Development, poverty reduction and environmental management have for too long been treated as separate objectives in Viet Nam – as in most countries. Separate institutions, policies, budgets and programmes have been established to work on each objective alone. The priority given to development has brought some immediate and major benefits. However, the cumulative negative impacts of Viet Nam̍s extraordinarily rapid development on water, air and land – and the subsequent suffering of poor people from pollution, climate change and soil infertility – show that these objectives need to be considered together.

The challenges of integrating environmental management and development are...

Viet Nam̍s rapid economic growth of 7 to 8 percent over the last decade or more has enabled one of the world̍s most impressive increases in the Human Development Index, with particular progress in education, health and increased standard of living.^[2] With China, Viet Nam has become a global leader in ensuring that high levels of economic growth lead to poverty reduction – although poverty is still high and the ̍easy gains̍, especially from agricultural land reform, have already been taken.

What of the environment? Consciously or otherwise, there has been a political and public willingness to ̍sacrifice̍ environmental assets...

Worldwide over the last two decades, one particular norm has evolved in order to meet the challenge of linking environment and development primarily: this is to get environmental issues reflected in the national plan. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced Agenda 21, which expressed the agreement that all countries shall prepare ˈnational sustainable development strategiesˈ. Since then, another emphasis has been on integrating environment into Poverty Reduction Strategies.

The subsequent failure of many such strategies to lead to real change – beyond getting the right words into planning documents – has begun to focus attention on the institutional and behavioural...

Viet Namˈs situation is common with many other countries: a broad spread of actors have some interest in environmental mainstreaming but with different expectations of how it could or should take place and in no coherent strategy – and sometimes with a greater interest in environmental mainstreaming not taking place.

The Party mechanism is sending out multiple messages on issues concerning development and environment, which are sometimes complementary but other times not, notably in the area of shifting cultivation. There is no clear message on how to balance environment, poverty reduction and development.

Central government has considerable power and resources,...

From experience to date in Viet Nam and elsewhere, we can identify several conditions that – if already in place – enable development objectives and environmental management objectives to be better integrated:

[1] Legality: The legislative system supports both environmental protection and social justice, with no significant inconsistencies between the two.

[2] Institutional home: All sectoral and decentralised institutions have mandates for tackling environment as a cross-cut issue within their own work.

[3] Public concern: Public demands to tackle environmental degradation and to nurture environmental assets are significant and well-expressed.

[4] Public and media advocacy: Mass organisations and NGOs are...

Whose demands for environmental integration? In the first place, future priorities for integrating environment and development might best be drawn from the views expressed by the main groups of poor people in Viet Nam, through PPAs and PEP surveys, among other means:

The chronic rural poor in remote uplands have expressed the need for access to common property resources and the means to generate viable livelihoods from them. These include payment schemes and other incentives that will encourage them to generate public environmental goods such as water, HEP, carbon, (agro)biodiversity and landscape, and support for resource rehabilitation and recapitalisation alongside...