Do collective property rights make sense? Insights from central Vietnam

Melissa Marschke,Le Van An,Truong Van Tuyen,Derek Armitage,Hein Mallee

doi:10.18352/ijc.334

Abstract

We draw on empirical results from three case studies of property rights change across forest and fisheries ecosystems in central Vietnam to investigate the circumstances under which collective property rights may make sense. A generic property rights framework was used to examine the bundles of rights and associated rights holders in each case, and to assess these arrangements with regard to their contextual fit, legitimacy and enforceability. The cases illustrate the interactions between private and collective rights to lands and resources, and the trade-offs inherent with different mixes of rights.

Highlights

Responding to the challenges of rural poverty and environmental sustainability requires a flexible mix of individual and collective property rights
Community forestry in Vietnam emerged as a policy response to access challenges, and is meant to enable villagers to incorporate aspects of traditional rights and management systems, in ethnic minority villages (Sunderlin and Ba 2005)
This is an example of a collective management right that is allocated to the village level, enabling villages or groups of villages to enter into partnership with the State for the management of forest resources. This policy innovation is a departure from highly centralized forest policies that have characterized forestry management in Vietnam – a series of community forestry sites have been established throughout Vietnam (Sunderlin and Ba 2005)

Summary

Introduction

Responding to the challenges of rural poverty and environmental sustainability requires a flexible mix of individual and collective property rights. Resourcebased activities shift, depending upon, among other things, household needs, local ecologies and market opportunities. For these reasons, conventional categorization or advocacy of private, collective or public rights rarely account for the complex realities found in particular places (Barry and Meinzen-Dick 2008; German and Keeler 2010). In the context of a mixed public-private or collective rights situation, such bundles of rights may be related to access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation of resources, or parts of a resource, through time and space (Barry and MeinzenDick 2008). The challenge for the resource manager, donor or policymaker is to ‘read’ when and where different rights regimes may be appropriate to support poverty alleviation and sustainable rural livelihoods more generally

Objectives

Results

Conclusion