The post-colonial period has been characterised by one ruling system and a specific political regime, with periodic uncertainties and outside threats. Nation building in the Mekong Delta since 1975 falls into 2 periods with different primary purposes of state interventions. In 1975 and 1976, the Communist state invested in hydraulic infrastructure to serve security purposes (to control the newly reunited country), and the projects were strongly aligned with collectivised agriculture. The second period of nation-building after Doi Moi was marked the construction of modern hydraulic infrastructure intended to tame nature and serve in the expansion, intensification and modernisation of the farming system. As well, technological investments driven by high modernism ideology have been aimed at retaining the privileges and benefits of irrigation management to related agencies or hydrocracies.
21 Nation building after 1954 was based on reports from technical surveys and field data from the French DPW produced starting in the 1880s (Biggs 2012:163).
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Immediately after reunification in 1975, the Vietnamese government undertook a nation-building campaign in the South, including the Mekong Delta, intended to (1) restore the agriculture, land and economy damaged by the war; (2) integrate the South into the Communism regime that had been established and developed in the North since 1945; and (3), most politically important, control the area which had been under different rule for 25 years. The nation-building started with the restoration and excavation of waterways to facilitate agricultural collectivisation.
However, the policy of collectivising the input and output of agriculture production led to a stagnant economy, mainly because of the low incentive to invest and contribute to collective farming. The extreme crisis during the late 1970s and early 1980s prompted reforms in the late 1980s (Renovation, or Doi Moi in Vietnamese). Throughout changes in political regime and policies, infrastructure building, especially for irrigation, has remained a central goal of intervention in the Southern Delta, as illustrated by large-scale irrigation systems, canal maintenance projects and dyke systems to mitigate floods and intensify agricultural production (Southern Institute For Water Resources Planning - SIWRP 2011b, Benedikter 2014b, Biggs 2012, Kono 2001, Käkönen 2008).
The obstacles of the complex Delta have persisted and continued to challenge the efforts to control it in the post-colonial period. As stated by Benedikter (2014b:232), ‘many of today’s problems in the delta are newer versions of much older problems and tensions in the region’. At the same time, the diversification, expansion and intensification of agriculture amid globalisation have pushed the Vietnamese state to further invest and modernise the water infrastructure of the Delta. In the late 20th and early 21st century, the nation-building of hydraulics infrastructure has been characterised by several features.
First, the government’s top-down policies22 of modernising irrigation infrastructure focus on hardware interventions — constructing and maintaining hydraulics works (i.e. canals, dykes, sluices, culverts). Influenced by global ideologies and beliefs in recent decades, Vietnam has followed the past, current and persistent worldwide trends in its efforts to control the Mekong Delta’s water landscape by applying the technocratic approach.
Second, post-Doi Moi decentralisation of state management has paved the way for dividing between levels of the state tasks in the construction, operation and maintenance of hydraulics
22 These top-down policies are supported by the Leninist doctrine of statehood and the rationale of central planning (Benedikter 2014b:32).
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works. Despite the decentralisation of state management, scholars working on the Vietnamese irrigation sector argue that the central state neglects the role of other stakeholders, including provincial and lower-level government officials, private enterprises, research institutes and individuals (Benedikter 2014b:235, Pham Cong Huu 2011). This neglect increases the risk of continued unawareness of potential environmental and social impacts of water infrastructure projects, which might lead the state to undermine the importance of potential impacts and their relation to political stability. The consequent effects on state involvement in day-to-day management and local views of the state are highlighted in this analysis. As well, the combination of decentralisation and local, centralised state management in hydraulic operation and maintenance (further analysed in Chapter 4) has ‘created space and mobility for the state engineers and water bureaucrats in Hanoi to seize the southern waterscape and expand its power’ since the late 1970s.
Consequently, the Northern hierarchical apparatus of water management agencies (the hydraulic bureaucracies, or hydrocracies) was copied in the Southern Delta, with human resources transferred from the North to occupy important positions (ibid:45-47). However, since Doi Moi, the equitisation of state-owned enterprises and the shift from the socialism-oriented market economy to the private sector in Vietnam, the growing number of private enterprises has diluted the monopoly power of state-owned construction companies in hydraulic projects (Benedikter 2014b:228).
