Contemporary features of civil society in Vietnam

By Anna Lauridsen – SNV Governance Advisor and Consultant
The briefing note does not necessarily reflect the official views or position of SNV

The purpose of this briefing note is to highlight some aspects of the current situation of Vietnamese civil society, including a number of challenges faced and future possibilities. For a more extensive overview of civil society in Viet Nam and its actors, please refer to the list of sources at the end of the note.

A changing landscape
Looking back over the past decade, it is possible to detect two broad trends related to civil society in Viet Nam. The first trend points to the increase of development NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that the essentially different from the organizations that emerged after the cutbacks in the late 1980s. Secondly, there has been a mushrooming of associations – voluntary, non-profit, “non-governmental”, community base, grassroots and cooperative. Fulfilling a variety of roles, these groups of associations are playing an increasingly important role in improving the active participation of people at all level to promote national values and development. They, for instance, engage in organizing development activities, income generation and knowledge dissemination. Together with the mass-organizations, these new associational forms provide assistance to the poor, but do not actively engage in public policy debates.

Recently, there have been signs of a shift from a mainly state centered management of development activities, to an acceptance of the contribution of the players, such as NGOs and community based organizations (CBOs). The Socio-Economic Development Plan 2006-10 (S-EDP) reflects more clearly than previously that the government regards an active involvement of the social-and the non-state sector as very important. Among suggested areas are the following priority areas;
• Education, health, gender and development of economic units such as cooperatives, units supported by organizations and funds.
• Also, a number of the new areas for greater NGO involvement have been outlined;
• Ethnic minority development and participation, participation in environmental protection, research (science and technology) and the development of cultural and religious organizations.

Additionally, the S-EDP proposes a broad frame of activities for NGOs, mass-organizations, professional associations and grass-roots based organizations to the engage in concerning policies, monitoring and evaluation of policies and activities. However, for this to be pacifically feasible a proper mechanism remains to be put in place by the government. Overall, the outlines for these new areas of involvement are at this stage somewhat unclear, and policies must be further developed in the order for the organizations to be able to take on this role.

The above openings can be seen as a high level of recognition of non-governmental organizations which may allow them to have a more mainstream role to play in poverty reduction and the general development of Viet Nam. This could translate into the civil sector contributing to the S-EDP in terms of service delivery and managing and monitoring of selected public fields. However, this role and its scope will have to be fully defined by the government or even by civil society itself. In this view, the NGOs of Vietnam can be seen as an untapped resource, waiting to be plugged into to join the efforts of the national development process. For civil society to effectively be a part of this process, it must start by overcoming some of its obstacles, including a weak legal framework, lacking internal capacities and financial resources.

Current constraints

Incomplete legal framework
The legal framework is the main constraints facing civil society in Vietnam today. The centre piece of this framework, the much debated Law on Associations, was due to be passed by the National Assembly in November 2006, but was recently postponed. Possibly, this delay can provide a window of opportunity for stakeholders to put forward their views on how to minimize articles restraining the potential of civil society. To date, these restrictions have not been conducive to facilitate for the establishment of new organizations, still are very cumbersome process, service delivery or advocacy. In practice, this mean that it could continue to be difficult for local NGOs to fully cooperate with the private sector and the state, as well as promoting transparency and anti-corruption.

Furthermore, the scope of the draft law results in different organizations being governed by different legal regimes. In this context, the socio-political mass-organizations are enjoying the most beneficial status, as opposed to the Vietnamese NGOs, which are linked to either a mass- or an umbrella association. Especially notable is the situation of hundreds of thousands of grassroots level organizations (CBOs) which are without any kind of legal foundation for their establishment and existence.

Finally, the current legal framework leaves great scope for state discretion. For example, during the registration and approval, it has been assessed that the organizations must go though three steps, submitting at least six different documents which takes about six months (Decree 88 on Associations). This procedure gives the state several opportunities of discretion over the process. Additionally, the provisions of the previous draft laws have not included clear guideline or limitations to discretion of a state authority to reject an application. Once an organization has been approved, the relevant state authority can still exercise discretion over it in relation to the prohibited acts, which in turn are broadly defined in the draft law. If an organization is found to be engaging in these kinds of acts, there appears to be no mechanism to file a complaint or to challenge the decision.

