Communities and Science: Paths to Sustainability in East Asia?

O'Rourke, Dara. 2004. Community-Driven Regulation: Balancing Development and the Environment in Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wilkening, Kenneth E. 2004. Acid Rain Science and Politics in Japan: A History of Knowledge and Action toward Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

East Asia's massive industrialization over the past decades has left vast concerns about environmental sustainability. That Vietnam and Japan, in particular, have suffered significant environmental degradation is without question. The pertinent questions, then, are how these countries can best mitigate adverse impacts and preserve the integrity and sustainability of their ecosystems. Two new books seek to shed light on paths to environmental sustainability in Vietnam and Japan.

Dara O'Rourke's Community-Driven Regulation focuses on the role of communities in environmental regulation in Vietnam. Kenneth Wilkening's Acid Rain Science and Policy in Japan emphasizes the role of science in leading and informing environmental policy and regulation. The juxtaposition of Japan and Vietnam is instructive. Japan rocketed to dizzying economic heights on the back of intense industrialization. In the process it largely dismissed environmental protection, a sin for which, according to Wilkening, it is now trying to atone by leading the world in global environmental action. Vietnam, an economic upstart cutting its teeth on market-oriented socialism, is amid massive industrialization and economic growth. It is, as Japan was at the height of its industrialization, similarly plagued by attendant environmental degradation.

Japan and Vietnam face common obstacles to successful environmental regulation. Both suffer pronounced inter-ministerial disputes. Firms are often regulated by several competing agencies. Environmental agencies tend to lack political power and are subordinate to economic agencies, and must deal with an intense pro-development bias by central governments. Their governments prop up large, polluting industries to preserve jobs. Government agencies seldom communicate constructively with each other, and little inter-agency cooperation exists.

In addition to these difficulties, O'Rourke observes several additional obstacles facing regulation in Vietnam: absence of independent NGOs, no free press, insulated bureaucracy, and widespread corruption. However "where both the existing literature and common sense would expect failure" he found examples of regulatory success. At its core, this success resulted from concerted community action. He analyzes this phenomenon using a framework he terms "Community-Driven Regulation" (CDR). This is essentially the "co-production" of regulation involving various state actors, civil society, media and firms driven by community mobilizations and citizens' complaints. The government, totalitarian by nature and indifferent or ineffectual concerning environmental protection, responds to such citizen pressures. This community driven process, above all else, is driving effective environmental protection.

Through six case studies, numerous interviews, and a broad literature review, O'Rourke dissects the intricacies of the Vietnamese environmental policy process, its actors and their strategies, and its driving factors. He struggles with common difficulties of case study research—small sample size (no statistical power), bias in sampling (targeted interviewing and personal involvement in community activism), and heterogeneous study subjects (two foreign-owned firms, two centrally controlled state firms, and two locally managed firms, all from different geographical areas and industries). The attendant difficulties of his method, however, do not impact the validity of his findings. The case studies are secondary to his detailed analysis and act primarily as framing objects. A major drawback of this case study approach, however, is that the reader is not given hard evidence as to the magnitude of the (growing) CDR phenomenon.

Existing theories of environmental protection and regulation fail to properly consider underlying social and political processes occurring in Vietnam. O'Rourke's critiques of the current, mainstream approaches (regulatory capacity building, market mechanisms, and public participation) are informed and grounded in literature and field research. Such approaches may be useful and important in the future, but in the near term he suggests that CDR is, and should be, the main driver of environmental regulation. This approach, however, ignores the possibility that successful regulation might...