, a 39-day forest resource use survey in 13 buffer zone villages of the PA, undertaken in April 2009 (VCF 2010). From my understanding, such an extensive survey would have been unprecedented for this purpose, and the claim that several district officials participated, is inconceivable. The survey was supposedly led by a Vietnamese FFI staff member whom I know well. He was most surprised to see his name in the report I showed him, and suggested that “they just make things up”.198 The reported survey results are equally

197 The documents I refer to I this section were partly available online and partly shared with me by key informants involved in VCF activities as international consultants or as staff members in the VCF secretariat. 198 To protect the confidentiality of my informant’s identity, I have omitted any references to him in this section. After reviewing numerous reports on VCF activities in Mù Cang Chải and discussing them with several key informants, I also came to the impression that this survey was never conducted, but may have been part of a scheme

224 questionable, as they claim that buffer zone villagers are much more dependent on timber and NTFPs from within the PA than my livelihood study suggests. While cardamom would have been a significant source of both household income and conservation concerns in most villages surveyed in 2009, the report fails to mention this, but argues that villagers’ forest dependence justifies pursuing further activities, under a second VCF grant, towards piloting forest access in Mù Cang Chải (Yen Bai FPD 2009).

In May 2009, following the supposed forest resource use surveys, meetings were reportedly held in 13 buffer zone villages, again involving 520 households, all of whom apparently signed so- called natural resource use agreements (cam kết thoả thuận sử dụng nguồn tài nguyên thiên nhiên) “on the proper and sustainable use of the PA’s natural resources” (VCF 2010).199 In the Fall of 2009, VCF-funded consultants, invariably ethnic Kinh, judging by their names, reportedly returned to the villages and monitored villagers’ forest use. I contend that this could hardly have yielded representative and credible insights, the consultants reported an overwhelming compliance rate of 100 per cent. Consequently, in June 2010, the Mù Cang Chải PA was awarded a second VCF grant of USD 100,000 to pilot agro-forestry as a model of regulated cultivation and harvest of NTFPs within the PA. These funds would have been transferred to the provincial FPD, which typically received VCF funds to allocate them to local level actors (FFI 2 27-07-2012). However, four months later, the VCF secretariat decided to drop Mù Cang Chải and three other PAs as pilot sites to allow subsistence use of PA resources, which was eventually only pursued in Bạch Mã National Park and Xuân Thủy National Park, following Decision 126/2012/QĐ-TTg (Bechstedt et al. 2010; VCF 2010).

When I first interviewed FPD officials in Mù Cang Chải and Yên Bái in July 2012, I was surprised that none of them knew about any VCF-funded activities. All VCF documents I studied were signed off by a senior official of the provincial FPD official in Yên Bái. When I interviewed him about the abandoned agro-forestry activities in Chế Tạo, he categorically ruled to account for funds that were never spent, as one of my key informants suggested. Another informant knew of several cases (which could include this case) of embezzlement of VCF funds designated for PAs in Vietnam’s Northern Region, including one case involving an FFI accountant colluding with provincial FPD staff in Yên Bái. 199 These activities were reported in several VCF reports and would, again, constitute a massive effort in community-based research to identify and accommodate common forest resource use or dependence. Three months after the meetings leading to the forest use agreements, two-day workshops focussing on sustainable forest resource use were supposedly held in each of the 13 villages and attended by 637 villagers, who again signed an agreement on forest resource use, not further specified.

225 out the possibility of allowing any forest use within special-use forests, as this would inevitably lead to rampant forest exploitation (MCC FPD 1 18-07-2012). This concern that rural peasants are not capable of managing their forest use, which hence has to be banned completely, is possibly wide-spread amongst MARD and FPD officials, according to international authors and key informants, who portray forest use rights not as a risk, but as an opportunity to accommodate and enlist buffer zone residents in PA management (NGO 20 11-06-2014; NGO 14 22-02-2012).

Apart from piloting agro-forestry, the second VCF grant to Mù Cang Chải also covered some communication skills training for the members of the FFI-funded community conservation teams (CCTs). According to the grant proposal, they were “lacking the capability to access local communities and disseminate capacity building activities in an appropriate manner” and hence required training by a Vietnamese consultant on how to relate to other Hmong villagers. However, none of the FPD officials or CCTs members I asked about this could confirm that this took place. Apart from the VCF-activities cited so far, the two grants from VCF to the Mù Cang Chải PA also covered further training activities, equipment purchases, and biodiversity surveys. I could not determine if these activities were actually conducted or not, and will not further wager, how VCF funds designated for Mù Cang Chải were used.

7.4.2. Limitations to co-management in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam

In 2010, while VCF-funded activities were still underway in many of Vietnam’s PAs, FFI and PanNature, a Vietnamese conservation NGO, implemented a two-year program funded by the European Commission (EC) and the Ford Foundation in Mù Cang Chải and two other PAs.200 The overall aim of the program, as with previous activities by FFI and VCF, was to integrate elements of participatory governance and livelihood development into PA management in Vietnam. Piloting different opportunities for income generation in selected buffer zone villages, four projects for handicraft production, the cultivation of apple trees (in two villages), and the raising of ducks were implemented, the latter in Nả Hàng B, as I noted in Section 6.2.5. In addition, different models of co-management and community-based forest patrolling were instituted in the three PAs. I here provide an analysis of how co-management unfolded in Mù

200 The telling title of the project was ‘Participation of Grassroots Conservation Organizations in Special Use Forest Protection and Management’ (Sự tham gia của các tổ chức bảo tồn địa phương trong quản lý và bảo vệ rừng đặc dụng 2010-2012). The project ran from 2010 to 2012 (extended to June 2013) with a total budget of the total budget of 564,000 USD (NGO 8 17-12-2013).

226 Cang Chải in order to evaluate the feasibility and relevance of co-management in Vietnam’s PAs, more generally.

In the early days of the Mù Cang Chải PA, there was a first and arguably premature attempt to institute co-management in Mù Cang Chải. Based on the investment plan for the Mù Cang Chải PA, which had been developed in 2002 by FFI, Vietnam’s first co-management forum was established in 2007 (Streicher and Crudge 2012). The Forest Protection Council (FPC), as FFI called it, was provincially sanctioned, following Decision 749/2007/QĐ-UBND, and was intended to provide a link between the PA management board and the local Hmong communities (Swan and O'Reilly 2004). However, experience soon showed that it lacked a viable institutional framework and agenda, especially regarding its relations with the Management Board, to enable meaningful co-management (Parr et al. 2013).

Building on the experience of the FPC, FFI facilitated the establishment of a so-called Management Advisory Committee (MAC, initially known by its literal translation Hội đồng tư vấn) in Mù Cang Chải and in two other PAs in 2011.201 In Mù Cang Chải, MAC members included the commune leaders of the five buffer zone communes, representatives from several district-level offices and mass organisations, as well as three FPD representatives (see Footnote 205). When I conducted my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải in 2013, the MAC met every three months, and its mandate was to provide advice from different stakeholder perspectives to the management board (FFI 2007c; Hải Anh 2010; Hoang Van Lam n.d.).202 What might have, however, compromised the efficacy of the MAC and the accountability of the management board was the fact that the acting director of the PA management board also became the chair of the MAC, quasi ex officio, according to Vietnam’s institutional culture (FFI 2 30-07-2013). Apart

201 The MAC in Mù Cang Chải was provincially sanctioned and established following Decision 1785/2011/QĐ- UBND Yên Bái and consolidated in Decision 1785/2011/QĐ-UBND Yên Bái. More recently it has been renamed to Mù Cang Chải Forest Protection Council (Hội đồng bảo vệ rừng huyện Mù Cang Chải), and the removal of the term advisory (tư vấn) seems to discursively erode its advisory function, but I cannot tell how widely this interpretation is shared or significant. FFI helped launch co-management committees following the same model in two other PAs, which FFI had also helped establish for primate conservation, namely the Species and Habitat Conservation Areas of Trùng Khánh in Cao Bằng Province and Khau Ca in Hà Giang Province (Parr et al. 2013). FFI also established community-based forest patrols in both of these sites, although with some important differences that I will mention in my analysis of forest patrolling in Mù Cang Chải (see Chapter 8). 202 In each of the five buffer zone communes in Mù Cang Chải, commune-level advisory councils (Tổ phối hợp quản lý bảo vệ rừng) consisting of village heads and commune officials were also instituted (MONRE 2012), but none of the village heads I interviewed in Chế Tạo or Púng Luông knew of these institutions, and FFI’s country director was quite aware that they were never operational (FFI 6 04-06-2014).

227 from this point, I found further limitations to co-management in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam, which I will elaborate on in this section.

Given that co-management (known in Vietnamese as Đồng quản lý) was still in its infancy in Vietnam, I sought to investigate the operation and efficacy of the MAC, although this proved rather difficult. I was not allowed to observe the regular MAC meetings, but the minutes that FFI representatives took of some MAC meetings indicate how novel the concept of co-management is to participants in Mù Cang Chải.203 Several MAC members I interviewed in 2013, seemed unsure about the role of the MAC, and none of them could recount any specific contribution to, or critique of PA management that emanated from a MAC meeting.204

Nevertheless, the MAC provided a unique forum for stakeholder interaction, but I tried to find out if it could facilitate meaningful exchange and collaboration. Other authors evaluating the potential for co-management in Vietnam have cautioned that MARD and FPD officials are reluctant to share management authority with community representatives (cf. Swan 2010; Nguyen Kim Dung et al. 2013), for whom, in turn, “[n]egotiating with government as equals, which lies at the heart of co-management, is completely new” (IUCN 2010). Furthermore, these authors have argued that, as a basis for co-management, buffer zone residents need to be granted forestland tenure and subsistence use rights of forest resources within PAs to ensure their livelihood needs are accommodated in PA management (cf. FFI 2007c). In turn, MARD has been reluctant to devolve management authority, forest land tenure and access to PA resources to buffer zone residents. Consequently, several donor-funded attempts to institute co-management in Vietnam’s PAs have not gone beyond tokenistic or “administrative co-management”, according to both Vietnamese and international observers (Wilder 2008; Hoang Van Chieu 2012; Nguyen Kim Dung et al. 2013:616; Parr et al. 2013). Similarly, I contend that the MAC in Mù Cang Chải brought together different stakeholders and formally established co-management, but I have no evidence that this introduced villagers’ participation or forest use rights into PA management. However, I question whether having formalized forest tenure and access are as

203 In a 2012 meeting, for instance, a FPD representative criticized other MAC member for lacking enthusiasm, according to a report of the meeting provided by FFI. Another member questioned the purpose of the MAC, suggesting that it is the job of the PA management board to manage the PA, which it has done well without the MAC. 204 The most substantive response I received from a MAC member was that it merely serves as a forum for the commune heads to lobby for greater benefits for their constituencies (PL official 1 02-08-2013).

228 pivotal to co-management in Mù Cang Chải as FFI (2007c) and other authors have suggested (cf. Swan 2010; Nguyen Kim Dung et al. 2013). I will highlight several issues of power dynamics before returning to the question of legitimizing forest access and tenure, which is fundamental to forest governance in Vietnam beyond its relevance for co-management.

7.4.3. The governmentality of co-management in Vietnam

Some contributions to the international literature on co-management have acknowledged that inter-personal relationships and cross-cultural dynamics are pivotal for the functioning of co- management institutions (Zanotti 2014). In the case of Vietnam, these politics of co-management have not been considered or empirically examined, although I find them particularly pertinent in the context of local governance in Vietnam. Based on my insights into the MAC in Mù Cang Chải, I argue that the institutional culture and hierarchy in rural Vietnam and related issues of state-society and inter-ethnic dynamics can pose fundamental hurdles to meaningful co- management. The MAC in Mù Cang Chải is unique in Vietnam, as it consists of predominantly ethnic Hmong members representing the five communes, the village patrol teams, and several district offices, while only two of its 14 members are ethnic Kinh.205 However, it would be naïve to assume that there are no contestations amongst the Hmong members or, for instance, that the five commune leaders have an equal voice, let alone the necessary backing from and accountability to their constituencies to make them legitimate community representatives. Therefore, their agency to represent and advocate for villagers’ perspectives remains subject to their own agendas and positionalities vis-à-vis other MAC members. Ethnographically examining these dynamics of bonding and linking social capital and their effects was beyond the access and insights I could gain. Nevertheless, my analysis of the MAC in this section highlights the underlying question whether the institutional environment of forest governance in rural Vietnam is conducive to co-management. Secondly, I question how FFI sought to introduce co- management and reported on its progress.

205 This was the constellation of the MAC in 2014. The two ethnic Kinh members were the heads of Mù Cang Chải’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (Phòng Nông nghiệp và Phát triển nông thôn) and of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (Phòng Tài nguyên và Môi trường). The heads of Mù Cang Chải’s Department of Justice (Phòng Tư pháp), police department (Công an huyện), as well as the its party secretary (Bí thư Huyện Đoàn) and the head of the Farmers’ Union (Hội Nông dân), all of whom are MAC members, are all ethnic Hmong. In addition to these regular MAC members, up to eight officers from FFI and PanNature typically participate at the MAC meetings, according to meeting minutes they produce. However, I would not know how their presence is conceived by other members, and affects the dynamics of the meetings.

229 In 2007, when supporting the establishment of the Forest Protection Council (FPC), the precursor to the MAC, FFI initially planned to use, rather than commune cadres, specifically elected villagers as community representatives (Swan and O'Reilly 2004). This would have arguably been inconceivable anywhere Vietnam, and this somewhat naïve idea indicates that some FFI actors lacked some understanding of the context of local governance. The proposal, initially specified in FFI’s 2002 investment plan for the Mù Cang Chải PA, must have been vetoed at some stage, possibly by provincial officials. The People’s Committees’ chairmen of the five buffer zone communes have since served as the only community representatives on both the FPC and the MAC. They are local state officials and typically members of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), whose accountability to villagers is limited, according to my understanding. Based on concerns in the co-management literature, the question arises whether the MAC allows its members, including commune officials and district of FPD officials, to govern villagers more effectively or insidiously than without co-management? From a Foucauldian perspective, co- management regimes can become, intentionally or not, “Trojan horses” for “intimate government” (Agrawal 2005:164; Kubo 2008; cf. Winkel 2012). This risk has not been addressed in Vietnam, but case studies elsewhere have suggested that state actors can use co- management relationships to infiltrate, co-opt and disenfranchise communities or their representatives (Stevenson 2006; Caruso 2011). Particularly relevant to Vietnam is Kubo’s (2008) concern that the limitations to co-management in a context of state land ownership remain poorly understood. What is relevant to Mù Cang Chải is the observation that NGOs establishing co-management schemes have, often inadvertently, served to facilitate and legitimize state control over rural populations and natural resources (Bryant 2002 ; Forsyth and Walker 2014).

In Vietnam, the hierarchical system of local governance by commune cadres already “extend[s] the reach of [state] power into the finest spaces of the social body”, making even a remote, rural commune like Chế Tạo a “regulatory community”, in Agrawal’s (2005:16) sense. The district and commune-level secretaries of the CPV and the system of mass organisations similarly serve to extend the gaze and influence of the Party (Kerkvliet 2001; Kerkvliet and Marr 2004). Outside actors cannot conceivably operate in rural Vietnam, at least not in Chế Tạo, without the support of these institutions, as I know from FFI’s activities, the constellation of the MAC, and my own fieldwork. Establishing co-management schemes within this framework of “intimate government” may formally legitimize the authority of commune cadres as community

230 representatives, but it does not preclude villagers’ (everyday) resistance to state authority, statutory property regimes or conservation interventions. Kerkvliet (1995, 2001, 2005) and other scholars have shown in multiple cases how state control in Vietnam is not totalitarian but vulnerable to (everyday) resistance by individuals and organisations (cf. Kerkvliet and Porter 1995; Kerkvliet et al. 2003; Kerkvliet and Marr 2004). At different points in this thesis I illustrate how some Chế Tạo villagers discursively challenge the legitimacy of commune officials and resist state institutions of property regimes and forest access restrictions.206 These cases illustrate how villagers’ agency and resistance effectively shape state structures, in a broad sense. However, the institutionalisation of, what I call, ‘state-led co-management’ in Mù Cang Chải, has not given villagers any agency, as their representation by commune officials does not provide that.

Apart from risk that villagers may not be or feel effectively represented in co-management arrangements, FFI’s agency in Mù Cang Chải raises my concern that international actors trying to introduce co-management fail to understand the context of local governance and its limitations to co-management in Vietnam. FFI has earned much praise for breaking the ground for co- management by establishing MACs in Mù Cang Chải and two other project sites (MONRE 2012; Parr et al. 2013), although no independent evaluation of the MACs has been done. In May 2014, during my last field visit to Vietnam, FFI sought to study the effects of the MAC in Mù Cang Chải by surveying Chế Tạo villagers about their sense of representation and participation through the MAC, as well as other questions about PES. The FFI staff designing the study consulted me on the questionnaire they had developed, and I carefully conveyed my impression that most Chế Tạo villagers do not even know about the MAC. My more fundamental concern that the MAC in Mù Cang Chải does not necessarily represent villagers’ concerns or affect PA management was not shared by the two Vietnamese FFI staff designing the survey, whose impression from actually attending MAC meetings was that the MAC provides an effective forum of co-management. In turn, my more critical analysis here is informed by the academic literature on co-management and local governance in Vietnam, as well as my own insights from field work. From my understanding, neither institutional norms of forest governance, nor state-

206 Most significantly, I examine villagers’ allegations of nepotism governing access to government jobs (see Section 6.5.1) and the distribution of PES (see Section 9.4.2); how they maintain customary property relations over forest resources within the PA; and resist hunting restrictions and forest law enforcement by the village patrol teams (see Section 8.5.2).

231 society relations, nor the political agency and will of villagers and local officials are conducive to institutionalising meaningful co-management in Mù Cang Chải, and possibly in Vietnam, more generally.

7.5. Conclusion: Protected area access in policy and practice

In this chapter I have analysed how Fauna and Flora International (FFI) and other non-state actors have sought to institute biodiversity conservation in Mù Cang Chải, and how their projects have intersected with state forest governance. I have paid particular attention to the contentious issues of participation and forest access. By the time the PA was established in 2006, such participatory objectives had become common policy among international conservation actors (see Section 2.4.4), but were arguably still antithetical to the status quo of state-centred forest governance in Vietnam (see Section 4.6). In terms of conservation governance by state actors, I portray the Mù Cang Chải PA as an under-funded paper park, but for FFI and other international actors, it had been a PA of considerable importance that was the subject of successive conservation activities implemented between the early 2000s and 2010.

My analysis of internationally funded conservation activities in Mù Cang Chải suggests that the institutional culture and context of forest governance in rural Vietnam is not conducive to instituting meaningful co-management, agro-forestry and PA access rights for buffer zone residents. I caution that some international actors in Mù Cang Chải failed to consider these institutional limitations, which go beyond the risks to co-management identified in the scholarly literature (see Section 2.4.4.2). Specifically, I find that ‘state-led co-management’, characterized by commune cadres serving as community representatives, is not necessarily effective in accommodating local villagers’ needs and perspectives. This may hamper the efficacy of co- management schemes FFI helped to institutionalize in Mù Cang Chải and other PAs. I also question the efficacy of some activities funded by the Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF), which accepted proposals and reports for conservation activities in Mù Cang Chải that are inconceivable in Vietnam. To me, this exemplifies how fraught and ineffective international conservation interventions can be.

While the purpose of this chapter has been to examine conservation interventions by different actors from a perspective of policy and governance, the following Chapter 8 will further examine

232 the efficacy and effects of FFI’s conservation activities in Mù Cang Chải through an actor- oriented study of hunting and patrolling. I will also evaluate the prospects of FFI’s agenda of gibbon conservation (see Section 8.4), which I examined at the outset of this chapter. In Chapter 9, my analysis of PES governance will provide another lens to examine how international and national agendas for conservation governance intersect. There, I will argue that villagers’ land tenure, forest access, as well as biodiversity conservation, are low priorities on Vietnam’s national forest policy agenda, as I have shown in this chapter with regards to the PA in Mù Cang Chải.

233 Chapter 8 Village politics between hunters, non-hunters, and forest patrols

8.1. Introduction

In the preceding chapter, I analysed the agendas and agency of state and non-state actors, and how they interacted in the implementation of conservation interventions in Mù Cang Chải. State- led forest law enforcement, FFI’s interventions, and the establishment of the PA in 2006 arguably came too late to avert Mù Cang Chải’s initial biodiversity loss, as much of the local NTFPs, pơ mu resources and forest wildlife had already been exploited during the 1990s. In Chapter 6, I tracked the exploitation of NTFPs and examined how villagers’ forest use and monetary livelihoods have evolved since, with a focus on the village of Nả Hàng B. In this Chapter 8, I first track the decline of forest wildlife and hunting to address my fourth research questions: Since the early 2000s, how have villagers’ practices surrounding hunting and forest conservation changed, and how has this intersected with community-based forest patrolling?

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on what Robbins et al. (2006:162) call the “conservation reality”, the actual extent of forest use (see Section 2.4.2), by examining the interplay of conservation compliance, resistance and enforcement in Mù Cang Chải. As a particularly insightful case for this, I focus on the interplay of hunting and forest patrolling in Chế Tạo. I try to explain how the institutionalisation of forest conservation has shaped villagers’ livelihoods, hunting practices and environmentalities, while highlighting how villagers’ conceptions of forest wildlife and biodiversity differ from FFI’s conservation agenda. I hereby build on my analysis of livelihood transitions since sedentarisation (see Chapter 5).

Analytically, I partly draw on Agrawal’s (2005) three-pronged environmentality framework, which examines how conservation interventions are implemented at the village level and to what effects (see Section 2.4.7). The preceding Chapter 7 addressed the first of Agrawal’s (2005) three aspects, the institutionalisation of forest conservation, and I here examine the efficacy and effects of FFI’s interventions to curb villagers’ hunting practices. Addressing Agrawal’s (2005) latter two elements, namely village politics and subject formation, I aim to represent the dynamics between hunters and non-hunters, and how such subjectivities have emerged (see Section 8.3). I seek to understand these processes in the context of local livelihoods, cultural practice and social

234 capital, which Agrawal’s (2005) study attends to insufficiently, as I argued in Section 2.4.7. Most pertinent to these village politics of hunting are the FFI-funded community conservation teams (CCTs), which have become the single most visible and contentious aspect of forest conservation for villagers (see Section 7.2.3). Based on the accounts of both villagers and patrol staff I interviewed, I provide my interpretation of how patrolling by CCTs has shaped villagers’ practices, relations and politics around hunting (see Section 8.5).

8.2. The demise and persistence of Hmong hunting practices

My first objective in this chapter is to examine the prevalence of contemporary subsistence hunting and its social, cultural and economic drivers. I first aim to explain villagers’ perspectives on declining forest wildlife, and how the majority of villagers have given up their customary hunting practices, while others still hunt regularly. In the subsequent section I will further examine the village politics among these groups of hunters and non-hunters, as I call them.

8.2.1. Villagers’ perspectives on the demise of forest wildlife

As I noted in Chapter 5, subsistence hunting declined in the 1990s in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B with the decline of shifting cultivation. Food security increased with agricultural intensification and livestock domestication, which decreased villagers’ forest dependence and made hunting less integral to their livelihoods. In addition, prior hunting had contributed to diminishing wildlife populations, as several villagers asserted. This, in turn, offered diminishing returns for customary hunting. Elderly respondents commonly noted the abundance of wildlife in the past and listed the different mammal species that used to reside in the forests. Their accounts suggest that the last sightings of tigers, bears, deer, and goats date back to the 1980s and 1990s, while forest pigs and chicken became rare in the early 2000s, as FFI studies also found (MCC NTFP trader Che 26-05-2014; CT villager 47 27-11-2012; Phan Thi Anh Dao 2002).

As reasons for the decline of forest wildlife, respondents most often noted hunting and trapping activities by local Hmong villagers. However, I could not determine to what extent hunters from outside of Mù Cang Chải, as well as land-use change and other factors, had contributed to the extirpation (local extinction) off different wildlife species. An FFI informant wagered that the final decimation of some mammal species was possibly accelerated by “professional hunters” from outside Chế Tạo, who sought to capitalize on the growing market demand for wild meats

235 and specific animal parts in the 1990s (FFI 4 27-07-2012). In turn, Chế Tạo villagers explained that they typically did not hunt forest wildlife to sell it, as they had limited access to the market in Mù Cang Chải until the late 1990s. Similarly, this delayed the commercial harvest of NTFPs in Chế Tạo (see Chapter 6).

While the decline of Chế Tạo’s large forest wildlife did not constitute a significant loss to local villagers and their livelihoods, it added urgency of FFI’s conservation agenda. This illustrates the different roles that forest wildlife and biodiversity play for local livelihoods and foreign conservation agendas, which I examine throughout this chapter. FFI’s biodiversity surveys in 1999 and subsequent years, which naturally involved more time and people than a hunting trip by local villagers, could penetrate the more remote parts of the Chế Tạo range and find remnant populations of certain mammal and bird species that had conservation value but little significance for opportunistic local hunters. At the time of my fieldwork, all that was left to hunt and trap were song birds and small rodents (mostly rats, squirrels and flying squirrels).207 FFI sought to raise villagers’ conservation awareness for the remaining large forest fauna, particularly the gibbons, seeking to make villagers what Agrawal (2005) calls ‘environmental subjects’ of FFI’s agenda for biodiversity conservation. My impression is that FFI overestimated the local hunting pressure on the vulnerable gibbon population and hence focussed early conservation interventions on curbing local hunting practices, without understanding the distinctions and drivers underlying different hunting patterns (see Section 8.4).

When I asked Chế Tạo villagers what changes to the forest they had observed since the PA was established, many of them, both hunters and non-hunters, confirmed that they had been hearing or seeing birds, gibbons and rodents more frequently. Some respondents portrayed the increase in bird and rodent species as an indication for forest recovery. Some hunters wagered that rodent population had recovered because larger mammals had disappeared, justifying rodent hunting for population control (see Section 8.3.1). I did not seek to determine ecological dynamics but to understand villagers’ socio-ecological perspectives. When I probed further for the significance of forest wildlife in villagers’ livelihoods, several villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B

207 Flying squirrels are highly arboreal, nocturnal rodents, which can glide from one tree to another (Nygren and Jokinen 2013). They belong to the family of squirrels (Sciurida), and the individuals that I saw during one hunting trip in Chế Tạo (see Section 8.2.3) were most likely the Indochina Flying Squirrel (Hylopetes phayrei), known in Hmong as nas ncuav tsau (cf. Thorington and Heaney 1981). They were up to 40-50 cm long (without their long tails) and weighed an estimated three to four kilograms, providing substantial meat.

236 suggested that they wanted their children to experience a forest complete with forest fauna, while at least three respondents expressed that the singing of birds and gibbons “make the forest feel warm” (CT villager 48 01-12-2013; CT villager 6 14-11-2012). Some Chế Tạo villagers also expressed a conception of animal rights, such as an elderly man who explained that he had come to see hunting as amoral, as it can “kill the mother of a young animal” (CT villager 47 27-11- 2012).208

Villagers expressing such a broad appreciation for forest wildlife, including for non-endangered bird and rodent species, arguably reflects a sense of environmentality that goes beyond FFI’s agenda of species conservation.209 Their notions may have been informed by FFI’s conservation awareness raising activities (see Section 7.2.3), but I could not determine if this was the case. I also tried to understand how this environmentality related to Hmong cultural conceptions of the environment and animal world. Scholars of Hmong culture and spirituality have described sophisticated conceptions of animals in Hmong cosmology and ritual practices (Tapp 1986b; Cooper 1998), as well as in relations to humans (Lemoine 1972; Tungittiplakorn 1998; Corlin 2004). Corlin (2004) argues that this deeply spiritual worldview guides Hmong resource use, while other authors, who are not experts in Hmong culture, claim that Hmong lack any attachment to natural resources that would allow for sustainable use (see Section 4.4). I question both view points and found no evidence that Hmong villagers in Chế Tạo have culturally grounded resource-use ethics or hunting regulations, as Tungittiplakorn (1998) also found when examining Hmong hunting practices in Thailand. To me, villagers’ notions of environmentality that I cite above suggest that their conservation attitudes are not necessarily culturally based but idiosyncratic and shaped by social processes. I aim to illustrate this further throughout this chapter by highlighting how villagers’ environmentalities have been influenced by different “tools of coercion”, as Carr (2013) might call either exogenous and endogenous influences.