Internal capacity
Another restraining feature of NGOs in Vietnam is the different characters of the organizations and how they were founds during various historical periods. This has resulted in different internal structures and activities. The mass- organizations, traditionally serving as socio-political organs for the Party, have been the major and most important of society groupings. In the past, they filled the void that is normally occupied by civil society organizations in other political contexts. In recent year, the mass- organizations have expanded their activities to include service delivery. By doing so, they have also shown that they can reach to the communes in an effective way. Unfortunately, this important access to the lower levels of administration has not included the promotion of enhanced accountability among the local governments. Furthermore, the internal structure has not been adapted to manage the new situation of handling programmes.

For INGOs, it has become increasingly common to operate through VNGOs. This has had the benefit of strengthening the capacity of Vietnamese NGOs in implementing development programmes, whilst extending their outreach. While having an important role to play in increasing accountability, the NGOs also need to enhance their internal capacity in order to better work with donors and the government.

Vietnamese NGOs are also faced by external challenges in the shape of institutional obstacles. In general, there are few support mechanisms for the local NGOs, and the ones that do exist, for instance the umbrella organizations, are generally quite weak with the exception of VUSTA. Networks, to the extent that they exist, are also weak and limited to a few groups.

Some traditional perceptions seem to be lingering and causing inertia in the development process. Among these is the expectation that the state is supposed to take action to support people in need. There is also a low level of co-operation between the bureaucracy and the non-governmental organizations, which could be the results of lack of information, knowledge or even tradition. This situation could possibly be alleviated by an enhanced coordination mechanism between the state and civil society.

Financial challenges
Common features of the non-profit sector are its reliance on voluntarism, and its ability to generate financial resources from the community and donors. In Vietnam, it has been estimated that about a 100 million USD of development aid is contributed yearly by INGOs and that social and charity funds have mobilized billions of VND from the communities for philanthropy activities .

At present, state funds are primarily provided to mass- organizations and activities “associated with state tasks”. Meanwhile, a large number of local NGOs are struggling to survive for the most part on foreign grants. For many organizations this lack of financial resources and uncertainties results in further restrictions in terms of hiring well qualified staff, which in turn could enhance chances of future funding and increase the institutional sustainability.

Financial state support could be provided through several channels, either directly from the government in the form of state grants, contracts or transfers of assets, or indirectly through tax exemptions and tax benefits for donors to NGOs.

The way forward
Although the donor community in Vietnam is some way away from having an explicit strategy for the engagement with civil society, an approach is incrementally taking shape and is facilitated by the recent accumulation of research on civil society. Nevertheless, to date the main support from bilateral and multilaterals have constituted of small grant schemes, supporting ad hoc projects. Among these, several donor-funded initiatives have aimed at supporting the research capacity of a few research organizations, as well as some regional universities and ministry based research bodies.

With the changing landscape of developing work following the Hanoi Core Statement, Vietnam’s localization of the Paris Declaration on Harmonization and Aid Effectiveness, donors engagement with Vietnamese civil society will be operating under new conditions. As the general trend is towards sector budget support, the question is how this could be adapted to the NGO sector in an effective way, allowing for adequate support to be channeled to organizations in need for capacity building.

One suggestion in line with these recent developments is the establishment of a multi-donor capacity development fund for the NGO sector, which also follows the reasoning within several other sectors. The fund could be grants-based supporting Vietnamese organizations in, for instance; capacity building and training, or policy development and dialogue with the Party and government. This could be one of the future areas of development for relevant stakeholders to discuss and reflect upon.

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Sources
Developing a sound legal environment for the development of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), NGO contribute for the Vietnam Development Report 2007 and Poverty Reduction Support Credit

Nguyen Thi Kieu Vien, (2002) Emerging Local NGOs (LNGOs) in Vietnam: Strengths, Limitations and Prospects, Master’s thesis, University of Queensland

Norlund, I., Tran Ngoc Ca, Nguyen Dinh Tuyen (2003) Dealing with the Donor – The politics of Vietnam’s Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy, Institute of Development Studies, University of Helsinki, Policy paper 4/2003

Norlund, I. (2006) Filling the Gap: The Emerging Civil Society in Vietnam, UNDP-SNV

Sabharwal, Gita and Than Thi Thien Huong, (2005) Civil Society in Vietnam: Moving from the Margins to the Mainstream, CIVICUS

Sidel, Mark and Vasavakul, T. (2006) Report to VUSTA on the Law on Associations, UNDP Vietnam