When Global Water Policy Goes Local: Mainstream versus Everyday Water Governance in Vietnam (original) (raw)

This thesis explores the contexts and effects of water governance in transitional Vietnam. There, as in many other developing country contexts, commodification of water – a process of converting water or water services formerly subject to non-market social rules into one that is primarily subject to market rules – is being promoted with enthusiasm to address local water problems. This has given rise to a number of local market and market-social hybrid mechanisms to address water governance. Water markets, particularly a market for water licences and permits, are proposed at the policy level as a means to achieve efficient use and equitable allocation of water. In a country like Vietnam, which has an extensive history of elaborate management of water especially for agriculture, such developments are radical, and potentially very far reaching. The proposed market solutions arguably fit alongside the fundamental reforms to the Vietnamese economy, which have resulted in an average growth of 7.5 percent per annum over the last decade. Like the economic reforms, the water reforms are not of local provenance. Rather, they reflect international orthodoxies, deployed in this case in accordance with such instruments as the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development – an international protocol on management and development of water resources signed in Dublin in January 1992, and endorsed by world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June of that year. For all such orthodoxies to be effective, in Vietnam as elsewhere, the water reforms must be implemented in practical ways alongside existing orthodox and unorthodox modes of governance, which are both layered and complex. By exploring the juncture and/or disjuncture between international, mainstream and everyday, local modes of water governance, this paper shows how and why water markets, especially the water use rights market, may or may not function well in the polycentric complexities of Vietnam. It also sheds light on the question of whether or not the markets are likely to achieve their targeted goals and generate expected outcomes.