208 He was not speaking of gibbon hunting specifically, and FFI’s booklet that employs the same generic narrative to instil empathy for the hunted gibbon population (see Section 7.2.3) was not yet disseminated to villagers by the end of my fieldwork (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013). 209 Encountering such discourse of forest wildlife and animal rights, I was particularly cautious of a possible “observation bias”, whether interviewees were enticed to tell me what they think I wanted to hear (Robbins et al. 2009:572). However, in the above cases I ruled this out, considering my relationship with the villagers I quote and how our cited conversations evolved. Even if respondents had assumed that I was a conservationist, I am unsure if they would be compelled to express Western conservationist values.

237 8.2.2. The persistence of hunting practices

While livelihood change and the decline in forest wildlife may partly explain the general decline of local hunting practices, the question remains why some villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B still go hunting regularly, as patrol staff, villagers, officials, and my own observations confirmed. Respondents were often quick to add that the majority of villagers no longer hunt, as they “already understand” (hiểu rồi) the importance of forest protection, as many put it. Given the secrecy that surrounds contemporary hunting practices (see Section 8.3.2), I could not determine how many villagers still hunt. I know first-hand only of five hunters in Chế Tạo and three in Nả Hàng B, but villagers’ accounts suggest that there are many more. Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed volunteered estimates that between twenty and thirty per cent of village households still engage in some hunting activity. The most common explanations for the persistence of hunting that I received from both villagers and forest patrol staff was that some villagers “don’t listen to the government” (không nghe lời nhà nước) because they are “hard-headed” (cưng đầu) or simply “don’t understand” (không hiểu). I sought to interrogate these discourses of compliance and non-compliance and will try to offer some more nuanced explanations for the persistence of hunting activity after over ten years of interventions by FFI and state actors seeking to curb villagers’ hunting practices.

Villagers most often cited repeated gun confiscations as a reason for the demise of the local hunting culture, more often than the incentive of conservation payments or the deterring effects of conservation enforcement by village patrols (the CCTs). While the first gun confiscation program in 2004 may have removed the majority of the guns villagers owned at the time (see Section 7.2), several subsequent initiatives evidently failed to eradicate remaining hunting practice. Most recently, in the Summer of 2013, nine guns were collected in Chế Tạo village (MCC FPD 5 27-11-2013), but only a few months later we joined a hunting trip with more guns than hunters (four muskets for two hunters, my translator and myself).210 The hunters explained that they had easily been able to submit an old gun and keep the ones they use for hunting, as other villagers and FPD officials also suggested (CT villager 70 08-12-2013). FPD officials were

210 All the guns I saw in Mù Cang Chải were of a traditional type that Tungittiplakorn (1998) describes from his research on Hmong hunting practices in Thailand. This includes at least ten guns owned by villagers and two that FPD staff and village patrols had confiscated and showed me. The typical Hmong hunting gun is a flint-lock musket with a markedly long barrel (which is not rifled), as depicted in Figure 8.1.

238 also aware that Hmong hunters can readily make a new musket themselves or purchase one, typically from Thaí people in Sơn La, for around 800,000 VND (40 USD) (MCC FPD 1 18-07- 2012; MCC FPD 3 29-10-2013).

Villagers’ accounts of the first gun confiscation program in 2004 led me to believe that there was relatively little resistance and resentment over this forced loss of a traditionally vital household asset. I link this to the decline of common hunting practices in the 1990s, which had made it obsolete for each household to own a gun. In fact, this had become a latent threat to public safety, as one villager noted when explaining why many villagers readily submitted their guns (CT villager 48 01-12-2013). In turn, villagers who wanted to keep their preferred gun for hunting could easily submit an older one, using overt compliance as an effective strategy of covert resistance (cf. Scott 1985; Kerkvliet 2005; Kubo 2008). This explains why some villagers could maintain their hunting practice, but not why they would, which I next explain in terms of the socio-cultural significance of hunting. I build here on my insights into the socio-cultural meanings of eating meat, which I explained in Section 5.6.6.

8.2.3. The cultural and culinary significance of hunting and trapping

I only gradually gained insight into the socio-cultural appeal of hunting and trapping, particularly during my latter stays in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, when my assistant Pha and I were invited to join numerous meals of hunted or trapped wildlife. These occasions illustrated how common hunting, trapping, and enjoying forest wildlife are and provided ample opportunities to converse about Hmong hunting culture. They also gave me the impression that even a small bounty of a few birds or rats provides a good reason for villagers to invite trusted friends (or us) for a meal. On two occasions in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, villagers bought a flying squirrel from local hunters to offer us and other friends something more special than an ordinary chicken, as one of our friends in Nả Hàng B explained (PL official 3 17-11-2013). While I personally found that the tiny amount of meat that can be gnawed off boiled or charred rats or song birds does not add much to a meal, most villagers seemed to particularly like the distinct flavour and appeal of wild meats.211 I probed for this amongst villagers who identified as non-hunters, who also stated that

211 In turn, Tungittiplakorn (1998) notes that flying squirrels are not eaten much in the Hmong communities he studied in Thailand due to the bitter taste of their meat. This strong flavour is also evident in the intestines of ruminants. I got the impression that many Hmong villagers particularly like this bitter taste, which was also evident

239 they prefer the taste of wild meats over domesticated varieties. A senior FPD official, also ethnic Hmong, portrayed this as an inherent part of Hmong culture and a serious problem for conservation, although I found that villagers’ attitudes towards hunting and conservation to be more heterogeneous (MCC FPD Tua 22-05-2014).

While hunting requires considerable time, resources and knowledge, trapping is an easier way of obtaining wild meat. My impression is that many villagers trap occasionally and opportunistically, such as setting a few traps when they go to the forest to tend to their cardamom fields. In turn, Mang, one of our most regular acquaintances in Chế Tạo, maintains a trap line with twelve traps that he checks daily, although he rarely retrieves more than four small rats or birds (CT villager Mang 11-07-2013).212 He explained that there are no individual property regimes over trapping or hunting grounds, which means that villagers are free to hunt or trap anywhere, although he knows of few other villagers who trap as much as he does (CT villager Mang 11-07-2013). Interestingly, FFI’s reports and rhetoric has paid much more attention to hunting than to trapping, although the latter constitutes an indiscriminate conservation threat to rodents and birds, the most abundant forms of forest wildlife left in Chế Tạo’s forests.

I finally gained some first-hand insights into Hmong hunting culture during my last stay in Chế Tạo, when Pha and I joined a typical all-night hunting trip with Mang and another villager, whom we did not know.213 We hiked for approximately forty minutes from the village to Mang’s cardamom field. We spent the night there in a simple shack (see Figure 8.1), which, as Mang explains, other hunting parties are also free to use. I was struck by how energetic and persistent the two hunters were throughout most of the night, which lasted much longer than any night-time meals or shamanistic rituals I ever attended in Chế Tạo. They took turns to repeatedly stalk along the dark forest paths and fire shots into the trees, while the rest of us stayed in the hut to prepare and grill the animals with which they returned. By two o’clock in the morning, they had shot four flying squirrels, three rats and one squirrel. The innards of all animals were boiled up at a funeral I attended in Nả Hàng B, where the intestines of a sacrificed buffalo were stewed, yielding a green, pungent soup that was served as a special treat. 212 A trap line is essentially a small fence across the forest floor that forces rodents to go through one of its traps. These typically are spring-loaded with a bent piece of bamboo that lets two pieces of wood snap together like scissors, trapping any small animals crossing (cf. Tungittiplakorn 1998). Mang moved his trap lines roughly once a month or when his catch decreased, which is indicative that he caught most of the rodents frequenting a certain area. 213 By then, we had gradually gotten to know some of the remaining hunters in Chế Tạo and had been invited to join other hunting parties, although the opportunity to join never materialised.

240 together and yielded a chunky and pungent broth, which the others devoured with more gusto than I could muster.

Figure 8.1: Typical hunting shack in Chế Tạo’s forest with three hand-made, long-barrel muskets

The meat that we did not eat during the night or for breakfast, at least half of the total bounty, Mang brought back to his house to enjoy with family and friends. Mang estimates that his regular hunting and trapping supplies half of the meat his family consumes, but I consider this an extreme case within Chế Tạo village, as Mang likely hunts more often and raises fewer animals than other households (CT villager Mang 08-12-2013, 09-12-2012). Yet, even Mang’s family is not dependent on hunting as a source of meat, and Mang explained that he goes hunting approximately once a month or whenever he fancies a feast of wild meat. As I understand it,

241 contemporary hunting practice in Chế Tạo is not driven by villagers’ need to source additional food or income, but by the socio-cultural aspect of hunting and valuation of wild meats.214

8.2.4. The absence of economic drivers of contemporary hunting in Chế Tạo

While Mang claims to never sell any wildlife he hunts, I know of other hunters in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B offering flying squirrels they had hunted to selected villagers for sale, albeit somewhat secretively. During our last stay in Chế Tạo, our friend and host bought three of them for 650,000 VND (32.50 USD), which lasted us for at least five meals. Apart from him, I wager that few households in Chế Tạo would have had the cash flow to buy locally hunted wildlife. On the other hand, it would not suit relatively wealthy villagers, who have ample domesticated chickens, to either buy or hunt forest wildlife themselves, according to my understanding of social norms. While the local demand for buying hunted wildlife may be limited in Chế Tạo, some villagers estimated that the three flying squirrels could have been sold in Mù Cang Chải for up to 500,000 VND (25 USD) each. However, they were sure that Chế Tạo hunters would be unlikely to bring any of their bounty to Mù Cang Chải town due to a common fear of being apprehended by FPD or police officers. Although Nả Hàng B is close to the market town of Ngã Ba Kim, villagers were confident that local hunters primarily hunt for subsistence and not to generate income. Given that the bounty of any hunting trip in Mù Cang Chải is uncertain and unlikely to yield any high-value wildlife species, I do not consider hunting as a significant source of income for Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải.

My understanding of hunting in Mù Cang Chải contrasts with the situation elsewhere in Vietnam, where the market demand for forest wildlife is reportedly insatiable and considered a much greater driver of over-hunting than hunting for subsistence or socio-cultural reasons (TRAFFIC 2009; Brunner 2013; MacMillan and Nguyen Quoc Anh 2013).215 In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, however, I find that neither market demand nor subsistence needs are significant drivers of local hunting practices, largely because there is little wildlife left in the forests. None

214 The second hunter on the trip, who was in his early twenties and normally goes hunting with his father or brother (of whom I knew that he hunted), said he goes hunting three to four times a month, at least in the Fall (CT villager 70 08-12-2013). 215 Several studies by academics and conservation NGOs have shown how a growing demand for forest meats (known literally as thịt rừng), particularly amongst the urban middle class, has greatly increased the hunting pressure on forest wildlife populations (Drury 2009; TRAFFIC 2009; Drury 2011; Sandalj et al. 2016). This market demand is mostly focussed on forest wildlife other than rodents, and the flying squirrel, the largest species that Chế Tạo hunters commonly find, is not valued highly by wildlife connoisseurs, as far as I know.

242 of the hunters or trappers I interviewed suggested they were dependent on wild meat, not even Mang, who likely eats more wild meat than most other villagers in Chế Tạo or Nả Hàng B. While I interviewed many villagers who eat meat only every few months, most of them claimed that they neither hunt nor trap, considering this a waste of time. Other studies in Vietnam and elsewhere have also deconstructed poverty as a significant driver of hunting, contesting the contribution that wild meat makes to household food security and protein intake.216

The primary objective of this Section 8.2 has been to elucidate the prevalence and drivers of contemporary hunting practices in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. According to my insights from interview data and observations, the most significant reason that a minority of villagers, which I cannot quantify, continues to hunt is the socio-cultural aspect of hunting, including the ‘socio- culinary’ appeal of eating wild meat. Interestingly, neither non-hunters nor hunters suggested that any villagers continue hunting because they still depend on wild meat for food security.

8.3. Village politics between hunters and non-hunters

After examining different drivers of contemporary hunting practice, I next examine the village politics between hunters and non-hunters. I first try to represent different villagers’ conceptions of how past and contemporary hunting practices have affected forest wildlife populations, and, secondly, how villagers’ differing attitudes towards hunting have made it a secretive and contested practice pursued by a minority of villagers.

8.3.1. Conservation impact of hunting

When hunting was still legal and common, until the early 1990s, interviewees confirmed that villagers were never worried about the sustainability of hunting. There were also no customary forms of monitoring wildlife populations and avoiding hunting juveniles or hunting during breeding seasons. This is plausible, given that Hmong spiritual beliefs only protected certain species or locales, as noted above. Secondly, Michaud (2012) reminds us that Hmong social

216 These sources include an FFI report on Chế Tạo (Swan 2006), a case study amongst the ethnic Katu in Vietnam (MacMillan and Nguyen Quoc Anh 2013), Tungittiplakorn’s (1998) study of hunting practices in three Hmong villages in Thailand, as well as parts of the growing literature on the (largely illegal) harvest, consumption and trade of bush meat, often based on research in Africa (Powell 2015). The latter source, for instance, deconstructs the argument that bush meat provides an essential source of protein for many poor people, arguing that very few of even the poorest people in the world are protein deficient.

243 structure is non-hierarchical and thus not conducive to the establishment and maintenance of social institutions for collective actions, such as customary hunting restrictions.

In hindsight, villagers commonly acknowledged that local hunting practices had resulted in a serious decline of local forest wildlife in the past. Nowadays, however, several hunters and villagers I shared meals of wild meat with suggested that hunting had become too rare to have any adverse conservation impacts. “The forest manages that” (hav zoov cem cev pov hwm xuub tuab lo lawm) Mang’s hunting buddy suggested, for instance (CT villager 70 08-12-2013). He was in his early 20s and did not emphasize how much of the wildlife had disappeared since the 1990s, as older villagers often did. His impression was rather that “this forest is big, you can go anywhere [to still find some animals to hunt]” (lub hav zoov hua lu yug xav moom haiv twg tuab lo) (CT villager 70 08-12-2013). Our host and friend, who rarely hunts himself, but bought three flying squirrels, as noted above, provided a different rationale to justify contemporary hunting. He suggested that hunting had become necessary to keep rodent populations in check, as both predator species and other villagers’ hunting practices had declined (CT villager 8 24-05-2014). Another villager, a non-hunter, wagered that hunters were able to avert population decline somehow keep some of the wildlife “for seed” (để lại làm giống), a common idiom in both Hmong and Vietnamese for sustainable management (CT villager 48 02-12-2013). In reality, however, it is impossible to ensure that hunting levels of an unknown wildlife population are sustainable, particularly if the extent of hunting is unknown.

On the other hand, Chế Tạo villagers who identified themselves as non-hunters often voiced concerns about the conservation impact of contemporary hunting and trapping. Several of them suggested that hunting was so pervasive that it was only a matter of time until “all animals are gone” (CT villager 25 14-12-2012). Non-hunters seemed to disapprove of other villagers’ continued hunting practice either because of such conservation concerns or because they considered it unfair that they had been complying with hunting restrictions, while others continued to hunt for their own benefit.

8.3.2. Bittersweet wild meat: Secrecy in contemporary hunting culture

Given the divide between hunters and non-hunters, I sought to understand the dynamics between these two groups of villagers and how this has shaped contemporary practices and politics of

244 hunting, addressing the first part of my fourth research question. Specifically, I sought to understand to what extent hunting had become a secretive practice and, secondly, if some villagers would denounce others for hunting or other illegal forest use.

My government minder Sinh once suggested that very few villagers still hunt, because they would have to “hide like thieves” to enjoy their feast of wild meats (MCC FPD Sinh 27-11- 2013). Indeed, hunters confirmed that they conceal their hunting practice and that they are not sure who in the village still hunts. Such accounts led me to understand that hunting, which used to be a customary and commonly shared activity, is nowadays pursued secretively by a minority of villagers. Although the majority of villagers I interviewed in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B opposed other villagers’ continued hunting practices, few of them said they confronted or reported on hunters. This is partly because challenging people’s behaviour directly is not common in Hmong society, as my assistant Pha explained.217 “I go my way, you go your way” (Nyiam moom nyiam kev) is a common Hmong saying that justifies turning a blind eye on other people’s wrong-doing. Within networks of bonding social capital, in particular, villagers are unlikely to report their kin, their friends, or fellow villagers, as at least four respondents admitted. More commonly, villagers were keen to state that they would intercept or report on outsiders they encounter in the forest. Social capital also allows hunters to safely share their hunting practice and wild meat with friends and relatives, as I could observe on multiple occasions.

The hunting trip with Mang provided some insight into the secrecy surrounding hunting within Chế Tạo village when we encountered two other villagers on our way out of the forest. The first one was Mang’s uncle, an outspoken critic of hunting, whom I interviewed twice about topics of forest conservation and forest use (CT villager 47 13-07-2013, 27-11-2012). We met him, as Mang reflected regretfully, because we had taken too long over breakfast, finishing the rest of the rice alcohol and some of the rodent meat. The four of us had each been carrying a gun, but managed to toss them into the bushes in time for Mang’s uncle not to notice. Asked by his uncle where we were coming from, Mang clearly knew to hide the fact that we had been hunting all night and he explained that he had shown us his cardamom fields. This seemed plausible enough

217 To understand this further, I asked villagers about social norms and debates surrounding the use of forest resources in the past. Some respondents recall that there had always been some villagers who wasted open access forest resources, but their accounts differ on how commonly this was criticized by other villagers.

245 to his uncle, who continued, while we picked up the guns and continued walking out of the forest. I happened to be ahead, when I soon ran into the younger brother of a senior commune official, whom we did not want to know that we had been hunting. Calling confidently from the back, Mang asked the man where he was going. “That’s what I was about to ask you” he replied, looking at the four of us, each holding a long hunting musket in hand that we had not been able to hide quick enough. Lost for an explanation, Mang played down our hunting trip, claiming that we had been unlucky and only shot a few rats. After further casual exchange, the other villager continued, leaving us to worry whether he would report our hunting trip to his brother or other officials. While there were no repercussions in the four remaining days of our final stay in Chế Tạo, these encounters and Mang’s reactions illustrated the secrecy that remains over contemporary hunting practices in Chế Tạo.218

Interestingly, during my final visit in May 2014, the Mù Cang Chải FPD was introducing monetary incentives for villagers who reported on fellow villagers’ illegal forest use. Vietnam’s legislation for forest protection includes provisions for such monetary rewards, which have been piloted elsewhere in the country, albeit with limited success (NGO 8 17-12-2013). In Mù Cang Chải, villagers who report on loggers or hunters can receive a nominal reward of 50,000 VND (2.50 USD) (MCC FPD Tua 29-05-2014).219 This reward system sought to make villagers the ‘eyes and ears’ of the FPD to monitor fellow villagers’ hunting or logging activities, which was also FFI’s aim for the community patrol groups, which I turn to in Section 8.5.

The efficacy of monetary incentives for reporting forest law infractions depends on the social dynamics between compliant and non-compliant villagers. Based on my partial insights into Chế Tạo’s village politics, I question if the strong patterns of social capital within Hmong village societies are conducive to monetary rewards for whistle-blowing. If we had not hidden our guns in time for Mang’s uncle to see them, he may have denounced our hunting informally, but I doubt he would have reported us officially or would have been enticed to do so by 50,000 VND. Although such a monetary reward would have been more significant to the second villager we

218 Interestingly, the second man we met was carrying several metal traps in his basket, as he was planning to spend the night in his cardamom field, located past Mang’s field. When I had interviewed him in his house before, he had told me that he had stopped trapping several years ago, although he admitted liking the taste of wild meat (CT villager 9 29-11-2013). 219 To put such rewards into perspective, 50,000 VND is at least half of the daily wage of a low-paid labourer in Mù Cang Chải or Ngã Ba Kim, but also a quite insignificant amount that even villagers can easily spend (see Chapter 6).

246 encountered, who has very limited monetary income, this would not have been his only consideration. My general impression was that Chế Tạo villagers valued social capital higher than a cash reward, and several respondents confirmed that they were more inclined to confront or report outsiders than fellow villagers. Secondly, villagers seemed more inclined to defend resources over which they maintain individual property over than open-access forest resources or the PA. In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I learned about regular village conflicts over the ‘stealing’ of firewood, cardamom or bamboo, typically by fellow villagers, from areas under individual ownership. Villagers brought such conflicts to the village heads much more frequently than cases of hunting or logging in other forest areas of the PA, which is essentially under open access, despite its designation as a special-use forest. I could not assess if a monetary reward might provide an additional incentive for villagers to report illegal activity within the PA.

In this section, I have sought to analyse contemporary village politics and subjective attitudes towards hunting in Chế Tạo. I find that the legacy of open access forest resources, including hunting grounds, as well as the dynamics of cultural protocols and social capital, all shape villagers’ agency in legitimizing or opposing other villagers’ access to different forest resources. In the remainder of this chapter, I will explain how these social institutions can intersect with the protection of the remaining gibbon populations and, secondly, with the practices of forest patrolling by the community conservation teams (CCTs). These are the two most prominent aspects of the PA and FFI’s interventions in Mù Cang Chải, as I emphasized in the preceding chapter.

8.4. The politics of gibbon hunting and conservation

FFI’s primary objective in Mù Cang Chải since the early 2000s has been to avert the demise of the remaining gibbon populations, which could total as few as 40 individuals along the ridgeline between Chế Tạo and Mường La (see Section 7.2.4). Given that FFI and FPD have failed to eradicate the hunting of rodents, which this chapter has focussed on so far, the question arises, if and how conservation interventions and villagers’ agency can affect the more specialized practice of gibbon hunting. In this section, I will present some insights into the secretive practice of gibbon hunting, although I could not determine how common it is in Chế Tạo and Chế Vượn.

247 8.4.1. Socio-cultural barriers to gibbon hunting

So far, I have portrayed contemporary hunting as a remnant of customary subsistence practices, typically pursued for its socio-cultural appeal, and best undertaken after dark to target nocturnal rodents, most notably flying squirrels. In turn, gibbons are best hunted in the early morning hours when they sing, which makes them particularly vulnerable to hunting (Rawson et al. 2011). Importantly, gibbons were the only species of local forest wildlife that committed hunters from Chế Tạo and surrounding communes could lucratively sell (see Section 7.2.4). A gibbon could be sold for between one and five million dong (50-250 USD) to wildlife traders in Mù Cang Chải or Mường La, and a live infant gibbon possibly for even more (FFI 8 17-12-2013; Rawson et al. 2011). Villagers’ accounts suggested that anyone caught shooting a gibbon or transporting it to town risked a substantial fine, while fellow villagers and FPD officials were less likely to turn a blind eye on gibbon hunting than they might do on villagers hunting and trapping birds or rodents.

Until the 1990s, gibbons and other primate species were more abundant in Chế Tạo, and some villagers, including Mang, hunted them opportunistically for consumption and local medicinal use, as both FFI reports and villagers I interviewed suggested. Elsewhere, ethnographic case studies of hunting found that Hmong hunters in Thailand and ethnic Lisu hunters in Yunnan abstained from hunting primates, because they were respected as more human-like than other wildlife (cf. Harris and Shilai 1997; Tungittiplakorn 1998). Four Hmong villagers I interviewed voiced similar subjective reservations, but I found no evidence for culturally or spiritually grounded norms that opposed primate hunting in the past. In the 1990s, primates became increasingly valued for their medicinal properties, and FFI’s subsequent propaganda sought to highlight the conservation value of Mù Cang Chải’s gibbons. Some FFI staff and villagers I interviewed suggested that hunters from neighbouring provinces of Lai Châu and Sơn La, typically ethnic Thái, had been largely responsible for a past decline of gibbon populations, which FFI surveys also indicated (see Section 7.2.2), but I could not determine the relative roles of outsiders and locals. Unable to influence outside hunters, FFI’s interventions had targeted hunters in Chế Tạo and neighbouring villages. Although FFI surveys found one of the two clusters of gibbon groups close to Chế Tạo village, I did not hear of any local villager ever shooting a gibbon since FFI started working in Mù Cang Chải in the early 2000s.

248 8.4.2. The hidden practice of gibbon hunting

There is, however, another village within Chế Tạo commune, which I have referred to by the false name Chế Vượn (see Section 7.2.3), which several FFI actors and Chế Tạo villagers portrayed as a hotbed of illegal forest activity. Chế Vượn is located close to the second cluster of gibbon groups, which can be heard singing from the village. During my first stay in Chế Tạo in December 2012, I visited that village with my assistant Pha, but without a government minder. One of the households we entered was that of a committed hunter, who was remarkably open. He soon showed us a small shoulder bag for his hunting supplies, which he had made from the fur of a black gibbon, as also depicted in an FFI report (Swan and O'Reilly 2004). He said he had only occasionally shot a gibbon, implying that he could do so more often or whenever he needed money. He was vague about how regularly he or other villagers hunt gibbons, but offered to make me a fur handbag like he had the next time he shot one. A younger villager present felt safe enough to admit that he had shot and wounded a gibbon just the day prior. Later, the household head showed us his gun and stepped outside to fire at a target, showing off his skill. To me, this illustrated that hunting, for gibbons or otherwise, was more prevalent in Chế Vượn than in Chế Tạo or Nả Hàng B, where I could not imagine any villager openly firing a gun in broad daylight. Back in his house, the hunter suddenly jumped up from his seat by the fireplace, quickly hiding his gun, when he heard an unfamiliar voice approaching his house. It was a villager from the main village of Chế Tạo, who had been sent by commune officials to look for Pha and me. We had visited Chế Vượn without seeking permission from the commune leadership (which had not been a concern with the other five villages of Chế Tạo commune we had visited previously). In this case, however, I was asked to pay an arbitrary but moderate fine of 500,000 VND (25 USD), which was arguably worth the insight we gained into hunting practices in Chế Vượn.

I found that livelihoods in Chế Vượn were more dire than in Chế Tạo village, as at least two- thirds of households experienced annual rice shortages of up to six months, and only three households had cardamom income due to a lack of suitable cardamom land in the local forest areas. Villagers are therefore dependent on their annual Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) or traditional forms of forest income at other times of the year. Arguably, their most lucrative and immediate income opportunity was to shoot a gibbon and sell it for an estimated VND 5 million (250 USD) in case of a live infant or slightly less for a dead adult (Swan 2006; Rawson

249 et al. 2011). This is more than the annual cash income of most households in Chế Vượn. Given the severity of food insecurity and lack of alternative livelihood opportunities, gibbon hunting in Chế Vượn could partly be driven by poverty, contrary to rodent hunting in the surrounding villages and communes. As noted above, the latter was largely driven by tradition and socio- cultural appeal, which gibbon hunting does not have.

While gibbons were by far the most lucrative species for hunters in Chế Vượn to target, there were also small populations of wild boars and chickens in the forests surrounding Chế Vượn. In another household we entered on our brief visit, villagers had been in the process of gutting a 90- kilogramm wild boar that one of them had shot by his maize field earlier that day. His plan was to take part of it to Mù Cang Chải to sell, where wild boar meat fetches a premium price of around 130,000 VND (6.50 USD) per kilogram, or 50 per cent more than pork from lowland pig varieties (MCC official 4 29-05-2014). Although Chế Vượn villagers confirmed that hunting a large wild boar is very rare, this would be a windfall earning for any household in Chế Vượn. He explained that he would leave the village around four o’clock the next morning to avoid being seen by a specific local villager. This person emphasized in our conversation that villagers in Chế Vượn were more forest dependent than their counterparts in other villages of Chế Tạo commune, but asked us not to convey this to the commune leadership. In turn, several commune officials and villagers in Chế Tạo spoke of Chế Vượn as the last refuge for both forest wildlife and hunters, differentiating it from Chế Tạo village.