Third, following the nature of local deviation throughout Delta history, local resistance and arrangements can affect the implementation of central plans. In particular, the Delta’s natural, physical and social conditions continue to influence state interventions to various extents depending on the activities and locations. As early as the 1990s, the Mekong Delta entered a new era of engineering shaped by regulatory devices (Miller, cited by Benedikter 2013:88). Benedikter (ibid:222) asserts the post-colonial era has seen ‘the shift from ‘opening up’ the Delta environment by canal dredging to ‘closing it off’ by the development of a large-scale regulatory infrastructure’, or in another words, the transformation of a river-water civilization to a modern hydraulic society (Fuhrmann 2008) in which almost every inch of the Delta’s surface shows signs of human interventions (Biggs 2012:6). However, the Northern model of hydraulic control proved to have many shortcomings when applied to the Mekong Delta and its specific natural and social conditions. As a result, the contemporary Delta stands as a regulated, controlled water landscape with less control than the Red River Delta, inter-connected canals with minimal regulatory input
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and only a few large-scale, closed hydraulic systems23 (Benedikter 2014b:81, Vo Khac Tri 2012:74).
Fourth, while guided by the national state plans, the present-day water landscape of the Mekong Delta has since the 1990s been significantly influenced by technical and funding supports from international donors, including development banks and the Dutch, German and Australian governments. These projects tended to favour technocratic solutions. However, since the 1990s24, hydraulic experts worldwide have condition how to better plan the hydraulic works by combining technocratic and management approaches to water management (Renault et al. 2007). Making participation by actors from the central to local levels more viable and effective (Pham Cong Huu 2011) and assessing the impact of water projects have gained attention only after severe, natural or man-made disasters (Benedikter 2014b:229).
Above all, the hydraulic sector is strictly controlled by the ‘synergetic relationships’ among water bureaucrats, state and local politicians, water enterprises and development banks (Molle et al.
2009:336). Thus, ‘the ways the flows of water are created or modified by water infrastructure are intertwined with flows of power and influence, often manifested in the form of political or financial benefits, whether private or collective’ (ibid). In the Mekong Delta, global trends have been translated into multi/interdisciplinary projects. Most notably, in the Mekong Delta Plan launched in 2010, the Vietnamese government and Dutch agencies are collaborating ‘to create a strategic long-term vision (2100) for the Mekong Delta, to set out a long-term Delta Program with a range of short-term measures (2015-2025) and to strengthen water governance for the delta’25.
In summary, post-colonial nation-building reflects trends in human intervention in the water landscape of the Mekong Delta persistent before the pre-colonial time. The trends include restoring old projects, expanding canal network and applying modern technologies in water infrastructure (e.g. dykes, sluice, culverts, large-scale irrigation systems) to serve either political aims (territorial control) or economic purposes (agricultural production). Despite differences in forms, the post-colonial era has repeated mistakes from earlier periods, specifically using water project architects unfamiliar with the Delta’s natural and social conditions, although the extent of
23 See map 3.1 in Benedikter (2014b:81) for the closed hydraulics plans in the Mekong Delta, most of which have not been completed.
24 The dominant ideologies have been irrigation management transfer, water user groups and, finally, integrated water resources management.
25 http://www.deltares.nl/en/news/news-item/item/13775/dutch-expertise-mekong-deltaplan-vietnam, accessed 07.03.2015
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trend has abated recently. The projects undertaken immediately after reunification clearly illustrate this tendency. In 1975, the Vietnamese government implemented a hybrid of the Green and Red revolutions seeking to make the Delta’s waterscape the ‘agrarian and irrigation frontlines’ for the Party, military and people26 (Benedikter 2014b:42). However, Northern engineers’ lack of knowledge about the Delta and insistence on achieving certain targets resulted in the failure of the ambitious, capital-intensive venture to build a network of electric pumping stations and dyke polders during the 1970s and 1980s (Benedikter 2014b:50, To Van Truong 2011). Consequently, the Vietnam government has applied the trial–and–error principle to water infrastructure projects in order to responding to the Delta’s hydrological and social requirements (Benedikter 2014b:50).
Despite the changes in attempts to conquer the Delta’s water landscapes—from soldiers, conscripted colonial subjects and comrades digging to large machines run by state-owned and private companies, human interventions in the Delta have remained ‘work in progress’ (Renaud’s words, Biggs 2012:5) or ‘work without end’ (Bigg et al., cited by Benedikter 2014b:94). Water infrastructure in the Delta represents ‘an ongoing and seemingly endless engineering campaign’ (ibid:94).