The Academic Debate on What Makes an Organization Non-governmental

Whether non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) exist in Vietnam's political system, how they earned their names and what is their positionality, have been thoroughly debated among Vietnam studies scholars. This section contributes to this debate by providing recent data on the self-identification of NGOs, their roles and their positioning in networks. It shows that although none of the organizations are 100 per cent non-governmental, they still perceive themselves and are perceived as separated from the state and build their networks accordingly. These organizations may vary in their goals, but they nevertheless show similarities in their approaches and networks due to the limited opportunities in Vietnam's political context and the donor landscape. The restrictive authoritarian and “responsive-repressive” system forms the background for actors in the wider Vietnamese political sphere and casts doubts as to whether NGOs and civil society (CS) exist in Vietnam. The definition of an NGO in this research is broader than the literal meaning of “non-governmental organization”. The terms NGOs, CS and CSOs can overlap, complement or contradict each other. To reach a common understanding of these terms, I start with deconstructing the term NGO before turning to the concept of CS and discuss what these concepts mean for Vietnam.

The term NGO was first used in the UN Charter of 1945, when NGOs were accepted as unofficial consultants and were explicitly named as such. This established a dichotomy between the official government actors and the unofficial non-government ones that were characterized by some form of organizational structure and closed identity. Since then, an academic debate has unfolded on what constitutes an NGO, besides being non-governmental. Vasavakul (2003, p. 25) notes that the Vietnamese political sphere refers to NGOs at the end of the 1990s as “popular organizations that were loosely connected to the party-state structure, financially self-sufficient and involved in development work once considered as falling under the jurisdiction of the party-state”. Vietnamese NGOs (VNGOs) used the methodology of fencebreaking (phá rào), which meant that policy positions were not directly expressed, but indirectly through breaking rules and regulations, which is still happening today.

There is no way around a thorough contextualization to avoid some common mistakes: homogenization of complex sociopolitical relations, historicalness and overly dichotomization. This chapter seeks to counter these three analytical oversimplifications through a detailed discussion of the actors central to this research, their relationship to each other and their overall embeddedness in the environmental governance present in the Vietnamese context. It then demonstrates how historic events have impacted the understanding of humannature relations and how environmental narratives have evolved. Studying the past is crucial to understanding why particular narratives that seemed opposing, are depicted as complementary by state actors. Lastly, the chapter not only takes a closer look at the state-society relations through scrutinizing relevant actors in environmental governance, but also recentres the relations between humans and nature by discussing landscape as a consequential creator of sociopolitical contexts.

Relevant Institutions for Environmental Policymaking in the Vietnamese State

The socialist republic is under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which is the only party allowed. The authoritarian rule in this one-party state is structured horizontally from the national level downwards. This means that the CPV has a system in which the inner-party organizational structures run parallel to the actual governing structure throughout the whole country. The elected people's committee works alongside the level's party secretariat. The lowest governing level is the village (thôn) and hamlet (xóm, áp). Next is the commune level (xã) or, in urban context, small towns (thị trần) or wards inside a bigger city (phường). This is followed by the district level (huyện for rural areas; quận for urban areas) and the provincial town (thị xã); provincial level (tỉnh) and cities (thành phố); and finally, the national level (trung ương). Authorities are responsible for what is happening in their areas, and they report to the next higher level. The direction of reporting is supposed to create a bottom-up approach, but in practice, directives and decrees from the upper level are handed down and applied on the lower levels (Ortmann 2020). Sometimes local authorities (i.e., up to the provincial level) adjust directives handed down from above to their own context. But in many cases, cadres lack either capacity, knowledge or both to do so and simply copy the text handed down from the national level and insert their area's name.

In 2011, I was riding my motorbike and stopped at a traffic junction in Hanoi. I was then studying Vietnamese as an undergraduate student in Vietnam. As the traffic light was red and the drivers were patiently waiting for the traffic flow from the intersecting street to die down, a few students with raised posters and uniformly dressed in “350.org” t-shirts, bravely crossed the street in front of the motorbikes. The words on the posters read “Đen đỏ tắt máy” [Red light, turn off your engine]. Having been involved with the environmental movement in Germany since 2005, I was intrigued, to say the least.

This was the first time I had personally witnessed public environmental action in Vietnam. The incident happened at a time when the 350.org movement gained momentum and spread worldwide, transforming many young people into activists. At the time, I was not aware that this global movement had spread to Vietnam. I was fascinated at what this movement meant in different places and how actions were adjusted to different contexts.

I continued to stay in touch with environmental student groups throughout my undergraduate years in Hanoi. Even after I have graduated from university, I remained interested in environmental movements in Southeast Asia. After graduation, I got a role as a coordinator between the head office of a German political foundation in Berlin and country offices in Southeast Asia. While I was working with the people and organizations in Southeast Asia, a few questions came to my mind: Are we actually dealing with the same problems from all perspectives? Do the solutions we are jointly working towards make sense? How much must the project partners in Southeast Asia perform in order to get funding?

