1Since the 1980s, while trying to maintain political stability and territorial integrity, the Vietnamese state has strongly moved towards the transformation of a centrally-planned economy to a more market-oriented model, in which private, foreign and joint-venture businesses are increasingly becoming the key pillars of the national economy. Another key aspect of the Đổi Mới’s agenda was a fundamental shift in the party-state’s foreign relations policy toward a normalization of Vietnam’s diplomatic and trading relations with China, the United States, and other countries since the early 1990s. Over twenty years after the Đổi Mới renewal renovation, Vietnam has been praised by various domestic and international institutions for its “impressive” achievements in socioeconomic development and poverty reduction and for its gradual liberalization and market diversification, coupled with its commitment to equality. Consequently, this has changed the relationship between the party-state and society in a number of fields, including the control of agricultural land and other forms of natural resources.

2Such transition marks a great change in our scholarly understanding of Vietnam. It has opened the door for intellectual exchange between academics and has resulted in a great amount of research and new knowledge/publications in different languages about various domains regarding Vietnamese society, including the relationships between the state and society at different levels and in various sectors or geographic areas. Among them, studies like those of Kerkvliet,1 Fforde2 and others3, have developed the “everyday politics approach”, which examines social interactions on an everyday action basis. This approach "from below" has given a fresh impetus to the study of social relations in Vietnam.

3However, our observations regarding academic research show that besides a number of rich ethnographic studies, there are many analyses from different social science disciplines that give a generalized view of trends of development and change in Vietnamese society over the past decades with limited field data. This means that research projects based on first-hand data from longer periods of fieldwork and qualitative investigations are still inadequate. As a result, we are suggesting that more field-based research be carried out in order to enhance and promote our understanding of Vietnam, especially its processes of sociopolitical changes.

4This Occasional Paper will contribute useful elements for understanding the social, political and economic dimensions of contemporary rural Vietnam. For epistemological and methodological reasons, the observations on social interactions in this paper were often made at a micro-level: individual actors/farmers, family, village/community. This has enabled the authors to engage in thorough descriptions and multi-layer analyses and to provide explanations from a variety of perspectives, all based on first-hand field data. Furthermore, this methodology has enabled them to assume that, in order to understand a complex system of socio-political interactions in transition such as in contemporary rural Vietnam, it is necessary to begin with concrete situations, to describe the specific context of each situation and to analyze the many articulations underpinning the observed actions.

5Regarding the issue of social interaction between the people and authorities respectively,4 we call for research to avoid seeing the state organization in Vietnam as a single institution with a mono-focus orientation. This means it is necessary to describe the party-state system with its different levels and its various institutions, which on the one hand pursue a single aim of socialist orientation, while sometimes and in some cases entail a number of actions that are often contradictory or competitive to each other.5

6The social and cultural anthropological approaches used in this paper provide us with the capacity to give a field-based description of socio-political situations in Vietnam in order to ‘enter the heart’ of human relationships, their dynamics and their real or apparent contradictions. The pre-established and less flexible methods would not have this ability to stick to different observable realities. By studying data from daily actions, we can highlight a few principles on how the relationship between population and authorities could make possible the chances for good governance and civil society expression.

7In addition to the different chapters in this study, with each being based on specific cases,6, the overall goal of this Occasional Paper is to offer a new look into the social interactions between the different actors/institutions in contemporary rural Vietnam, especially local and higher central authorities with different actors of society, including farmers, entrepreneurs, local cadres, intellectuals, etc.

8This occasional paper emphasizes several points:

9First, this study is to prioritize some "methods of approach to reality “is” that are as flexible as possible and most productive empirically7.” What the authors want to highlight are the views of different actors and different perspectives: those of various administrative bodies, the legal entity, the local group (farmers, traders, women, etc.) in order to be able to analyze their interactions and the power games that are established.

10Secondly, tensions seem to be dominant in all three case studies. However, we are not claiming that this reflects a general situation. This is, however, the case in the areas where fieldwork for this study was conducted. This is related to governance and especially "good governance", which is the objective of many development projects, and has a direct relationship with the norms and their applications. Norms and their application will be two transversal topics in this study. Governance can be defined descriptively as one form of balance between official norms (laws, regulations) and enforcement of these norms (the actual practices observed). The game plays between norms and practices are also a major theme in our research. Similar to China and other countries, it is argued that in Vietnam there are significant differences between official norms governing these institutions (the Communist Party, People's Committee, People's Council, etc.) and the real behaviour of their agents8. It is the articulation of these differences that will bear our analysis. Again, the qualitative approach will stay closer to the realities and their complexity.

