Crafting Sustainability? The Potential and Limits of Institutional Design in Managing Water Pollution from Vietnam's Craft Villages

Abstract

Despite a raft of government initiatives, Vietnam's rapidly growing craft villages—rural hubs for small-scale industry—produce alarming levels of water pollution that seriously affects human health and the environment. Framing water quality as a commons dilemma creates the scope for appropriately designed, collaborative institutions that better address local conditions and the need for vertical and horizontal coordination. However, institutional and social theorists highlight that broader historical and social relationships can interact recursively with institutions and are not readily manipulated through institutional crafting. Our research in four craft villages of northern Vietnam finds that the challenge for managing water quality in craft villages is thus broader than institutional design, and requires an understanding of how regulations and policies emerge from and interact with broader societal processes.

Keywords:

• complex commons
• craft village
• design
• institutions
• scale
• Vietnam
• water pollution

Acknowledgments

This research was undertaken with the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development, Hanoi, and was supported by an Australian Development Research Award (ADRA0800080 Crafting Sustainability: Addressing Water Pollution in Vietnam's Craft Villages). The authors thank numerous informants for freely contributing their time and views; three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments, and Sophie Dowling for editing support.

Notes

Note. From commune records in Duong Noi, Phong Khe, Moc Nam, and Duong Lieu.

The implementation of the Doi Moi (economic renovation) policy in 1986 sought to transform the Vietnamese economy from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented one.

In policy terms, rural villages are designated craft villages if at least 30% of households are engaged in off-farm activities. Each craft village specializes in one of the following specific areas of production: (1) food processing; (2) textile and leather products; (3) construction materials and masonry; (4) recycled products; (5) traditional handicrafts; or (6) “other” products (MONRE 2008, 4).

These reports note that water pollution overrides atmospheric and solid waste as a locus of community concern.

The coordination of resource appropriation, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance, at multiple levels of governance is one of Ostrom's eight principles of robust CPR governance (Ostrom 2005). Multilevel governance links local to higher levels of social and political organization in order to address multiple management objectives, knowledge systems, and collaborative problem solving (Berkes 2008).

Government regulations stipulate that family-based workshops cannot hire more than 10 workers. Since many craft enterprises with more than 10 workers still called themselves family-based workshops, we found it more useful to classify workshops according to size, and developed this classification of small-, medium-, and large-scale enterprises based on our field observations.

During the period of our research, Duong Noi was absorbed into the urban administrative boundaries of Hanoi. Village land that was compulsorily acquired by the state was purchased at low “farmland” rates of compensation because craft producers had not rezoned their land for industrial purposes. A number of producers lost significant amounts of money after being forced to sell manufacturing equipment at cost when they made a loss on the land housing their workshops. The same land dramatically increased in value when rezoned for urban residential use. Such events have reinforced poor relationships between villagers and the state and further undermined regulatory compliance.