What remains true across borders and boundaries is that in times of environmental crises, immediate and effective actions are necessary to save lives and livelihoods. Environmental projects are needed not only to mitigate crises, but also to adapt to unavoidable consequences. Yet, in a global context where resources are unevenly distributed and the needed actions rely on projects and funding from another place, a few questions remained: Are the projects that exist necessary and effective? Or are power relations and misunderstandings of sociocultural translations hindering truly meaningful actions? This book cannot provide answers to all these questions.

In 2011, I was on my motorbike in Hanoi when I witnessed students protesting air pollution and emissions from motorized traffic. Ten years later, in 2021, I was in Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta and finally able to understand what environmental action means in Vietnam and which narratives and understandings are used. A lot and yet not much has changed since then. Hanoi looks different now, with its new highways, high-rises and SUVs on the streets. My friends now live in condos instead of socialist housing. They continue to strive as socialist citizens and active participants in the capitalist market economy. Power has shifted a little from INGOs to VNGOs, and the political context in Vietnam becomes harder to act in. Environmental action, in general, and climate action, in particular, are more necessary and urgent than ever before, though the action taken is still insufficient. Climate change and the human responses continue to be complex, and other crises have increasingly happened alongside climate change. Mapping the complexity and identifying all the entry points for action remains inevitable; social scientists and researchers have a responsibility alongside natural scientists and their data findings to find ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Through my research, I have sought to understand how power structures inform environmental narratives and thereby shape our understanding of the problems and solutions to ecological crises. This research is a clipping from a large landscape of knowledge needed to understand the environmental map of our world with its sociocultural contexts and political-economic implications. It uses the Area Studies approach to first understand a place in its own specificity, without drawing a theoretical blueprint for use beyond the context.

Within this specific context, I have argued that Sustainable Development is a powerful narrative that has become universal. Derived from a longstanding discourse about “development” and the debate around its meaning for different actors, Sustainable Development finds itself in the same tradition and confronted with similar critiques. Deriving from the Brundtland Commission's report in 1987, the term has since spread and has been adapted and filled with different meanings by various actors. It is now central to environmental rule in Vietnam and used by the authoritarian government and NGOs to navigate state-society relations.

Chapters 2 and 3 focused on Vietnam's national context, and the state governance and actors as well as society are mainly involved in national politics. But to understand the connection between narratives and power, we need to move our analysis beyond the national context. The nation-state is indeed very important in environmental governance—in previous and later descriptions we can see how the institutions form actual realities on the ground. Nevertheless, Vietnam as a nation has always been embedded in transnational flows, connected with international actors and formed part of processes that cannot be assigned to only one scale.

As Tsing (2005, p. 1) states, “Global connections are everywhere” and contends that we reflect on our methods to find and understand the universal. We must resist the temptation to homogenize the global and heterogenize the local; instead, we must see “the global” as something that is co-made in the local, and vice versa. Sassen (2008, 2014) reassesses and disaggregates scales in her analyses because the presumption of them can bring biases into investigations. As an alternative, she scrutinizes foundational components as the starting point of her processes across scales; she puts theory at the end, and not at the beginning, of her work to truly understand the reason behind.

To avoid categorizations, I examine environmental narratives and study how they are coproduced by actors across different scales in Vietnam and beyond. My research shows that using some scales and categories is inevitable to understanding power relations. But we need to pay equal importance to processes that move across scales and to connections between actors in different geographic location. Therefore, this chapter expands the analysis on environmental narratives and the constitution of actors beyond the nation-state to the international level.

Grounding Contemporary Environmental Narratives in Historic Context

The narratives that exist today need to be understood in their historic context. Trade, migration, wars and colonialism have shaped narratives and our understanding of nature in Vietnam today. Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and many other belief systems came to Vietnam and formed unique philosophies in combination with the local animistic beliefs. These beliefs have demonstrated the nature-human relations. For example, the Yin and Yang (dương âm) belief in reference to Daoism is itself not part of a single belief system or religion, but rather the result of the different influences in Vietnam (Jamieson 1995, p. 16).

Writing a book—going from research to initial manuscript to final publication— takes time. While I was going through that process with this book, the political context changed significantly.