11Thirdly, for each case study, understanding the contexts in which words and actions are expressed to show the relationships between population and authorities are important. Strong causal links exist between the social, political and economic contexts as well as the quality of their relationships, and therefore will be discussed in detail throughout the text. On the other hand, the relationships between population and authorities are an important part of the governance process9, consequently a crucial observation spot of social and political life and a true place of debate in Vietnam10.

12Fourthly, we believe that our descriptions can be of valuable evidence in present relevant situations and of use to assess the current history of sociopolitical changes, assuming that current transformation processes will directly affect these relationships. These descriptions and interpretations are also arguments to show that the transition process in the economic and legal spheres (especially in the production of laws) are much more advanced than in politics, including forms of local governance and civil society expression.

13We will look at every social situation, their legal frameworks and the issues underpinning their implementation. Our approach to society will not be normative. We do not seek to define what is "good", “correct” or “not”. Instead, we are trying to describe and uncover how relationships between population and authorities "work" in different realities, therefore, new empirical evidence in the debate on the causality between the development of governance and civil society and economic development (measured primarily by growth). This debate was launched by Janos Kornai in his book The Road to a Free Economy. Shifting from a Socialist System: The Example of Hungary (1990). Since then, further studies have been made on these assertions both on China11, on Cuba12 and on Vietnam13, with even a global perspective in a comparative analysis of economic performance and governance of the above countries by two economists from the French Development Agency (AFD), Nicolas Meisel and Jacques Ould Aoudia (2008).14 In brief, all links of direct cause and effect between the economic development and the development of governance and civil society are at their best just hypothetical in orientation and in many well-documented cases irrelevant.

14Each chapter in the book is a specific case study of social interactions between people and authorities around three main themes related to the relationship between population and authorities in contemporary rural Vietnam: 1) the build up phase of tension and conflict with attempts at conciliation and bottlenecks; 2) the conflict phase in itself with the respective actions of parties to defend their positions; 4) the post-conflict phase when the situation returns to normal, whether it was resolved or not. We noticed immediately that there was a phase 3, which deals with the tensions in conflict transformation in other aspects, but this is not discussed in detail here, even if it is implicit in the three chapters.

15In chapter one, ‘A failed « success story » for Tourist Development Projects in Tam Dao: Gaps between Laws and their Application’, Christian Culas examines a buffer zone village of Tam Dao National Park, which received four successive development projects in tourism since 2005. The author sees the projects and their applications as an arena in which specific exchanges between villagers and the various administrations in village take place. This shows the genesis of tensions and conflicts around the purchase of land and promises of direct employment in projects for expropriated villagers, as well as repeated attempts from farmers to request clarification and justification on projects. This explains the modes of expression and protest the villagers use against the administration.

16In chapter two, entitled ‘Agricultural Land Claims in the Red River Delta during Decollectivization’, Nguyen Van Suu analyses and explains conflicts over the holding and utilization of certain areas of agricultural land between groups of villagers, and between villagers and cadres in Bắc Ninh province. The author also illustrates the forms and the extent of such conflicts and exposes the root of collective claims to land by villagers during the process of agricultural decollectivization. Throughout the chapter, he argues that there exists not only a major gap between official norms and the practices of the villagers, but also a space for the villagers to move around what the party-state wants to do and how the people in society struggle for their daily needs. All of the above shows the importance of land property rights and indicate how the everyday practices of land holdings and land use have influenced the official norms of the party-state over the question of land ownership, management and land use in contemporary Vietnamese society.

17In chapter three, Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh offers a case study of ‘Practical Norms and Gaining Legitimacy in Hà Nam Province’, which shows, in a postconflict context, how local officials are "assessed", appreciated or rejected by villagers according to various criteria. These criteria are both objective, such as corruption and governance effectiveness, but also more subjective (criteria) such as the adaptation of the "envelope theory" (to pay the administrative legal fee or not) depending on the level of wealth seekers and their family and emotional proximity. Ms Binh’s article also shows how the application of certain national guidelines for local cultural expression, such as the renovation of Đình temples and pagodas, can be initiated by local officials to anticipate or meet the demand of the village for identity and symbolic expressions. For their part, villagers are actively involved in renovations and cultural incentives controlled by the Partystate, but have also rediscovered the concrete symbol of their local identity, which had remained silent for 50 years. The game of power and authority are organized symmetrically, but not always in a balanced manner, making it difficult or improbable to formulate an explanation with nomological arguments or simply in terms of linear causality.