No abstract

This paper focuses on informal civil society in an authoritarian context, particularly the unprecedented nation-wide protests and civic action in Vietnam, triggered by the industrial pollution and the resulting mass fish death on the central coast in 2016. We explore civil society actors' motivations and tactics to take action under political restrictions. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews with civil society actors. The findings illustrate how informal civil society in Vietnam is built on independent or partly NGO-affiliated individuals working together to promote non-violent change, although the process of doing so might involve challenging the government apparatus. The activists were motivated to take action by the dead fish’ symbolism of endangered livelihood, environmental protection, and to demand transparency from the government. Critical factors further contributing to the mobilisation of citizens included the combination of food symbolism and anti-China nationalism, the tactical use of Facebook by urban activists, and religious leadership in the rural areas. The protests resulting from the coastal pollution can be seen as boundary-spanning events through which Vietnamese civil society actors ‘invent’ spaces of (political) participation amidst limited ‘invited’ space.

This paper aims to explore how under authoritarian regimes, undergoing reform processes, divergent forms of environmental activism may emerge. Two severe cases of environmental degradation serve as our starting points: the marine disaster in the central coast of Vietnam in 2016 and the Mekong Delta's ongoing environmental degradation. While the former offers a case of rural grievances over mass fish death in Central Vietnam triggering protests on a national scale, the latter presents a continuum of environmental changes leading to serious impacts on deltaic livelihoods, albeit with no observable efforts of activism compared to the situation in other countries along the Mekong Delta. Drawing from in-depth interviews and participant observation with NGO workers in Vietnam who focus on environment and community development, we unravel the conditions, methods and rationalities behind their engagement (or lack thereof) with environmental activism in each case. We argue that the difference between the cases can be explained by tracing the process of politicising environmental grievances, taking into consideration culinary nationalism, anti-China nationalism and political opportunities under authoritarianism. Moving beyond current literature on activism under authoritarian regimes which relies mainly on institutional and/or social network approaches, our analysis helps further shed light on how contemporary environmental activism is mobilised in Vietnam from a geographically and politically grounded as well as culturally embedded position.