“Nothing Is Like It Was Before”: The Dynamics between Land-Use and Land-Cover, and Livelihood Strategies in the Northern Vietnam Borderlands

Abstract

Land uses are changing rapidly in Vietnam's upland northern borderlands. Regional development platforms such as the Greater Mekong Subregion, state-propelled market integration and reforestation programs, and lowland entrepreneurs and migrants are all impacting this frontier landscape. Drawing on a mixed methods approach using remote sensing data from 2000 to 2009 and ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) has occurred across three borderland provinces-Lai Châu, Lào Cai and Hà Giang-with high proportions of ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers. After a broad examination of regional land-use changes, we select three case studies to further analyze the underlying relationships between specific LULCC and local livelihood diversification strategies. These include specific patterns of urban growth due to a range of political decisions in Lai Châu and Lào Cai Provinces; reforestation due to nontimber forest (NTFP) product cultivation in the west of Lào Cai Province; and a stable landscape that restricts government attempts at refashioning upland livelihoods in the east of Hà Giang. Our findings point to the difficulties of completing LULCC maps for this highly heterogeneous region and the complexity of LULCC and livelihood interactions and relationships examined on the ground. OPEN ACCESSLand 2015, 4 1031

Driving forces for livelihood structure changes in Vietnam’s northwestern mountainous region: A case study on Yen Chau district, Son La province

“…Scott (2009) proposes that since 1945, the upland areas have encouraged the forward movement of modern states by incorporating a development program related to economic progress, literacy, and social integration. As a result of these processes, for the majority of farmers, these changes have brought about the replacement of public property by private land-use rights, the introduction of new cash crops, and the motivation to revolutionize swidden cultivation through permanent cropping, including maize, tea, rubber, and palm oil, especially (Podhisita 2017;Turner and Hien 2015;van Vliet et al 2012). Evidence of these problems can be found in the northwestern mountainous region of Vietnam, one of the poorest regions in the country (Tuyen 2015).…”

Introduction: The Continued Importance of Smallholders Today

“…Increasingly, however, the forces external to the smallholder or smallholder communities emanate from well beyond the urban hinterland, constituting teleconnections. Research that explicitly considers the impact of teleconnections on smallholder land use and livelihoods is key to better understanding broader LULCC processes and patterns, as suggested in this special feature (see [59,60]). With increasing calls for studies related to teleconnections in land systems and sustainability science [71,72], it is worth stressing the importance of smallholders in teleconnections research.…”

“…Several of the contributions do consider the question of ethnicity, through an examination of how different ethnic groups are positioned differently within local land systems ( [58], this volume) or socioeconomic systems ( [60], this volume). In many smallholder studies, ethnicity functions as a more naturalized and therefore often unexamined category of constructed difference.…”

“…Geographers Sarah Turner and Thi-Thanh-Hiěn Pham [60] used remote sensing and ethnographic fieldwork to examine rapid land-use/land-cover change (LULCC) in three borderland provinces in northern Vietnam. Results show that government interventions, state policies, market opportunities, and changing agricultural and ecological conditions led to highly heterogeneous LULCC in the region between 2000 and 2009.…”

In-between Poppy and Rubber Fields

“…It factors in the human and natural moving matters, for example, imperial encounters, trade, religion, and water, which signify multiple complex local, regional, and global nexuses (Michaud 2010;Shneiderman 2010;Smyer Yü 2015;Turner, Bonnin, and Michaud 2015;Samuel 2005;Cederlöf 2014;Drew 2014a). Second, it is becoming clearer that transborder livelihood changes in the region are mostly consequences of the modern nation-states' territorial endeavor to harden their physical borderlines and of their differentially implemented cross-border modernization programs (Shneiderman 2015b;Michaud and Turner 2016;Horstmann 2014;Turner and Pham 2015). The former presents a geopolitical reality of highly controlled border crossing, while the latter subjects borderland communities to the reconstruction of their livelihoods, making them increasingly dependent upon the statecorporate development agenda and the fluctuation of market demands locally and globally.…”