Working in the Mekong Delta
in Vietnam, this International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF)-British Council project comprises an interdisciplinary
team of researchers from Northumbria University in the UK and the Mekong
Institute at Can Tho University in Vietnam. The team is jointly led by Dr Oliver Hensengerth at Northumbria University and Dr Van Pham
Dang Tri at Can Tho University. At Northumbria University, the team includes Prof Matt Baillie Smith, Prof Katy Jenkins and Dr Katie Oven. At Can Tho University, the team includes Nguyen Tan
Loi and Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao. Key non-university partners include Lam Thi
Hen from the Centre for Women’s Development in the Mekong Delta and Dr Nguyen
Duc Viet, a water management specialist at the Ministry of Agriculture and
Environment.
The Mekong Delta is Vietnam's key rice production area, playing a major role in national and global food
security. While floods have traditionally been an integral part of peoples'
lives in the region, in 2016 and 2020 Vietnam experienced major droughts, accompanied
by increasing levels of salt intrusion (Nguyen et al., 2026). These droughts are
referred to as salt-droughts. The 2020 salt-drought caused five delta provinces
to declare a state of emergency and was the worst drought on record since 1926
(Bloomberg, 2020). Accordingly, technologies, knowledges, data and practices in
government and local communities on how to respond to droughts are still
emergent.
Planning and policy-making
for disasters in Vietnam is a hierarchical process characterised by top-down
structural solutions, a lack of public involvement and local resistance to
government policies (Ha et al., 2018). Gendered impacts are only slowly being
recognised. For example, as caregivers and responsible for the household, women
spend more time collecting water, reducing time for paid work (UN, 2020).
This research takes place as
the Vietnamese government aims to upgrade early warning capacity. This follows
UN calls to protect everyone by an early warning system within the next five
years (UN, 2022). Effective warning systems bridge scientific and local
knowledge and incorporate gender-sensitive approaches (Diaz et al., 2022; Shah
et al., 2022). Doing so requires a better understanding of how local people
experience emerging hazards and how new forms of marginalisation develop. For
new technologies, this raises questions of what data is relevant to people, how
to translate data into actionable knowledge and how to avoid reproduction of
inequalities (van Ginkel and Biradar, 2021). The project is situated within the
literature on just transitions, specifically on the role of knowledge
production and exclusion (Nikolaeva, 2024). The research work links this to two growing sets of
literature: locally-led adaptation, which highlights the role of local people's
knowledges and aspirations as a basis for adaptation (Westoby et al., 2020); and
everyday activism, which foregrounds the often invisible actions of local
people (Börner et al., 2021).
The project's objectives are:
- To study emerging experiences and responses to drought and
salt-intrusion amongst government and communities;
- To understand on what knowledges and data sets these
responses are based, and to identify gaps in data and information needs for
policy development and decision making;
- To bring together different knowledges on salt-droughts,
including the areas, people and livelihoods impacted, via a series of mapping
exercises and interviews to create the long-term basis for the development of a
people-centred early warning system;
- To build capacity of early career researchers through
methods training, networking, and an inclusive and equitable publishing
strategy.
Key research questions are:
- How are new drought
hazards and salinisation processes being experienced by local people?
- What
sources of information do people use?
- How do local processes of knowledge
generation intersect with government interventions?
- How and where in these
processes do power dynamics unfold that disenfranchise people, and what are the
gendered effects?
Working at the commune level
in the provinces of Ca Mau and Soc Trang (now part of Can Tho City following
the administrative reforms of June 2025), the researchers ground-truth remote sensing and
hydrometeorological, land use and other technical data with community experiences,
knowledges and understandings on drought and salinity. This is done via an interdisciplinary
methodology that includes critical policy analysis, participatory mapping,
narrative interviews, and drought and salinity forecast modelling. Through this methodology, the project aims to create dialogue on how different types of data represent different
knowledges and understandings of drought and drought impact. This enables the research to
develop capacity for community engagement and decision-support, and to develop
the information basis for the development of solutions that benefit local
livelihoods.
To find out more, please contact Dr Oliver Hensengerth.
