Retaining the Old Countryside, Embracing the New Countryside

Abstract

Vietnam’s New Rural Development program envisages the creation of a newly modern rural Vietnam. Drawing on fieldwork, this paper argues that the program has had little bearing on peasant livelihood strategies. The emergence of deagrarianization has not arisen as a result of the program but because of household interest in maintaining a diverse set of income activities. These two contrasting rural realities—the advance of deagrarianization against a backdrop of continued subsistence farming—coexist and are mutually supportive. Peasant livelihood diversification strategies have been perpetuated without much attention to broader state-led initiatives aimed at “reforming” the countryside.

Forest Tales? Unravelling Divergent Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) Maps and State Narratives in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

“…Some villages have small concrete paths for motorbikes" (interview, 2023). The officials added that the New Countryside Program supported the construction of new government buildings, schools, and commune community centers and provided limited construction materials or cash for "modernizing" roofs, kitchens, and toilets (official interviews, 2023 [46,47]). Dependent upon road infrastructure for maintenance and construction, hydroelectric dams were also seen as an important infrastructural change in these two districts.…”

Agrotourism and fast urbanisation: The double pressure of development on peri‐urban agriculture in Hôi An, a small city of central Vietnam

“…modernising infrastructure and educating rural people), which is similar to the ways that the urban agenda is premised on modernity and social order (Harms, 2016;Minh, 2017). As underlined by these trailblazing authors, there is a disjunction between the state's modernising goals and farmers' demands to maintain certain traditional farming activities (Nguyen et al, 2020(Nguyen et al, , 2021.…”