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Paper short abstract

This paper applies theories of bureaucratic agency to consider the embodied knowledge - the mētis - that local officials brought to their work implementing Vietnam’s Zero-COVID policy.

Paper long abstract

Despite playing a crucial mediatory role between state and citizenry in Vietnam, the socially-embedded practical knowledge of local officials working in the socialist state remains understudied. Informed by ethnographic data collected in pandemic-afflicted Ho Chi Minh City across 18 months between 2021 and 2023, this paper elucidates the informal know-how, skills, and values that Vietnamese officials relied on to implement the government’s strict Zero-COVID policy in local communities.

The paper responds to appeals for ethnographic enquiries focused on the embodied knowledge relied upon by local officials to implement top-down plans. By revealing how these low-level officials - or bureaucratic brokers as I term them - improvise workable compromises in day-to-day regulation situations, the paper problematises theorisations of top-down planning that dichotomise officials and subalterns. The ethnography reveals how, in practice, collusion between officials and local populations leads to bureaucratic schemes being adapted, thereby increasing their acceptability and, at times, their longevity.

Adapting the concept of mētis popularised by James Scott to differentiate between embodied knowledge and formal knowledge, the paper introduces the concept of có lý có tình (being right but reasonable) to express what the ethnographic evidence suggests are the most desirable qualities of effective Vietnamese officials. In developing this concept, the paper shows how these officials not only seek to prosecute the state’s agenda in a manner acceptable to both citizens and their bureaucratic masters but are also able to shape that agenda in ways hitherto underacknowledged in the literature on bureaucratic planning and state simplification.