Thua Thien Hue province (Vietnam)

Vietnam is increasing local rights to its forests (Barney, 2005), but institutions implementing decentralisation and land allocation still rarely involve local people. Government strongly supports plantation and agricultural development and has forbidden the practice of traditional shifting cultivation. In this situation CIFOR aimed to (1) test the MLA methods in the local socioeconomic context, (2) provide methods and information to better take account of local perceptions in land use and conservation planning, (3) provide baseline data for biodiversity conservation and (4) discuss the opportunities and constraints for conservation institutions in the local context (Boissière et al., 2006).

Khe Tran village in Hue Province is situated in the buffer zone of a planned conservation area. It was chosen as the focus of the study because of the strong presence of minority groups, and potential for a partnership with Tropenbos International Vietnam (TBI-V) and the Extension and Training Support Project (ETSP). The researchers wanted to assess people’s perceptions of the importance of biological resources as well as the role they would like to play in forest management and subsequently give recommendations on the ways to involve them in protected area management.

The key stakeholders were the villagers belonging to the Pahy minority group mixed with Kinh and Khome, and decision makers responsible for land allocation and land use planning (local government of Phong Dien district, Phong My commune). CIFOR worked with the 20 households of Khe Tran, through groups based on gender and location (which is linked to ethnic and economic status). Socio¬economists, translators and botanists from Hue and Hanoi participated in the survey, and TBI-V assisted in coordination and administration. Altogether, the team spent five weeks in the field.

The villagers were keen to participate in the activities, and one or two members represented each household during the community meetings, although they had to get formal authorisation from the village head and from commune officers to work with the team every day. We focussed on village lands in the immediate landscape, an area of about 200 ha, and followed the main methods, excluding the soil sampling due to the high costs.

The MLA team discussed recommendations for land use planning with the key stakeholders in a workshop at Hue, at the commune and during village meetings. They considered options for community forestry, land tenure clarification, local involvement in conservation, and economic incentives. The study was followed by a participatory planning workshop through CIFOR’s Future Scenarios (FS), which brought together local people and Phong My commune officers, government planning authorities and members of Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry (HUAF) (Evans, 2006). It combined and used MLA results in a way that further involved local people and built recognition of a bottom-up approach in land use planning.

In the context of this study, the methods perhaps provided too much information, particularly biophysical data and could have been simplified to make more efficient use of time and funds. The use of three languages - English, Vietnamese and Pahy – and translators complicated inventories and discussions. The coordination and integration of data among the field and village teams, e.g. to find local names for important species, took up a lot of time and efforts.

Because of the presence of minority groups, it was a sensitive area and it proved particularly challenging to gain the trust of local government authorities. They demanded payments and withheld permission to conduct plot surveys farther away from the village or for foreign researchers to stay overnight in the village. Development-oriented authorities commented that the approach was too technical and academic to be useful to conservation practitioners. The trust that nevertheless developed between villagers and team, helped to obtain reliable results.

The comprehensive set of methods is somewhat impractical for local people and decision makers, but local educational institutions such as HUAF are considering integration of MLA and FS into their curriculum. The Vietnamese conservation institution views MLA as a valuable source of information and NGOs such as ETSP, SNV (Dutch Development Organisation), TBI-V and World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) consider it to have potential to learn about local perceptions in their project areas.

The baseline data produced from this study may be used in planning the Phong Dien Nature Reserve in the future, if local government and conservation institutions are interested in involving local people in its management.