In August 2013, the most recent gun confiscations collected hunting guns from two thirds of all households in Chế Vượn, while finding guns in only 12 per cent of all households in Chế Tạo village (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013; MCC FPD 5 27-11-2013). This suggests that there had been a high prevalence of hunting activity in Chế Vượn, although rates of gun confiscations, gun ownership and hunting activity are not necessarily closely correlated, as noted above. During my subsequent two trips to Chế Tạo, I tried to return to Chế Vượn for further data collection, and recurrent negotiations over this became an interesting case of power play between different local gatekeepers. While we were never able to return, I could interview several district and commune officials, the village head and two villagers (incidentally Mang’s in-laws), all of whom had grown up or still lived in Chế Vượn, to triangulate some of my data and further understand the specific case of Chế Vượn. However, I could not further investigate if, for instance, the latest

250 gun confiscations in Chế Vượn had reduced hunting practices or gibbon hunting, specifically. At least until the 2013 gun collections, most households in Chế Vượn arguably could have hunted gibbons and generated substantial monetary revenue. However, this cannot have been too common, as the gibbon populations in Chế Tạo had remained stable or maybe even increased since 2006, according to a Chế Vượn village official (cf. FFI 2013) and FFI’s repeated gibbon surveys (see Section 7.2.4).

The continued survival of the vulnerable gibbon population of Chế Vượn therefore suggests that local poverty and lack of income opportunities had not necessarily been the driver for continued gibbon hunting, and that outside interventions and local social institutions may have reduced hunting pressure. These institutions include regular patrolling by the local CCT; FFI’s propaganda for gibbon conservation; villagers’ agency in shaping social norms against gibbon hunting; and villagers’ reduced dependence on forest income due to Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). I could not determine the relative importance of these factors or how they had shaped village politics and villagers’ environmentalities regarding gibbon conservation. Nonetheless, in the following section and the subsequent chapter, I will highlight several limitations to both CCTs and PES affecting conservation behaviour and compliance in Mù Cang Chải. In Section 10.8., I conclude this thesis by reflecting further on the case of gibbon hunting an survival in Chế Vượn.

8.5. The politics and perils of community-based forest patrolling

The community conservation teams (CCTs) were established in 2003 prior to the PA by FFI to help monitor biodiversity and convey conservation awareness and hunting restrictions to fellow villagers, as noted in the preceding chapter. Ten years later, when I started doing fieldwork in Chế Tạo, I soon found that the CCTs had become the most prominent and most contested element of forest conservation within Chế Tạo village. Although still solely funded by FFI, villagers invariably portrayed the CCTs as state agents policing the PA and enforcing forest use restrictions. In Section 7.2.3 I noted that FFI had decided to employ villagers as forest patrols to maintain a handle on their project site in Chế Tạo. In the following five sub-sections, I will, addressing the latter part of my fourth research question, examine how the practices and politics of community-based enforcement by the CCTs have intersected with villagers’ hunting practices and conservation attitudes.

251 8.5.1. Forest patrolling by community conservation teams (CCTs)

The CCTs consisted of a total of 18 Hmong villagers from Chế Tạo and surrounding communes and were split into three groups, each of which patrolled one of the three areas (nhóm) that the PA is divided into.220 Pao and Sinh, who also served as my government minders (see Chapter 3), were CCT supervisors and responsible for collecting data on patrolling activities and wildlife sightings to report these to FFI and the PA management board. They therefore received a substantial salary of 4 million VND (200 USD) per month in addition to their regular wage as patrols, although their responsibilities allowed them to spend much more time in the Mù Cang Chải FPD station than in the forest, according to my observations. The total cost of the CCTs for FFI amounted to USD 16,356 per year, including an allowance paid to the PA management board for administration and reporting (FFI 6 04-06-2014).

Throughout my multiple stays in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, Pha and I got to know several CCT members in both Chế Tạo and Púng Luông quite well, and we had ample opportunity for informal conversations and shared meals. We also enjoyed close relationships with Pao and Sinh, despite their formal and sometimes restrictive role of policing my fieldwork. Compared to other patrol staff and villagers, however, they were less outspoken about some of the problematic aspects of community-based enforcement, on which I seek to shed light. Pao and Sinh both promised more than once that Pha and I could accompany a patrol team, but safety concerns prevented us from ever doing so.

8.5.2. Forest use and patrolling beyond national policy

As I emphasised at the outset of this chapter, most villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B are no longer dependent on forest conversion and forest income, and there is little opportunity for the latter after decades of unrestricted hunting and pơ mu logging (see Chapters 5 and 6). Their regular need for forest products is limited to firewood and construction timber, and only some of the latter is sourced from within the PA. Otherwise, apart from the remaining hunters, local villagers only utilize the forests of the PA for cardamom cultivation, most of which predates the

220 They are contracted by FFI to spend 16 days per month hiking the same four-day routes, although they tend to patrol less frequently during the rainy season (MCC FPD Pao 15-07-2012). Their monthly salary of 1.4 million VND (67 USD) is comparable to that of low-level commune or Forest Protection Department (FPD) officials. Compared to other internationally funded forest patrols, however, they remain the second-poorest paid forest rangers in Vietnam (FFI 4 27-07-2012).

252 establishment of the PA, and for the occasional collection of rattan and medicinal plants (CT villager 33 15-12-2012a). Importantly, none of this is restricted by CCTs, who have an informal policy to allow these forms of forest use due to their significance for local livelihoods (MCC FPD Tua 09-11-2012; Le Trong Dat et al. 2005).

All patrol staff and relevant FPD officials I asked, as well as FFI staff involved in Mù Cang Chải, stated that they personally favour this approach over strict enforcement of formal state policy, which prohibits the harvest of any forest products from both SUF and protection forests (with the exception of dead wood). Villagers in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B confirmed that CCTs always question people they encounter on patrol what they are doing in the forest, but invariably let them continue if they “have a good reason”, such as collecting forest products for household use, cutting timber for house construction, or checking on their cardamom fields. CCT members can often verify such claims, as they personally know most local villagers they meet on their regular patrol routes (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013). Nonetheless, this informal policy of granting villagers access to the PA gives them plenty of excuses when they are intercepted by CCTs, such as that they were tending to their cardamom fields. The Mù Cang Chải PA is therefore not off-limits to buffer zone villagers as PAs formally are in Vietnam.

Unlike local villagers, who have a good excuse of being in the PA, those who are hunting, logging or collecting NTFPs for sale do need to fear being intercepted by the CCTs, according to the accounts of both villagers and patrol staff. Sinh and other CCT members noted that hunters and loggers regularly try to run away, apparently so fast that they lose their shoes and do not even pick them up (dha khau hle tsi khawg), as one Chế Tạo hunter put it, to emphasize his fear of being caught by the CCTs. Indeed, the CCTs regularly intercept hunters and loggers, confiscate their knives, axes, saws, chain saws, guns, and hunted wildlife, and formally report the incident. Local villagers who are identified may be issued a warning or formally reprimand at a public commune-level meeting. This happens every so often in Chế Tạo, as villagers confirmed, although they suggested this has little effect on the accused, except for that they may send their wife to the next meeting to avoid further confrontations, as one villagers suggested (CT villager 48 02-12-2013). The most common criticism that Chế Tạo interviewees voiced about the CCTs was that enforcement was too lenient, as “nobody gets fined”. Indeed, very few people have ever been fined for illegal activity within the PA, as both villagers and FPD officials confirmed.

253 Analysing the data from CCT reports that Pao, Sinh and FFI staff shared with me, none of whom could provide consecutive data, illustrates how common confiscations by CCTs are. While in the three latter quarters of 2012, for instance, the patrol teams confiscated, amongst numerous knives, machetes and hatchets, 19 guns and 5 chain saws; in 2014, the CCTs confiscated, in March and April alone, 4 guns and 5 chain saws. CCT members confirmed that most of the guns and chain saws that they confiscate belong to hunters or loggers from outside Mù Cang Chải. These confiscations are in addition to the gun confiscation programs I have mentioned above, which the commune leaderships conducted with district police forces in 2004, 2008 and 2013 in many villages of Mù Cang Chải.

Importantly, CCT members are not formal FPD enforcement personnel and hence do not have the legal authority to intercept trespassers and confiscate their belongings (FFI 4 27-07-2012). Nevertheless, neither FPD, FFI nor patrol staff were aware of this formal limitation, although some disputed it, and none of them knew of any cases of offenders challenging the authority of CCTs. However, several CCT members told me about threatening incidences of being outnumbered and physically attacked, and in one incident even being shot at, by outside loggers (MCC FPD Sinh 09-11-2012; FFI 8 17-12-2013; MCC FPD 5 27-11-2013).221 They confirmed that local Hmong villagers are typically not involved in the teams of professional loggers, who are reportedly often from Than Uyên district (located west of Mù Cang Chải in Lai Châu Province) and occasionally target the remaining pơ mu trees that are still to be found in remote parts of the PA. Interviewees from both FFI and the CCTs consider these loggers the greatest threat to the local forests and CCTs, alike. This exposes the CCTs to similar risks of attacks that regular FPD patrols face elsewhere in Vietnam. I will briefly recount how illegal logging and forest law enforcement are commonly portrayed in Vietnamese media in order to later highlight some differences between enforcement by local Hmong CCTs and district-level FPD staff. In the subsequent section, I will return to the designated focus of the CCTs to curb hunting by local Hmong villagers.

221 A senior FFI staff member was quite disturbed to learn from me of several incidences of CCTs being physically attacked, and he highlighted the moral dilemma of funding the CCTs and thus putting its members at risk (FFI 6 04- 06-2014).

254 8.5.3. The Forest Protection Department (FPD) in Mù Cang Chải

Vietnamese media reports and official FPD publications commonly portray Vietnam’s forest patrols as heroes fighting a national battle against ruthless illegal loggers (who are known in Vietnam as lâm tặc). In turn, independent academic scholars and conservationists have portrayed FPD patrols as notoriously ineffective due to a lack of resources and widespread collusion with illegal loggers (McElwee 2004b; Hoang Cam 2011; Sikor and To Xuan Phuc 2011; Cordall 2012; Brunner 2013; Nguyen Huu Dung 2013; To Xuan Phuc 2015). A common criticism of forest law enforcement in Vietnam is that FPD rangers do not patrol the forests enough to deter or intercept illegal forest exploitation where it happens but rather rely on roadside checkpoints to confiscate illegally extracted forest products. While vast quantities of illegal timber and NTFPs pass official checkpoints and border crossings every day, the much smaller quantities of confiscated timber are officially auctioned off, as it is in Mù Cang Chải. This potentially provides a lucrative source of income for provincial and district FPDs and, more critically, little incentive to patrol the forest and curb illegal logging before it takes place (EIA 2011; To Xuan Phuc, Mahanty, et al. 2014).

I found six reports in official media outlets of Yên Bái Province that showcased the Mù Cang Chải PA and its FPD forces. Each article features one illustrative photo of FPD personnel patrolling the forest, invariably looking up and scanning the canopy and, in one case, accompanied by a female Hmong villager. I recognize several officers from the Mù Cang Chải district FPD (Hạt Kiểm Lâm) and I suspect that they would only patrol the forest like this for a photo opportunity. Similarly unrepresentative I find the image in Figure 8.2 of an FPD officer explaining a giant dial of forest fire risk level (cấp dự báo cháy rừng), which is arguably emblematic to Vietnam’s PAs (cf. Brunner 2013), to two Hmong women. However, it seems to me that these images, typical of FPD publications, seek to convey that the FPD in Mù Cang Chải engage local Hmong villagers in their work of forest protection.

255

Figure 8.2: Mù Cang Chải FPD staff explaining forest fire risk to Hmong women

Interestingly, some of the junior FPD staff also staged photos depicting themselves in the forest, but in a very different light. One of them posed very effectively, in formal FPD uniform, but sipping from a small carton of Milo (a fortified milk product), in front of a Hmong hunting shack, and thus looked remarkably out of place as a forest ranger. From their comments and the way they were showing me this image, it seemed to me that their intention had been to capture this poor fit, which is antithetical to the official representation of FPD agents. I could not engage in further discussions about their views, but, ironically, their photo captures perfectly the critical discourse of FPD expressed by international scholars cited above, as well as my own observations.

Apart from the main FPD station in Mù Cang Chải, I regularly visited the FPD station (Trậm Kiểm Lâm) in Púng Luông, where FPD staff had, in the past, intercepted at least three cases of villagers from Nậm Khắt or Púng Luông with pỏ mu timber or wildlife (MCC FPD 3 29-10- 2013). However, in conversation about their enforcement activities, FPD staff in Púng Luông noted that their station can easily be avoided via an alternative road through Nậm Khắt, and that their primary objective is to serve as a mere deterrent to illegal forest extraction (MCC FPD 10 17-08-2013). This underlines my observations and villagers’ impressions that the FPD staff in Mù Cang Chải do little to curb illegal forest activities, at least not in the PA. To further investigate conservation enforcement in and around the PA, I will next aim to illustrate how patrolling by the CCTs has shaped village politics and environmentalities in Nả Hàng B and Chế

256 Tạo, in particular. I will highlight some fundamental shortcomings of community-based enforcement and suggest how they may be remedied in Mù Cang Chải.

8.5.4. The dilemma of community-based enforcement

I first interrogate the potential advantages and shortcomings of community-based enforcement and then examine the positionality and agency of the CCTs, as well as villagers’ opinions on patrolling. I try to evaluate the efficacy of local patrols in curbing local hunting practices, particularly of the gibbons, which has been FFI’s lasting objective in funding the CCTs. Drawing partly on Agrawal’s (2005) work on environmentality, I highlight how different actors’ agendas of forest use and conservation have evolved, building on my analysis of contemporary hunting practices in the preceding sections.

In his analysis of the interplay of conservation governance and environmentality, Agrawal (2005) highlights the potential of employing villagers as forest patrols, which I will argue largely backfired in Chế Tạo. Based on a Foucauldian perspective on power, Agrawal (2005:93) suggests that local forest patrols can “use their intimate knowledge about members of the community to ensure that power is wielded neither too forcefully nor too weakly”. Under the veil of being ‘community-based’, they effectively infiltrate the “regulatory community” and therefore operate “constantly, consistently, effectively” to keep villagers under surveillance and their forest use in check, as Agrawal (2005:93) asserts. From a governmentality perspective, forest patrolling by villagers is more insidious and less susceptible to resistance than enforcement by outsiders, such as regular FPD state forest rangers. However, I find that Agrawal neither fully considers villagers’ agency to resist or evade forest patrols nor how the social embeddedness of village patrols can become a double-edged sword, as other scholars have also found. I found that latent conflicts of interest (cf. Robbins et al. 2007; Doane 2014) affect the efficacy of the CCTs, as well as the risk that they pursue illegal forest use themselves (cf. Vasan 2002).

In addition, I found further issues that contribute to the conflict potential of the CCTs in Mù Cang Chải. The initial intent of employing villagers as forest patrols was for them to serve as the “eyes and ears” of FFI and the PA management board to monitor villagers’ forest use, much like in Agrawal’s (2005) theory outlined above, and enhance villagers’ conservation awareness and compliance (Swan 2006:48). However, I found that their positionality had become a serious

257 constraint, rather than an asset. For one, villagers also had ‘intimate knowledge’ about the CCTs, in particular when and where they patrolled, which allowed committed hunters to hunt elsewhere without encountering patrols.222 Secondly, as with the nascent initiative of monetary rewards for villagers reporting on illegal forest activities (noted above), social capital ties, which CCT members have with many local villagers, preclude rigorous enforcement, as CCT members admitted that they do not prosecute or fine fellow villager and local kin but primarily outsiders. This issue was often noted by villagers I interviewed, and many of them called for stricter enforcement or a reform of the system of CCTs.

Given that local villagers who still go hunting can easily avoid the CCTs and, secondly, that other forms of forest use by buffer zone villagers within the PA are largely limited to seasonal activities (most notably cardamom cultivation and the occasional harvest of rattan or other NTFPs for household use), the CCTs rarely actually encounter local villagers on their patrols.223 Together with the informal policy of allowing subsistence use of PA resources, this should provide little ground for conflict between patrols and most villagers. Nevertheless, many villagers were conflicted about the CCTs, which I will aim to represent in the following section.

8.5.5. Suspicions and resentment towards community conservation teams (CCTs)

Many villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo volunteered notions of jealousy and suspicion towards the CCT members and their patrolling. During their four-day patrols, the CCTs had unrestricted access to the most remote parts of the Chế Tạo range, which were the last refuge of some of the remaining wildlife. Other villagers alleged that the patrol teams secretly hunt and trap forest wildlife, when on patrol, or cultivate cardamom there. Interestingly, both hunters and non-

222 For instance, when we went hunting with two Chế Tạo villagers, they were confident that we would not encounter any patrols. A villager in Nả Hàng B explained that hunters rely on other villagers to warn them via cell phone if a patrol team passes through the village (NHB villager 3 07-11-2013). Across the ridgeline, within Chế Tạo commune, there is very limited cell phone reception, which means that the CCTs operating there cannot call for support if faced by a larger group of outside loggers, for instance (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013). This illustrates that certain infrastructure developments can facilitate both forest patrolling and forest exploitation, as it has been argued for roads that provide better access to remote forest areas (see Section 6.2.5). 223 Several CCT members suggested that they, at most, encounter three to four (groups of) people during their four- day patrol, but often no-one at all. Forest use is a seasonal activity that is largely limited to the dry season and to the months when the common agricultural labour calendar gives villagers time to tend to their cardamom fields or prepare wood for house construction, for instance. These factors have also traditionally limited the hunting season to the months of October to December. More recently, the frequency of villagers going to the forest and CCTs encountering villagers peaks in the weeks leading up to the cardamom harvest in September (MCC FPD Sinh 22-11- 2013).

258 hunters in Chế Tạo voiced such allegations against the CCTs, often unprompted, when I was asking more general questions about hunting. Yet, I did not encounter these concerns about the patrols among villagers in Nả Hàng B, where a different CCT operates from the two teams that patrol within Chế Tạo commune. Most Chế Tạo villagers who expressed concerns about the CCTs were generally in favour of forest protection and patrolling, which most villagers still consider necessary to deter illegal forest use by outsiders. However, many of them questioned the integrity of the patrol members, and several respondents confirmed that such scepticism is wide-spread in the village community of Chế Tạo.

Several respondents also seemed somewhat jealous over the power and income CCT members have gained, and that the CCTs had been hand-picked by commune officials to serve as village patrols.224 Indeed, both FFI and FPD staff admitted that villagers, who were renowned as good hunters, were selected to serve on the first patrol teams in 2003 (MCC FPD Sinh 22-11-2013; FFI 4 27-07-2012). Employing hunters as forest patrols is a common strategy amongst conservation agencies, as hunters typically have intricate and extensive knowledge of local forests and forest wildlife (FFI 6 04-06-2014; FFI 4 27-07-2012; Swan and O'Reilly 2004; Wilder 2008).225 In addition, FFI actors hoped that employing hunters in forest protection eliminates the hunting pressure they exerted on forest wildlife, while giving them an alternative perspective and income opportunity (FFI 6 04-06-2014; Swan 2006). On the other hand, I consider that their identity as (former) hunters contributes to the common rumour that they still hunt when on patrol and out of sight, which undermines their socio-political legitimacy as patrols in the minds of some Chế Tạo villagers.

Arguably, trapping rodents or shooting a forest chicken for dinner while sleeping in the forest is within Hmong customs, but several Chế Tạo villagers took a normative stance against the CCTs

224 A common source of jealousy that I observed in Chế Tạo is that between the two clans (Sung and Giang), as noted in Section 6.5.1. While the clan membership of the 18 CCT members is roughly representative of the distribution of the clans in the communes of the PA, I could not determine to what extent jealousy and allegations towards the CCTs stem from latent tensions between the different Hmong clans. What is evident, however, is that the effects of social capital are defined by more than just clan membership. I found evidence of bonding social capital amongst members of different clans, which is common in Hmong societies, given the effects of inter-clan exogamy and relations; on the other hand, I also found evidence of jealousy and animosity among members of the same clan, both in the context of this section, as well as regarding conflicts over access to land, employment opportunities, and government assistance (see Chapter 6). 225 Indeed, several CCT members showed me photos of wildlife tracks and feces that they took while on patrol and could easily identify the species they originated from. They suggested that other villagers would not have such knowledge, which is key for both hunters and conservationists monitoring forest wildlife.

259 doing so.226 An elderly villager shared a recent rumour that a patrol team had confiscated a few rats from a fellow villager they intercepted and had then eaten them themselves (CT villager 54 18-07-2013). To him, this was such an affront to the mandate of the patrols that he asked me to report his allegations to commune or district officials. He explained that he would not report this to officials himself, as they would not listen to him as an ordinary villager. His allegations may not be farfetched, as one patrol member volunteered in conversation with Pha that his team had once confiscated three bags of hunted animals and feasted on them for the rest of their patrol trip. Another villager alleged that the patrol teams regularly bring back forest wildlife and enjoy it with selected commune officials. Indeed, Pha and I were invited to one such meal with a chicken that looked suspiciously like a forest chicken, although the host claimed it was a domesticated variety that had fallen sick and hence had to be slaughtered.

During my first stay in Chế Tạo, I also learned that parts of the commune leadership must have had their doubts about the CCTs. In 2009, two villagers were asked to follow the patrol teams’ routes to their camp sites to look for evidence of the CCTs engaging in hunting or trapping activities. One of these two ‘detectives’ recounted that he had found plenty of chicken bones and other traces, but surprisingly decided not to report this because he, like the gentleman cited above, thought the officials would not believe him, although he had been sent to investigate (CT villager 48 13-11-2012). Instead, he reported that he found no evidence and thus covered-up illegal hunting by village patrols.227 Nevertheless, the claim that the CCTs secretly hunt and trap had spread all the way to Hanoi, where an NGO staff member suggested, possibly exaggerating, that one of the more prominent CCT members “eats forest wildlife every day” (NGO 8 17-12- 2013). While some of the patrol teams may since have continued feasting on the last of Chế Tạo’s forest wildlife, which they were supposed to help protect, I could not determine whether or not this had been common practice.

226 What villagers and I refer to as forest chicken (gà rừng in Vietnamese) refers, more accurately, to red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), of which there are several subspecies in Vietnam, mostly Gallus gallus jabouillei. These are all ancestors of domesticated chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) (Granevitze et al. 2007; Kanginakudru et al. 2008; Berthouly et al. 2009). 227 Ironically, I also found myself in a moral and methodological dilemma whether to convey such allegations to commune or FPD officials, but decided not to, also because I noticed that they were widely known. I justify this further when discussing my positionality and the ethics of engagement in Section 3.5.

260 Notably, interviewees who were closely related to CCT members or the commune leadership voiced no concerns about the integrity of CCTs. This suggests that bonding social capital not only shapes villagers’ agency among each other, such as whether they denounce illegal forest use, but also their representation and sharing of views towards me. Nevertheless, I was struck by how many respondents openly voiced opposition to or allegations about the CCTs. The patrol staff themselves are well aware of this, and one of them asked Pha in confidence if we had encountered any allegations by villagers against the CCTs (MCC FPD 2 23-07-2013). Other patrol members, whom I carefully probed about villagers’ concerns with patrolling, mostly brushed these off as rumours stemming from jealousy.

8.5.6. The legitimacy of patrolling by insiders, outsiders and hunters

Apart from facing scepticism and jealousy, I found that the CCT members themselves were conflicted by their mandate. I got to know six of the patrol staff in Chế Tạo and Púng Luông quite well, and four of them mentioned voluntarily at some stage that their positionality put them under considerable social stress within their family or village communities. They felt they had become targets of some villagers’ opposition to certain aspects of forest conservation and, at times, felt threatened by the aggression that some villagers expressed towards them, typically behind their backs (MCC FPD Sinh 09-11-2012; MCC FPD 5 27-11-2013). Comparing the stories of different patrol staff, it seems that local animosity towards the CCTs was more common in Chế Tạo, and particularly in Chế Vượn, than in other communes, which is also my impression from villagers’ accounts. Two of the junior CCT members who patrol in Púng Luông and Nậm Khắt communes face little opposition from villagers, but were troubled by their mandate of enforcing forest use restrictions that made the lives of ordinary villagers more difficult, as they put it (MCC FPD 12 15-11-2013). One of them added that some of his family members regularly tell him to quit his job and “come back home to be a farmer” (MCC FPD 10 12-08-2013). Nevertheless, he was convinced that the CCTs were fighting an overall worthy cause, and he was proud to serve as a government agent, as several other CCT members expressed. Several of them, however, noted that their salary provided insufficient compensation for their physically and socially difficult work.

As local villagers policing fellow villagers’ forest use, the CCTs exert the type of “intimate” control that Agrawal (2005:93) argues would be perceived as “more humane” than patrolling by

261 outsiders, such as regular state forest patrols. However, when I asked Chế Tạo villagers about their ideas for forest patrolling, several suggested that ethnic Kinh FPD staff should patrol the forests or accompany the local CCTs. Their common rationale was that this would ensure that the patrol teams are more impartial and resolute against local hunters, while less likely to secretly hunt or grow cardamom while on patrol. Nonetheless, both villagers and CCT members had concerns whether Kinh rangers were physically capable to keep up with local Hmong patrols in the difficult terrain, which occasional joint patrols in the past had also shown (MCC FPD 10 07- 08-2013; NHB villager 15 08-08-2013). These two respondents also alluded to the common stigma that FPD rangers were office-based and rarely ventured into the forest, as noted in the previous section. In turn, it seemed that Hmong CCT members were suspected of being too ‘close’ to the forest: villagers’ allegations that some CCTs secretly hunt while on patrol imply an essentialist argument that ‘a hunter remains a hunter’ and will enjoy some wild meat when camping out in the forest. Regardless of how true or common this was in Chế Tạo, I contend that such allegations are likely to arise wherever former hunters are employed as forest patrols.

Apart from villagers’ distrust in the integrity of the CCTs in Chế Tạo, the case of the CCTs in Mù Cang Chải calls into question whether community-based patrolling by former hunters can help convert other traditional hunters; and, secondly, whether it can be effective in a village society with extensive social capital and kinship networks, given how this seemed to impede rigorous enforcement in Chế Tạo. These issues were at the heart of villagers’ concerns about the CCTs, and hence I investigated if community-based patrolling could be differently organized or conducted to alleviate the conflict potential that surrounded the CCTs in Mù Cang Chải.

Dating back to 2003, the village patrol scheme in Mù Cang Chải was the first of its kind in Vietnam, and there have been few comparable initiatives since. In 2011, under an international project to enhance participation in PA management, the NGOs FFI and PanNature established village patrol groups (as well as co-management institutions) in two other PAs, building on FFI’s experience in Mù Cang Chải. The patrolling scheme in the Ngọc Sơn-Ngổ Luông Nature Reserve (Hòa Bình Province), for instance, differed from the CCTs in Mù Cang Chải in that members of all buffer zone households participated in the patrol groups on a rotational basis. They were not paid for their patrolling efforts, but received ten per cent from the official sale of

262 any illegal timber they confiscate.228 Although pressure by outside loggers had been more significant in Ngọc Sơn-Ngổ Luông Nature Reserve than in Mù Cang Chải, patrolling by rotating villagers in the former site proved successful and less problematic than in Chế Tạo, according to reports by NGO representatives involved in both sites (NGO 8 17-12-2013; Nguyen Xuan Lam and Nguyen Viet Dung 2013).

