State Environmentalism under Authoritarianism: Environmental Policies, Politics, and State-Society Relations in Vietnam

At a time when the interrelated problems of climate change and biodiversity loss are reaching a tipping point, immediate and effective action to protect people’s lives, livelihoods, and the environment seems urgently needed. In the twenty-first century, states have emerged as major players in environmental governance, and there appears to be a growing global consensus that they must lead the way in implementing change. However, the question of what kinds of policies, government institutions, and political actions are needed to address the global climate emergency effectively remains perhaps the most contentious issue of our times. In the face of never-ending policy reversals and endless negotiations over policy directions in liberal democracies, some scholars and activists suggest an authoritarian model of government with more decisive, centralized, and downright coercive action to respond to the global crisis.

This dissertation examines whether authoritarian states can offer the rest of the world an alternative in terms of viable environmental and climate governance. It does so by using the example of Vietnam, a one-party state ruled for decades by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). To this end, the dissertation analyzes both the political processes underlying the “greening” of the Vietnamese state and the functioning of the authoritarian state in the environmental sphere. Three papers in this thesis approach this question from different methodological and analytical perspectives: first, from a policy perspective; second, from the perspective of state‒donor interaction in the context of development cooperation; and third, from the perspective of local and social aspects of forest management and how they are negotiated and agreed to on the ground. Together, they offer a nuanced understanding of Vietnam’s authoritarian state environmentalism, focusing on its distinctive policies, political practices, and institutionalized frameworks for state‒society interaction.

The thesis finds that the CPV primarily perceives climate change as a political threat due to its negative impact on all aspects of political, economic, and social life in Vietnam, potentially undermining the party-state’s efforts to maintain public legitimacy. Faced with multifaceted environmental problems, the CPV appears to be under pressure as the expectations of public and international partners to the state also shift. In response, the government is adopting comprehensive environmental policies and making ambitious international climate commitments. However, the party-state maintains a restrictive topdown approach to non-state actors at both the national and local levels, presumably to control the political process of state “greening” as completely as possible. At the same time, considerations regarding economic growth and political stability appear to be a critical factor in environmental policymaking and an important priority for state institutions at all levels of government. The findings also point to the fragmentation of environmental policy implementation in Vietnam, where authoritarian state politics leads to a variety of conflicts, dilemmas, and trade-offs at the expense of the environment. This implies that authoritarian resilience remains an overarching political goal that both drives and constrains the rise of state environmentalism in Vietnam.

The insights from the individual papers and their synthesis help to unpack the “black box” of Vietnamese environmental governance in which environmental policies, institutions, and political actions often serve various non-environmental goals of the party-state, including social control, political stability, and regime resilience. They shed light on the complex and contradictory nature of authoritarian state environmentalism, which often produces questionable social and environmental outcomes. Overall, this dissertation interprets emerging state environmentalism in Vietnam primarily as the concerted effort of the Communist Party to maintain its political legitimacy and international image, and it casts a pessimistic view of the alleged merits of an authoritarian state in solving complex climate and environmental problems.