Impact of forestland allocation on land use in a mountainous province of Vietnam

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

“…Findings from our study in Hoa Binh Province (Clement andAmezaga 2008, 2009) and from other studies led in the northern uplands of Vietnam (e.g., Celander and Hoang Xuan Ty 2000;Gomiero et al 2000;Castella et al 2006) suggest that the outcomes of land allocation have resulted from the neglect of three important fitting contextual factors. Primarily, the inadequacy of state-imposed institutions with the local biophysical conditions was a central policy flaw.…”

“…This was supported by evidence from the fieldwork conducted by the authors (Clement and Amezaga 2008) and by others' works in the northern mountain region. Land allocation has added a serious constraint to the viability of upland farming systems (Gomiero et al 2000;Castella et al 2006). Empirical evidence thus supports the theoretical claim that common property is generally better adapted to large land areas with low productivity and low accessibility than individual property (McKean 2000).…”

“…However, fixed cultivation has not resulted in increased agricultural productivity as expected. On the contrary, the shortening or suppression of fallow periods has led to soil nutrient loss and decreased soil fertility (Le Trong Cuc and Rambo 2001;Castella et al 2006;Jakobsen et al 2007). As a consequence, farmers have stopped cultivation in some areas, thereby losing their major and often unique source of cash income -with no or few other livelihood options available (Jakobsen et al 2007;Clement and Amezaga 2008).…”

The effect of forestland allocation to the livelihoods of local people in the North Central Coast of Vietnam: A case in Nam Dong district

“…Vietnam is one of the few forest gain developing coun-tries according to FAO (2010), and therefore has attracted researchers particularly in the field of forest transition theory (Mather 2007, Barbier et al 2010. As the increase in forest cover appears to follow the drastic change in land and forest policy, which is known as forestland allocation (FLA) policy, previous studies have attempted to specify the explanatory variables of the forest cover change before and after FLA. On the other hand, ethnic minorities have historically domiciled in forested mountainous regions of Vietnam, and it is widely reported that they collectively utilized surrounding natural forests for extraction of products and also forestland for farming (Bien 2001, Sunderlin and Huynh 2005, Castella et al 2006, Tran and Sikor 2006, Sikor and Tran 2007, Thang et al 2013. Therefore, interactions between newly introduced de jure FLA and de facto people-forest nexus became another concern of the previous studies.…”

“…In contrast, a village-level study in the North Central Coast Region detected a population-driven increase in the area of shifting cultivation through the 1990 s; then the area reversed to a rapid decrease from the end of the 1990 s; and FLA was most likely a cause to this change (Jakobsen et al 2007). Thiha et al (2007) Though the FLA policy expects that livelihood improvement through the allocation creates incentives among local people to protect allocated forests (Castella et al 2006), household surveys reported negative impacts mainly caused by an ineffective implementation process and noncompliance among the local people. In two pilot project sites in the Central Highland Region in the early 2000 s, the forest cover decreased after FLA because people rushed to the surrounding forest to clear land for farming (Sikor and Tran 2007); and close ties between the local authority and village people hampered the monitoring of recipients＇ obligation to protect the allocated forests, resulting in a connivance of cultivation inside allocated forests (Sikor and Nguyen 2007).…”