Based on the experience of key informants with other forest patrol schemes in Vietnam, I suggest that broadening the membership and rotating the constellation of the CCTs in Mù Cang Chải could increase their transparency and accountability, while avoiding scepticism and jealousy by other villagers. I find, however, that such CCTs could hardly serve as both enforcement and monitoring agents, which has been FFI’s intention for the current CCTs (Nguyen Huu Dung 2011). Ironically, the villagers most capable of monitoring biodiversity, as noted above, are experienced (former) hunters, but I found that their identity as such had proven to be a liability. Accordingly, the CCTs arguably served better as monitoring than as enforcement agents, but the reverse could be true for CCTs with broader membership and rotating participation.

The case of the CCTs exemplifies the difficulties that FFI and other non-state actors have faced trying to institute biodiversity conservation in Mù Cang Chải (see Chapter 7). In the preceding chapter I argued that biodiversity monitoring and conservation had been of lower priority in Vietnam’s forest policy compared to forest law enforcement and forest fire prevention, which were the primary purposes of FPD patrols. In the following chapter on Payments for ecosystem services (PES), I will continue to question the prospects of biodiversity conservation in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam more broadly.

8.6. Conclusion: Conservation expectations in a paper park

After providing an institutional analysis of conservation governance in Chapter 7, I could here examine the efficacy and the effects of FFI’s conservation interventions, which is the underlying objective of my fourth research question. The most salient topics in this regard are gibbon

228 Notably, participation in the groups in Ngọc Sơn-Ngổ Luông Nature Reserve was subject to villagers’ conservation compliance, and households that have been found to hunt were excluded from participating in the patrols. However, it remained unclear if the prospect of participating in forest patrol groups had stopped villagers from pursuing illegal forest use themselves (NGO 8, 17-12-2013). Secondly, the prospect of receiving ten per cent from the sale of confiscated timber arguably provides little incentive to actually deter logging, as critiques of Vietnam’s state FPD patrols contend (see Section 8.5.3).

263 hunting and forest patrolling by the CCTs, which I have addressed in the latter half of this chapter (Sections 8.4 and 8.5). In the preceding chapter, I suggested that FFI’s agenda to make Hmong villagers environmental subjects supporting gibbon conservation was partly naïve, and here I explain why, nevertheless, a majority of villagers support the PA. I contend that this is largely because their opportunity costs of the PA have been low, and because lenient enforcement by the CCTs informally accommodates villagers’ needs for forest access, most importantly for cardamom cultivation. Essentially, the PA came too late to halt the final exploitation of forest wildlife, pơ mu timber and wild NTFPs.

The practice, politics and effects of community-based forest patrolling by the FFI-funded CCTs emerges as an important factor shaping local practices and discourses of forest use and conservation, particularly with regards to hunting. Agrawal (2005) and other theories of community-based conservation suggest that employing local villagers as patrols provides for better enforcement with less conflict potential (cf. Pilgrim et al. 2011; Poppe 2012; Robinson et al. 2014). However, I found that Hmong social structure and relations prohibit the CCTs from undertaking rigorous enforcement, also because villagers can easily avoid them. Furthermore, I found that the CCTs find themselves in similar dilemmas as scholars have found of other community patrol groups. Due to their social embeddedness, CCT members occupy a problematic positionality in the village community (cf. Robbins et al. 2007; Doane 2014), and are routinely accused of hunting and trapping while on patrol (cf. Vasan 2002).

Regarding the effect of villagers’ suspicions about the CCTs, I found that they, regardless of whether they were justified, undermined the legitimacy and authority of the CCTs, and consequently some villagers’ support for the PA. Nonetheless, I did not find that villagers’ resentment against the PA or the CCTs had ever motivated “explicit resistance” against the PA, as strict conservation enforcement has in other countries (cf. Kull 2004; Inskip et al. 2014; Mariki et al. 2015). Holmes (2007:193) defines “explicit resistance” as actions that seek to undermine a PA’s conservation objectives, such as arson or the killing of flagship species. This could be the case for gibbon hunting, if perpetrated by local villagers, but I contend they would be more prone to hunting gibbons to generate cash revenues rather than to undermine the PA. In turn, I portray contemporary hunting practice as “implicit resistance”, as it is not pursued for reasons of resistance but for socio-cultural reasons, as I illustrated above (Holmes 2007:193).

264 What the literature on community-based patrolling has not considered, to my knowledge, is that villagers find it too lenient and advocate for stricter enforcement, as many of my respondents in Chế Tạo did. I contend that strict conservation enforcement would have met greater resistance if pursued in the 1990s, when villagers’ opportunities for and dependence on hunting and forest income were higher. Given that food security and income opportunities had expanded with livelihood changes since the 1990s, I found that most households in Chế Tạo could afford to not harvest the remaining wild NTFPs that still had commercial value (see Section 6.2.4). Even in Chế Vượn, where households had very limited access to income opportunities, villagers seemed to largely refrain from hunting the remaining gibbons, arguably the most lucrative local source of income. In conclusion of this thesis (see Section 10.6.1), I will interpret the survival of the endangered gibbons, against all odds, as a conservation success, although it remains difficult to explain.

265 Chapter 9 The policy and practice of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

9.1. Introduction

In the preceding four findings chapters, I have analyzed the implementation and effects of development and conservation programs by state and non-state actors in Mù Cang Chải, and how they have interacted with villagers’ livelihood practices. This serves as the backdrop for my analysis, in this chapter, of PES policy development and governance in Vietnam, addressing my fifth and last research question: Since 2010, how are payments for ecosystem services (PES) distributed in Mù Cang Chải, and how does this intersect with local conceptions of distributive justice and forest use? My study of how Hmong peasants have been receiving, using and responding to PES is grounded in my livelihoods study (see Chapters 5 and 6). This complements my study of previous conservation interventions by state and non-state actors that sought to achieve conservation compliance among Hmong villagers (see Chapters 7 and 8).

When situating my analysis of PES in Vietnam in the conceptual literature and the national policy context in Chapters 2 and 4, respectively, I briefly characterized Vietnam’s PES framework as a non-voluntary system of direct conservation payments, funded to 98 per cent by hydropower companies, which contribute 20 VND per kilowatt hour (0.1 US cent/kWh) they generate. I further noted that Vietnam’s PES framework departs from market-oriented models of PES in several fundamental ways, and relies on simplified and uniform metrics for the collection of fees, valuation of forests, and distribution of payments. Importantly, PES funds in Vietnam are not invested in forest conservation activities, but are primarily disbursed to forest owners living in the watersheds of hydropower operations. This leads to questions of how, exactly, PES are distributed to households, how these payments are conceived and how they contribute to recipients’ livelihoods. Mù Cang Chải proved to be a very fruitful locale for my analysis of these questions, which elucidates the many idiosyncrasies, implications and contestations surrounding this novel forest financing mechanism in Vietnam.

While the premise of this chapter is that PES in Vietnam is governed as a uniform, state-led program to subsidize rural livelihoods and development, not finance forest conservation, I seek to understand the underlying reasons for and emerging implications of this approach to PES,

266 partly drawing on evidence from Mù Cang Chải. I examine how PES are allocated and distributed within Mù Cang Chải, highlighting differences between and within selected communes (see Section 9.2 and 9.3). I focus on Chế Tạo and Púng Luông communes, as I have in previous chapters, but also Nậm Khắt, Kim Nọi and Lao Chải communes, as they provide additional comparative insight into key questions of PES distribution. These sections address the first part of my research question regarding the allocation of PES funds to Mù Cang Chải, and their distribution in different communes.

In the latter half of this chapter, I address the second part of my research question, as I examine how villagers and officials conceive of the different payment levels and distribution systems in Mù Cang Chải (see Section 9.4); how Chế Tạo villagers conceive of PES in the context of forest conservation (see Section 9.5); and use my case study of Mù Cang Chải to highlight shortcomings in Vietnam’s PES framework (see Section 9.6). This brings the chapter full-circle and provides evidence for my analysis of the potential of PES in Vietnam, which leads into the conclusion chapter.

9.2. The institutionalisation of PES as livelihood subsidies in Mù Cang Chải

In this section I maintain a focus of PES as a forest-based financing mechanism, laying out how PES are allocated to Mù Cang Chải’s forest areas. I sought to triangulate data on payment rates per hectare and per household from interviews, official reports and media coverage, but encountered some data gaps and inconsistencies, which is understandable, given the lack of transparency in PES distribution, which I will illustrate in the following sections. Rather than seeking to present extensive and accurate data on PES levels, I focus on how PES is implemented in Mù Cang Chải to highlight shortcomings in Vietnam’s PES policy framework.

9.2.1. The valuation of Mù Cang Chải’s forests for PES

In 2013, the Yên Bái Forest Protection and Development Fund (FPDF) received 35.7 billion VND (1.7 million USD) in user fees from 23 hydropower stations and three water companies, which pay user fees according to PES policies, outlined in Section 4.6.2 (McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014). While under the prior 661 Program each hectare of forest received the same payment rate, PES funds are distributed very unevenly across the province and the district of Mù Cang Chải, as I show throughout this chapter.

267 In Mù Cang Chải, 59 per cent of the district’s forest areas lie within watersheds of hydropower operations and, in 2014, were allocated over 12 billion VND (600,000 USD), approximately a third of Yên Bái’s PES funds (Hồng Duyên 2015). The two eastern communes of Nậm Có and Cao Phạ drain eastward into the Red River (Sông Hồng) and its tributary Sông Chảy, and in 2012 each hectare of their forests was only “worth” 51,000 VND/ha, partly because several hydropower operators along Red River tributaries had not started paying user fees yet (MCC official 3 27-05-2014; Thái Sinh 2013). In turn, the forest areas in the 13 western communes of Mù Cang Chải, including my wider study area, received PES funds of 320,000 VND/ha in 2012 (MCC official 3 27-05-2014; Thái Sinh 2013). This is because the western parts of Mù Cang Chải drain westwards into the Black river (Sông Đà) and its tributaries, feeding the reservoirs of two of the largest dams in Southeast Asia (in Hoà Bình and Sơn La Provinces) and several small and medium-size ones. Given that two of the latter had not started paying user fees yet in 2015 (Yen Bai Newspaper 2015), and considering ongoing hydro-dam developments in both Mù Cang Chải and Mường La districts, the payment rate for forestland in Western Mù Cang Chải is set to further increase over the next few years.

Mù Cang Chải is a particularly interesting locale to examine PES distribution in Vietnam, as the following sections of this chapter will show. Because there has been no forestland allocation to households in Mù Cang Chải, the only formal forest owners in the district are the two forest management boards – the protected area management board and the Protection Forest management board. According to PES policy, the management boards can disburse PES funds by sub-contracting households for forest protection, much like they did under Program 661. In this case, they can keep ten per cent of the funds they disburse to cover their transaction costs, just like provincial FPDFs do (Circular 85/2012/TT-BTC). However, the management boards in Mù Cang Chải have no direct relationship with individual households and therefore pass the PES funds on to Commune People’s Committees (CPCs).229 Each CPC of Mù Cang Chải therefore receives PES funds from the Púng Luông Protection Forest management board, and the five communes that are part of the PA receive additional funds for their areas of special-use forest

229 According to Decree 99, for households to receive PES, they need to have signed contracts with either provincial FPDFs directly or with district-level organisations, such as forest management boards. In Mù Cang Chải, there have been no new contracts signed for the distribution of PES, which builds on contractual arrangements between the Management boards and village heads over conservation payments from Programs 661 and 30a (MCC official 3 27- 05-2014). This situation is not uncommon in Vietnam, as a key informant confirmed (NGO 7 08-06-2014).

268 (SUF) from the PA management board. Due to the lack of individual forestland tenure in Mù Cang Chải, the communes disburse the PES funds among all villages and households, but each commune does so quite differently. This contributes to a high variance of household PES levels, as do the different ratios of forestland to population in the communes I examines. I will attend to this later and first explain how forest areas in Vietnam and Mù Cang Chải are valued for PES.

9.2.2. Ignoring forest quality in national and local PES governance

To calculate the amount of PES funds that an area of forestland receives, the ministerial Circular 80/2011/TT-BNNPTNT established a system of four k-factors to account for forest quality and volume (K1), forest classification (K2), forest type (K3), and, more elusively, the difficulty of forest protection (K4). These four k-factors can each have a value of 0.9, 0.95 or 1, and are multiplied to an overall k-factor (see Table 9.1). The rationale underlying these different k- factors is that forest areas of different properties differ in their capacity to provide ecosystem services. This system of four k-factors therefore allocates higher PES funds per hectare to forests that are rich in quality, remote or within PAs. However, this differentiation is hardly applied in practice, which continues the legacy of ‘quantity over quality’ in forest management in Vietnam, as I argue later.

Table 9.1: K-factors to assess forest quality for the calculation of PES 1 0.95 0.9

K1 – Forest status and volume rich forest average forest poor forest special use K – Forest classification protection forest production forest 2 forests

K3 – Origin of forest natural forest plantation forest

K4 – Difficulty of forest protection very difficult difficult less difficult

PES payment rate per hectare of forest = nominal payment rate x K1 x K2 x K3 x K4

Source of data: MARD circular 80/2011/TT-BNNPTNT

McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh (2014), contracted by VNFF to conduct the first official review of PES implementation in twelve provinces, find a striking lack of application of the k-factors: only two provinces apply all four k-factors; Yên Bái and two other provinces differentiate only between planted and natural forests (applying K3 only); and eight provinces simply treat all

269 forests as equal and disregard the system of k-factors (all k-factors equal 1). Both provincial leaderships and outside commentators have argued that applying all four k-factors for a differentiated valuation of forest areas would either be too complicated or not equitable (Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013; Dam Viet Bac et al. 2014; McElwee et al. 2014). The latter argument illustrates the importance of equality for PES distribution, which both villagers and officials expressed in conversations with me. On the other hand, the Yên Bái People’s Committee suggested in a provincial directive that forest areas across the province are so similar that the application of four k-factors would not result in significantly different payment rates for different forest areas, which is not convincing (NGO 18 10-06-2014). In addition to political will, the application of the four k-factors would require provincial authorities to factor data on forest quality, type, origin and protection into their spatial analysis of watersheds and forest tenure. These data, particularly concerning land tenure, are not available in many parts of rural Vietnam due to unclear or overlapping property relations, incomplete processes of forestland allocation, and a lack of provincial forest inventories (McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014).

Particularly during the early years of PES implementation, many provincial FPDFs lacked spatial data on forestland tenure and other parameters to correctly disburse all the PES funds they received, and in some provinces disbursement rates were only 40 to 60 per cent (NGO 18 10-06- 2014; McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014). Not-disbursed funds need to be added to the FPDFs’ contingency funds, according to Decree 99. Interestingly, the Yên Bái FPDF disbursed 83 per cent of its PES funds to forest owners in 2013, and has maintained one of the highest disbursement rates of all provincial FPDFs, while using less than ten per cent of collected fees to cover its administrative costs (McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014). As I understand it, PES distribution was more efficient in Yên Bái than in other provinces, as recipients of most provincial PES funds were state organizations, who typically sub-contract households for forest protection. In turn, in provinces that had previously allocated forestland to rural households, such as Sơn La, the costs of providing PES contracts to over 50,000 forest owners can be beyond the FPDF’s budget of ten per cent (McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014).

To cover their administrative expenses, forest management boards and state forest companies are entitled to up to ten per cent of the PES funds they pass on to sub-contracted households (according to Circular 62/2012/TT-BNN-BTC). From the commune-level documents I was

270 shown, it is evident that the commune leadership of Nậm Khắt, but not that of Púng Luông, also keeps ten per cent of the PES funds it receives to cover administrative costs, given that they manage the process of contracting households, although the communal peoples committees have no formal role in PES distribution, according to Decree 99.230 Among the PES experts I interviewed, there was some confusion regarding which institutions may keep ten per cent and for what purpose. One of the expatriate experts was confident that some forest management boards conceive of their administrative budget as ‘their’ share of the PES wealth that they typically use to line their pockets (NGO 20 11-06-2014).

The inconsistencies of how local state actors in Mù Cang Chải use PES funds to cover transaction costs illustrate how they could keep more than their fair share of PES funds, although I am not privy to all the data necessary to show if and how such loopholes are utilized. I will return to this point later when I represent villagers’ concerns over the disbursement of PES funds. I will argue that loopholes for, legacies of, and allegations of poor local governance can undermine the effectiveness and transparency of local PES governance and Vietnam’s PES framework as a whole. This risk is latent in Vietnam, as there are no provisions for auditing of how provincial FPDFs, district-level forest management boards, communal people’s committees or other state actors use their administrative budgets and disburse PES funds (McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014).

9.3. PES governance and distribution in Mù Cang Chải

After outlining how PES have been introduced and allocated in Mù Cang Chải, I next represent some perspectives of local villagers and officials on the use of PES funds. I then examine in detail how PES are distributed to households in five different communes of Mù Cang Chải, which provides the basis for my subsequent analysis of some of the unintended effects of PES.

9.3.1. The debate over PES as livelihood subsidies in Mù Cang Chải

When I first interviewed a senior official at the Mù Cang Chải FPD about conservation payments in the past, he was very adamant that conservation payments have become an essential element

230 I know that in 2013 the CPC of Nậm Khắt kept ten per cent of the PES funds they receive for the protection and special use forest within their boundaries, but not of the production forest. However, I do not know if, for instance, the Protection forest management board chooses to not keep ten per cent of funds and let the CPC keep this share to cover their costs of distributing the funds to households.

271 of forest policy, as Hmong peasants would otherwise revert to shifting cultivation (MCC FPD Tua 09-11-2012). He was suggesting that Hmong households had become dependent on PES, which I found to be the case in Chế Tạo village (see Chapter 6). In other villages, however, households receive much lower levels of PES and are therefore hardly dependent on them, as I found in Nả Hàng B. Even if Chế Tạo villagers could no longer afford to buy agricultural inputs if PES were ever to cease, households now have much more terraced rice land than they had in the past, when they primarily practiced shifting cultivation. Therefore, I do not find that the threat of Hmong peasants returning to slash and burn agriculture is as real as it seems in FPD publications, which portray contemporary Hmong livelihoods in the historical dichotomy of shifting and permanent cultivation. Official reports and publications by both the PA management board and the Management Advisory Committee (MAC, the co-management forum) routinely state that Hmong buffer zone residents in Mù Cang Chải are highly forest dependent and still practice shifting cultivation. Portraying local peasants as a conservation threat has long served to justify conservation interventions (see Chapter 2). In Mù Cang Chải and in the context of PES governance, it further justifies disbursing PES to peasants as livelihood subsidies rather than investing the funds in forest conservation.

My impression from interviewing a diverse sample of villagers is that they invariably feel entitled to receive PES, which many respondents portrayed as monetary incentives to comply with forest protection regulations. To my routine question why they received PES, many villagers simply explained that, as one of them put it, “the government has been telling us to protect the forest and therefore we get money” (CT villager 14 27-11-2012). In both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, respondents commonly portrayed PES as a continuation of past conservation payments, as McElwee (2016) also found among peasants in her field sites. When I probed for the link to hydropower generation, some respondents shrugged their shoulders, and the typical answer I received was that “now, there is hydropower generation, so we get more money” (CT villager 47 29-11-2012). Key informants confirmed that villagers in Vietnam rarely understand the principle of PES, as state agents neither explain the sources nor distribution of PES funds (NGO 18 10-06-2014). Nevertheless, many villagers expressed much trust that they will continue receiving payments related to forest protection. In my review of the PES literature (see Section 2.4.6), I argued that such trust is essential for PES to function as an incentive, but remains under- recognized in the PES literature (cf. Neef and Thomas 2009).

272 Providing an interesting counterpoint, some of the FPD officials and better-off Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed argued that the increasing levels of PES, along with other forms of government assistance, had fostered laziness and dependency amongst some villagers. I recorded four villagers alluding to this discourse, and they invariably claimed that their own wealth was due to their hard work, whereas others were lazy and just “wait for the government to help”, as one of them put it (CT villager 53 17-07-2013). This relates to the discourse I commonly encountered among certain villagers that relative poverty, more generally, is due to some villagers being lazier than others (see Section 5.5.2).

Although the official state policy is to give PES to watershed residents to incentivize forest protection, two FPD staff carefully voiced their doubts whether PES in Mù Cang Chải were effective enough in this regard (MCC FPD 3 29-10-2013, MCC FPD 10 17-08-2013). I would not be surprised if more FPD staff objected to the fact that the PA management board annually disburses over 6.5 billion VND (325,000 USD) in PES to households, 71 per cent of which go to Chế Tạo households (for the 14,332 hectares of special-use forest within Chế Tạo commune), but I would not expect them to make that explicit in conversation with me. These PES funds allocated to the PA exceed the PA’s annual operating budget of 4 billion VND (200,000 USD) by over 50 per cent. However, the PA management board keeps only ten per cent of these funds to cover transaction costs and distributes the rest to buffer zone residents, following Decree 99. Therefore, PES has brought little financial reprieve for the many underfunded ‘paper parks’ in Vietnam, which notoriously lack funds for conservation activities, including effective forest patrolling (see Section 7.3.2).

Compared to official FPD staff, FFI staff I interviewed were more free to criticize the government’s policy of using PES funds as livelihood subsidies rather than for forest protection activities. FFI’s position was that part of the funds should be used to cover the costs of community-based patrolling, for which FFI has been finding it increasingly hard to attract donor funding (FFI 6 04-06-2014; FFI 8 17-12-2013). Indeed, FFI’s annual costs for patrolling in Mù Cang Chải (343 million VND, equivalent to 16,354 USD) in 2012 were equivalent to only 5.3 per cent of the PES funds that the PA management board distributed to households in form of PES in 2012 (Thái Sinh 2013). An FPD official suggested that the management board is considering using some of these funds to help fund patrolling efforts in future years (MCC FPD

273 3 29-10-2013), but other key informants were unsure if this were even allowed. According to my understanding it is more likely, any patrolling costs would have to be covered by the management board’s ten-per-cent-budget for administration, according to a former MARD official involved in drafting Decree 99 (MARD 2 12-06-2014). However, a long-term friend and international counterpart of his wagered that forest management boards involved in distributing PES funds are more likely to use the administrative budget to line their pockets, rather than for forest patrolling or other conservation activities (NGO 20 11-06-2014). In conclusion of this thesis, I will return to this debate over the use of PES funds.

9.3.2. PES distribution and differentiation at the commune level

I will next explain in more detail how PES funds are distributed in selected communes of Mù Cang Chải, and highlight how significant the implications of different modes of distribution are, even in communes other than Chế Tạo. This section will be followed by a more specific analysis of the case of Chế Tạo, with a focus on villagers’ perceptions of distributive justice. Previous studies of equity in Vietnam’s PES system by Loft et al. (2017) and Le Ngoc Dung et al. (2016) were limited to people’s general perceptions of justice, but did not consider local differences in payment rates and how these informed recipients’ conceptions of distributional justice.

9.3.2.1. Commune leadership in benefit sharing

As noted in Section 6.4.2, Chế Tạo commune’s high PES funds are evenly disbursed across all seven villages on a per-person basis, rather than a per-adult or per-household basis, which results in a high variance of household payments with household size. Some villagers I interviewed, but not all, argued that equal payments per household member privilege larger households and do not reflect the actual costs of living. The variability of households’ PES levels and the lack of transparency in PES distribution have resulted in much contestation among some villagers. Examining PES governance in neighbouring communes, I discovered arguably more equitable ways to distribute PES funds, and found that each commune in Mù Cang Chải has much freedom and limited accountability on how they disburse the money.231 I will evaluate issues of equity,

231 Not only disbursement of PES, but also my access to relevant data varied from commune to commune. In both Púng Luông and Nậm Khắt commune, the respective heads of the CPC could show me detailed lists of forestland per village or per household and explain how PES are calculated and distributed. In Lao Chai and Kim Noi communes, which I visited primarily to investigate how PES are distributed, I could not collect numerical data, but comprehensive explanations on PES distribution. In turn, in Chế Tạo, where obtaining quantitative data from the

274 distributional justice and some of the implications of these different ways of PES distribution, which are interesting given MARD’s reluctance to decentralize PES governance (see Section 10.5.1). The following Table 9.2 provides some data on forest areas per commune, as well as PES revenues per commune and per person. The latter, in the final column, only serves as a proxy for a communes’ relative ‘PES wealth’, while actual PES levels per households depend on how the funds are distributed within the commune, which I examine in this section.

Table 9.2: Selected data on forest land and PES for Mù Cang Chải communes mentioned in text

Special- Total forest 2013 2013 PES use area with PES revenue Commune forest Protection Production tree cover Popul revenue per person name [ha] forest [ha] forest [ha] [ha] ation [USD] [USD] Chế Tạo 14332 4102 2371 17386 1727 252,103 146 Púng Luông 342 3530 539 3976 3098 57,646 19 Nậm Khắt 1226 5027 3174 6093 3751 88,349 24 Lao Chải 3276 4202 5089 6769 5794 98,149 17 Dế Su Phình 931 1675 1165 2639 1887 38,266 20 Kim Nọi 0 2254 519 2208 1288 32,020 25

(Source: Records collected from Púng Luông Production Forest management board)

Púng Luông commune, for instance, bases the distribution of PES partly on the forest areas that were informally allocated to each household for firewood harvest in the 1990s, although households do not hold forest protection contracts or RBCs for these areas. Nevertheless, households receive the district-wide payment rate, which, after deducting transaction costs, came to 289,891 VND/ha for each hectare of forest in 2012. Each village in Púng Luông commune maintains detailed lists that specify each household’s forestland, differentiating between natural and planted forest (see Figure 9.1); the latter is multiplied with a k-factor of 0.9 for the calculation of PES, as noted in Section 9.2.2.

For many villagers, it had been of little practical significance how much forestland their household or other households have according to official lists, as access to forest products has been shared within kinship and social groups (NHB village head 12-11-2013). With the increase of conservation payments and the advent of PES according to these lists, household forestland commune leadership was notoriously difficult (see Section 3.3), I was repeatedly told that no lists of household forestland exist.

275 holdings acquired new monetary significance. In reality, however, household PES levels are likely more equitable than official forestland holdings, as some families do not bother to formally allocate forestland to their sons when they move out and informally share forest access and PES with them, as several villagers in Nả Hàng B confirmed. Nevertheless, families with multiple sons remain disadvantaged in Púng Luông, as they more often have had to split finite amounts of forestland and PES. In turn, Chế Tạo’s per-person disbursement of PES simply provides more money to larger households. With Chế Tạo’s high payment rates, several villagers and commune officials wagered that this could incentivize some families to go beyond the government’s two-child-policy (see Section 6.4.2). While having three or more children is not uncommon in Hmong villages, including in Mù Cang Chải, I have no evidence of any family doing so to maximize PES revenues.

Figure 9.1: List of household names (blurred) and forestland holdings in Nả Hàng B for PES calculations

In Nậm Khắt commune, which borders Púng Luông commune to the North, and likewise has three villages in its small portion of the PA buffer zone, payments under Programs 327, 661 and 30a were disbursed on a per-person basis, like in Chế Tạo. However, in 2011 the commune

276 leadership became concerned that this could incentivize families to have more than two children, and since 2012 PES in Nậm Khắt have therefore been disbursed on a per-adult basis (Nậm Khắt official 1 26-05-2014).

A second important decision commune leaders are free to make is whether PES funds should be disbursed equally among the villages or according to forest area within village boundaries. The latter is the case in both Púng Luông and Nậm Khắt, and results in significant variances of average household payments between villages. In both communes, those villages with more forest and fewer households within their boundaries are relatively more remote, whereas those with little forest and higher populations are located closer to the road. A commune official from Nậm Khắt argued that it is fair that the remote villages receive relatively more of the commune’s PES funds, as their villagers typically have limited access to market-based and other income opportunities (Nậm Khắt official 1 26-05-2014). This position invokes a conception of distributive justice that is based on need rather than equity, and the commune leaders govern PES as a means of re-distribution (cf. Sikor et al. 2014; Wegner 2015).

