A tragedy, but no commons: The failure of 'community-based' forestry in the buffer zone of Tam Dao National Park, Vietnam, and the role of household property rights and bureaucratic conflict

This study examines why Vietnam's "community-based" forestry, which intended to simultaneously encourage community involvement in forest policy while ensuring social equity in access to forest resources and guaranteeing forest conservation, failed to meet these goals when implemented at the local level. Vietnam has created protected forest areas and offered economic incentives to households to move out of agriculture in protected areas and towards sustainable, "community-based" forestry. However, local implementation of national forest policy around Tam Dao national park has led to two outcomes that diverge from these goals: (1) many households continue to use protected land within park boundaries for agricultural and forestry purposes; and (2) only a handful of households have been given subsidized protection contracts to protect land in the national forest, even though original policy implied widespread community involvement in forest protection.;To explain this, I examine the process and outcome of forest land use rights allocation that led to these results. I argue that Vietnam's "community-based" policies of forest land allocation were implemented by two different bureaucracies that were accountable to different interests, resulting in inter-bureaucratic conflict over the national park territory. Local governments under the provinces are accountable to local economic interests, and protect the intrinsic property rights of subsistence farmers to land inside the park. The park Management Board, on the other hand, is wary of provincial accountability to local economic interests and sought to stymie community involvement in forest protection. Because of this conflict between these two bureaucracies, the goals of Vietnam's "community-based" forest policies were lost. Using data obtained from ten months of field work conducted from 2006-2007 around Tam Dao national park in northern Vietnam, this study refines theories of the causes of failure in "community-based" natural resource management by showing how bureaucratic conflict can hinder community involvement in forest management. It also highlights how local officials in non-democracies may nonetheless be accountable to local economic and institutional interests and demonstrates how de facto property rights can represent a form of soft political power that constrains local officials in implementing national policy.