Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Vietnam’s recent policy of “community-based natural resource management” devolves management of some forest resources to local officials, who in turn manage the provision of crop and forest land use rights to households. A household with long-term forest use rights can be granted a long-term use rights registration certificate (LURC) which can be sold, traded, inherited and mortgaged. The implementation of this pseudo-property rights regime has been nearly completed among non-forest land users, but it remains incomplete among forest users. This paper uses national household survey data from 2002 to examine the characteristics of forester-farmer households that have been granted pseudo-property rights to agricultural and forest land and tests the hypothesis that the socio-economically and politically advantaged households are more likely to have been granted formal use rights. Because property rights to land are often associated with improved economic opportunity for the land holder, this paper addresses the important prior question of who is able to seize these benefits earliest under the local management scheme. The paper finds that income quintile, ethnic status, household head age, gender and education, and location in the north all affect access to land and tenure security. The effects of most of these variables are stronger in the case of forest resources.