However, in both Chế Tạo and Lao Chải communes, PES are disbursed equally across all villages. In both locations, commune officials I interviewed justified this with the same hypothetical scenario that in case of a large forest fire, villagers from all villages will be needed to fight the fire; and if certain villagers received a smaller share of the commune’s PES funds, they would be less inclined to join firefighting efforts (MCC FPD Tua 18-08-2013; Lao Chải official 1 28-05-2014). In my mind, this narrative speaks to both the primacy of fire prevention in Vietnam’s forest policy discourse (see Chapter 7); and to the commonly-cited idea, as noted above, that villagers and local officials strive towards equitable PES distribution in Vietnam (Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013; Dam Viet Bac et al. 2014; McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014). Some Chế Tạo villagers, however, do not perceive this as fair, as I explain in Section 9.4.

9.3.2.2. The distribution of PES for planted forest areas

The leadership of Kim Nọi commune, as my final case to show the significance of commune- level PES governance, has devised an innovative way of distributing PES funds it receives for its areas of planted forest, which were mostly reforested by villagers during Program 661 in the early 2000s. The four other communes I have mentioned so far distribute PES funds for planted

277 forest areas equitably amongst all households without any consideration of who contributed to reforestation. In turn, Kim Nọi has a relatively high ratio of planted to natural forests and does not distribute the funds for this forest area equitably.

In 2006, the leadership of Kim Nọi commune informally allocated to each household the area of planted forest that they (or their parents) had planted in the course of the 661 Program (Kim Nọi official 1 29-05-2014). In addition, the commune’s natural forest areas were distributed equally to all households, giving each household 3.6 hectares. Each household has thus had exclusive access to fuel wood in their plots of natural and planted forest, although they never received formal land tenure or protection contracts for these areas.232 This informal forestland allocation was undertaken in Kim Nọi to alleviate conflicts over forest access and provide households with an incentive to manage their own forest areas for sustainable fuel wood extraction (Kim Nọi official 1 29-05-2014). With rising conservation payments and PES, which households receive for all of ‘their’ forest areas, these property relations have received increasing monetary significance, much like in Púng Luông, as mentioned above.

When villagers in Kim Nọi planted trees under the 661 Program in the 1990s, they possibly did so to sell their labour without any prospect of collecting monetary dividends in the future, similar to what villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B reported. With the allocation of planted forest areas to these households ten years later, and the more recent introduction of PES, they now ‘own’ more forest and will continue to receive more PES than other households. Given that households did not participate equally in reforestation in the 1990s, the uneven distribution of PES for planted forest areas contributes to the variance of household PES levels in Kim Nọi. Commune officials who explained this to me argued that it is fair that those households who participated in reforestation now retroactively receive additional rewards (Kim Nọi official 1 29-05-2014). This invokes the idea that some villagers were just too lazy to participate in reforestation activities, adding that some of them now regret that they or their parents did not.233 I could not investigate

232 To reify these informal property regimes, many households have established physical boundaries between their and neighbouring plots of forest, often clearing any vegetation or dredging the soil along the property lines. The commune officials I interviewed were keen to add that there have been very few cases of transgressions and conflicts over these property regimes, which are softened amongst kin and friends if there is any need (Kim Nọi official 1 29-05-2014). 233 As I could only spend one day in Kim Nọi, I could neither collect villagers’ perspectives on this, nor numerical data on the variance of forestland holdings and PES per household in the different villages of Kim Nọi. I can only

278 this further, but it is plausible PES distribution in Kim Nọi has led to similar contestations of distributive justice that I observed in Chế Tạo, which I turn to next.

9.4. The contested governance and distributive justice of PES in Chế Tạo

After identifying key issues of PES distribution in Mù Cang Chải and highlighting the special case of Chế Tạo, I next examine how some villagers and commune officials conceive of the differences between Chế Tạo and surrounding communes. I do this through an analytical lens of distributive justice, which the PES literature has increasingly considered as important, but rarely examined empirically (see Section 2.4.6.2). In the final three sub-sections of this chapter (Sections 9.4 to 9.6), I therefore examine how PES distribution intersects with local conceptions of distributive justice and forest use, addressing the second part of my fifth research question.

9.4.1. Contestations surrounding Chế Tạo’s PES wealth

Throughout Mù Cang Chải, Chế Tạo is known for its remoteness and, more recently, its high levels of PES, as I gathered from interviews with both villagers and officials in different communes. Surprisingly to me, none of the villagers I interviewed in Nả Hàng B portrayed it as unjust that their counterparts across the ridgeline in Chế Tạo receive much higher PES than they do, although some of them underestimated actual PES levels in Chế Tạo. Acknowledging that these are due to Chế Tạo’s extensive forest area, they considered Chế Tạo’s PES levels as compensation for the supposed hardship that comes with Chế Tạo’s remote location. I asked respondents who talked about Chế Tạo’s PES levels if they would rather live in a more remote place and receiver higher PES, but none of them did. Nả Hàng B villagers referred to Chế Tạo’s lack of market access, whereas my livelihoods study finds that livelihood in Nả Hàng B are much more dire than in Chế Tạo.

While Nả Hàng B villagers played down the high PES levels in Chế Tạo, some of the commune officials I interviewed exaggerated them, suggesting that some Chế Tạo households receive in excess of 60 million VND per year (Nậm Khắt official 1 26-05-2014), or that PES levels are so high in Chế Tạo that villagers no longer need to grow their own rice anymore, and could buy all the rice they need (Lao Chải official 1 28-05-2014). While neither of these assertions are

assume that more factors than merely laziness contributed to villagers’ ability and motivation to participate in reforestation activities.

279 accurate, they illustrate that some outsiders conceive of Chế Tạo as a privileged place due to its PES levels, while for others it remains a marginal and disadvantaged place. Of the Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed, many invoked the latter discourse and none of them suggested, unsurprisingly, that PES levels in Chế Tạo were excessive or unfairly high relative to surrounding communes. Within Chế Tạo commune, however, PES distribution among the seven villages is also much contested, which I turn to next.

Villagers throughout Chế Tạo commune have been benefiting from the commune’s exceptional PES funds, nearly 70 per cent of which derive from the commune’s 14,332 hectares of special- use forest (SUF) that form most of the PA. In Chế Tạo village, I soon encountered a common misconception amongst villagers that PES were linked to or exclusive to the PA, unaware that PES funds are allocated with no differentiation between SUF and other forest categories throughout Vietnam. More specifically, several interviewees expressed strong opinions that the PA ‘belongs’ to the three buffer zone villages of Chế Tạo, Tà Giông and Chế Vượn, and that the four western villages of Chế Tạo are not entitled to the same levels of PES. These sentiments are particularly strong in Chế Vượn village, which has 6000 hectares of forest in its boundaries and only 18 households (MCC FPD Tua 22-05-2014; Chế Vượn villager 2 26-07-2013). If PES funds were allocated according to forest areas within village boundaries, as they are in Púng Luông and Nậm Khắt, for instance, villagers in Chế Vượn would receive nearly four times as much as they currently do.

To avoid conflict throughout the commune, the seven village heads of Chế Tạo decided to share PES funds equally across the commune (MCC FPD Tua 30-07-2013).234 This cautionary approach illustrates the common preference of officials to seek equality in PES distribution, as noted above, although some villagers’ conceptions of distributive justice would favour a more uneven distribution (Sikor et al. 2014; Wegner 2015). Conceptually, this debate over property relations is another case of Chế Tạo villagers reifying administrative boundaries between communes and villages, as some villagers did when seeking to exclude villagers from Nả Hàng B from cutting pơ mu trees within Chế Tạo commune in the 1990s (see Section 6.2.2) and, secondly, when questioning the rights of villagers from neighbouring communes to hunt within

234 I have, however, no insight into the power relations between these seven village heads, who are all from either of the two Hmong clans Giang and Sung, or whether commune or FPD officials had any influence in this decision.

280 Chế Tạo commune (see Section 8.3). The case of Chế Vượn village, however, illustrates strong property relations over village boundaries, which makes it particularly divisive. In the final section of this chapter I will put the practices and discourses of PES distribution that I document into the context of national PES governance in Vietnam.

9.4.2. Contestations surrounding PES governance in Chế Tạo

Apart from the contentions surrounding the equity and justice of PES distribution, a surprising number of Chế Tạo villagers also voiced their concerns about the procedural justice of PES distribution, namely a suspicion that commune officials “eat money” (noj nyaj) and have been siphoning off PES funds for their own benefits. One respondent likened the distribution of PES funds to the flow of irrigation water that diminishes as water is diverted to different fields (Chế Vượn villager 1 26-07-2013). Others were more explicit, suggesting that PES funds “fall to the ground and become dust” (nyaj poob luaj teb ua nplhav nthsauv), or disappear “into the dog’s rear end” (nyaj nkas dev qhau quav) (CT villager 43 12-07-2013; CT villager 13 14-12-2012). One villager had observed that a senior commune official bought a new motorcycle after PES had been distributed, which was proof enough to him.235

Some of the more outspoken villagers were also those who voiced their scepticism towards community forest patrols (see Section 8.5.5), or about nepotism within the commune leadership, more generally (see Section 6.5.1). Allegations towards community patrols and over the embezzlement of PES funds were the two most sensitive topics that emerged during my first visit to Chế Tạo, and both illustrate a deep-seated scepticism and antagonism that some villagers seem to have towards some of the commune leadership. My aim was not to verify such allegations, but rather to understand their reasons and effects.

235 I was initially surprised how many villagers openly voiced such concerns to me, without me probing for it, often in response to my routine question how much they had been receiving in PES in the past years. Some of them added that my translator and I should keep their names “in our hearts”. An elderly villager said “I have told you so much, I might get into trouble” (CT villager 25 14-12-2012) and a younger, particularly outspoken villager ran his fingers across his throat to emphasize the same concern (CT villager 13 14-12-2012). His uncle, who enjoyed telling elongated and funny stories, suspected district-level officials had been siphoning off PES funds and suggested that many villagers share such suspicions. When he started explaining to us how, in 2011, supposedly VND 50 million (2500 USD) of PES funds for Chế Tạo were missing, his wife called in from outside the house to tell him to keep quiet (CT villager 15 28-11-2012). In Section 3.5, I explained how I treated sensitive data, including in cases when informants explicitly requested that I make them public.

281 Villagers’ scepticism about payment disbursement seemed to be linked to the lack of transparency in sources and scheduling of PES, as many of them were confused that they had been receiving PES in multiple instalments and of varying amounts each year.236 I understand this is partly because neither the sources, principles nor the distribution of PES were sufficiently explained to villagers. Instead, villagers developed their own narratives about the nature of conservation payments, and provided varying data on payment levels they had been receiving. Household heads I interviewed more often remembered how many payments they received each year than their amounts. Only very few villagers reported having received payments that roughly correlated with the supposed payment rates per person of VND 1.2, 1.7 and 3 million for 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively, that local officials provided (CT official 7 02-12-2012; MCC FPD Tua 22-05-2014). When I asked a group of young men if they did, they gasped at these payment levels, and suggested that “if we got that much money, everyone here would protect the forest”, as I noted in Section 1.1 (CT villager 16 29-11-2012). To me, this suggested that scepticism over PES distribution had eroded some villagers’ support for the PA or forest conservation. More generally, this means that not only payment levels, but also recipients’ conceptions of governance, transparency and equity are important for PES to serve as an incentive for conservation behaviour and compliance.

While PES levels and their distribution are more prominent and contentious topics in Chế Tạo than in Nả Hàng B, villagers I interviewed there were similarly confused about PES rates and their scheduling and also provided PES data that were inconsistent with official payment rates. Interestingly, however, I never encountered any suspicions among Nả Hàng B villagers about the embezzlement and distribution of PES funds, about the integrity of forest patrols, or about the leadership of Púng Luông commune, more generally.

When I once mentioned to an FPD official that villagers had been giving me inconsistent data on PES rates, he was quick to suggest that “farmers never write down” how much money they receive and spend (MCC FPD Tua 18-08-2013). Indeed, that is what many household heads said when they could not remember other elements of their household budgets. Based on my analysis

236 Households in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B have been receiving at least two payments per year, as the two forest Management boards have been disbursing PES for protection and special-use forest areas separately. Actually, provincial FPDFs usually collect user fees and forward funds to the Management boards twice a year, but the Management boards in Mù Cang Chải typically disburse these funds together at the end of the year (MCC FPD Tua 18-08-2013).

282 of the seasonal nature of household income and expenditure in Section 6.6, my impression is that cash flow in most village households is very transient, particularly in those households that do not have regular incomes. Both income and expenditure are so immediate, that few households are able to save money to keep track of their funds. Many interviewees in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B were stretched to remember details about past payments, including the number of household members past payments were based on in a given year, which precluded any meaningful statistical analysis of PES data, particularly for Chế Tạo. Therefore, the variance in payment levels that villagers reported receiving is partly due to partial or incorrect data, and does not necessarily reflect unjust distribution or embezzlement of funds.

Although I was surprised how many villagers voiced allocations or suspicions against the CCTs, it is plausible that even more Chế Tạo villagers hold such sentiments. Regardless of whether they are justified, my objective is to illustrate how they can affect village politics and environmental subject formation, to use Agrawal’s (2005) terms. The case of Chế Tạo illustrates how such village politics can undermine the intended effects of PES, namely to provide monetary incentives to support forest conservation. What I take from this is that good PES governance and justice not only depends on good leadership, but also on its subjects to legitimize state institutions, including PES. I have argued similarly with regards to other state institutions, as well as property relations, and will conclude on this line of inquiry in the final chapter.

9.5. The nexus of PES and opportunity costs in Chế Tạo

In this chapter, I have so far established that, based on state policy and implementation, PES effectively became livelihood subsidies for recipient households. Beyond its policy objectives, however, I found that PES have broader, unintended effects, shaping how recipients conceive of forest protection and how they use local forest resources. Although PES levels, in state policy, stand in no relation to recipients’ opportunity costs, I find that these do factor into villagers’ positions on PES and their decision-making over forest use. In the following section I probe how PES relate to opportunity costs by discussing whether PES could provide an incentive for villagers to forego shifting cultivation, hunting and cardamom cultivation, specifically.

283 9.5.1. Can PES prevent a return to shifting cultivation?

The first time that villagers received payments for reforestation and forest protection, typically on former swidden areas, was under Programs 327 (from 1993) and 661 (1998-2010). Examining the significance of these meagre payments from a livelihoods perspective in Section 6.4, I found that they were relatively significant for Chế Tạo villagers, while Nả Hàng B villagers could easily earn much more by cutting pơ mu timber for sale, at least for the first few years of Program 327. In neither case, however, were the payments necessary to achieve the overarching objective of eradicating shifting cultivation, which was driven by programs for agricultural intensification and government assistance (see Section 5.4). More recently, however, the increasing payments under Programs 661, 30a and PES have become integral to villagers’ modern livelihoods, particularly in Chế Tạo. This is due to the rising costs of agricultural inputs, cultural practices and modern commodities, as I illustrated in Section 6.6. While some Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed feared a life without PES, I argue that most households there could have afforded to continue wet rice cultivation even without PES, as noted above.

In Nả Hàng B, household PES levels are much lower, but allow the 50 per cent of village households who are not rice self-sufficient to buy most of the remaining rice they need. They are therefore more dependent on PES as livelihood subsidies than their counterparts in Chế Tạo, who receive much higher PES. Furthermore, villagers’ opportunity costs to maintain forest cover are very low in Chế Tạo, as opportunities for forest income or forest conversion are limited nowadays. In turn, opportunity costs of forest conservation are higher in Nả Hàng B, where some land-poor households could convert forestland to agricultural land.

From an ecological economics perspectives, PES levels should be in relation to recipients’ opportunity costs of maintaining forest cover or ecosystem services. However, the very different situations in the two case study villages show that household PES levels in Mù Cang Chải stand in no relation to villagers’ opportunity costs, livelihood vulnerability or dependency on livelihood subsidies. These do not factor into Vietnam’s PES policy framework, neither for a differentiation of household payment rates between nor within communes. In fact, compared to households in Chế Tạo, Nả Hàng B households face higher opportunity costs of forest protection and higher dependence on PES to make ends meet, but receive much lower PES. However, these considerations did not feature in any villagers’ discourses of distributive justice, and most Nả

284 Hàng B villagers I asked portrayed Chế Tạo’s high PES levels as fair (see Section 9.4.1). Moreover, their relatively low PES did seem to contribute to Nả Hàng B villagers not converting forestland back to upland agricultural use. Therefore, the question emerges whether villagers conceived of PES as a disincentive to hunt or cultivate cardamom, which I examine in the following section.

9.5.2. Can PES prevent ongoing hunting and cardamom cultivation?

From FFI’s perspective, the two most eminent sources of pressure on the forest that emanate from villagers in Mù Cang Chải are cardamom cultivation and hunting. Hence, I next question whether PES has dis-incentivized cardamom cultivation and hunting. This depends on how villagers conceive of PES and forest conservation, as these two cases aptly illustrate.

When I asked villagers how the remaining “hard-headed” hunters could best be converted, none of them thought that current or even higher levels of PES would have any additional effects, partly because Chế Tạo villagers had received “so much money already” (CT villager 48 02-12- 2013). When I asked Mang and his hunting buddy whether higher PES levels could compel them to abstain from hunting, they did not appear to see a connection between PES and hunting. To them PES were rewards for “protecting the forest”, which meant maintaining forest cover, not necessarily forest quality, structure or biodiversity (CT villager 70 08-12-2013). Neither in their minds nor in Vietnam’s PES policy, hunting is not antithetical to forest conservation. The opportunity costs of abstaining from hunting were quite low, as hunters pursued their tradition for its socio-cultural appeal, not for economic reasons, and because their hunting bounty was low in both nutritional and monetary value (see Section 8.2.4). Therefore, if monetary incentives were able to curb Hmong hunting practices, I would have expected to see this effect in Chế Tạo. Considering, however, that hunting was mainly pursued for its socio-cultural appeal, I see limited potential for PES to help convert the remaining hunters in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B.

Compared to hunting, the situation for cardamom cultivation was very different, as it was a novel livelihood opportunity that is economically very significant to many households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B. For most cardamom-growing households in Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo, cardamom incomes were much higher than PES levels. Therefore, from an ecological economics perspective, PES levels would have had to be significantly higher to dis-incentivize cardamom

285 cultivation by compensating villagers’ opportunity costs.237 However, evaluating income opportunities with more than economic revenue in mind, several villagers I interviewed highlighted the risks of relying on cardamom income and considered PES as a more stable and desirable source of income (see Section 6.3). In particular, two Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed had even decided not to expand cardamom cultivation due to a perceived risk that this may jeopardize the allocation of PES funds to the village, well aware of the conservation impacts of cardamom cultivation (CT villager 24 13-12-2012). One of them, for instance, wagered that cardamom expansion would result in a further reduction of forest wildlife, and that this could, in turn, bring about the end of the PA and possibly PES (CT villager 25 14-12-2012).

As I noted in Section 9.4.1, many villagers I interviewed associated PES with the PA, and some of them felt more entitled to PES than other villagers. Other respondents thought PES were tied to conservation compliance or outcomes in some way. For these villagers, PES had provided an incentive to not clear forestland for cardamom cultivation, albeit only due to their misinformation and not due to PES policy. Of course, these misconceptions of PES may have been shaped by government propaganda for PES that portrayed them as conditional on conservation outcomes. Regardless of how common such misconceptions were, or how they affected villagers’ conservation behaviour, the case of Chế Tạo illustrates very well the misfit between PES policies and biodiversity conservation objectives in Vietnam. While conservationists see cardamom cultivation as detrimental to forest structure and biodiversity (Buckingham 2004; Eames and Mahood 2011; Killeen 2012), as noted in Section 6.3, neither cardamom cultivation nor forest wildlife factor into the valuation of forests in Vietnam’s PES framework. This means that villagers in Mù Cang Chải could continue or intensify cardamom cultivation and hunting practices without jeopardizing PES levels. Indeed, even the “empty forest” of Chế Tạo, as Redford (1992:412) might call it, provides watershed services, the singular focus of Vietnam’s PES framework, and downstream hydropower operators provide PES funds regardless of how much cardamom is cultivated and how many gibbons remain in the

237 This comparison at household level is appropriate for the evaluation of PES as monetary incentives, but at the wider commune or watershed level, any such comparison needs to consider that the spatial distribution of (potential) cardamom income is uneven, whereas each hectare of forest in the watershed receives the same PES payment rate. Throughout Chế Tạo commune, for instance, villagers harvest approximately 40 tonnes of fresh cardamom each year, which may fetch USD 40,000, according the 2013 FPD survey noted above and prior estimates by a senior FPD official. Regardless of how accurate such an estimate is, Chế Tạo’s cardamom income is certainly dwarfed by its annual PES funds of USD 252,000 (in 2013).

286 forests surrounding Chế Tạo. This case study of Chế Tạo provides much insight into the shortcomings of Vietnam’s PES framework, which I turn to next.

9.6. Lessons learnt from Mù Cang Chải for Vietnam’s PES policy

In the preceding two subsections, I have used the case of Chế Tạo to illustrate local contestations over PES governance and distribution (see Section 9.4), and the intersection of PES and forest conservation objectives (see Section 9.5). These issues speak to ongoing debates in the PES literature, within which I situated my analysis in Section 2.4.6. They also illustrate specific shortcomings of Vietnam’s PES policy framework, which I turn to next, specifically regarding the regulation of PES distribution and the role of forestland tenure in Vietnam. Relating my case study of Mù Cang Chải to accounts of PES implementation elsewhere in Vietnam, this section leads up to the final conclusion chapter of this thesis, where I will offer further interpretations on the financing, governance and future prospects of PES in Vietnam.

9.6.1. Governance and equity in PES distribution

The equitable or just distribution of PES has become a contentious topic in the PES literature, and emerged as such during my first weeks in Chế Tạo. In Sections 9.3 and 9.4, I show how PES policy and different approaches to payment distribution result in a problematic variability of households payment rates between and within different communes. I was able to show how these different systems of payment distribution have affected intra- and inter-village differentiation of payment rates and how this has resulted in problematic village politics, not only in the extreme case of Chế Tạo. What I found in Chế Tạo in several cases was that a legacy of top-down governance and the lack of accountability enabled nepotism and embezzlement to influence the disbursement of opportunities and benefits, including PES funds. While I did not seek to verify such allegations, I found that they shaped villagers’ discourses of distributive justice and their support for local PES governance and forest conservation more broadly.

I discussed my findings with several national PES experts in Hanoi, who could recount unpublished cases of PES distribution that make for insightful comparison. In Yên Châu commune, Sơn La Province, for instance, PES were reportedly shared equally among all villages, although some of them were located outside the watershed to which PES funds were allocated (NGO 18 10-06-2014; To Thi Thu Huong and Pancel 2009). The rationale for this was to seek

287 equitable PES distribution, with which other officials have justified not applying the k-factors, as I mentioned above (cf. To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013). Two key informants knew of other provincial or local-level leaderships who diverted from national policy directives to achieve a more equitable distribution of PES or a partial use of PES funds for forest protection activities (cf. McElwee 2016). These cases show that even where PES distribution is regulated, adapting the rules to local conditions is common and can make good sense, as long as “everyone is happy” (NGO 18 10-06-2014). This suggests that further regulation of how communes should distribute their PES funds may not be the best way to mitigate the problems of PES governance and distribution that I identified in Chế Tạo. While Chế Tạo is an extreme case, PES levels and distribution mechanisms likely vary in many other districts in Vietnam. Therefore, the case of Mù Cang Chải shows that commune-level leadership is critical, as well as how this is perceived by villagers, which highlights their agency in shaping the legitimacy of local state institutions.

9.6.2. PES distribution and forestland tenure

Apart from policy and governance, the equity of PES distribution also depends on local patterns of forestland tenure and participation in PES schemes. This became evident during Vietnam’s PES pilot phase for in Lâm Đồng and Sơn La province between 2008 and 2010. Interestingly, the leadership of Lâm Đồng Province initially wanted to distribute twenty per cent of PES funds equally to all watershed residents, but policy makers within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) insisted that only households with secure forestland tenure could be beneficiaries of PES (UN-REDD 2010). This resulted in a highly unequal distribution of payments to these “forest owners”, who constituted a mere ten percent of all households in most villages of the pilot project (To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012).

Vietnam’s national PES policies allow for both household forest owners (who hold a so-called Red Book Certificate) and households contracted for forest protection to receive PES. In fact, of the over 500,000 households who received PES in 2015, only around 120,000 were forest owners (Nguyen Chi Thanh and Vuong Van Quynh 2016). Nevertheless, the past allocation of both forestland and forest protection contracts in Vietnam has been marred by inequality and nepotism (To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Suhardiman et al. 2013). This means that in many locales some households may still be excluded from receiving PES. In provinces that have extensively

288 allocated forestland to households, such as Sơn La, Hòa Bình and Lào Cai, there are several thousand household forest owners entitled to PES. However, delineating their property relations and signing PES contracts with all of them incurs prohibitively high transaction costs (cf. Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013; McElwee and Nguyen Chi Thanh 2014).

In my analysis of the conceptual literature on PES, I argue that tenure security has been uncritically portrayed as a generic condition for good PES governance and distributive justice (see Section 2.4.6.2). Only recently, PES scholars have increasingly emphasized the contextuality of forestland tenure and institutional limitations of tenure-based PES (George et al. 2009; Adhikari and Boag 2013; Matzdorf et al. 2013; Naughton-Treves and Wendland 2014). Recognizing, among other limitations, the inequality of land tenure and high transaction costs, several authors have argued that PES distribution often requires a trade-off between efficiency and equity (van Noordwijk and Leimona 2010; García-Amado et al. 2011; Tacconi 2012; Martin et al. 2014).

Given that forestland holdings are either unequal or unclear in PES schemes in Vietnam, I contend that PES distribution to 7757 households in Mù Cang Chải could be described as “fairly efficient and efficiently fair” (Leimona et al. 2015:16). Since none of the households in the five communes I examine have formal tenure security, the communes distribute PES funds to all village households, minimizing transaction costs. Throughout Vietnam’s PES watersheds, the allocation of forest protection contracts to all households is likely to achieve more equitable and efficient PES distribution than forestland allocation to households. The variability and contestations I encountered around PES distribution within and between communes of Mù Cang Chải stem from different systems of payment distribution, not from inequality in land holdings.

The case of Mù Cang Chải therefore shows that state ownership over forestland can be conducive to efficient and equitable PES distribution, but this is contrary to prior assessments in the literature on PES in Vietnam and elsewhere. McElwee (2016) and other Vietnam scholars contend that the lack of household tenure security over forestland undermines the equity of Vietnam’s PES scheme (cf. Wertz-Kanounnikoff and Rankine 2008; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Bayrak 2015). This is in line with PES theory (Clements et al. 2010; Agrawal and Adhikari 2013; Sunderlin et al. 2014), and with PES policy in Vietnam, which aims to further the

289 outstanding forestland allocation to households (MARD 2014). In turn, I contend that this would not increase the equity, but complexity, transaction costs and conflict potential of PES distribution in Mù Cang Chải, including at the village level. Therefore, I argue that household forestland tenure and PES are not necessarily mutually conducive under Vietnam’s current PES framework. On a different note, I show in the following conclusion chapter that the lack of tenure security and the prevalence of sub-contracting households means that PES in Vietnam cannot become a strictly performance-based system.

9.7. Conclusion: PES between conservation and development

The premise of this chapter has been that PES in Vietnam primarily provide livelihood subsidies and not necessarily financing for forest conservation. Therefore, I have focussed on how PES funds are distributed in five communes of Mù Cang Chải, which has lead to much confusion and conflict within and between villages. As Chế Tạo commune stands out with its high PES rates, it aptly illustrates the problematic village politics that can emerge when PES distribution is poorly regulated or not transparent. I illustrated how the case of Chế Tạo has shaped discourses of distributive justice throughout Mù Cang Chải, and how other communes seemingly govern PES distribution more equitably.

