water-policy-dynamics-under-a-post-cold-war-communism

This article will contextualise accounts of political intention and policy development towards water issues in Vietnam. The author examines two main empirics: the evolution of formal policy; and the by now extensive series of 'active' case studies that have examined donor as well as other projects in the sector. The article examines the notion that attempts to explain Vietnamese water policy have shifted away from assumptions that an analytical framework’s categories may easily and without too much risk be extended across different contexts. Rather, comparisons of Vietnamese experience across contexts will tend, if they are to be persuasive, to shift to the use of languages that reflect ontological fluidity, in that what things mean is expected to change over time, without reference to an imagined transcendental and universal 'real'. In this sense, Vietnamese water policy may be usefully understood as an example of how 'success gives voice to the local'.