I set out to understand what nature and environment mean for people in Vietnam and their political system. I have worked in the broader field of ecological development and political cooperation, and I have often wondered how the cooperation partners in Asia whom I corresponded with understand the issues surrounding nature and the environment. As it turned out, these partners were less interested in international development cooperation and more in the local entanglements with different entities of the Vietnamese government. As a result, I ended up writing about sustainable development and power structures in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese environmental governance that my informants were concerned about has caused many new worries since 2021 (when I concluded my research) for Vietnamese non-state actors, international organizations and even departments within the Vietnamese government. The last three years have seen further restrictions in the opportunities to engage in political and environmental spaces. The economic decentralization that has been central to the state's governmental setup has continued to lead to decisions being made at the top state level while putting responsibility on the individual citizens. As individual clean-up campaigns and propaganda posters that encourage citizens to keep their environment clean are still going strong, prominent advocates in the environmental field have been incarcerated, among them are persons who have inspired and helped me with this research. The arrests sent shockwaves through the environmental community, with the grapevine full of speculation about why they happened. In the wider context, an understanding of the Vietnamese state's approach to governance is crucial to the bigger picture. I have not rewritten the manuscript to fit new changes since they have happened after my fieldwork. They are, nevertheless, important to bear in mind, and I have added paragraphs to point that out wherever appropriate.

The arrests and newly issued decrees were followed by anti-corruption campaigns and an increase in surveillance—for example, the staff of the restaurants where I reserved tables for dinners would always seat me at a convenient table and started to have pictures of me.

As shown in the previous chapter, the Sustainable Development narrative has been on a global conceptual landslide over the last three decades. It was derived for the global scale but has been adapted to multiple contexts within the ecological modernization programme. This chapter examines how the narrative is used by the state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for governance in Vietnam, and which other alternatives exist. The Sustainable Development narrative has been so successful because it offers space for adaptation and is not perceived as a threat to power relations. The Vietnamese government uses it to further extend its environmental governance. Furthermore, the Sustainable Development narrative allows for ecological modernization, embraces the capitalist economic model and sustains economic growth. By not questioning the current governance system in Vietnam, this narrative has a competitive advantage compared to other narratives. As a result, NGOs have used the Sustainable Development narrative to maintain their place between the Vietnamese government and international funding organizations. Their theories of change are limited to the conceptual path dependency and their perception of the environment, with the identification of environmental crises as part of it. They use Sustainable Development as a narrative to serve power relations but leaves space for manoeuvre when it comes to practical implementation.

The Vietnamese Policy Adaptation of Sustainable Development

The 1980s were a time of transformation in Vietnam. Often attributed to the 6th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in 1986, the Đổi Mới renovation politics had actually begun much earlier. In that year, famine and poverty forced people to transform policies (Kerkvliet 2005). For example, family units adopted collective farming, following earlier village traditions, instead of the cooperative structure. Another reason for the major change in politics was the global threat to socialism. As the Soviet Union and East Germany began to crumble and eventually fell apart, the CPV recognized that if they wanted to hold on to power, they might need to change their way of governance. Among the officially proclaimed changes was the introduction of a “market economy in socialist direction” (kinh tế thị trường định hướng xã hội chủ nghĩa). This meant the return of private property and the welcoming of foreign organizations into Vietnam. It led to a new era in Vietnam's environmental policy under the Sustainable Development narrative.

PREAMBLE

Tropical peatland ecosystems in Southeast Asia are globally important as carbon sinks. They are also diversely rich in terrestrial and aquatic fauna and flora, and are significant sources of livelihood for local communities. However, agribusiness-driven land-use change and drainage cause a great amount of peatland degradation and ignite underground peat fires; these in turn generate air pollution known as “haze” and lead to significant economic losses and affected public health. Haze and climate change are connected, with peat burning emitting substantial amounts of greenhouse gases (GHG) and pollutants—which are projected to increase with climate change due to rising intensity and frequency of droughts. However, these issues are largely treated separately in policy and governance, which offers a big challenge for management and a lost opportunity for sustainability.

This article provides an overview of state-of-the-art research on peatlands and their governance in Southeast Asia, mainly focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia, home to the largest tropical peat deposits in the region. It first outlines and maps key developments over recent, along with associated environmental issues. Next, it details the connection between haze and carbon emissions in the region's peatlands and how peatlands represent a large proportion of national GHG emissions in both countries. It then traces the evolution of peatland policies at the national and regional levels, from conservation to addressing fire and haze issues, reflecting their complex relationship with national development and the corporate sector. The following section focuses on opportunities to integrate and improve peatland governance; while regulatory approaches are already largely in place, there are untapped opportunities related to financial and market instruments, as well as the ability to create enabling governance environments through community participation. The authors then highlight the remaining challenges in this endeavour, namely data uncertainties and the complexity of integrating policies across multiple scales and issues.

PEATLANDS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Pristine peatlands are usually waterlogged all year round. The carbon-rich material from aboveground biomass and roots that fill them decompose very slowly, making these areas globally important stocks of carbon. They also provide many other essential ecosystem services beyond carbon sequestration, such as regulating the water cycle and maintaining water quality in catchment areas, acting as coastal buffers and sources of timber and non-timber forest products for adjacent communities. The UNEP's Global Peatland Assessment estimates that peatlands cover 3–4 per cent of the planet's land surface, with tropical peatlands making up ∼11 per cent of the global peatland area.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.