In Vietnam, PES funds are distributed to watershed residents, regardless of their conservation performance, opportunity costs or dependency on livelihood subsidies. Nevertheless, I examined whether the high household PES levels in Chế Tạo could possibly compensate for the opportunity costs of abstaining from hunting or cardamom cultivation, the two local forest use practices with the highest conservation impact (see Section 9.5). Although PES levels outweigh the economic significance of customary hunting, this is pursued for its socio-cultural value and PES is therefore unlikely to serve as a dis-incentive. In turn, PES cannot compensate for the opportunity costs of giving up cardamom cultivation, which is more lucrative than PES for most cardamom growers, even in Chế Tạo. Nevertheless, some Chế Tạo villagers erroneously assume that PES are conditional on forest quality or biodiversity in the PA. To them, PES thus provides an incentive for conservation compliance, which PES policies does not, as PES is paid independent of biodiversity levels or decline. I could not assess how widespread these misconceptions of PES are, but they illustrate that conservation behaviour is not only shaped by conservation policies, but also by how these are locally portrayed, enforced and conceived.

290 Interviewing villagers about their conceptions of PES and the village politics surrounding PES distribution revealed some unintended effects of PES governance. In the following conclusion chapter, I will build on my study of PES in Mù Cang Chải to provide broader interpretations of the efficacy of PES and forest conservation in Vietnam.

291 Chapter 10 The prospects of conservation, development and PES in Vietnam

10.1. Introduction

The overarching aim of this thesis was: to investigate how ethnic minority Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải district, Yên Bái Province, Vietnam, and their livelihood practices have intersected with outside interventions for rural development and forest conservation since 1954. In Section 10.2 of this conclusion chapter, I first provide a summary of my analyses that I presented in the preceding five chapters. The purpose of this is to recapitulate the essence of my research findings for the reader before delving into further interpretations. Going beyond chapter summaries, I emphasize the linkages and analytical threads that underpin my analysis. Subsequently, in Section 10.3, I highlight how my research locales, analytical approaches, and conceptual foci are different from those of related studies I drew on in Chapters 2 and 4, outlining both the scholarly contributions and analytical limitations of this thesis.

In the latter two sections of this chapter, I provide further interpretations of selected research findings in two key areas of analysis, namely, state interventions that led to Hmong livelihood change (Section 10.4), and, secondly, forest governance in Vietnam, with particular attention to payments for ecosystem services (PES) (Section 10.5). Throughout this chapter, I show how my case study research in Mù Cang Chải has provided insights that are relevant beyond the case study locale, and can inform both scholarly debates and policy development in Vietnam, as well as in certain international contexts.

10.2. Synthesis of research findings and their significance

From my research aim and conceptual approach, I developed five research questions to examine specific aspects that are relevant in the local context of my field sites. My first two research questions investigated villagers’ recent livelihood changes (Sections 10.2.1. and 10.2.2) The latter three research questions provided an institutional and actor-oriented analysis of conservation governance and practice (Section 10.2.3), and of PES governance in Mù Cang Chải (Section 10.2.4).

292 10.2.1. Socio-economic differentiation in livelihood transitions

Addressing my first research question in Chapter 5, I examined livelihood transitions since the ban on shifting cultivation: Since 1954, how have state actors pursued rural development in Mù Cang Chải, and how has this affected livelihood practices and socio-economic differentiation in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B? The purpose of this question was to ground subsequent chapters in a situated understanding of historical and contemporary livelihoods in the two case study villages.

Most prominently, I found that new patterns of socio-economic differentiation, vulnerability and dependency emerged in both study villages in the early 1990s, which affected village households quite differently (Section 5.4). Following the ban of shifting cultivation, households soon found themselves in a “race” for suitable paddy land, and some households with limited human and social capital were disadvantaged. Due to Hmong inheritance norms, household differentiation in land holdings has since been exacerbated, as families divide their paddy land among their adult sons (Section 5.4.2). State agricultural extension services facilitated the adoption of fertilizer and high-yield seed varieties, which enabled nearly all households in Chế Tạo, but only half of the households in Nả Hàng B, to achieve rice self-sufficiency by the early 2000s. Subsequently, agricultural subsidies gradually decreased, and the prices of agricultural inputs increased, which became a financial burden for many income-poor households. According to my interpretation of villagers’ accounts in both study villages, the ban on shifting cultivation marked the emergence of both household differentiation and livelihood monetization.

Recent livelihood changes of Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải have been shaped by state institutions for poverty alleviation and development. I examined how “poor households” were defined and supported, which fails to consider modern patterns and endogenous conceptions of poverty and wealth (Section 5.5.1). I illustrated how certain livelihood assets had taken on new socio-cultural and monetary significance, including land and labour for house construction (Sections 5.5.2 and 5.5.3), while purchased meat had become a modern, socio-cultural symbol of monetary wealth (Section 5.5.6). My goal throughout Section 5.5 was to illustrate how households engage with modern livelihood challenges and opportunities, highlighting differences between and within Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B.

293 10.2.2. The monetization of subsistence livelihoods

After finding that villagers had become increasingly dependent on monetary income to cover the growing costs of subsistence livelihoods, in Chapter 6 I examined how villagers had been earning and spending money, addressing my second research question: Since the 1990s, how have villagers in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B engaged with emerging opportunities to obtain financial capital, and how has this affected household expenditures?

In Nả Hàng B, nearly all households had engaged in a collective cultivation of opium, which provided, together with livestock rearing, dependable income, until both practices were banned in the early 1990s. The need for alternative sources of monetary income added to the challenges of expanding paddy cultivation, which I examined in Chapter 5. However, most households in Nả Hàng B were able to harvest, from local forest areas, certain non-timber forest products (NTFPs), including valuable orchids and medicinal plants, as well as high-value pơ mu timber, which was in growing demand across northern Vietnam in the 1990s (cf. Nguyen Phi Truyen and Osborn 2006, Hoang Cam 2009). This resulted in the rapid exploitation of many pơ mu trees, orchid species, and other NTFPs by the late 1990s. The irony is that this temporary return to forest exploitation was an indirect result of the state-led ban on shifting cultivation, which had sought to facilitate forest recovery.

Relative to villagers in Nả Hàng B, their counterparts across the ridgeline in Chế Tạo village were less dependent on additional sources of income after the opium ban, as only an estimated ten to twenty per cent of households had cultivated surplus opium for sale, and because Chế Tạo households had access to relatively more paddy land. In addition, villagers in Chế Tạo commune had remained cut off from emerging market opportunities to sell NTFPs or pơ mu timber, as a road to the commune centre was only completed in 1998. Much like in Nả Hàng B, they engaged in what interviewees describe as a “race” to cut the last accessible pơ mu trees in the 1990s, but they left these lying in the forest for future use as coffin wood or house building timber. In fact, 11 of the 35 households I interviewed in Chế Tạo village still owned several of these large trees in the forest. Interestingly, they could afford to not sell them, despite the high market value the rare pơ mu lumber had obtained.

294 I also found that villagers could, if they wanted to, sell a pơ mu tree that they had cut twenty years prior, a cardamom field, or a prior swidden field suitable for cultivating cardamom to fellow villagers for substantial money, although these resources were officially located within the PA, which legally prohibited any harvesting or sale of forest resources. Conceptually, these cases highlight the importance of informal property relations and illustrate how these can persist in the face of state statutory property regimes (cf. Sturgeon and Sikor 2004; McElwee 2011; Sikor 2012a).

To better understand monetary aspects of villagers’ livelihoods, I also examined other sources of financial capital, including preferential bank loans for poor households by the state-owned Bank of Social Policies (BSP). These bank loans enabled poor households to invest in their children’s education and acquire certain commodities that had become integral to modern peasant livelihoods. Due to limited opportunities for market-based livelihood diversification, only three households in both villages were able to use bank loans to invest in new income opportunities, while the majority of households I interviewed were severely indebted (Section 6.5.3).

I further examined villagers’ access to career opportunities in government service, the only formal and the most desirable opportunity for monetary income (Section 6.5.1). Villagers’ accounts suggested that access to these positions was mediated by corruption and social capital, which excluded many, including some who had taken out bank loans for their education. This contributed to a common discontent towards the commune leadership, which I also found in the context of forest patrolling and PES distribution (Chapters 8 and 9).

A central analytical theme in Chapters 5 and 6 was how villagers were able to access and interact with different livelihood assets and opportunities, and how this had resulted in socio-economic differentiation. This was particularly evident in Nả Hàng B, where paddy land had been scarcer than in Chế Tạo. In turn, villagers in Nả Hàng B had the opportunity to harvest and sell NTFPs during the 1990s, and this did not exacerbate socio-economic differentiation, as households had similar access to this opportunity. Opportunities for cardamom cultivation, however, were not equally accessible to all households, and therefore had exacerbated household differentiation since around 2005. This was also because some households’ former swidden fields, still under individual property regimes, had proven suitable to grow cardamom. Furthermore, rising

295 conservation payments and the shift to Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) in 2012 had established new patterns of both inter- and intra-village inequality.

10.2.3. Actors and agendas of conservation governance

After pulling out key elements from my two livelihoods chapters, I now offer a joint synthesis of Chapters 7 and 8. My first objective there was to analyse how Fauna and Flora International (FFI) sought to institutionalise biodiversity conservation, co-management, and community-based forest patrolling in Mù Cang Chải, and how this intersected with state forest governance and contemporary forest use.

In Chapter 7, I examined the interplay of conservation actors and agendas in Mù Cang Chải, following my third research question: Since the early 2000s, how have state- and non-state actors pursued forest conservation in Mù Cang Chải, and how have their agendas intersected? The key non-state actor for biodiversity conservation in Mù Cang Chải had been FFI, and I argued that FFI’s approach, compared to state forest governance, was remarkably progressive and community-oriented in Vietnam, but therefore partly failed.

Throughout Chapters 7, 8 and 9, I illustrated how local state actors could shape and implement international conservation projects according to their own agendas. The agency of international conservation actors to challenge the status quo of state forest governance was rather limited, which became evident as FFI and activities funded by the Vietnam Conservation Fund (VCF) failed to institutionalize meaningful forms of co-management, local PA resource use, community-based conservation enforcement, and performance-based PES. In all cases, I argued that international actors had failed to understand the political landscape of forest governance in Mù Cang Chải, and in Vietnam more generally. Trying to institute Vietnam’s first co- management forum in Mù Cang Chải, for instance, FFI’s plan to have specific community representatives elected by villagers was antithetical to local governance in Vietnam, as it may have undermined the role of commune officials. Instead of elected villagers, commune cadres became community representatives in Mù Cang Chải’s co-management forum, which arguably reflected fundamental barriers to participatory governance in Vietnam.

In Chapter 7, I analysed FFI’s interventions through a lens of conservation policy and governance and I sought to evaluate their efficacy in Chapter 8. FFI’s greatest conservation

296 concern in Mù Cang Chải had been villagers’ hunting practices and FFI’s most prominent intervention were the so-called community conservation teams (CCTs), forest patrol groups of local villagers. Therefore, my fourth research question examined the village politics of hunting and patrolling with a focus on Chế Tạo village: Since the early 2000s, how have villagers’ practices surrounding hunting and forest conservation changed, and how has this intersected with community-based forest patrolling?

I started Chapter 8 with an analysis of how customary hunting practices had declined in Chế Tạo with the decline of both forest wildlife and shifting cultivation. Although the economic and livelihood significance of hunting was very low, I found that an estimated 20 per cent of Chế Tạo villagers regularly went hunting for socio-cultural reasons. According to my understanding, hunting had shifted from being a communal livelihood activity to being a secretive practice that many non-hunters in Chế Tạo opposed.

The literature on community-based conservation highlights the advantages of employing villagers for enforcement and monitoring, but the socio-cultural and socio-political dynamics have not been sufficiently considered (Section 2.4.4.2). I found that the social embeddedness of the CCTs had not only been an asset, but also a liability. They were implicated in social relations and obligations that undermined their agency to apprehend many local hunters or loggers, while villagers who wanted to avoid encountering CCTs in the forest could easily do so, as villagers knew when and where the CCTs were patrolling. Although conservation enforcement by the CCTs was lenient and ineffective, their operation had become very controversial. Villagers I interviewed were surprisingly open in questioning the legitimacy and integrity of the CCTs, suspecting them of secretively hunting while on patrol. I tried to understand the origins and implications of these suspicions and found that they undermine local support for the PA. While conservation agencies often rely on former hunters and their expertise for community-based conservation enforcement and monitoring, the case of Mù Cang Chải shows how this can back- fire. I suggested that having villagers from all households serve on CCTs on a rotating basis could lower the conflict potential, but this would mean that the CCTs are less capable of monitoring forest biodiversity, the initial goal of FFI’s project.

297 I used the case of the FFI-funded CCTs to highlight the vulnerability of biodiversity in Vietnam’s PA landscape, particularly given FFI’s donor dependence (Section 7.2.4). Therefore, FFI wanted the CCTs to be funded through Mù Cang Chải’s PES funds, and the annual costs would have been a mere 5.3 per cent of the PES funds allocated to the PA. This, however, would be contrary to the purpose of PES of providing livelihood subsidies, the premise of my analysis in Chapter 9.

10.2.4. The governance, distribution and effects of PES

Given that Vietnam’s PES delivers very different payment rates to different watersheds, districts and households, I sought to investigate, in Chapter 9, how PES had been distributed and received in Mù Cang Chải, addressing my fifth research question: Since 2010, how are payments for ecosystem services (PES) distributed in Mù Cang Chải district, and how does this intersect with local conceptions of distributive justice and forest use? I here synthesize my findings and will, in Section 10.5, reflect on some more fundamental aspects of PES policy and governance in Vietnam and beyond.

The premise of my analysis of PES governance has been that PES in Vietnam are “livelihood subsidies” for households living in the watersheds of hydropower operations. The government rationale for this is that PES strengthens both villagers’ livelihoods and their commitment to forest protection, but neither state-led nor independent studies have sought to study to what extent PES achieves these twin objectives. Examining the multiple outcomes of PES in Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B, I found that even the low payment rates in Nả Hàng B offer households some financial reprieve, while the exceptionally high payments in Chế Tạo had exacerbated household differentiation and village politics of mistrust (cf. Fletcher and Büscher 2017). Yet, PES in Chế Tạo could not compensate for the opportunity costs of foregoing cardamom cultivation or gibbon hunting, nor could they dis-incentivize customary hunting, which is pursued for socio-cultural reasons (Section 9.5.2). Nevertheless, some Chế Tạo villagers I interviewed misconceived PES as conservation payments related to the PA and assumed that PES were conditional upon conservation compliance or the abundance of forest wildlife. In reality, however, continued hunting and cardamom cultivation would not jeopardize PES, which are calculated solely based on hydropower production in the watershed.

298 Examining PES distribution, I found high inter- and intra-village variances of household PES levels, partly because commune leaders had significant freedom in PES distribution. Villagers and local officials either justified or criticized certain aspects of PES distribution in Mù Cang Chải, exhibiting different conceptions of distributive justice. With a focus on Chế Tạo, I examined how PES shaped “village politics” and villagers’ environmentalities (cf. Agrawal 2005). This revealed multiple unintended and indirect effects of PES, partly stemming from villagers’ scepticism over embezzlement of PES funds. Regardless of whether these allegations were justified or not, they negatively affected villagers’ attitudes to conservation and to the commune leadership, much like villagers’ suspicions over the CCTs. This means that high PES levels do not necessarily have a high impact, but can actually backfire, particularly if there is a lack of transparency or trust in PES governance.

10.3. Unique context and scholarly contributions of this thesis

After synthesizing my research findings, I next distinguish my research from related studies in Vietnam and within the international scholarly literature. The purpose of this section is to highlight several aspects that are unique to the context and analytical focus of my thesis, upon which I justify my choice of topics and conceptual approaches for my subsequent interpretations in Sections 10.4 and 10.5.

A large body of research has studied how structural change since the 1990s has affected peasant livelihoods and forest governance in Vietnam’s uplands, as I have in this thesis. However, several of the most-studied processes and issues are not as pertinent in Mù Cang Chải as they are in other locales. Mù Cang Chải has partly remained at the margins of national developments and has never been the subject of international academic research. In the following two sections, I differentiate my study from other scholarly work in the fields of forest governance (Section 10.3.1) and ethnic minority livelihoods (Section 10.3.2). I highlight the wider relevance of my insights from Mù Cang Chải, as well as key scholarly contributions and analytical limitations of this thesis.

10.3.1. Mù Cang Chải in the national context of forest governance

A large body of scholarly work has examined Vietnam’s forest policy landscape since the 1990s, but there remain important gaps of contemporary relevance that I sought to address with this

299 thesis. Much of the published work concerns Vietnam’s forest policy and land reform in the 1990s (Sikor 2001b; Castella et al. 2006; Sikor and Tran Ngoc Thanh 2007; Clement and Amezaga 2009), but Mù Cang Chải is one of many places where forestland has not been allocated to households. Yet, my thesis shows that the equality and prospects of forestland allocation have to be re-examined in the context of PES (Section 10.5).

The interaction of international NGOs and state agendas for conservation and development has been studied in other countries (cf. Bebbington 2004, 2005; Mitlin et al. 2007), but much less so in Vietnam, where I find this dynamic to warrant particular attention. Of scholarly concern are the “hidden alliances”, as Forsyth and Walker (2014:408) call them, that emerge when state actors partner with international conservation agencies and adopt their agendas, which can reify and ‘green-wash’ state control (see, for instance: Bryant 2002; Brockington and Scholfield 2010).238 FFI, however, intervened in Mù Cang Chải and its other project sites to introduce co- management and reported positively on its progress. Nevertheless, I found that FFI’s interventions in Mù Cang Chải resulted in “state-led co-management”, as I call it, which has done little to represent villagers’ interests in PA management (Section 7.4.2). In Mù Cang Chải and other FFI sites, the Vietnamese state has upheld state forest governance not with international actors in a “hidden alliance”, but against them, which I also argue in my interpretation of PES governance (Section 9.6).

McElwee (2016) argues that the implementation of PES since 2010 has resulted in the re- centralization of state forest governance in Vietnam, and I find that this started happening in Mù Cang Chải from 2006 with Vietnam’s first piloting of co-management. Importantly, my case study reveals that Vietnam’s hierarchical governance structures in the countryside are not conducive to participatory forest governance and that they limit the agency of international actors to introduce new models of forest and PA governance (Section 7.4). While my case study is similar to other studies of re-centralizing resource governance (Ribot et al. 2006; Pulhin and

238 This was also the case in Dressler’s (2005, 2014) field sites in Palawan (Philippines), where state sedentarisation and forest conservation was “cloaked in the rhetoric of livelihood support”, as it was supported by an international conservation NGO (Dressler 2005:412). This furthered the marginalisation of local ethnic minority populations, traditional swiddeners, who were thus not empowered by, but rather co-opted into community conservation, much like more recent studies have also observed elsewhere (cf. Agrawal 2005; Stevenson 2006; Kubo 2008:80; Caruso 2011). Dressler (2005:412) blames international conservation actors for “misreading the local socio-political landscape”, which I similarly blame FFI for, when I question if FFI understood the institutional limitations to a people-oriented approach to forest conservation in Vietnam (Section 7.4).

300 Dressler 2009; Petursson and Vedeld 2015), I do not conceive of it as a case of state territorialisation. Indeed, several scholars have found evidence of territorialisation in other aspects of forest governance in Vietnam, not least with the establishment of protected areas (McElwee 2004a; Nguyen Van Chinh 2008; Taylor 2011). However, within my findings on the governance of the protected area in Mù Cang Chải, I find no evidence for (geo)political motivations to territorialize Mù Cang Chải and its Hmong residents through forest governance. Hence I take a more differentiated perspective on territorialisation and resistance in my analysis of conservation governance and of rural development (see Section 10.4.).

Both in national and international comparisons, Mù Cang Chải is not a typical site to study how forest conservation has interacted with peasant livelihoods. Overall, I found little evidence of conservation resistance or of the social costs typically associated with PAs (Section 2.4.3). In the early stages of my fieldwork, I was concerned that I had selected ‘the wrong field site’ to examine villagers’ forest dependence and the livelihood impacts of conservation. Contrary to reports by the local FPD (Forest Protection Department) and by FFI, I found that Hmong peasants surrounding the Mù Cang Chải PA are no longer dependent on shifting cultivation or forest income. In general, topics of illegal forest exploitation, forest law enforcement, and PA management are not as contentious in Mù Cang Chải as they are elsewhere in Vietnam. Other PAs are often surrounded by higher population density, including forest dependent peasants, and face conservation pressure from commercial logging and hunting, often by outsiders. In comparison, Mù Cang Chải’s forests hold few resources of market value, and local villagers enjoy informal access to most forest resources they need. This is partly due to lenient enforcement, as both PA management and forest patrolling are in the hands of local Hmong actors. The village politics that have emerged around hunting and patrolling in Chế Tạo, however, illustrate how conflictive community-based conservation can be, even if relatively little seems to be at stake from both conservation and livelihood perspectives.

While Mù Cang Chải is an atypical site to study the social impacts of conservation, it is a very fruitful site to study PES. Vietnam’s PES policy framework, its rapid development, its focus on livelihoods, and its institutional context provide an insightful case study for PES implementation and outcomes. While certain aspects of PES in Vietnam have received international scholarly attention (Section 4.6), we know very little about how local state actors implement PES policies

301 and distribute payments, and similarly little about how PES interact with recipients’ livelihoods and their conceptions of forest conservation. I sought to address these gaps by grounding my study of PES within a larger analysis of conservation governance, peasant livelihoods, and forest use. My application of Agrawal’s (2005) environmentality framework in the context of PES is novel and brings attention to the village politics and subjective conceptions of PES distribution. Based on these findings, I provide more fundamental discussions of the political ecology of PES in Vietnam in Section 10.5., interrogating the financing, governance and implementation of Vietnam’s PES program, as well as of key aspects of land tenure and conditionality, which relate to scholarly debates in the international PES literature.

My analytical attention to villagers’ livelihoods and conservation attitudes not only strengthens my use of the environmentality perspective, but also responds to a broader lack of actor-oriented studies in the literature on conservation governance (Dressler et al. 2015) and on PES (Milder et al. 2010; Suich et al. 2015). Furthermore, my study is the first that examines PES in the context of ethnic minority livelihoods, which is becoming increasingly pertinent, as rising PES rates are set to remain a consistent source of financial capital for over 500.000 rural households in Vietnam. Although there are no official data or reliable way to estimate how many of these are ethnic minority people, it is evident that this proportion is significant, as I explain in Section 4.6.2. I next highlight other sources of financial capital that Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải have, which have received too little attention in the study of ethnic minority livelihoods in Vietnam. Building on this, in the subsequent Section 10.4, I provide further interpretations of how Hmong livelihoods and state interventions have interacted in Mù Cang Chải.

10.3.2. Ethnic minority livelihood opportunities in Mù Cang Chải

I here highlight two angles of my study that differentiate it from previous studies of ethnic minority livelihoods in Vietnam. Building on this, I provide further interpretations of state- society relations in Mù Cang Chải in Section 10.4.

10.3.2.1. Monetary livelihoods and income opportunities

Given Vietnam’s rapid economic development since the 1990s, several authors have examined ethnic minority livelihoods in the context of growing market integration, given that highland ethnic minority people often have limited access to market-based opportunities (Henin 1999;

302 Turner 2007b; Friederichsen and Neef 2010; Bonnin 2011; Kozel 2014; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). I contribute to this literature by examining how Hmong households have engaged with shifting opportunities to obtain financial capital, including through cardamom cultivation, PES, government job opportunities, and preferential bank loans (Chapter 6). These sources of cash flow have separately received some scholarly attention, but not their relative significance in the context of household budgets, incomes and expenditure. I sought to examine this through a multi-sited and actor-oriented approach, which highlighted some useful insights, but also avenues for further research, as I will briefly outline.

Firstly, cardamom cultivation has been a lucrative income opportunity in certain parts of Vietnam’s northern highlands, often for ethnic Hmong peasants. Previous studies have examined historical and contemporary cardamom commodity chains and their livelihood significance in upland Lào Cai province (Sowerwine 2004a; Tugault-Lafleur and Turner 2009; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). Non-academic reports have provided further insights into cardamom production and its conservation impacts, including in Mù Cang Chải (Tran Van On et al. 2002; Buckingham and Tiep 2003; Dinh Van Tu 2004). Expanding on these studies, I sought to illustrate how the expansion of cardamom as a cash crop furthered household differentiation; how villagers conceive of cardamom income vis-à-vis other income opportunities and PES; how unique property relations over cardamom fields have developed; and how cardamom cultivation intersects with state agendas for livelihood development and conservationist agendas for biodiversity protection. This provides novel insights and avenues to understand peasant agency and conservation policies surrounding cardamom cultivation as an income opportunity for highland peasants in Vietnam (Section 6.3).

Secondly, the state-funded Vietnam Bank of Social Policies (BSP) has made micro-credit very accessible to peasant households across the country (cf. Poon and D. T. Thai 2010; Saint-Macary 2014). Previous studies have argued that the BSP should disburse more loans to poor households to better achieve its objectives of poverty reduction (Nguyen Viet Cuong 2008; Nguyen Viet Cuong et al. 2015). In contrast, I emphasized how easily-accessible bank loans have become a debt trap for many income-poor peasant households in Mù Cang Chải (Section 6.5.3). The wider, international literature on micro-finance has become increasingly critical of the concept (Ahlin

303 and Jiang 2008; Raza 2010; Bateman and Chang 2012), but has, to my knowledge, not identified the specific risks for subsistence households that my study highlights.

Thirdly, government career opportunities for local villagers exist in every commune in Vietnam, but have not been considered in prior studies of ethnic minority livelihoods. I show that access to these jobs is mediated by corruption and social capital, which is not uncommon for formal employment opportunities in Vietnam (Thi Tuyet Tran 2013). This is particularly interesting in a Hmong village society, where social and kinship relations are culturally structured. I also found villagers’ discourse and engagement with government careers to be a particularly insightful lens into village politics, local governance, as well as villagers’ livelihood identities and aspirations (Section 6.5.2).

As access to cardamom land, bank loans and government career opportunities is not equitable, many households in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B struggle to make ends meet. Nevertheless, few engage in off-farm livelihood activities or move to urban areas to seek employment, as it has been found in other parts of upland Southeast Asia (Rigg 2006). This may be because Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải lack necessary assets for or access to alternative livelihood opportunities, and because social obligations and livelihood identities of being peasants are culturally engrained and remain strong (Section 6.5.2).

I also found that villagers’ livelihood decision-making had important gendered dimensions, as men and women had very different social roles and capabilities, in Bebbington’s (1999) sense of the word, to engage in novel livelihood opportunities. However, I was not able to comprehensively examine the gender dynamics of Hmong livelihoods, due to the scope of this thesis and my limited access to female informants, as I explain in Section 4.3.3. Further research, ideally conducted by female researchers with female assistants, could greatly enhance our understanding of household dynamics and gendered dimensions of Hmong livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải, while drawing on prior studies of Hmong women in Vietnam and beyond (Schein 2000; Duong Bich Hanh 2008; Bonnin and Turner 2013; Le Thi Dan Dung 2015; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015; Vang et al. 2016). A second limitation of my livelihood study is that my data on household expenditure proved to be too variable for a quantitative analysis of household spending patterns (Section 3.6.3.3). Further researchwith more extensive data collection on

304 household income and expenditure in my study area could, together with qualitative insights, examine the economic anthropology of semi-subsistence livelihoods more rigorously.

