Conflicts and Concepts: The Politics of Forest Devolution in Postsocialist Vietnam

Abstract

"In this paper, I examine people's resistance to land allocation in Chieng Dong. In particular, I seek to understand why people resisted land allocation almost in its entirety. I locate people's motivations in cleavages between land relations in the villages and land legislation. My findings suggest that villagers resisted the very concept of land tenure itself contained in the new land law. Their opposition to concrete elements of the land legislation manifested a more fundamental disjuncture between the concept of land tenure promoted in the new land law and people's lived relations to the land. People were not ready to give up the substance of land relations that had proven useful before collectivization and under collective agriculture. Land allocation, its implementation and the reactions it provoked, thus provided a window in which different conceptions of land tenure came to light."