The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam

The Everyday Politics of Resources explores the impact of development processes on the lives, livelihoods, and landscapes of the people of Northwest Vietnam. Over the past two decades, the homes and farms of hundreds of thousands of people have been appropriated to make way for dams, rubber plantations, and mining operations. While this development has enriched the state and private enterprises, it has also resulted in widespread hardship, impoverishment, and long-term environmental destruction.

Nga Dao draws on more than twenty years of on-the-ground research in the region to show how these developments have affected people in vastly uneven ways, creating wealth and stability for some while dispossessing others. Filled with poignant and sometimes angry narratives by those who have lost their land and traditional livelihoods as well as more triumphant stories from those who have prospered under the capitalist transformation of the region, The Everyday Politics of Resources is a timely, urgent examination of modernization’s benefits and costs.

Nga Dao is Associate Professor of Business and Society and International Development Studies at York University. She is the coeditor of Vietnam Hydropower and Its Challenges to Sustainability and Water Rights and Social Justice in the Mekong Region.