Decentralization Of Forest Management And Impacts On Livelihoods Of Ethnic Minority Groups In Vietnams Uplands

An analysis of how decentralization reforms are changing local institutions for natural resource management in mainland Southeast Asia. The focus is on mountainous areas where impoverished populations struggle to preserve meagre resources, remaining biodiversity and food security.

This report identifies the driving forces for reforestation in three villages of Northern Vietnam. Using an institutional analysis focused on the rules governing upland access and use, the authors assess the relative impact of state policies (reforestation programs and forestland allocation) on land use change. Findings show that the latter are indirectly responsible for reforestation, but not because of the incentives they provided. Instead, they disrupted the local rules governing annual crop cultivation and grazing activities leading to the end of annual cropping. Tree plantation was chosen by farmers as a last resort option. Lessons learned highlight the importance of local level studies and collective rules for land management.

Redefining Diversity and Dynamics of Natural Resources Management in Southeast Asia, Volumes 1-4 brings together scientific research and policy issues across various topographical areas in Asia to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues facing the region. Upland Natural Resources and Social Ecological Systems in Northern Vietnam, Volume 2, provides chapters on natural resource management in northern Vietnam tied together by the concept that participatory local involvement is needed in all aspects of natural resource management. The volume examines planning for climate change, managing forestland, alleviating food shortages, living with biodiversity, and assessing the development projects and policies being implemented. Without the involvement of local communities, households, and ultimately individual people, the needed action will not be effectively taken. Upland Natural Resources and Social Ecological Systems in Northern Vietnam, Volume 2, goes beyond just Northern Vietnam to address the issue of transboundary natural resource management—an issue that Vietnam is dealing with in its relations with northern neighbor, China, and western neighbor, Laos—as well as the transboundary water governance between Pakistan and India in south Asia, with the hope that some of the lessons learned may one day be useful in the case of Vietnam and its neighbors. Provides a multi-disciplinary case study into a complex environmental situation involving government institutions, planning, and practices, using northern Vietnam as the focus Covers the issues of natural resource management and biodiversity in depth using international case studies Provides examples of measuring the potential climate change impacts on food security in agricultural regions Examines topics such as planning for climate change, managing forestland, alleviating food shortages, living with biodiversity, and assessing development projects and policies

The decentralization of control over the vast forests of the world is moving at a rapid pace, with both positive and negative ramifications for people and forests themselves. The fresh research from a host of Asia-Pacific countries described in this book presents rich and varied experience with decentralization and provides important lessons for other regions. Beginning with historical and geographical overview chapters, the book proceeds to more in-depth coverage of the region's countries. Research findings stress rights, roles and responsibilities on the one hand, and organization, capacity-building, infrastructure and legal aspects on the other. With these overarching themes in mind, the authors take on many controversial topics and address practical challenges related to financing and reinvestment in sustainable forest management under decentralized governance. Particular efforts have been made to examine decentralization scales from the local to the national, and to address gender issues. The result is a unique examination of decentralization issues in forestry with clear lessons for policy, social equity, forest management, research, development and conservation in forested areas across the globe from the tropics to temperate regions. Published with CIFOR

In addition to winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her path-breaking research on “economic governance, especially the commons,” Elinor (Lin) Ostrom also made important contributions to other fields of political economy and public policy. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin (often with coauthors, most notably her husband, Vincent), along with papers by others expanding on her work, brings together the strands of her entire empirical, analytical, theoretical, and methodological research program. Together with Vincent’s important theoretical contributions, they defined a distinctive “Bloomington School” of political-economic thought. Volume 3 collects explores the historical development of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, illustrates its application to a wide range of specific policy problems, and highlights recent extensions that ensure it will remain a vibrant focus of research for years to come. The IAD framework emerged from a long series of interdisciplinary collaborative research projects, but the guiding figure in its development was Elinor Ostrom. Anyone familiar with the full range of her research will recognize common presuppositions and themes for which she used the IAD framework as an organizing device. This book collects examples of policy-relevant applications of IAD to a wide range of policy sectors. In a fundamental sense, the IAD framework helps us understand how Ostrom’s mind worked when she approached a particular problem of policy, and it highlights those factors that she asserted needed to be considered in any complete analysis. Unfortunately, she did not leave us a complete or definitive guidebook on how to apply this framework. This volume collects important components of such a guidebook from a wide range of sources, including previously unpublished papers, and as such it should help anyone seeking to use this framework to analyze a variety of policy areas.

The Center for Development Research (ZEF) is an international and interdisciplinary academic research institute of the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn, Germany, EU. ZEF's research aims at finding solutions to global development issues. A 10 years strategy plan outlines land- and water use, biodiversity, public health and renewable energies as priority transdisciplinary research areas.