Paper short abstract:

The paper examines illegal wildlife demand reduction campaigns in Vietnam, and demonstrates that these campaigns represent 'ungrounded' environmentalism. This environmentalism risks deepening racist stereotypes and cultural misrepresentations steeped in conservation thinking and practice.

Paper long abstract:

The unusual marriage of socialist commitments with capitalist aspirations in Vietnam has unleashed a myriad of paradoxes that make the issue of state-society relations highly complex. The country has a poor reputation for their response to environment as well as conservation issues. It also has a reputation for constrained civil society space for activism. The one-party Communist state selectively adopts a neoliberal agenda to reinforce its monopoly of power as well as to advance capitalist accumulation of land and nature. Under this polity, civil society groups, including conservation non-government organisations, have to learn 'to dance within the constraints of the system' to carve out space to progress their agendas. The paper will draw on new empirical data to critically examine the dynamics and complexity of conservation activism in Vietnam as it has unfolded over time, focusing on leadership strategies, discourses, and operations that conservation civil society groups adopt in order to achieve their organizational objectives and influence the state. Likewise, it will analyse the extent to which wildlife conservation is taken up, connected or disconnected with more general environmental activism in the country. There are significant and sizeable lacunae in research on conservation activism as well as environmental activism in Southeast Asia's authoritarian contexts. The research will make two distinctive contributions. First, it will provide a grounded analysis of the ways, discourses and framings that conservation groups utilise to wage their activism around conservation issues. Second, it will explore how local conservation NGOs aspire to accentuate Vietnamese leadership in conservation.