The Art of Not Being Freshened: The Everyday Politics of Infrastructure in the Mekong Delta

Abstract

With the growing threat of climate change, states are increasingly turning to large-scale infrastructure projects in order to control environmental conditions, especially in coastal areas. These projects are often planned and implemented in a centralized, top-down manner and sometimes fail to achieve their stated objectives in the face of “everyday resistance” from local residents and farmers. This study draws on interviews and secondary research to examine the contentious everyday politics of infrastructure in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, focusing specifically on how small-scale, surreptitious acts of “counter-infrastructuring” on the part of farmers, such as the construction of illicit wells and shrimp ponds, have undermined the top-down policy of “freshening” the coastal zone through the construction of large water-control works (namely, the Ba Lai dam). By elucidating the motives for farmer resistance, which are primarily economic rather than explicitly political, and the covert and largely uncoordinated means farmers employ to resist and subvert state infrastructure, this study contributes to our understanding of environmental politics in Vietnam and more broadly, with implications for the future viability of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as those aimed at adapting to climate change and sea-level rise in coastal regions.

1. Introduction

1.1. Context

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region, saline intrusion has long been seen as a challenge and constraint on agricultural production. The issue of saline intrusion is particularly acute in the coastal province of Bến Tre, where the main distributary of the Mekong meets the South China (or East) Sea.

Since the 1900s, a series of governments, from the French colonial authorities to the American-allied Republic of Vietnam (1954–1975) and post-1975 Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have invested heavily in the construction of infrastructure meant to seal the region off from the influence of the tides and make it more amenable to intensive agriculture. These efforts have intensified since the 1990s, with the construction of the Ba Lai dam and the associated network of sluice gates. However, these efforts have not achieved their desired effect and have encountered unexpected resistance from farmers, who have subverted and undermined this infrastructure in order to raise saltwater shrimp.

This paper draws on interviews with farmers and rural residents in Bến Tre province—as well as on secondary sources, such as articles from Vietnamese media, legal documents and policy papers issued by the Vietnamese government, and technical reports prepared by Vietnamese government agencies and foreign donors involved in large infrastructure projects—to examine the contentious “everyday politics” of infrastructure in Vietnam. In doing so, it seeks to answer three interrelated questions: First, what drives state investment in large-scale infrastructure projects, such as the Ba Lai dam? Second, why do farmers sometimes resist such infrastructure projects? Third, what forms does such resistance take, and what are its implications for the viability of large-scale infrastructure projects?

The examination of the everyday politics of infrastructure is increasingly urgent in the context of global climate change, which is driving renewed investment in large infrastructure projects. I argue that there are broader lessons to be learned from this particular case around the nature of state-directed adaptation to climate change (particularly its reliance on large-scale infrastructure), the resistance to such projects, and the implications for future adaptation efforts in countries such as Vietnam.

After a brief literature review, centered on infrastructure and the concept of “everyday politics”, the article examines the history of infrastructure projects in the region, the construction of the Ba Lai dam in the early 21st century and the resistance it faced from local farmers, and the more recent resurgence of state efforts to build infrastructure and crack down on everyday resistance.

1.2. Literature Review

The involvement of states in the planning and construction of infrastructure, and especially water management infrastructure, has a long history. While the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century was accompanied by a declining emphasis on large water-control systems and a shift towards smaller, decentralized projects, the 21st century has instead seen a resurgence in state-funded “megaprojects” [1]. This trend is, at least in part, a reaction to global climate change and its impacts on water resources, economic development, and livelihoods. The resurgence of large-scale water management projects is particularly apparent in Asia, with notable examples (in various stages of planning and implementation) including the Garuda seawall in Indonesia [2], the South–North Water Transfer Project in China [3], the “water grid” irrigation scheme in northeast Thailand [4], and Chinese-funded hydropower dams and irrigation projects in Cambodia [5,6].

This recent “return” to big infrastructure projects [1] has been accompanied by a resurgent interest in infrastructure as a topic of social and historical research. In its broadest conceptualization, infrastructure includes a broad set of human and social relations; Simone [7], for example, uses the concept of “people as infrastructure” to refer to the understandings and interactions by which the residents of Johannesburg “engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices”, creating “an infrastructure—a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” [7]. Other work has focused on the mutual entanglement and inseparability of “nature” and human-made “infrastructure;” Carse [8], for example, describes the ways in which the surrounding forests and watershed have been enrolled in the operation of the Panama Canal, taking a form that he dubs “nature as infrastructure”. Similarly, Pritchard [9] argues that the Rhône river was restructured and transformed—becoming what she dubs an “envirotechnical” system—as part of a broader state-led process of economic and political modernization. Finally, Blok et al. [10] call attention to the “activities, materialities, and concepts through which an environment is performed in always situated and contested ways”, asking us to think of infrastructure not as a noun, but as a verb, as a process by which environments are “infrastructured”.

For the purposes of this study, perhaps the most pertinent articulation of infrastructure comes from Bryant and Bailey’s Third World Political Ecology [11]. The authors embrace the materiality of infrastructure, and they call attention to the centrality of infrastructural projects such as dams, factories, and roads in the creation of wealth and the maintenance of political order. Such “nodes of control … all serve to reinforce, and in some cases even symbolize, the power of stronger actors”. In this way, “unequal power relations are reflected at key points in the physical environment”, and infrastructure thus serves as a means of exerting control over the physical environment and the distribution and quality of natural resources—in short, as a means of exercising power over people through power over nature.

