Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Vietnam’s forest policy has attempted to engender “community-based” natural resource management by creating private economic incentives for households to sustainably use and protect forest land by allocating them private forest land use rights. The goal of such policies has been to ease the socio-economic marginalization of poor, ethnic minority communities living in remote, mountainous areas while conserving forest resources. Local governments are in charge of allocating these use rights to households. Many scholars argue that, under such circumstances, and without democratic institutions or central oversight to constrain local officials in their allocative power, we should expect forest land use rights to be distributed to households in such a way as to exacerbate existing power distributions in the community, further marginalizing those the policy intended to empower. Thus, the expectation is that, under such circumstances, local officials are not accountable to marginalized groups in their communities. This paper tests this theory by examining how local officials on the edge of Vietnam’s Tam Dao national park allocated forest land use rights to households of different socio-economic and political standing. I argue that, despite a lack of democratic institutions at the local level and little oversight from above, local officials in Vietnam are constrained in their allocative power by the existence of long-standing, community-recognized household property rights over forest land and by community expectations that justice-based claims to land will be fulfilled. This paper thus reexamines the categories of “accountable” and “non-accountable” as they relate to local officials’ responses to socio-economic inequality in their distribution of forest land use rights in Vietnam. In addition, it challenges categories of “powerful” and “powerless” as they have typically characterized community members of various statuses and their ability to affect policy implementation in non-democratic settings.