How do farmers make decisions in a land degradation context? A case study from Northern Vietnam

Stemming from a three villages case study in Northern Vietnam, this paper examines how farmers have coped with and adapted to land degradation in the uplands. It assesses how policies and research programs implemented in the area have affected local determinants, namely farmers’ perception of the environment and local rules, and how in turn the latter impacted individual and community behaviour. Following a qualitative approach that draws from ethnography and institutional analysis, it hopes to contribute to the current literature by testing the effectiveness of this approach in understanding farmers’ decisions in a land degradation context and by highlighting new determinants that have not been so far much considered in the analysis of land use change. Land degradation has attracted the attention of donors, researchers and policy-makers in Vietnam over the past two decades. Deforestation and soil erosion were identified as the key issues to address, and officially justified the design of new national policies and research programmes. Since the 90s, specific policies have targeted uplands management in Vietnam, including forest land allocation, sedentarisation and reforestation programmes. Improving (or substituting) ethnic minorities’ land management systems and reforesting barren hills have been two major goals for these government initiatives. If some of these objectives (such as reducing significantly shifting cultivation practices) have been reached, their success in improving people’s livelihoods and uplands’ environmental attributes has been largely challenged. On the contrary, social and economic inequities between mountainous and deltaic areas have increased over the last decade. At the same time, considerable research effort has focused on developing soil conservation and sustainable land management practices. However, although some results were technically promising, very few of them have been adopted by farmers. Recognition for this shortcoming emerged within the scholars’ community in the late 90s. Main causes were identified as a non integration of socio-economic determinants within the development of technical solutions and a focus on the plot level with no consideration of how upscaling results. Stemming from this recognition, a new research paradigm emerged, guiding new research and development projects on land degradation in tropical countries. The latter have adopted a participatory, interdisciplinary, communityand catchment-based framework. Several research projects have been implemented in Vietnam following this new line of scientific enquiry. However, research techniques are still hardly transformed into farmers’ practices. This paper aims to highlight new key determinants for successful policies and research projects addressing land management issues by analysing farmers decisions regarding land use in three villages of Northern Vietnam, including one village in which research programmes on soil erosion have been implemented. In these three villages, farmers have practised shifting cultivation in the uplands for a few decades, cultivation annual crops such as cassava, arrowroot and taro. Annual cropping has been pointed out both by local authorities and researchers as highly soil erosive. Policies modifying land tenure, restricting land use and encouraging reforestation have been implemented nationwide since the late 90s. At the same time, researchers have organised in one village farmers’ field schools and have proposed soil conservation practices to limit land degradation. Recently, all farmers stopped annual cropping and have planted monoculture tree plantations or let land under fallow. This research work analyses to which extent policies and research works have contributed to land use change in the area, by examining farmers’ perception of land degradation and farmers decision-making process. It is not a research project or policy evaluation, in the sense that it doesn’t seek to systematically identify the necessary and sufficient factors for the adoption of sustainable land management practices. It rather seeks to link observed farmers’ decisions with a range of factors and assess the relative contribution of these factors in farmers’ behaviour. Data collection and analysis rely on an approach drawing from ethnography and institutional analysis. Semantic realism is used as an ontological basis to address farmers’ perception of uplands and soil erosion. It distinguishes ‘brute facts’ and ‘institutional facts’ to examine the social function of the term ‘land degradation’ and study how these meanings are shared by different social groups. Then institutional analysis is applied to decrypt farmers’ decisions and behaviour, using a refined version of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by Ostrom. The refined version proposed by the present research work integrates an historical perspective and pays a special attention to the social constructions of land degradation by local actors. Results suggest that the research projects have had little impact on farmers’ perception of uplands and land degradation in the study area. Narratives brought up by policies were much more powerful in impacting farmers’ beliefs. However, institutional analysis showed that the shift from annual cropping to tree plantations in the area was rather an accident than the result of farmers’ new beliefs on forests and reforestation incentives provided by national policies. Narratives on forest benefits carried out along with policies, even if assimilated into individual’s imagination have had little impact on final farmers’ decision. The collapse of local rules, due to a combination of soil fertility decrease and change in land tenure, was the decisive factor in land use change. This study defends that, when natural resources are managed by local users, local studies integrating acute models of individual behaviour have marked assets over meso or macro scale studies. Though powerful to analyse the contribution of aggregated or macro-scale factors at the regional or national level, the latter might miss decisive factors that are only observable at the community level. It argues that, when seeking to explain human behaviour, using a socially constructed view of nature is a necessary approach to assess the relative impact of external forces on individual decisions. Lastly, it showed that when examining commons management, individual decisions should be analysed together with community dynamics. In the present case study, collective determinants were as much responsible for land use change as individual strategy.