10.3.2.2. Political context of ethnic minority livelihood change

While the monetary reality of ethnic minority livelihoods in Vietnam deserves further investigation, the political context of state interventions into peasant livelihoods has been better studied in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Previous studies have argued that state development policies in Vietnam have failed to understand the situation and needs of highland ethnic minorities and therefore have not achieved equitable poverty alleviation (Sowerwine 2004a; Taylor 2007; McElwee 2009; Turner, Kettig, et al. 2015). Furthermore, several authors have revealed underlying political objectives of expanding state territorial control and furthering the cultural assimilation of highland ethnic minority groups (McElwee 2004a; Nguyen Van Chinh 2008; Taylor 2011). Yet, some scholars have highlighted the agency of certain ethnic groups, and of the Hmong, in particular, to adapt their livelihoods to structural changes, incorporating aspects of both tradition and modernity (Michaud and Forsyth 2011; Michaud 2012; Turner, Bonnin, et al. 2015). Several authors frame such agency as forms of resistance to state development directives, but seek to not victimize ethnic minority actors and polarize their relationship with the state (Bonnin 2011; Sowerwine 2011; Turner 2011). Although I examine some of the same forms of agency, such as the use of traditional rice seed, I do not portray them as resistance, and my interpretation of state-society relations, namely between Hmong villagers, local officials and national policies, partly differs from previous studies, as I explain in the following section.

In my review of the literature on peasant resistance (Section 2.2.3.4), I noted that several scholars warn against a monolithic representation of the state and of state domination (Moore 1998; Li 2005a; Mittelman and Chin 2005), and against an essentialist representation of peasant agency as resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990; Ortner 1995; Brown 1996; Moore 1998). I find that such dichotomous conceptions are at the heart of Scott’s (2009) much-cited Zomia thesis, which is based on historical research concerning developments up until the 1940s, although I suggest that the situation in Mù Cang Chải in the 1950-1970s is comparable to the context of Scott’s (2009) book. Nevertheless, the Zomia thesis serves its purpose as a useful reference for the interpretation of peasant societies in the context of modern state making. In the following

305 section, I use it as a starting point to argue that, according to my understanding, peasant resistance in Mù Cang Chải was more selective, while state territorialisation was not as effective as parts of the resistance literature may lead us to assume. Moreover, countrary to this literature, I suggest that Hmong villagers partly benefitted from state interventions and state making in Mù Cang Chải.

10.4. Interpreting the intersections of Hmong livelihoods and state interventions

After highlighting what makes my research, its context and my analysis unique, I can now build on some of my key findings to offer a broader discussion and theorization of how Hmong livelihood practices have intersected with outside interventions in Mù Cang Chải, which has been the overarching research aim of this thesis. In this section, I build an argument that state interventions were necessary to induce certain changes to livelihood and cultural practices in my study sites, as Hmong social structure was not conducive to initiating and coordinating collective agency.

I first show that the concepts of territorialisation and resistance, which other scholars have used to theorize case studies of ethnic minority livelihoods in the context of state interventions, do not capture what I found in Mù Cang Chải. I then examine my findings from the governmentality perspective, which provides a Foucauldian lens into state policy, but arguably does not consider aspects of social structure that shape peasant livelihoods and agency. Therefore, I draw on Carr’s (2013, 2014) more actor-oriented approach to livelihoods research that attends to social and household dynamics, for instance. Based on this, I show how villagers have benefitted from and appreciated certain state interventions into their livelihood and cultural practices, and I finally argue that, given Hmong social structure, these interventions were essential for certain livelihood transitions to take place.

10.4.1. The intersections of territorialisation and resistance in Mù Cang Chải

The premise of Scott’s (2009) Zomia thesis is that many ethnic minority groups in the Southeast Asian highlands historically sought distance and independence from lowland rulers, and maintained nomadic and swidden livelihoods to evade state control and taxation. Scott (2009:47) contends that states sought to overcome this “friction of the terrain” through “distance- demolishing technologies”, particularly the construction of roads, to bring highlanders under

306 their gaze and governance. I provide an alternative interpretation of how the first roads into Mù Cang Chải and Chế Tạo affected the lives of the local Hmong.

The construction of the road from Nghĩa Lộ to Mù Cang Chải in the late 1960s did enable the nascent socialist state of Vietnam (the DRV government) to introduce central planning, taxation and collectivization in Mù Cang Chải in the 1980s and 1990s (Section 5.3). However, the accounts from villagers I interviewed suggest that taxation and collectivization were barely enforced in Mù Cang Chải or could easily be evaded, much like in other highland locales. On the other hand, many households in Nả Hàng B were able to benefit from early market opportunities that came with the integration into the centrally planned economy. In Chế Tạo, which was connected to Mù Cang Chải by road only in the late 1990s, respondents similarly emphasized that this road brought no negative consequences, but much-needed market access to more readily sell livestock and buy new commodities.

The establishment of roads, taxation, collectivization and central planning in Mù Cang Chải by the early Vietnamese state is consistent with Vandergeest and Pelusi’s (1995) concept of territorialisation and helped make Mù Cang Chải ‘legible’ to central state governance, as Scott (1998) argues. The accounts of village elders and key informants suggest that early state efforts of taxation failed, as they also did in other parts of Vietnam’s highlands (Nguyen Huu Thang 2002), due to resistance of entire Hmong villages in Mù Cang Chải (MCC NTFP trader Che 24- 05-2014). On the other hand, respondents in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B confirmed that villagers welcomed integration into the centrally planned market economy that emerged in Mù Cang Chải in the course of early socialist territorialisation in the late 1960s. This is plausible, given that this provided access to a growing range of commodities, as well as opportunities to sell lifestock to government shops. This suggests that Hmong villagers in Mù Cang Chải selectively resisted those state interventions that negatively affected them. In turn, this means that they did not resist state interventions as categorically as parts of the resistance literature and Scott’s (2009) Zomia thesis might lead us to assume. Scott (2009) suggests that highland ethnic minorities purposefully maintained swidden livelihoods and lived in remote locales to evade taxation and state control. In Mù Cang Chải, I found the situation to be a lot more complex.

307 Conceptually, I argue that structuralist concepts, such as territorialisation and Zomia, are not sufficiently nuanced to theorize the intersection of state structure and peasant agency, as peasants and other social actors interact with and shape socio-political structure (cf. Giddens 1984). To understand this intersection of state structure and peasant agency, a central element of my research aim, I next consider the usefulness of the more nuanced governmentality perspective, which examines how state structures and governance seek to shape their citizens.

10.4.2. Governmentality and livelihood identities of sedentarization

The Foucauldian concept of governmentality posits that people’s thinking and conduct is most effectively shaped if they internalize or aspire a given agenda and thus become ‘subjects’ of this agenda (cf. Agrawal 2005; Kubo 2008; Fletcher 2010). While governmentality has proven very popular in political ecology studies (Mann 2009; Winkel 2012), the topic of sedentarisation is rarely examined through the lens of governmentality (for one notable exception, see Dressler 2014). Also, many studies do not interrogate to what extent state governmentality actually shapes citizens’ attitudes and agency (Rutherford 2002; Cepek 2011). Given how villagers I interviewed routinely portrayed swiddening as a backward and primitive livelihood practice, which mirrors state justifications for sedentarization, it seems that state sedentarisation in Mù Cang Chải achieved its objective by fostering villagers’ aspirations for more modern livelihoods based on intensified paddy cultivation. Dressler (2014:250) refers to this as the effects of “green governmentality”, but to understand this process better, we need to examine how Hmong villagers conceive of shifting cultivation and their new livelihoods.

Scholars of anthropology and other disciplines have often portrayed shifting cultivation as an integral part of people’s culture that is worth preserving, also because it can constitute a more sustainable and biodiverse form of agriculture than permanent cultivation (Cairns 2007; Young 2007; Vliet et al. 2013). Some authors have suggested that state bans on shifting cultivation have undermined peasants’ livelihood security and independence (Condominas 2009; Cramb et al. 2009). This may be the case in their study research contexts, but I find that generalizing this risks to romanticize the sustainability and cultural importance of swiddening.

Contrary to the literature cited above, none of the villagers I interviewed in Mù Cang Chải suggested that swiddening was an integral aspect of a cultural Hmong livelihood identity that

308 was worth preserving (Section 5.4). However, I estimate in Chapter 8 that approximately 20 per cent of Chế Tạo village households still engage in customary hunting activities, precisely because they conceive of hunting as a traditional socio-cultural activity that is worth preserving, although it has lost much of its significance for subsistence. I consider this as “implicit resistance”, which, according to Holmes (2007:193), does not intend to undermine state authority.239 I will return to villagers’ hunting practices in the final section of this chapter, but the fact that hunting is still an integral part of some villagers’ livelihood identities, shows that these are always idiosyncratic and not uniformly shaped by outside interventions (cf. Carr 2013).

With the exception of four older men in Chế Tạo, villagers I interviewed in both villages invariably expressed aspirations for modern livelihood elements and had often invested significant amounts of money in cell phones, TVs, motorbikes, house furniture and renovations. I observed what Michaud (2012:1869) calls the “indigenization of modernity”, as villages valued commodities and livelihood practices, including eating meat purchased at the market, in new ways (cf. Carr 2013). The monetization and modernization of subsistence livelihoods had been facilitated by state interventions, such as preferential bank loan programs and PES, and exposed income-poor households to new vulnerabilities. Importantly, villagers did not really have the option to remain unaffected by these developments. They experienced what Carr (2013:77; 2014) refers to as “livelihoods as intimate government”, as fellow villagers or household members bringing home cash income or new commodities, for instance, serve as “tools of coercion” in the monetization of subsistence livelihoods. The four villagers noted above include a 76-year-old man in Chế Tạo, who was lamenting how PES had eroded his status as the household head, traditionally in charge of economic decision-making. His son had taken charge of collecting the PES money from the commune centre and making decision on how to spend it, including on several motorcycles. The father was particularly bitter, as his son had told him that “an old dog can’t protect the house” (Dev laus zuv tsi lo tsev) (CT villager 49 16-07-2013), challenging the traditional respect for parents and elders that is integral to Hmong social structure (cf. Cooper 1998).

239 My observation that some households still go hunting I also framed as “implicit resistance”, as it is pursued for socio-cultural reasons and not to undermine the conservation objectives of the PA, as Holmes (2007:193) frames the targeted killing of flagship species in other PAs outside Vietnam (cf. Inskip et al. 2014; Mariki et al. 2015).

309 Conceptually, the case above shows that we need to consider social structure and dynamics to understand new patterns of both livelihood identities and vulnerabilities that emerge with livelihood transitions. The governmentality perspective can shed light on how state interventions aim to shape local livelihoods, but an actor-oriented livelihoods perspective is needed to examine how state interventions and livelihoods identities intersect and actually shape new patterns of differentiation and vulnerability, which vary within and between households. New sources of vulnerability include seed failures and rising prices of agricultural inputs, as previous studies in Vietnam have also found (Hossain et al. 2003; Tran Duc Vien and Nguyen Thi Duong Nga 2009; Turner and Bonnin 2012; Delisle 2014; Kyeyune and Turner 2016). However, my understanding is that these risks have typically been cushioned by government subsidies and assistance in times of crises, as I could witness during the 2013 seed failure in Púng Luông. This has contributed to Hmong villagers I interviewed portraying the state as a reliable source of livelihood assistance, and hardly as a domineering force that they had needed to evade or resist. Older respondents routinely credited state interventions, including agricultural extension services, for facilitating this livelihood transition, and they remembered the swidden ban as necessary step. Interestingly, I found that this was also the case for state restrictions to certain cultural practices, which I turn to next.

10.4.3. Villagers supporting state restrictions of livelihood practices

Apart from the ban on shifting cultivation, I examined other state restrictions of customary livelihood activities that similarly led to only limited or selective resistance, according to villagers’ accounts. These interventions include the opium ban (1993), the logging ban (1997), gun collection programs (from 2004) and the establishment of the PA (2006) (Chapters 7 and 8). As I explained in my analysis of these state interventions, they largely came too late to avoid the final decline of forest wildlife and pơ mu trees and did not severely restrict villagers’ livelihoods activities.240 Villagers I interviewed in both Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo invariably portrayed

240 The opium ban (1993) did remove the primary income opportunity of villagers in Púng Luông and led to some economic hardship and forest degradation, as villagers were forced to harvest wild NTFPs at unsustainable rates (Section 6.2.1). Nevertheless, many villagers I interviewed emphasized the positive outcomes of the opium ban, as it curbed opium consumption among villagers, which had reportedly stifled the productivity of some households. Similarly, some respondents were relieved when local state agents started collecting hunting guns, which had lost their importance after most households stopped hunting in the 1990s and subsequently had become a security concern in the eyes of several respondents (Section 8.2).

310 livelihood transitions away from swiddening, hunting and opium cultivation as positive developments that would not have been possible without state interventions.

Similarly, state restrictions of certain cultural practices also had positive livelihood effects, and were not necessarily met with resistance.241 Despite formal restrictions being in place, I observed shamanistic rituals to be an integral and unrestricted part of village life, which villagers readily confirmed. In turn, commune officials in both Púng Luông and Chế Tạo actually enforced restrictions to bride wealth, which had increased with monetization and had become a significant economic burden. Even with maximum bride wealth of VND 20 million (USD 1000) enforced, households in Nả Hàng B needed to take out a bank loan to pay for their sons to get married, with the exception of a handful of households with high incomes from cardamom cultivation or government work. Villagers spoke of this cultural obligation as onerous, but inevitable. “This is our culture, we have to do it” (nuav yog txuj kev cai peb yuav tsum ua) said a father of two teenage boys who was unclear about how he would be able to pay for their weddings or pay back a loan he would have to take out (NHB villager 12 05-08-2013).

A second traditional practice that most Hmong households in Mù Cang Chải could no longer afford to follow was the cultural norm that each son sacrifices a buffalo at their father’s funeral. This had been feasible during the era of shifting cultivation and free grazing, when households had large herds of cattle. In the mid-1990s, a government directive limited this to one animal per funeral. Nevertheless, I observed at funerals in Nả Hàng B and Chế Tạo how families that could afford to sacrifice two heads of cattle still felt free to do so. For many other households, limits to bride price and funeral sacrifices had provided relief of costly cultural obligations, and respondents welcomed these state interventions, rather than conceiving of them as undue state interference into local cultural practices.

This illustrates how Hmong villagers have been supporting, complying with and resisting state interventions quite selectively, depending on how these affected them. This is the essence of Kerkvliet’s (2009:232) concept of “everyday politics”, which reflects his understanding of peasant interactions with state interventions as political agency, regardless of whether this is in

241 Since the early establishment of socialist rule in Vietnam in the 1950s (then only in the DRV), the state had sought to restrict selected aspects of ethnic minority practice, such as shamanism, while commodifying and romanticizing ethnic minority clothing, dance and music, for instance (Section 4.2.3).

311 compliance or in resistance (Section 2.2.3.4). Sacrificing two buffalo at a funeral or complying with gun confiscations, for instance, are actions of “everyday politics”, as they have political ramifications. As such, they also shape the outcomes of state interventions by supporting or undermining them. This understanding goes back to Giddens (1984) structuration theory and explains why it is essential to consider the interaction of peasant agency and state interventions, not merely the impacts of conservation on local livelihoods, for instance. Such a structuralist perspective would fail to consider structure and agency equally, including how social actors help shape their own structural environment, such as policy implementation. Nevertheless, the question remains whether state interventions were necessary to achieve certain livelihood transition in Mù Cang Chải, and I address this question in the final sub-section.

10.4.4. Hmong social structure impeding collective agency

If Hmong villagers benefited from state interventions in the ways I describe above, the question emerges as to why state initiatives were necessary, or whether villagers could have limited bride wealth, funeral sacrifices or hunting practices without state interventions, or whether they could have expanded paddy cultivation independently prior to the ban on shifting cultivation. Villagers traditionally worked across household and clan boundaries to organize hunting parties, build rice terraces and construct minor irrigation features, as I noted in Chapter 5. However, larger initiatives, such as the construction of communal irrigation infrastructure and the allocation of new land for terracing that this opened up would not have been possible without government initiative, as older interviewees in both Chế Tạo and Nả Hàng B confirmed. I contend that this is because Hmong social structure is not conducive to endogenous development of communal regulations or collective action. In an acephalous lineage society like the Hmong, there are only household or clan leaders (Michaud 2012). Unlike in feudal societies, for instance, there is no communal leader or customary authority that has the power to convene the community and help form collective regulations of hunting practices or of bride wealth and funeral sacrifices.

The non-hierarchical Hmong social structure may also explain why, in the absence of state intervention, Hmong villagers did not manage their forest use sustainably, as I showed for the cases of hunting, logging and NTFP collection in the 1990s (Section 6.2). This experience runs counter to theories of collective action, which posit the ability of communities to avert the tragedy of the commons by forming social institutions for sustainable resource use (Ostrom

312 1990; Dietz et al. 2003). This, however, requires a social structure and community dynamics that are conducive to collective action, which Hmong village societies do not traditionally have.

Examining the village politics of hunting and patrolling, I showed that Hmong villagers ‘mind their own business’ and have limited agency, beyond kinship networks, to interfere with each other’s conservation behaviour (Section 8.5). Among friends and relatives, in turn, social capital and obligations are strong. Therefore, community conservation teams (CCTs) introduced by FFI are conflicted by their mandate and their social embeddedness, which stifles their ability to enforce forest use restrictions. These dynamics of collective and individual agency are related to the acephalous social structure of Hmong society, and may also apply to the mostly acephalous groups of the Austronesian, Mon-Khmer, and Miao-Yao ethnolinguistic groups (Michaud et al. 2016).

Social structure and social capital in Hmong societies thus seem to limit communal approaches to conservation enforcement and are not conducive to collective action or resource management. This evidence, however, does not substantiate the age-old, essentialist discourse that Hmong are ‘forest destroyers’, lack any resource ethic, or have a “low emotional attachment” to their natural environment (Tomforde 2003:357; see also: Forsyth and Walker 2008, as discussed in Section 4.4.1). Contrary to this theory, I emphasized that certain property relations and spiritually grounded rules of forest use, grounded in Hmong culture and worldview, protected certain trees, wildlife or forest areas in Mù Cang Chải, at least in the past (Section 8.2.1).

Although there seem to be cultural limitations to collective agency in Hmong societies, Hmong social structure and traditional hunting culture have not stopped many villagers I interviewed in Mù Cang Chải from individually acquiring a sense of environmentality in support of forest conservation. I return to this point in the final Section 10.7 of this chapter, where I use my findings regarding gibbon conservation and survival to reflect further on the interplay of individual and collective environmentality.

Conceptually, my arguments in this Section 10.4. provide a scholarly contribution to the literature on livelihood studies by showing that added analytical nuance can overcome an often essentialized dichotomy of state interventions and citizens’ agency. Some scholars have critiqued actor-oriented livelihoods perspectives for affording disadvantaged citizen too much agency in

313 shaping their livelihoods in the face structural constraints (Wood 2003; Rigg 2006; Masaki 2007; Nygren and Myatt-Hirvonen 2009). However, I argue that we need to look more openly at both the non-state structural constraints, as Carr’s (2013:77) concept of “livelihoods as intimate government” does. Secondly, we need to be more open to state agendas for rural development and local livelihood identities not necessarily being mutually exclusive, but compatible. In Mù Cang Chải, this was the case with sedentarization, which in other studies has been convincingly portrayed as the epitome of territorialisation, but also in the cases of state bans to opium cultivation and gun ownership, as well as onerous bride wealth and funeral sacrifices. One key reason for this was, somewhat ironically, Hmong social structure that effectively limited villagers’ agency. However, I find that the actor-oriented approaches have not yet sufficiently considered to what extent social structure and social capital can hamper the individual or collective agency of local actors. I have aimed to show how studies of both livelihoods and conservation could better consider socio-cultural dimension of agency. This is also the case in the more specific literature on PES, which has called for actor-oriented approaches to better examine how the agency or PES recipients shapes and is shaped by the implementation of PES, which is my aim for the following Section 10.5.

10.5. Interpreting the political ecology of PES in Vietnam

The premise of my study of PES implementation in Chapter 9 was that PES in Vietnam is a non- voluntary system of non-conditional conservation payments, which was introduced in 2010 to continue household conservation payments that had been introduced under Program 661 (1998- 2010). To explain why this is the case, I here offer some more fundamental discussions of PES policy and governance, examining key aspects of PES financing, allocation, monitoring and conditionality. Going beyond my study of PES distribution, this discussion is specific to the Vietnamese context, but provides some critical insights to debates in the scholarly PES literature.

I start by considering the financing of Vietnam’s PES program and its focus on watershed services to offer initial explanations for why PES are governed as livelihood subsidies. I then relate this reliance on household payments to government cash transfers elsewhere to show the purpose of PES is similarly debated in Vietnam, leading to calls for more conditionality in PES. Hence I discuss whether performance-based PES are conceivable in Vietnam. This leads me to question the role of land tenure security for PES, a cornerstone in PES theory. In the subsequent

314 Section 10.6., I argue that this is a missed opportunity and offer some concrete policy recommendations to enhance PES policy and its outcomes.

Conceptually, I follow recent calls for an actor-oriented and “weak theory” analysis of PES, which cautions against theorizations of PES that overlook the diversity of actors and their positions (van Hecken et al. 2018:314; see also Gibson-Graham 2008; Kolinjivadi et al. 2017; Shapiro-Garza et al. forthcoming). I contribute to this approach by drawing on the structure- agency debate, showing that the conceptions of PES by different actors vary significantly and that it is their agency that shapes the implementation and effects of PES programs in Vietnam and elsewhere. Importantly, this approach, as well as many PES studies I cite, is in line with the type of political ecology perspective I developed in Section 2.3. (cf. Bury 2008), although many PES scholars do not label their perspective as political ecology, as noted in Section 2.4.

10.5.1. The financing of PES in Vietnam and beyond

The financing of PES, including the agenda and agency of the so-called buyers of ecosystem services, have received too little attention in the PES literature, as I argued in Section 2.4.6. However, the financing of PES determines how ecosystem services are valued and sets important parameters for the scope and governance of PES schemes. Like in Vietnam, many PES schemes focus on watershed services, partly because these have proven more marketable than other ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation (Huang et al. 2009; Goldman-Benner et al. 2012; Kolinjivadi et al. 2014). This is because hydropower companies often constitute viable buyers of watershed services, particularly in Vietnam. Vietnam’s PES program is financed to 97 per cent by hydropower operators, but which ecosystem services do they need and what do they get for their user fees?

The most important watershed services for hydropower operators are water conservation and erosion control. However, not only forests, but also plantations of fast-growing timber species, rubber trees, coffee bushes and cardamom provide erosion control. Ironically, even the much- maligned imperata grasslands, which became the symbol of forest degradation in vast parts of the Southeast Asian highlands (Section 4.4), provide effective erosion control (Falvey 1981; Dove 1986). Vietnam’s PES scheme, however, applies only to areas classified as forestland, but this may include tree plantations, degraded forests and denuded hills, all of which provide few

315 ecosystem services and often poor erosion control. Nevertheless, if such areas are part of a hydropower watershed, they are allocated the watershed-wide payment rate, although they may contribute to the siltation of the reservoir, increasing dredging costs for hydropower operators (McElwee and Huber, forthcoming).

Given the state-centred policy making process in Vietnam, the main buyers of Vietnam’s PES scheme, hydropower and water companies, have had limited influence on PES policy development and on how their fees are used and distributed (McElwee 2016). As there is no effective monitoring system, the state of watershed forests and services remains unclear, and forest degradation and soil loss may continue unabated in areas receiving PES. Vietnam’s PES policy thus fails to guarantee the provisioning of ecosystem services to the buyers, also because it does not provide any incentive for recipients to enhance watershed services.

The shortcomings of Vietnam’s PES system thus start with its focus on watershed services, state- led policy development, the disenfranchisement of buyers and sellers, and a lack of monitoring. These are issues of power and equity that have been overlooked in the PES literature. Hausknost et al. (2017) emphasize that PES schemes are political projects driven by powerful actors, while the participation of buyers, recipients and other stakeholders is an issue of procedural equity in PES governance that receives little attention (Bremer et al. 2014; Farrell, 2014). The absence of transparency and monitoring, which is typically in the interest of all actors (Corbera 2015), further skews the power inequality in PES governance.

In Vietnam, some of these shortcomings are due to the institutional legacy of conservation payments, which I return to later. In the following sections, I offer further explanations for why PES in Vietnam does not serve the interest of its primary buyers, does not feature elements of additionality and conditionality, and how these shortcomings are conceived by different actors on the ground. I start by taking a step back to examine the implications of PES as unconditional household payments.

10.5.2. The developmental approach to PES as livelihood subsidies

International scholars have been quick to identify Vietnam’s PES system as a government subsidy scheme, not a market-oriented or neoliberal PES scheme following common PES theory (Wertz-Kanounnikoff and Rankine 2008; Suhardiman et al. 2013; McElwee et al. 2014;

316 McElwee 2016). I agree and contend that the policy objective of PES as unconditional livelihood subsidies is akin to the concept of so-called household cash transfers (Persson and Alpízar 2013).242 Governmental cash transfers have gained prominence in several African states and aim to distribute wealth, giving disadvantaged members of society their “rightful share” (Ferguson 2015:195). Ferguson (2015) argues that this approach to “[g]ive a man a fish”, which also serves as the catchy title of his book on cash transfers, is unlike Western models of social welfare and effectively compensates those who do not have access to wage labour opportunities. Interestingly, this is very much how several villagers and commune officials in Púng Luông justified the exceptionally high PES levels for the remote commune of Chế Tạo, as I recounted in Section 9.4.1., examining different conceptions of distributional justice. Nevertheless, to what extent such payments can catalyse livelihood diversification largely depends on recipients’ livelihood opportunities and capabilities (cf. Bebbington 1999). I found that these are severely lacking for Hmong peasants in Mù Cang Chải, which is also why few households have benefited from preferential bank loans (Section 6.5.3).

The abiding question to what extent PES as livelihood subsidies have been able to contribute to household incomes, livelihood security or poverty alleviation has never been systematically investigated in Vietnam. I did not seek to examine this extensively, but my study revealed a multitude of socio-economic outcomes of PES, which have received too little attention in the PES literature (Milder et al. 2010; Suich et al. 2015; van Hecken et al. 2015). Apart from highlighting the risk of growing household inequality and social conflict, I was able to document how PES provides some livelihood security to households that receive significant payments, particularly in Chế Tạo, but this also depends on how PES is allocated and distributed, and on how recipients conceive of and use PES.

In my analysis of the outcomes and the village politics of PES, I also discovered some discontent with the concept of PES as livelihood subsidies. Two local FPD officials in Mù Cang Chải and a small group of three or four better-off villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo in November 2013 argued that PES had fostered dependency and laziness among villagers who just “wait for

242 Ferguson (2015), as well as other scholars, refer to these transfers are conditional cash transfers (CCT). Their conditions typically relate to fairly basic eligibility requirements, such as childrens’ school attendance. Therefore I consider them akin to unconditional PES, but do not refer to them here as CCT to avoid confusion, also with the term community conservation team (CCT).

317 government assistance”. Similarly, several expatriate key informants criticized the absence of conditionality in Vietnam’s PES system, often based on an impression that ethnic minority peasants had been pocketing PES for “doing nothing” (NGO 16 10-06-2014; NGO 9 18-12- 2012). A senior expatriate development official presumed that PES had fostered complacency and an unreasonable sense of entitlement to payments amongst ethnic minority peasants, in particular. He suggested hypothetically, but no less dismissively, that if he were an ethnic minority villager “I would stand by a tree and say ‘I want benefit sharing now’” (NGO 16 10-06- 2014). This claim, however, misses the point that watershed residents in Vietnam have only involuntarily become PES recipients.

Such arguments against distributing PES as unconditional livelihood subsidies are akin to the neoliberal arguments against household cash transfers (Hanlon et al. 2010; Gliszczynski 2015). Fundamentally though, the respondents cited above argued that PES in Vietnam should be based on some form of performance-based conditionality. Therefore, I next examine whether this is conceivable within the context of PES policy and governance in Vietnam.

