1. Full name: Trinh Thi Hanh 2. Sex: Female
3. Date of birth: 16/07/1983 4. Place of birth: Nam Định
5. Admission decision number: 2213/2011/QD-XHNV-SDH Date November 21th 2011 by Rector of University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU, HN.
6. Changes in academic process: No
7. Official thesis title: Changes in livelihood of the Muong in Hoa Binh hydropower resettlement
8. Major: Ethnology 9. Code: 62 22 70 01
10. Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Nguyễn Văn Chính
Assoc. Prof. Trần Văn Bình
11. Summary of new findings of the thesis:
- Resettlement policies, which play a crucial role in arranging the resettlers’ lives in the new sites, are based on the perspective of managing and stabilizing the relocated people’s lives in the region rather than using reasonable development strategies.
- In fact, Hoa Binh hydropower project required a large number of resettled people, which was about 2 times higher than the expected one. However, there were not any policies and fully detailed plans for their relocation. Numerous decisions were made formally for temporarily resolving the obstacles, not for a long-term schedule. Two principal resettlement models applied are “di vén” and ‘lập làng mới”, which seriously affected all of the resettled people’s livelihood sources, especially their social capital.
- In the model of “di vén”, the displaced people’s social capital was mostly preserved due to a little change of their community that provided the displaced households strong social support for overcoming their shock and crisis situations so that they could quickly stabilize their lives.
- Concerning “lập làng mới”, the resettlers lost most of their social network and had to restart their lives from the beginning. As a result, it took them a long time to overcome their crisis and adapt a new lifestyle in the new sites.
- There have been a large quantity of performances/projects assisting the affected people after their resettlement from the State and NGOs. Nevertheless, these projects have not been successful as expected because of not making the best of the people’s social capital.
12. Practical applicability:
The study will make a significant contribution to clarify the resettlement models, the displaced people’s adaptation to a new social environment/context in the resettlement sites. The dissertation’s results indicate that previous studies were focused on analyzing their material capital’s role and bypassed their social one. Besides that, the study proves that their social capital (namely the relations in their families, clans, with their neighborhood and friends, with the supernatural world) plays an important role in restoring their resettled people’s livelihood as well as maintaining it sustainable. Therefore, the social capital should be considered in parallel with the material one since the former determines the possibility and methods of using the later to achieve the sustainable livelihood.
In practical terms, the dissertation illustrates that there have been a large number of supporting projects for the displaced people in generally and ethnics in particular towards the target “hunger eradication and poverty alleviation”; however, they are not successful as expected. It is recommended that these types of projects should pay more attention to the ethnic and cultural diversity, respect and be able to make the best of the local knowledge as well as listen to the affected people’s voices/ideas.
13. Further research directions:
- The role of social capital in restoring the livelihoods of the unvoluntarily resettled people in the ressettlement of hydropower projects in particular and development projects in Vietnam in general
- Some issues in the development and implementation the resettlement policy in Vietnam
14. Thesis - related publications:
1. Trinh Thi Hanh (2016), “Changes in worship of Mường People in their resettlement: Hiền Lương Commune, Đà Bắc District, Hòa Bình province”, Museum of Ethnology review (2), pp. 45 – 52.
2. Trinh Thi Hanh (2016), “Accessing forced migrants’ social capital in resettlement zones – some theories and recent studies”, Social Sciences of the central region review (4), pp. 24 – 32.
3. Trinh Thi Hanh (2016), “Involuntary resettlement: theoritical models and methods”, Journal of Theoretical Education (253), pp. 84 – 88.
