Bauxite mining in Vietnam's Central Highlands: an arena for expanding civil society?

• Author: Marston, Hunter
• Position: Report

When the Vietnamese government approved plans in April 2006 to begin mining huge bauxite reserves in the Central Highlands, it unleashed a series of high level debates that showcased a range of voices, lobbying interests, and outright opposition, that had hitherto been stifled. Between 2007 and 2010, civil society activists, bloggers, environmentalists, lawyers, and senior Communist Party officials, mobilized and coordinated opposition with an efficiency and strength that surprised both Vietnamese policy-makers and international scholars of Vietnamese society. Moreover, the extent of the news coverage, governmental reviews and public petitions criticizing the bauxite mines, revealed a vibrant civil society in Vietnam. The controversy also sparked national debate touching on far broader issues of nationalism, animosity towards China, as well as the role of the state in economic and evironmental development.

This paper examines the status of contemporary civil society in Vietnam from a process-oriented perspective. (1) The traditional Western intellectual understanding of non-political civil society is not an appropriate framework with which to study Vietnamese civil society, which is almost invariably situated in a dense web of connections to the government. This paper, then, analyses Vietnam's civil society in light of its actions and processes rather than by its political and structural links to the state in Vietnam.

I argue that the predominantly urban and state-centric approach (2) of current models for analysing civil society falls short of resolving the complex dynamics behind such debates as that concerning Vietnam's bauxite mines, which showcases a convergence of elite-level dialogue and grassroots opposition. Instead, we should look to an expanding and contracting space (3) for civil society-like actors to lay claims that challenge policy from the top. The combined interaction of grassroots citizens and reform-minded political elites on certain policy issues will negotiate the future contours of civil society in Vietnam.

The analysis takes as a case study the current project of the large-scale bauxite mines in the Central Highlands. The Chinese-Vietnamese joint venture between two state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is seeking to take advantage of Vietnam's immense bauxite reserves (the third largest in the world) in order to process aluminum. (4) The project came under unprecendented criticism from mainstream elite in the Communist Party, environmental scientists, prominent lawyers and citizen bloggers. (5) After a series of contentious policy debates and high-level reviews of the project's sustainability, environmental as well as social impact, by various government ministries, the Vietnamese state-owned corporation Vietnam National Coal and Mineral Industries Group (VINACOMIN) went ahead with the mining project, and in early 2012 it began extracting and processing aluminum from its raw source, bauxite.

While collective citizen action has had a measurable impact on the agenda within Vietnam's highest legislative body, the National Assembly, the failure to stop the bauxite mines reveals Vietnam's continuing state-centred political control. (6) Thus, one observes, on the one hand, an increasingly organized and prominent civil society able to lobby the state's decision-makers and, on the other hand, an enduring elitist, state-centred approach to politics and policy formulation in Vietnam today. The arena of friction and cooperation between Vietnamese citizens and their government exposes coalescing civil society networks and actors. (7) It is the nature of such civil society in Vietnam to which I now turn.

What is Civil Society?

The term civil society has appeared in a variety of contexts throughout the history of liberal democracies and in developing countries. Some argue that the existence of a civil society is the defining benchmark of democracy. (8) The terms democracy and civil society are often closely linked. The case is not so in a non-democratic country like Vietnam. The link between democracy and civil society does not always necessarily hold true.

While standard, Western theories hold that civil society refers to all independent civil organizations outside of the state government's jurisdiction, (9) this definition does not apply to civil society in Vietnam. The growth of civil society in Vietnam has been extremely gradual, contested and inchoate. Civil society is a highly sensitive topic among the nation's political leadership and is not yet a widespread concept at the grassroots level. However, growing civic activism and social awareness of a range of issues, from the environment to public health, have motivated a variety of actors in the public sphere.

The dominant theory on civil society in Vietnam tends to bifurcate the concept. Some theorists, assuming that authoritarian states retain complete control over inactive and passive populations, assert that there is no civil society in such countries. (10) On the other hand, given the dearth of autonomous civil society organizations in this context, other scholars expand civil society's inclusiveness to cover state actors and semi-autonomous organizations. (11) State leaders at the political centre have certain advantages and leeway due to their positions of authority. At the same time, however, their highly visible positions mean they are especially vulnerable to inter-party or high level power struggles.

Grassroots activists lack comprehensive access to power, but their ability to avoid state scrutiny allows them considerable freedoms and networking capabilities. When the two groups forge links, state elites are able to grant grassroots activists the political coverage which they would otherwise lack, and citizens are able to connect state elites with the networks and local resources at their disposal, thereby forming and strengthening networks of civil society actors on multiple levels.

So how are we to define civil society? Civil society has generally been understood from two perspectives: structuralist and ideational. The structuralist perspective holds that civil society comprises certain associations in the public sphere that remain autonomous from the state, claim no political affiliations or objectives (that is, they are not political parties and do not seek positions of political power) and register in the non-profit sector. In other words, they are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) with no formal links to the state or private business practices. Their autonomy from the state and accountability to society puts them in a unique position to lobby the government for reforms and advocate policy measures.

The ideational perspective defines civil society as associations that promote public welfare, advocate such broad concepts as good governance and government accountability, and/or represent the rights of marginalized groups of people (such as labour unions, homeless or trafficked populations, or people living with HIV/AIDS). In theory, these associations are driven by a conviction for the public good. (12)

As noted below, these definitions break down in the Vietnamese context. Most NGOs in Vietnam are not truly independent from the state (in access to resources, legal coverage, or maneuverability outside of the state's monitor), and many Vietnamese NGOs explicitly avoid challenging state policy and would certainly not vocalize objections to state behaviour. (13) Rather, Vietnamese NGOs often work closely with their counterparts in the government to reach consensus on shared interests. (14) Therefore, this paper adopts a process-oriented approach. That is, it defines civil society actors in light of their behaviour and actions, rather than by their structural links to or independence from the government. (15)

Vietnam's Marxist-Leninist legacy casts a long shadow over the shape of civil society in Vietnam today. The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) still dominates politics and society, viewing itself as the sole, legitimate and authoritative voice of the Vietnamese people. As Vietnam struggles to define civil society with such legal actions as Decree 79, the so-called "Grassroots Democracy Degree" of 2003, (16) which permits some local participation in governance projects, and the "Law on Associations" that came to a head in the National Assembly in 2006, (17) state leaders and civic actors push the boundaries of contentious arenas, such as the legal status of NGOs and control over economic development, formerly limited to strict CPV control.

The Vietnamese Marxist model gives citizens the freedom to form associations but not to question the political authority of the Party. For this reason, mass organizations affiliated with the party have for some time been the most typical form of association in Vietnam, leaving little to no room for independent civil society organizations. (18) The traditional slogan, "The Party leads, the people rule, the government manages", captures the interconnectedness of what Joseph Hannah calls the "3-bubble model" of Marxist-Leninist thinking on civil society. (19) However, Marxist theory of civil society is just as rigid and problematic as Western European formulae, as Hannah notes, and does not aptly apply to the Vietnamese context today. (20)

The CPV is not the monolithic organization of standard Marxist theory. (21) Benedict Kerkvliet, one of the more astute critics of state-society relations in Vietnam, sees the situation as "a kind of weather balloon for civil society", in which a younger generation of reformers in the CPV (and non-Party members) negotiates the freedoms of an expanding civil society with an older generation of leadership. (22) For this reason, Thaveeporn Vasavakul has called the contemporary period "Post-Socialist Vietnam", and argues that doi moi reforms in the late 1980s resulted in significant recognition of organizations (to...