10.5.3. PES in the nexus of land tenure and conditionality

In terms of its governance, Vietnam’s PES scheme is also decidedly non-neoliberal, as it is characterized by state-determined collection and allocation of payments and has facilitated a re- centralising and strengthening of state forest governance, much like state-led PES schemes have in other countries (cf. Börner et al. 2010; Phelps et al. 2010). However, despite the official paradigm of top-down governance, my analysis of PES distribution in Mù Cang Chải shows that commune officials have considerable freedom to adapt national policy directives to local conditions. This is because forestland in Mù Cang Chải has not been allocated to households, who are therefore sub-contracted for forest protection. Based on the situation in Mù Cang Chải, I contend that equitable PES distribution is more likely among households contracted for forest protection than among households that have been allocated forestland, given that this allocation has been notoriously unequal in Vietnam (cf. To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Suhardiman et al. 2013; Loft et al. 2017).

The case of Mù Cang Chải therefore shows that state ownership over forestland can be conducive to efficient and equitable PES distribution, but this is contrary to prior assessments in

318 the literature on PES in Vietnam and elsewhere. McElwee (2016) and other Vietnam scholars contend that the lack of household tenure security over forestland undermines the equity of Vietnam’s PES scheme (cf. Wertz-Kanounnikoff and Rankine 2008; To Xuan Phuc et al. 2012; Bayrak 2015). This is in line with PES theory (Clements et al. 2010; Agrawal and Adhikari 2013; Sunderlin et al. 2014) and with PES policy in Vietnam, which officially aims to further the outstanding forestland allocation to households (MARD 2014). However, based on the case of Mù Cang Chải, I contend that further forestland allocations in PES areas would not increase the equity, but the complexity, transaction costs and conflict potential of PES distribution. Importantly, Vietnam’s PES policy has unevenly increased the monetary value of watershed forests and thus the stakes of forestland allocation, which therefore seems less likely to proceed than it might in non-PES areas. Moreover, I contend that the Western concept of individual land tenure is not pertinent to Vietnam’s PES scheme, but only for performance-based PES schemes, which no country of the global South has managed to institutionalize. However, this is not the only barrier to conditional PES in Vietnam.

Performance-based or conditional PES schemes require recipients to have individual tenure security and the capacity to ensure the provisioning of ecosystem services in their forest area for which they receive PES. Secondly, state actors need to monitor recipients’ performance, and withhold payments in case of non-compliance. In Vietnam, part of the dilemma of conditionality is that PES recipients often cannot realistically protect several hectares of forest, particularly if these are under pressure from outside loggers. To do so, villagers would need to rely on the assistance of law enforcement by FPD or police officers. This, however, would effectively introduce a downward accountability of state agents to villagers, which is antithetical to Vietnam’s institutional hierarchy, as an expatriate conservationist emphasized (NGO 14 05-06- 2014). The “conservation reality” in Vietnam, as in most parts of the Global South (Robbins et al. 2006:162), is that state agents cannot enforce forest protection laws effectively, which begs the question whether PES recipients could do so, even if PES were conditional upon conservation outcomes. They may take PES as an incentive to abstain from forest use themselves, and this is arguably the only “performance” on which PES in Vietnam could be based. Although PES recipients are not necessarily forest dependent peasants, Vietnam’s PES framework and its focus on livelihood subsidies seems to partly rest on the two assumptions that are reminiscent of the Environmental Kuznet-Curve (cf. Duraiappah 1998; Mills and Waite

319 2009): Firstly, poverty is a primary driver of forest degradation and, secondly, increasing poor peasants’ incomes decreases the conservation pressure they exert on the forest. These assumptions and associated stereotypes of ethnic minority land use have justified forest policy and sedentarization programs in Vietnam and neighbouring countries since at least the 1970s, as I emphasize in Section 4.4 (see for instance, Forsyth 2013; McElwee 2016). Based on this legacy and more recent forest policy developments, I argue in the following section that PES in Vietnam could hardly have been any different than it is.

10.5.4. Policy objectives and conceptions of PES

Several scholars explain the nature and governance of Vietnam’s PES system on account of its development pathways and institutional legacy (McElwee 2016; Traedal et al., 2016). The bias towards unconditional household payments is entirely intentional and unsurprising (McElwee and Huber, forthcoming), particularly given that any PES program requires trade-offs between conservation and livelihood objectives (Phelps, Friess, et al. 2012; Muradian et al. 2013) and between efficiency and effectiveness (van Noordwijk et al. 2012; Hejnowicz et al. 2014; Calvet- Mir et al. 2015; Le Ngoc Dung et al. 2016). However, how do different actors conceive of the PES program and its objectives?

From a governmentality perspective, PES is a tool of “neoliberal governmentality” (Fletcher 2010:173), and many scholars have conceptualized PES as a neoliberal approach for states to shape citizens’ environmental behaviour (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Büscher 2012; McElwee 2012; Fletcher and Büscher 2017). However, other scholars have argued against theorizing PES policies too categorically (Kolinjivadi et al. 2017; Shapiro-Garza et al. forthcoming), and van Hecken et al. (2018) caution that this overlooks alternative ontologies that different actors may hold of PES, which I sought to capture. Given its lack of conditionality or incentives structures, it seems that Vietnam’s PES neither seeks changes to environmental behaviour nor to forest environments, except for keeping forests in place. Nevertheless, different actors maintain different conceptions and expectations of PES. On the one hand, MARD hails PES as a new source of forest financing that has lessened the financial burden of the forestry sector on the state (McElwee and Huber, forthcoming). Secondly, hydropower operators and other payers may regard PES as a tax-like fee with few reliable benefits. Thirdly, PES recipients may conceive of PES as compensation for their opportunity costs of forest use or for their labour in forest

320 patrolling (McElwee 2016) or, as I found in Mù Cang Chải, as government cash transfers for wealth distribution.

These differences illustrate that different actors conceive of and act upon a national policy program very differently and hence contribute to shaping its implementation and effects, rather than merely being at the receiving end. This process of structuration, as Giddens’ (1984) calls it, has been integrated into livelihoods studies and political ecology perspectives (Sections 2.2.3 and 2.3.1), but much less so into governmentality studies, I find. I have examined different actors’ conceptions of PES policy and implementation in this section and in Chapter 9, including: contestations surrounding distributional justice; inequality and social conflict over payment rates; opportunities and accusations of embezzlement of PES; misconceptions of PES objectives and mechanisms; the intersection of property relations, livelihoods and payment rates; as well as expectations of performance and conditionality. These aspects are socially constructed and not necessarily a result of PES policy, but they have very material implications, as they hamper the implementation and outcomes of PES at the village level. This shows that an actor-oriented perspective that is not preoccupied by theorization (cf. Kolinjivadi et al. 2017; van Hecken et al. 2018) can reveal unintended and hidden effects, including problematic (mis)conceptions and village politics, which more structuralist approaches may miss. This actor-oriented approach also responds to calls by Rutherford (2002) and Cepek (2011) for more attention to citizen’s perspectives and agency in governmentality perspectives, much like my prior discussion of villagers’ agency in shaping development interventions in Section 10.4.

Based on what different actors expect Vietnam’s PES program to aim for or achieve, and how the program is implemented in Mù Cang Chải, it seems that PES falls short of achieving its joint objectives of forest protection and poverty alleviation. It seems that PES is neither able to protect Vietnam’s endangered forests nor does PES incentivize the restoration of Vietnam’s degraded forests. I next develop some policy recommendations for how PES policy could more effectively provide watershed services, based on selected shortcomings I have discussed, so far. Considering the agency of different actors in such political processes, I start by assessing what the stakes of different actors in such policy revisions might be.

321 10.6. Policy recommendations for revising PES in Vietnam

Although Vietnam’s PES has never aimed to enhance the provisioning of forest ecosystem services, I will next discuss whether and how the policy framework could be improved, and what the stakes of different actors in such policy revisions might be. So far, it seems that neither PES policy makers who developed a PES framework for livelihood subsidies, nor hydropower operators that can pass on their user fees to electricity consumers, nor institutions that distribute PES, nor villagers who receive them unconditionally, would conceivably benefit from a more rigorous PES system that accounts for forest quality, conservation outcomes, or villagers’ opportunity costs. However, I argue that the shortcomings in the system are becoming an impasse to the anticipated expansion of the PES system to include private sector buyers.

While Vietnam’s PES scheme has received much recognition, both internationally and in state policy discourse, for levying over 50 million USD annually, I contend that the contributions from hydropower operators have been the proverbial low-hanging fruit of PES financing in Vietnam. The national PES Decree 99/2010/NĐ-CP requires not only hydropower companies and water suppliers to pay for forest watershed services, but also private sector tourism operators, industrial water users and aquaculture operators, although their user fees have never been regulated or collected. Hydropower companies are mostly state-owned or joint-stock companies with majority government holding and have been able to recover their user fees of 20 VND/kWh by increasing electricity prices by 564 VND/kWh between 2010 and 2016 (Pham Thu Thuy et al. 2013). While hydropower companies are largely excluded from participating in PES policy development, as noted above, they arguably have limited economic need and political will to lobby for a more sophisticated PES system. This, however, may be very different for private sector actors, which PES policy makers are increasingly trying to enlist in PES. Unlike hydropower operators that benefit from regulated electricity prices, private sector actors in the free market cannot pass on their PES contributions to the consumers without incurring a market disadvantage. Therefore, they are more likely to expect tangible benefits from their contributions and question the effects and the shortcomings of Vietnam’s PES system, which I have sought to highlight in this thesis. The most comprehensive way to increase the willingness of any buyer to pay is to ensure that they receive adequate returns on their user fees, such as the provisioning of ecosystem services they rely on.

322 For PES policy to better provide watershed services, PES rates in a watershed should be differentiated depending on how effectively a forest provides these services. The current system of k-factors provides for such differentiation, but the parameters need to be modified, as they relate to biodiversity rather than watershed services (Section 9.2.2).

More importantly, PES should provide incentives to recipients to undertake additional forest management activities that actively enhance the provisioning of ecosystem services. For instance, forest plantation owners could receive additional payments to implement soil conservation activities, such as selective cutting or planting of grass strips. Households receiving PES for protecting degraded forests could receive additional money to undertake forest restoration activities, as suggested above.

More generally, PES funds should be used to provide buyers with ecosystem services they rely on. New groups of buyers need to be included in the policy making process to ensure that the collection of fees and the use of funds are transparent and effective. Buyers and providers need to have access to relevant information, including through a monitoring system that tracks changes to forest cover and quality. This is also required to administer additional payments for additional forest management activities.

The three measures above would mitigate specific shortcomings of Vietnam’s PES policy to enhance forest environmental services. They exemplify how PES policy in Vietnam could be revised, given sufficient political will, and it remains to be seen if this can be mobilized among PES policy makers, buyers and providers.

10.7. Conclusion: Gibbon conservation and survival

Beyond my study of PES in Mù Cang Chải and Vietnam, I have examined several historical and contemporary phenomena that have been of central importance to the livelihoods of Hmong villagers, and which speak to the scholarly nexus of peasant livelihoods and forest conservation. The short history of gibbon conservation in Mù Cang Chải is an insightful case that illustrates how Hmong agency and outside interventions can interact, which has been my aim in this thesis. The fate of the gibbons also constitutes an empirical riddle with which I will conclude this thesis.

323 Since the early 2000s, FFI has been committed to conserving Vietnam’s last Black Gibbons, of which there may be as few as forty individuals remaining in the Chế Tạo Range. The sudden decline of gibbon populations by more than 50 per cent in neighbouring Mường La (Sơn La province) between 2007 and 2008, when the community conservation teams (CCTs) were not operating there due to a funding shortfall, suggests that patrolling by CCTs possibly deters gibbon hunting to some extent. Gibbon conservation in Chế Tạo, much like biodiversity conservation in Vietnam’s under-funded PAs, remains dependent on international actors like FFI, which have been increasingly facing donor fatigue. While the Mù Cang Chải PA receives substantial PES funds, these cannot be used to fund the CCTs, according to PES policy. Although portrayed by both state and international actors as a conservation financing mechanism, Vietnam’s PES policy does not close the financing gap for forest conservation in Vietnam.

The most interesting empirical question that emerges from my case study of forest conservation and local livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải is why the remaining gibbons have survived so long, seemingly against all odds. Gibbons are particularly vulnerable to hunting pressure, as they live in family groups, reveal themselves with their morning singing, and have a slow reproduction rate (Nadler et al. 2010; Rawson et al. 2011). Hunting pressure could be particularly high in the village of Chế Vượn, where gun collections in 2013 revealed high rates of gun ownership (with 12 guns confiscated in 18 households), and where hunters can easily avoid the CCTs, as both villagers and patrol staff confirmed (Sections 7.2.2. and 8.4.2.). Around two-thirds of the 18 Chế Vượn households face severe rice shortages and a lack of income opportunities, as only three households cultivate the small forest areas locally available for cardamom growing. For Chế Vượn households, the gibbons arguably constitute a last but very lucrative opportunity for forest income, as any animal shot could be sold for up to 5 million VND (250 USD), equivalent to more than the annual cash income of most households in Chế Vượn, according to villagers. Nevertheless, the fact that the vulnerable gibbon population around Chế Tạo, mostly located close to Chế Vượn, remained stable between FFI surveys in 2006 and 2010 suggests that local villagers do not rely on gibbon hunting for income generation, but how can this be explained? This may be because FFI’s lasting interventions have instilled a sense of environmentality or social norms for gibbon conservation among villagers; or because the operation of the CCTs has provided an effective deterrent; or because Chế Tạo’s high PES rates serve as an added incentive

324 to abstain from gibbon hunting, maybe due to misconceptions that PES are conditional upon conservation outcomes in the PA, as some villagers I interviewed in Chế Tạo village thought (Section 9.5.2). According to PES policy, however, an extirpation (local extinction) of the gibbons would not affect PES rates. Neither would it affect local livelihoods. In fact, the actor arguably most affected by a potential extirpation of the gibbons is FFI and its agenda of biodiversity conservation. However, the evidence seems to suggest that FFI hast mostly won its flagship battle in Mù Cang Chải, for which the agency of local Hmong villagers was crucial.

Interestingly, the survival of the gibbons is seemingly at odds with my thesis, developed in Section 10.4.4, that Hmong social structure is not conducive for collective action or for villagers influencing each others’ conservation behaviour. Given that individual hunters could have long extirpated the gibbons, their survival seemingly required the formation of collective environmentality and social norms for gibbon conservation. This has precisely been the underlying objective of FFI’s conservation activities since the early 2000s. These included establishing CCTs, building a community house in Chế Vượn, hiring local villagers and patrols for gibbon censuses, as well as regular conservation awareness raising activities. As part of these, FFI distributed calendars in Chế Tạo, which were hanging in most Hmong households I visited, on which an image of a gibbon reminds villagers that “our survival depends on you” (Figure 10.1). This rhetoric places primary responsibility for the success of FFI’s gibbon conservation agenda in the hands of local villagers, and implies that villagers are both the primary threat and saviour of the gibbons. With the lasting survival of the gibbons, it is increasingly clear that local villagers are not a latent conservation threat. In any case, FFI can report the survival of the Chế Tạo gibbons as a conservation success, although I argued in Chapters 7 and 8 that many of FFI’s conservation interventions, including co-management and CCTs, partly failed or backfired due to a lack of attention to local political structures and Hmong social structure. More generally, this case shows that local residents have much agency over the fate of conversation interventions and that their support is pivotal for conservation success.

325

Figure 10.1: FFI’s gibbon calendar in Chế Tạo household: “our survival depends on you”

The course of gibbon conservation and gibbon survival in Mù Cang Chải arguably mirrors the evolution of conservation, development and livelihoods in Chế Tạo that I have covered in this thesis. I have examined the effects of hunting, NTFPs harvest, timber harvest and cardamom cultivation, each of which exhibit different dynamics of individual and collective forest use in the interplay between livelihood development and forest conservation. In each case, I have shown that analytical attention to the diversity of actors, agendas and livelihoods can reveal variable and unpredictable outcomes. In the case of gibbon conservation, the lasting survival of the gibbons was not necessarily predictable. Given the local context in Chế Vượn, it would have been entirely plausible if the gibbons had been extirpated before I arrived in Mù Cang Chải to undertake fieldwork.

326 This research was the first international academic study in Mù Cang Chải, which will remain a fruitful locale for further research on related topics and could provide additional insights into why gibbons continue to survive – or not. Similarly, the modernization and monetization of peasant livelihoods in Mù Cang Chải will continue, and it would be fascinating to learn from subsequent studies how livelihood practices, socio-economic differentiation and peasant identities evolve in Chế Tạo and surrounding villages. This will continue to take place in the context of state programs for rural development and forest conservation, including Vietnam’s PES program, which is being revised and expanded. I hope that subsequent research can build on my thesis to expand our understanding of the implementation and effects of these programs.

As a case study, this thesis can only be the first step, and not a definitive study, to try to understand how Hmong livelihoods and outside interventions have interacted in Mù Cang Chải. Nevertheless, for me it has undoubtedly been a long and rich research journey that I was exceptionally fortunate to undertake. For the reader, I hope I have provided an insightful account of my fieldwork in Mù Cang Chải and a useful interpretation of my findings that illustrates their relevance beyond my case study.

327 Appendices

Appendix 1: The genealogy of political ecology (part of Section 2.2)

1. From cultural ecology to political ecology

The field of political ecology has its original antecedents in cultural ecology, which formed in the 1960s and comprises of different approaches to socio-cultural anthropology (Prudham 2009). Ortner (1984) usefully distinguishes cultural ecology from both symbolic and structuralist anthropology, and suggests that its identifying analytical objective, as proclaimed by Sahlins (1964), was the study of human adaptation to environmental change (cf. Prudham 2009).243 Subsequently, cultural ecology became most known for its ethnographic studies of pre-industrial village societies that sought to show how certain cultural practices serve to maintain human- environment relationships, as evident in Rappaport’s (1967) and Harris’ (1975) work.244 Following then-common perspectives from ecology, systems theory, homeostasis and adaptation, many cultural ecologists conceived of culture as a function of environmental context and material needs, guiding society through environmental and economic challenges (Prudham 2009).245

243 Symbolic anthropology was epitomized by Geertz’s (1973:89) conceptualisation of culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings [embodied in symbols]”, which can be interpreted through a fine-grained analytical description of the ontological contexts of cultural meanings. For instance, Geertz’ student Sherry Ortner’s (1978) ethnography of a remote Sherpa village in Nepal is centred around Buddhist symbols and rituals (cf. Ortner 1984). On the other end of the ontological spectrum, structuralist anthropology goes back to Lévi-Strauss (1963, 1987), who sought to understand the variety of cultural phenomena through finding common principles and relationships. 244 Roy Rappaport’s (1967) classic study among the Tsembaga in Papua New Guinea, who were shifting cultivators who also herded pigs, examined a ritual of sacrificing, every 12-15 years, enough pigs to keep the herd at a manageable size. In his view, this cultural practice was an adaptation to the environmental problem of pigs raiding crops, which served both spiritual and economic food security purposes. It was further related to cyclical patterns of inter-tribal warfare. In some of his work, Marvin Harris (1966, 1985; 1987) examined the reasons for culturally embedded dietary practices. According to his theories, pigs are not raised in the Middle East, as they compete with humans for the same food and cows are sacred in India, as they provide labour and should therefore not be killed even in times of hunger. These studies follow the objective and method of cultural ecology as described above, although Harris refers to his perspective as cultural materialism (Harris 1968). 245 The development of cultural ecology was also significantly shaped by Julian Steward (1955), Robert Netting (1975; 1977, 1981) and Andrew Vayda (1969), among others (cf. Mathewson and Stea 2003; Sluyter 2005). Although contemporary anthropology has moved beyond cultural ecology, as I show below, James Blaut considered himself a cultural ecologist until the 1990s (Sluyter 2005), and Karl Zimmerer (2006, 2007) still refers to a sub-set of political ecology as contemporary cultural ecology. More recently, Peter Finke’s (2007) work, which he terms cultural ecology, seeks to understand the evolution of both science and culture through the dynamics of ecology; to me, this seems more akin to Lovelock’s 1974 Gaia hypothesis of the world as a self-regulating organism than to the anthropological field of cultural ecology.

328 With its rigid and functionalist conceptions of social structure and culture, cultural ecology neither considered power dynamics in state-society relations or between different social actors, nor how local cultures were influenced by macro-scale processes (Blaut 1980). More generally, cultural ecologists did not examine the political and social processes that shape socio-economic differentiation, vulnerability, and access to resources and opportunities, factors that are at the core of both political ecology and livelihood studies. Therefore, Wolf (1982) argued that cultural ecologists needed to draw on political economy perspectives to better capture the global and market forces that were transforming village societies (Robbins 2004; Prudham 2009).246

Wolf (1972) had previously coined the term political ecology himself, and Blaikie and Brookfield (1987:17) are often credited for mainstreaming an early political ecology perspective that “combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy”. Seeking new approaches to understand environmental issues in the context of development, the political ecology approach emerged as “an attempt to develop an integrated understanding of how environmental and political forces interact to mediate social and environmental change” (Bryant 1992:12). Throughout the 1990s, political ecology rapidly gained popularity, especially amongst geographers who studied environmental issues in the Global South.

2. From neo-Marxist to critical realist political ecology

Analytically, early political ecology was often shaped by its neo-Marxist, structuralist roots, as evident in Blaikie’s (1985) analysis of desertification in Africa (Mann 2009). Blaikie rejected simplistic and apolitical narratives of overgrazing and revealed political and socio-economic factors at different scales that pushed herders into marginal grazing lands. Blaikie’s work questions environmental discourse and policy that blames local resource users for environmental degradation. This approach paved the way for political ecology to critically interrogate environmental science, policy discourse and political agendas (see below). Since Blaikie’s early advocacy, “there has always been a strong normative tone to work in political ecology” and

246 Sluyter (2005:974) considers both cultural and political ecology as sub-disciplines of geography, but notes that “no one has yet provided a detailed historical process analysis” of their cross-fertilization. My synthesis here also remains a sketch of the many interrelated scholarly developments that came together to shape the early field of political ecology. I find it important though that it was the same conceptual influence from political economy that also made hazard studies more attune to difference and context at different scales, as exemplified by Amartya Sen’s (1981) work, which led, in part, to the development of livelihood studies (Clifford 2009).

329 authors have since drawn increasingly on contemporary notions of human rights and social justice to advocate for social change (Bryant and Jarosz 2004; Walker 2007).247

Although much of the early political ecology was innovative enough at the time to challenge apolitical views and managerial approaches, it was still grounded in realist ontologies and materialist epistemologies. In the 1990s, however, poststructuralist thinking began to influence the social sciences and brought new perspectives to political ecology that broadened the analytical scope of the field substantially (Blaikie 1999; Rocheleau 2008). Poststructuralist political ecology started to see concepts of nature (Escobar 1999; Castree and Braun 2001; Demeritt 2002), knowledge (Forsyth 2003; Paulson et al. 2003; Latour 2004), human- environmental scales (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003), and social identities (Moore 1998; Li 2000) not as material categories but as socially constructed through processes of discourse, agency and governance.

Drawing on social constructivism has allowed political ecologists to interrogate and deconstruct environmental knowledge and policy discourses and thus continue Blaikie’s (1985) project more thoroughly. Forsyth (2003) draws on Science and Technology Studies to show how environmental knowledge and policy are co-produced (cf. Fairhead and Leach 1996; Adger et al. 2001; Gray and Moseley 2005). Further studies have since shown that shifting cultivation, often portrayed as backward and destructive, has received an unfair amount of blame for deforestation (Lambin et al. 2001; Fox et al. 2009).248 Vietnam and other countries banned shifting cultivation in the 1980s, partly based on theories that it jeopardizes lowland water supplies and agriculture, but Forsyth (1998, 2005) showed that this “environmental orthodoxy” is partly politically motivated, and that the ecological link is more complex (see Section 4.4.1). Interestingly, I find that Hmong peasants have partly internalized this discourse.

247 However, some authors have argued that academic landscape does not leave much time or recognition for engaged and activist scholarship and that many political ecologists fail to live up to their ethical commitments (Bryant and Jarosz 2004; Walker 2007). In my methodology chapter, I discuss my ethical dilemma of wanting to investigate and report on the embezzlement of conservation payments and illegal hunting by community forest rangers. 248 Within the tradition of cultural ecology, Harold Conklin (1954, 1961) had already shown how shifting cultivation can be sustainable, although political ecology authors writing on shifting cultivation rarely cite his early work (cf. Batterbury et al. 1997).

330 Within this line of poststructuralist political ecology there are also several authors who have criticized how environmental problems are constructed through environmentalist and conservationists discourses (Bryant 1998). Their concern is that environmental problems and environmental conservation are ‘depoliticized’ and that “[t]he saving of nature is often taken for granted as an innocent endeavour, never implicated in relations of power and a noble exercise for the good of all life” (Rutherford 2002:295; Brockington 2005; Büscher 2010).249 Political ecology has thus proven to be an effective perspective to interrogate the political agenda and effects of conservation interventions, including how NGOs can inadvertently support state control (Bryant 2002).

While illustrating the effects of power, knowledge and discourse, the poststructuralist ontological position that environmental problems are socially constructed questions the realist position that the natural environment exists in its own right (Batterbury et al. 1997). Gandy (1996:30) argues that this makes “poststructuralist epistemologies peculiarly unsuited for environmental research”. Realism, on the reductionist end of the epistemological spectrum, is also unsuited, as it disregards how political and social processes shape our interaction with and understanding of the environment (Blaikie 1999). The broad literature of political ecology has been shaped by both realist/materialist and relativist/constructivist contributions, as well as by the cross-disciplinary debate over these opposing ontological positions and their epistemological implications. To overcome the shortcomings inherent in both ontologies, several political ecologists have advocated the adoption of a critical realist ontology as a more balanced basis (Gandy 1996; Batterbury et al. 1997; Blaikie 1999; Forsyth 2001). A critical realist political ecology assumes that there is an independent material reality to the environment, but acknowledges that our knowledge of the environment can only be partial and is shaped by social and political processes (Lopez and Potter 2005; McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). In this thesis, I also follow a critical realist perspective, as I examine how both discursive and structural processes shape different actors’ realities, representations and identities in the intersecting contexts of peasant livelihoods and forest conservation.

249 This concern builds on Ferguson’s (1990) analysis of World Bank-led development in Lesotho. In his view, neoliberal development acted discursively as an ‘Anti-Politics Machine’ to reduce development to technocratic modernization, neglecting social and cultural dimensions and implications.

331 Appendix 2: List of interviewees and codes of identification Number of Code Identification/Position informants CT official Chế Tạo commune-level official 7 CT villager Chế Tạo villagers 65 Villagers or village head from Chế Vượn Chế Vượn villager 3 (Pseudonym for a village in Chế Tạo commune) PL official Púng Luông commune-level official 4 NHB villager Nả Hàng B villagers 45 NHB village head Nả Hàng B village head 1 Nả Hàng A village head Village heads and villagers from other villages in Púng 1 Luông commune. Mì Háng Tảo Chủ 1 village head Mì Háng Tảo Chủ and Nả Hàng A are, with Nả Hàng Mý Háng Tâu village B, the three buffer zone villages of Púng Luông. 1 head Mý Háng Tâu and Nả Háng Tâu are located 12km past Nả Háng Tâu villager Ngã Ba Kim towards Nghia Lo 1 Nậm Khắt official 1 Officials from communes other than Chế Tạo and Kim Nọi official 1 Púng Luông. Lao Chải official 1 Staff of Mù Cang Chải banks (Agribank and Vietnam MCC bank staff 3 Bank of Social Policies) MCC official Mù Cang Chải district-level officials 11 3 current NTFP trader NTFP trader 4 1 former NTFP trader (pseudonym Che) Officers from Mù Cang Chải Forest Protection MCC FPD 11 Department. Includes members of ranger teams. Staff member of conservation and development NGOs, NGO 20 including some bilateral development programs FFI Staff members of Fauna & Flora International, Hanoi 10 Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development MARD 2 officials Total: 193 (113 villagers, 43 state officials and 37 NGO staff or other key informants)

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