'Lost worlds' or 'lost causes'? Biodiversity conservation, forest management, and rural life in Vietnam

This dissertation focuses on the rise of interest in biodiversity conservation in Vietnam, and the narratives of richness and loss that have accompanied it. In the 1990s, thanks to international interest in endangered species, conservation organizations along with the Vietnamese state pursued new policies for biodiversity conservation and forest management, primarily through an expansion of the protected areas system. This dissertation explores how these paradigms of biodiversity conservation came to dominate thinking about nature and culture in Vietnam at the close of the 20th century. One of the main conclusions of the dissertation is that biodiversity conservation is fundamentally different than the discourses about forest management promoted under colonial regimes in the region. Through an ethnographic analysis of the actors involved in biodiversity conservation at all levels, the dissertation highlights the processes by which new narratives of nature developed in the late 1990s in Vietnam. The dissertation looks at how certain “truths” about Vietnamese nature were produced, and how they animated state-making processes and new forms of governmentality that were extended into the management of “wild” and “natural” spaces. At the same time, the dissertation also focuses in how local villagers around one nature reserve conceived of these state projects, and how they reacted to them, both directly (in resistance and protest against forest restriction policies) and indirectly (the ways in which their everyday lives presented different ways to see and use the natural world). To address the ways in which local lives of both migrant and longer term communities were impacted by biodiversity conservation, the dissertation provides an analysis of rural life in Vietnam, such as local views of the state and its legitimacy, and an analysis of the links between biodiversity and agriculture and other economic activities. The overall value of wild biological resources to household economies is also explored, and an analytical framework for understanding local rights, access, and land tenure to resources is presented.