Conceptualising context in institutional reforms of land and natural resource management: the case of Vietnam

Abstract

Research and policy debates over natural resource management in developing countries have largely focused on identifying the set of institutions that best supports resource sustainability and poverty alleviation. We argue that beyond finding the right institutional fit for a social-ecological system, it is equally important to understand how context affects the design and outcomes of institutional reforms. We propose a refined conceptualisation of context, based on a revision of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. We defend a systematic analysis of context, distinguishing between contextual factors affecting the fitness to local socio-ecological conditions and contextual factors that mobilise power such as political-economic interests and prevailing discourses. We illustrate our argument with empirical research on land-tenure reforms that have been implemented since the 1980s in northern Vietnam. The proposed analytical framework and conceptualisation of context allows a more pervasive understanding of contextual factors, enabling the incorporation of the forms of power that give meaning and legitimacy to institutional change.

Land Governance in Post-Conflict Settings: Interrogating Decision-Making by International Actors

“…This means that land rights of women derive via the rights of male relatives and constitute use rights rather than ownership rights. The 3 Clement and Amezaga (2013) use a similar approach to analyze land and resource management in Vietnam [14]. They develop an analytical framework that accounts for structural and discursive factors, which shape the outcome of institutional reforms.…”

An Assessment Framework for Benefit Sharing Mechanisms to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation within a Forest Policy Mix

“…These rights are in turn a pre‐condition for eligibility to incentives, such as Vietnam's national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) and eventually REDD+ (Phuc et al , ). An important socio‐political contextual factor that colors the FLA is the state dominance in forest land management under Vietnam's centralized governance system, yet there have been discrepancies between provinces in its implementation (Clement and Amezaga, , ). Decisionmaking processes and outcomes vary due to flexibility provided at the subnational level to implement national policies within their jurisdictions (Clement and Amezaga, ).…”

“…An important socio‐political contextual factor that colors the FLA is the state dominance in forest land management under Vietnam's centralized governance system, yet there have been discrepancies between provinces in its implementation (Clement and Amezaga, , ). Decisionmaking processes and outcomes vary due to flexibility provided at the subnational level to implement national policies within their jurisdictions (Clement and Amezaga, ). Building primarily on Yang et al (), and extracting lessons from other studies examining different aspects of the FLA policy in practice (Clement and Amezaga, , ; Phuc et al , ), the FLA as a contextual factor in the national PFES policy is assessed following a defined set of criteria and indicators on the effectiveness, efficiency and equity effects, and presented in Table .…”

“…Overall efforts to promote forest and protection and development policy can lead to inequity at various levels, whether within state agencies or between communities in different areas (Clement and Amezaga, ). While centralized policies, roles and responsibilities have been transferred to lower government (Trung et al , ), implementation has been uneven and the abilities to implement FLA varied depending in part on the different provinces' objectives, capacity and political ideology (Clement and Amezaga, , ; Yang et al , ). The status across provinces, and communes, ranges from completed FLA with defined and secure rights, to incomplete FLA processes, to poor FLA practices with unclear land user rights.…”

Institutional factors and opportunities for adapting European forest management to climate change

“…It does not, however, offer enough explanation on how the problem is defined and negotiated among the stakeholders, although the institutional and social learning realized through stakeholders involvement is considered important in adaptive management (Moser and Ekstrom 2010). A more comprehensive model to conceptualize the decision-making process is the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework (Ostrom 1990;Ostrom et al 1994), extensively used for various policy problems (for a synthesis, see Ostrom 1999), including new issues such decentralisation of forest management (Andersson 2006;Clement 2010) or multi-level institutional context in land reform (Clement and Amezaga 2013). IAD is about how rules, physical conditions and attributes of a community affect stakeholder incentives for undertaking certain actions (Ostrom 1999:59).…”