“Local people want to keep their sand”: Variations in community perceptions and everyday resistance to sand mining across the Red River, Vietnam

Abstract

The Red River Delta is Vietnam's most densely populated catchment, with its communities intertwined with, and dependent upon, the delta and its resources. Intensive, widespread riverine sand extraction is linked to substantial degradation of the delta, directly threatening these livelihoods. The response of rural communities is to resist in various ways, dependent upon a complex matrix of geospatial factors. Using an ethnographic approach, we explore factors contributing to the scale and patterns of resistance to sand mining of both an upstream riverine community and downstream coastal community in the Red River Delta. The riverine community protest openly to illegal mining directly threatening their river-connected livelihoods, manifest through reporting to authorities, bankside protests and involvement of mass media. In contrast, the coastal community have shifted from open protest, through openly reporting to the authorities, to closed forms of within-village gossip. Here, resistance patterns are driven by proximity to mining sites, perceived impact of mining, and pre-existing structural legislative mechanisms. Under scenarios of rapidly increasing rates of sand extraction to satisfy wider global needs, there is an urgent need for studies of local-scale impacts and resistance, capturing socio-economic characteristics of communities, to better plan for future scenarios of resource extraction and exploitation.