ABSTRACT
Vietnam has a long history of governing the poor. From the state’s perspective, the poor are ‘the people’, and this is more than just rhetoric and sentiment. They are, as not just politically correct Hanoi cadres will tell you, the bottom line of legitimacy and national security, and ensuring their wellbeing is the primary function of a ‘socialist democracy’ like Vietnam. On the other hand, the poor, as many Hanoi mandarins will also confide, are poor in the pejorative sense of being uneducated, bounded in and inexperienced beyond their local que or ancestral village. Here, they need to be ‘gone down to’, governed, instructed, chided, led in ‘correct’ ways, by those higher in the governing and territorial hierarchy that stretches all the way from the hamlet to Hanoi. From a liberal governance perspective, too, the people are the very basis of liberal governance, legitimacy, democracy. They need to be gone down to in order to have their voices heard: to be able to participate, make locally appropriate choices of infrastructure and services, and to hold unresponsive local territorial patrimonies accountable for local outputs and outcomes. This, it is clear, will mean breaking open the sealed territorial constraints on information and competition, even or perhaps especially where this causes existing, territorialized local governance arrangements a headache or two.
