The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest VietnamBy NgaDao, Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2025, xviii + 313 pp. US$38.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐50‐178087‐5

Abstract

The exploitation of resources in Vietnam's Northwest region has long been undertaken in the name of development, argues Nga Dao, but it has actually generated new forms of poverty there, including peasant landlessness, exposure to toxic waste, and heavy care burdens for women. A critique of development and the state power that wields it, The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam is an empirically rich work of geography based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. It is also a wrenching study of how rapid environmental change drives rapid social change, and vice versa, transforming peoples and places in unpredictable but consequential and lasting ways. The author introduces memorable characters, foregrounds their stories, and situates both in a region changing so much and so fast as to be virtually unrecognizable from one decade to the next. Further, in many cases that Dao presents, the changes have been so great as to render villages uninhabitable for the people who had long called them home. A work of political ecology, The Everyday Politics of Resources makes a significant contribution to the field based on its thorough-going analysis of an understudied region. Dao examines processes of development and territorialization, critiques power relations, and investigates policy and practice. Working at multiple scales, she deconstructs dominant discourses, compares decisions made in Hanoi to their village-level implementation, and traces the commodification of land, water, and labor. In so doing, she explains the production of inequality in resource access and livelihood possibilities across a vast, diverse, and fascinating part of Vietnam. The book's great strength lies in its fine empirical detail and close attention to lived experience. Wedged between China to the north, Laos to the west, and the Red River on the east, the vast Northwest region (vùng Tây Bắc) is home to ethnolinguistically diverse peoples, rugged mountain topography, and rivers rushing through steep valleys. As shown in literature on the encompassing region of Zomia, such geographic ruggedness and sociocultural difference long afforded the region a measure of political autonomy from lowland centers of power (Scott 2009). Conditions there contributed to a scholarly inaccessibility relative to downstream Hanoi and the Red River Delta, where population, power, and knowledge concentrate. Only recently, and thanks in no small part to Dao's pioneering academic activism (Dao 2010, 2017), have scholars gained perspective on how ongoing processes of economic development, resource expropriation, and state incorporation have climbed the hills, creating new subjects along the way. Innovatively organized, the book's parts correspond to the materials and historical processes under study. An introduction and Chapter 1, “The Cultural Politics of Development,” foreground a robust theoretical framework and raise pointed questions about the aims, practices, and beneficiaries of development based on the “introduction of a market economy with a socialist orientation” (p. 3). Scholars of Vietnam will recognize that formula as a hallmark of đổi mới, a series of market-based reforms, begun in 1986 that have ushered in a capitalist economy but maintained a single-party state. Although Dao notes continuities with earlier eras, her focus rests squarely on reform-era material changes still unfolding in the Northwest frontier. She emphasizes that materialities matter and, I would add, so does the sequence in which the state-led transformations take place, as each builds on what came before. Accordingly, Dao divides the book into three parts—on hydropower dams, rubber plantations, and mining—that trace how development, territorialization, and everyday politics have unfolded roughly chronologically in different but overlapping ways. On the whole, she demonstrates that resource extraction in Northwest Vietnam has generated a ratchet effect that has dispossessed smallholding farmers, displaced human communities, and degraded riverine, agrarian, and forest ecologies. In addition to montane topography and ethnic diversity, Northwest Vietnam is defined by the Black River (Sông Đà), which originates in Yunnan Province, China, and joins the Red River above Hanoi. Because it connects the upstream hinterland to the Red's delta heartland, the Black River was the primary means of transportation, trade, and communication until road construction late in the First Indochina War (1946–1954) opened a viable, overland alternative (Lentz 2019). But, thanks to steep valleys and high flow volume, it was the river's hydropower potential that transfixed state planners, who as early as 1958 began to envision concrete dams on its main stem working in cascade. First up was the massive Hòa Binh Dam, begun in 1979 with support from the Soviet Union and completed only in 1994, then the gargantuan Sơn La Dam, completed in 2012, and the Lai Châu Dam in 2016. Generating power in more ways than one, the dams feed electricity to the national grid and stand as monuments to national development and the conquest of nature. Yet the reservoirs they created have also displaced old riverine communities, including over 100,000 mostly Thái people from Sơn La's alone. Forced to move to resettlement sites on higher ground, they lost fertile fields, rich fishing grounds, historic villages and graveyards, and much more. Dao discusses how displaced people “long for the river” in common but gendered fashion: women mourn a tradition of washing their hair on New Year's Eve that used to cleanse them of bad fortune and ring in a better year; men, who lost access to land for maize and rice, no longer drink homebrew but drown their sorrows in cheap spirits instead (p. 46). Subsequent book sections on rubber tapping and mineral extraction demonstrate an emerging pattern of resource commodification, development-induced displacement, subject formation, and livelihood transformation. As with dams, Dao explains the relevant policy framework, charts stakeholding agencies and corporations, and describes local implementation and its differentiated effects within and between communities. Although rubber was introduced to central and southern Vietnam during the French colonial era, only in the mid-2000s did the postcolonial state identify rubber as a strategic commodity in the Northwest and identify “barren land” there for plantation development. Capitalizing on high commodity prices and new cultivars, rubber plantations now cover approximately 50,000 ha. Yet, as Dao shows, much of the hilly land converted to plantations was, in fact, fallow land still used by local swidden farmers. Some of the appropriated land had even been allocated to families displaced by the dams, effectively displacing them once again. Ruing a shortage of arable land and trouble earning a living among his constituents, a Thái commune chair fingered his province higher-ups and the rubber company, stating, “They got our land” (p. 140). The shortest of the three, the sections on mines are the most up-to-date and, perhaps, most heart-breaking. Beginning in 2019 and accelerating through the COVID-19 pandemic, the central and provincial government promoted minerals as a source of state tax revenue and regional development. Dao focuses on the extraction of iron ore in Yên Bái Province and copper in Lào Cai. As with hydropower dams and rubber, local folk have enjoyed relatively few benefits but borne heavy costs. Whereas the other resources have affected wider areas and larger populations, ore extraction has a smaller but deeper footprint. Writes Dao, living conditions near mines are “far worse”: tailings foul air, water, and soil; blasting damages homes and rattles nerves; and pollution damages health and well-being (p. 226). “You know, our minerals are a curse,” declared a Mien (Dao) man in Yên Bái, pointing to the loss of his community's livelihoods because cinnamon trees stopped growing, mud buried rice fields, and water became scarce. “We are so poor now,” he concluded (p. 216). Out-migration is increasingly their only option. Hearing such rich local perspectives and weaving them into her political ecology of Northwest Vietnam is a product not only of the author's methodological rigor but also her intellectual commitment and personal fortitude. Dao performed over 20 years of ethnographic research in sites throughout the region. She also conducted household surveys, interviews, and archival study. Such long-term research provides a longitudinal perspective on the momentous changes unfolding over time in different places. Building relationships with local interlocutors enables Dao to excavate perspectives long overlooked by officials and overwritten by development discourses. Her commitment speaks as much to intellectual curiosity as it does to her profound mettle and deep care for the people she studies.