Institutions as the outcome of continuous evolution throughout history

Each historical period of the making of the Delta’s water landscape has seen attempts to impose foreign rules and arrangements and sometimes to replace the existing system. However, pre-existing elements have survived or been transformed through a process of interaction and negotiation in which actors and stakeholders influence others and join in selecting the current institutions. Consequently, the Delta culture, agriculture and rural livelihood have been formed from the history of interaction of various institutions. The transformation of agriculture and rural livelihood is not a straightforward process. Rather, practices have been formed, negotiated and

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adapted through interaction between rulers’ initiation of interventions and local inhabitants’

selection of intervention, all under the influence of natural and physical conditions.

Institutions connect the past and present, old and new, traditional or existing and imported arrangements. According to Cleaver (2012:8), working from the school of critical institutionalism, the complexity of institutions is intertwined with social life, with their historical formation under social and economic changes over time and with the interplay between global and local factors, the traditional and the modern, formal and informal arrangements. The interaction of old and new and central and local institutions occurs throughout the history of the making of the water landscape the Mekong Delta. As Jamieson (1995:2) states, ‘all Vietnamese people are today still, as they were fifty years ago, interacting with that past in the process of shaping their future’. In the field of hydraulic management, Biggs et al. (2009:221) argues that the reproduction of past arrangements reliant on private contractors to carry out public works since the 1880s has continued to shape state decisions because of the interests of project lobbyists and the aging of infrastructure, which leaves no space for major changes in water resources strategies. Biggs (2012) terms this continuity institutional and physical inertia or the powerful influence of pass arrangements which persist either because the reasons for their existence remain or because popular belief holds that certain ideologies (e.g. the technocratic solution of building hydraulic works) is the best solution (e.g. fast, easy, more beneficial) for development.

However, institutional and physical inertia have not been able to preserve any single institutional or physical setting. Thus, changes and amendments have happened in the formation of bricolage (Cleaver 2012; see Chapter 2 for more background information). Institutional bricolage has been formed through interventions throughout the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.

Institutional bricolage makes up modern hydraulic agriculture, with a canal irrigation system started in the early settlement of the Delta, dredging machines introduced by the French and individual pumps first brought to the Delta by Americans. The whole system and policies continue to be heavily dependent on technologies and infrastructure (institutional inertia) but pay a certain level of attention to local flexibility as a result of the adaptation process over the history of state management. The same tendency can be seen in the Red River Delta, where water control consists of a mixture of features from the collectivist period and new constructs from 2 decades of liberalisation and decentralisation (Fontenelle 2000).

In addition, the living and working culture of the Southern Delta reflects various cultures involved in the complex history of interaction with nature and human settlements. Sox (1972:140)

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concludes that Vietnamese adaptations and mal-adaptations are a reconstruction of the Cham exploitative systems (e.g. crop cycles, irrigation subsystems, boating, fishing and some economic organisations). The interrelations of Khmer peasants, fishermen and wood cutters, Chinese merchant-lenders and transporters and, later, Confucianism have made the pluralistic Delta society which shares economic tasks and emphasises paternalism (Brocheux 1995:108, 112, Hickey 1968:5, 134). The complexity of changes and various cultures from different groups and periods has created the diverse society of the South. The experience of diversity over time has made an open society that easily accepts new factors entering the institutional negotiation ground.

‘The villagers feel that the old ways are good, especially when they are expressed in rituals, but they also feel that the new ways are acceptable when proven of value’ (research in the Mekong Delta, Hickey 1968:285). As follows, Delta inhabitants have assessed and validated new technologies and practices, including irrigated farming and the usage of individual pumps. This behaviour marks the process of legitimating institutions, or qualifying pieces to contribute to a new bricolage.

The interrelations among natural, physical, social and political conditions generally have been the main drivers of water resources management over the history of making of the Delta’s water landscape. The contemporary state shares with the pre-colonial and colonial governments the desire to control territory. The question then is how the state achieves its goal in the contemporary period in which the market and individualistic lifestyles are increasingly dominant in the Delta. The analysis of the bureaucratic–informal interface of water management practices in the Mekong Delta presented in the following chapters sheds light on these issues. Chapter 4 introduces and analyses the state management structure which affects internal dynamics, especially at the commune–hamlet level, and other actors at the interface. Chapter 5 presents an anthropological analysis of the negotiation at the interface over water drainage and canal dredging.

We point to the role of the institutional process in guiding and, thus, explaining the work in progress in Delta’s hydraulic intervention and the influence, survival and transformations of innovations in the Delta landscape over history. Chapter 5 contributes to the understanding of the role of the institutional process by illustrating the process of institutional legitimation and by partly answering the question of how bricolage is formed in contemporary irrigation management.

In analysing the activities of field drainage and canal dredging, the negotiation processes are reviewed. Examining the processes involved in the power relations and interrelations between the state and other actors clarifies the nature of state–society interaction in the form of everyday dialogue in the Delta’s local irrigation management.

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Chapter 4 DECENTRALISATION AND IRRIGATION