Property Rights and the Social Incidence of Mangrove Conversion in Vietnam

The distribution of economic benefits from wetlands is fundamentally determined by ownership and control of resources, and hence the property rights and institutional setting of analysis is critical in determining the ecological sustainability of management practices. In the last decade it has been recognised that wetlands, in common with many coastal resources can, given certain circumstances, be sustainably managed under common property regimes. Conversion to private or state property does not necessarily enhance sustainability, and in fact often precipitates the incentives for unsustainable management. This occurs when the conversion process changes the parameters of common property management such as the location of beneficiaries; the equitable distribution of benefits; and the reliance on the sustainable resource within the livelihood system. The paper discusses the significance of the recent advances in the understanding of common property resource management in the context of external changes in management, for example through state appropriation or privatisation. Inequality and the diversity of income sources from private and communally managed resources are important factors in determining whether transactions costs can be reduced and hence whether common property resources can be effectively managed. A case study is presented to examine whether privatisation of common property resources impacts on inequality within the general population of resource users and non-users, and the impact of changes in inequality on the common property resource management. This is centered on mangrove conversion for private agriculture and aquaculture in Quang Ninh Province, northern Vietnam. Land conversion creates a diversity of impacts and livelihood strategies. The results focus on the impact of changing state, private and communal property rights on the identified stakeholders. An appraisal of the incidence of costs and benefits of conversion is undertaken demonstrating that state intervention for efficiency objectives can only be justified if both the environmental externalities and the distributional consequences of conversion are ignored. The wider policy context of Vietnam are discussed. These include effective state privatisation of coastal resources and the resettlement policies of population away from the densely populated coastal floodplains as a result of perceived negative impacts of population growth. Results of a household survey of coastal villages reveals that the poorer households, who exhibit greater reliance on mangrove resources, are most likely to experience negative livelihood impacts as a result of state appropriation of common resources. The analysis explores which parts of the present livelihood system are contributing to inequality, through decomposition analysis, before examining the impacts of conversion on present day management. The results demonstrate empirically that privatisation of common property wetlands directly leads to increasing inequality within the local population, thereby providing a feedback whereby the conditions for sustainable management of remaining common property wetlands are further breached, and producing a downward spiral of unsustainable management, in this case due to state intervention.