Upland Transformations in Vietnam

6. Land Allocations in Vietnam’s Uplands: Negotiating Property and Authority

 Upland Transformations in Vietnam 6 Land Allocations in Vietnam’s Uplands: Negotiating Property and Authority Thomas Sikor Introduction Vietnam’s nationwide programme of land allocation has generated a sizable body of research in recent years. As discussed in the introduction to this book, the research has included field studies on local-level land allocations in the Northern Mountain Region, Central Coast and Central Highlands. It has considered the effects of land allocation on local livelihoods, land and forest use, and local property rights. Taken together, the insights generated by this research attest to the importance of land allocations for understanding economic, social and environmental change in Vietnam’s uplands. They also demonstrate the connection between changes taking place in the uplands and larger political economic forces. Against this background, I seek to explore in this paper what land allocations tell us about negotiations over property regarding land in the uplands. Property, in brief, is about relationships among social actors regarding valuable objects (Benda-Beckmann et al. 2006). These relationships are defined in law, yet they also exist in actual social relationships and social practices. Property practices are about how people make, remake and unmake property relationships in their daily interactions, e.g., when they plant a crop, collect firewood in a state forest, or tend their livestock on collectively used pasture. They form property relationships in the sense of actualized social relationships considered legitimate. The relationships, in turn, influence individual practices. It is this mutual constitution of property practices and social relationships that receives my primary interest.  Land Allocations in Vietnam’s Uplands  Moreover, my concern is with control rights, an often-neglected element of property relations (Benda-Beckmann 1995). Control rights are about the various types of capacities by which politico-legal institutions affect the use rights held by social actors. Such control is concerned with the capacity to define the core elements of property relationships: the actors recognized to take part in property relationships, the objects considered to possess material and immaterial value, and the relationships considered legitimate. In practice, control is enacted in many ways, including actions concerned with enforcement, rule making and dispute resolution (Agrawal and Ribot 1999). Attention to control rights reveals that property practices are intimately bound up with practices constituting and unravelling authority, authority understood as power considered legitimate (Lund 2002, Sikor and Lund 2009). On the one hand, institutions grant or deny legitimacy to claims on resources on the basis of their authority. Practices are recognized as property practices only if politico-legal institutions sanction them. On the other hand, property is one of the fields in which politico-legal institutions compete for legitimacy. The institutions seek out claims on resources to authorize as property in the attempt to solidify their legitimacy in relation to competitors. Simply put, claimants seek out politico-legal institutions to authorize their claims, and politico-legal institutions look for claims to authorize. The relationship is a dynamic one. This paper, therefore, inquires what negotiations about control over land can tell us about the processes constituting authority in Vietnam’s uplands and beyond. Land remains of crucial importance in the uplands— for its role as a productive resource and its symbolic value—and beyond the uplands because of its association with strategic resources (timber, watershed protection, biodiversity, land for colonization, etc.) and territorial sovereignty. Property rights to land, therefore, are one of the primary arenas in which authority is negotiated in the uplands. Of course, there are other arenas where negotiations take place, such as development, personal security, national defence and ethnic identities. Yet none has witnessed as radical a shift in central government policy as property regarding land. The nationwide programme of land allocation stands for a radical turnaround in central government policy, replacing the focus on agricultural collectivization and forest nationalization of the 1960s to mid-1980s. Local land allocations therefore offer unique opportunities to situate the authority of Vietnam’s central government in relation to other politicolegal institutions.  Upland Transformations in Vietnam My approach to the study of land allocations is different from previous research, including my own, in two important ways. First, it focuses on negotiations over control rights, and not use rights. Second, it uses the insights derived from the study of negotiations over control rights to examine authority relations. In other words, my approach looks at authority relations as they emerge from negotiations over property associated with land allocations...