Shifting policies for shifting cultivation: A history of anti-swidden interventions in Vietnam

Abstract

Swidden cultivation has long been seen as incompatible with state goals for development, modernisation and environmental protection in Vietnam. This article provides a history of anti-swidden programmes since the French colonial period: how targets were selected, how different justifications were used, how interventions were implemented, and what the impacts were. Shifts occurred over time in targets, tools, and techniques, due to leeway available to local officials and resistance of target populations, but which also prolonged overall anti-swidden campaigns by providing opportunities for continual reinvention. Shifting justifications have allowed for new funding and approaches over time, while remaining rooted in misunderstandings and cultural chauvinism.

When Policies Problematize the Local: Social-Environmental Justice and Forest Policies in Burkina Faso and Vietnam

“…How the representation of this 'problem' has come about has a long history. Shifting cultivation practices practiced by upland minority groups has been vilified since the French colonial rule and considered as the anti-thesis to state goals of development, modernization and environmental protection (Cleary, 2005;McElwee, 2022) and Vietnam's anti-shifting cultivation policies aimed to remake these farmers into ideal subjects of the State. Vietnam has been termed as a late socialist country (Wilcox et al, 2021) where a market economy can coexist somewhat peaceably with socialist rhetoric and the Communist one-party state rule.…”

Climate precarity in rural livelihoods: Agrarian transformations and smallholder vulnerability in Vietnam

“…However, state officials have long attempted to eliminate swidden throughout Southeast Asia, driven by goals ranging from poverty alleviation to environmental protection. Anti-swidden policies have included resettlement and sedenarization, prohibitions on practices such as use of fire and re-zoning of swidden lands into protected forests (McElwee, 2022). Rapid declines in swidden accelerated in the 1990s, which saw a hardening of land use boundaries, including zoning of agriculture and forestry as separate, which reduced spatial flexibility, as well as expropriation of formerly commonly managed fallow fields for other uses (Jakobsen et al, 2007).…”

Pyropolitics and the Production of Territory

“…Building on the work of Michael Dove (1983), she argues that these interventions rely on the simplification of what are actually a diverse set of agrarian practices. While attempts to limit swidden practices-and their associated reliance on fi re-have changed in form over time, they remain rooted in a persistent cultural chauvinism (McElwee 2022). McElwee laments the extent to which the remaking of subjectivities through these forms of "environmental rule" has led many locals to accept narratives of their own backwardness.…”