The construction and maintenance of infrastructure is thus of central importance to modern states, so much so that Guldi [12] speaks of the “infrastructure state” that “design[s] the flow of bodies, information, and goods”. “Modern governments in developed nations”, she notes, “have mediated the relationship between individuals and infrastructure technology for so long that the role of the state in designing ports, sidewalks, and bus lines is nowadays taken for granted”. The centrality of infrastructure to modern states speaks first to the importance of infrastructure to production and economic growth, which are of particular concern to the developmental states of the Global South. As Kaup [13] observes, the construction of natural gas infrastructure is necessary to the extraction of resources and the establishment of a state-directed “regime of accumulation” in Bolivia.

In this way, infrastructure projects can serve as a vehicle for the interests of state-connected elites. Verhoeven [14], for example, observes that, in Sudan, infrastructure projects such as dams have served as a means for state building and for the broadening of “elite accumulation and control”. In their study of hydrological infrastructure in Vietnam, Evers and Benedikter write of a “concrete mafia” [15] of well-connected construction firms that derive the lion’s share of the benefit from large construction projects. This bears a strong resemblance to Crow-Miller et al.’s [3] description of the “Chinese Water Machine” as a network of government and nongovernment entities and individuals who “pursue concrete-heavy water infrastructure projects that serve the political and economic agendas of the Machine’s constituent parts”.

There are also ideological reasons for which states invest in large, visible manifestations of their power. Mukerji [16], for example, describes the role of “powerful and showy” infrastructure in consolidating state power in seventeenth-century France. As Scott observed in Seeing Like a State [17], infrastructure simultaneously serves to symbolize the “high modernist” ideology of contemporary states while also making people and nature “legible” and amenable to political control.

As mechanisms of state power, infrastructure works are also frequently subject to political contestation and resistance. Barnes [18], for example, describes how farmers in Egypt actively circumvent large-scale water management projects through the use of small-scale technologies, such as pumps, to divert irrigation water from regions and crops earmarked by the state for intensification. Meehan [19,20], meanwhile, describes an assemblage of everyday technologies that households employ to direct and utilize the productive forces (specifically water) for household consumption and production, undermining state infrastructure and reducing the capacity of the state to deliver water for commercial use. Bryant and Bailey argue that just as infrastructure can serve as “nodes of control” for states or ruling groups, there exist as well “nodes of resistance”, or “infrastructure that potentially serves as the basis for autonomous local community livelihoods and social organization” [11].

This study examines contestation and resistance around infrastructure through the lens of what Kerkvliet calls “everyday politics”, a concept he develops in his work on the Philippines and Vietnam [21,22]. Unlike the formal world of electoral politics, everyday politics involve, in Kerkvliet’s words, “little or no organization” and consist instead of the “activities of individuals and small groups” who “indirectly and … privately endorse, modify, or resist prevailing procedures, rules, regulation, or order;”, “instead of being public or confrontational”. Kerkvliet writes, “most villagers’ struggles were surreptitious, indirect, and entwined with their everyday lives” [22]. Such a definition of everyday politics also includes the uncoordinated acts of peasant resistance described by Scott in Weapons of the Weak, including “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, [and] sabotage” [23]. As Scott emphasizes in The Moral Economy of the Peasant [24], such contentious acts of peasant resistance are often couched in the making of claims to resources and the protection of livelihoods. This point is also raised by Bryant and Bailey, who write that “grassroots actors” frequently “resort to everyday resistance techniques as part of a broader effort to protect threatened livelihoods” [11] and access to resources.

Such resistance does not necessarily entail a rejection of the state and its legitimacy; rather, as Kerkvliet notes, everyday politics, at their heart, are about the access to and distribution of resources [22]. Thus, acts of resistance or contentious politics may also convey attempts to survive, get by, or make a living by carving out access to scarce resources (such as irrigation water). It is perhaps thus best to think of such actions not merely as negative or destructive (even when they entail the sabotage of state infrastructure), but also as productive and enabling of new infrastructural configurations. In this way, they can represent subaltern forms of resistance in the form of what Dajani and Mason dub “counter infrastructure” [25]. Thus the “infrastructuring” of the state may be met with “counter-infrastructuring” from below.

2. Materials and Methods

Research for this paper was conducted in the coastal portion of northern Bến Tre province between 2014 and 2019, focusing specifically on two districts: Bình Đại and Ba Tri. Bến Tre is a rural, agricultural province that produces rice as well as fruit, sugar cane, and coconut, and it had a population of approximately 1.3 million in 2018. Due to its proximity to the sea and the fact that it is transected by numerous distributaries of the Mekong (including the Tiền, Ba Lai, and Hàm Luông rivers), most of the province is affected by elevated salinity levels (above the 0.4% concentration beyond which rice crops are adversely affected) for at least part of the year. Furthermore, the existing phenomenon of saline intrusion is expected to increase in both severity and extent over the coming decades due to climate change and sea-level rise.

These vulnerabilities have, however, drawn the attention of the Vietnamese state. Since 2000, the northern area of Bến Tre has been targeted by the government for transformation into a “freshened zone” (vùng ngọt hóa) suitable for intensive agriculture through the construction of large-scale water management infrastructure, such as dikes, dams, and sluice gates (see Figure 1). Over the same time period, the area has also seen the proliferation of saltwater shrimp farming and widespread everyday resistance to state salinity-control efforts. Such a shift to shrimp farming was especially apparent in the Bình Đại and Ba Tri districts; in 2014, the former had 17,839 hectares of aquaculture land (mainly shrimp ponds), and the latter 5855 hectares (out of a total of 47,065 hectares province-wide) [26].

The main data source for this study consists of semi-structured interviews conducted with farmers in Bến Tre. These interviews focused on production practices, farmer livelihoods, and water management strategies. In total, interviews were conducted with 22 farmers in the Bình Đại and Ba Tri districts between 2014 and 2016 (see

Table 1. Summary of Interviews.

Interviewee Number	Age	Sex	District	Primary Livelihood(s)	Interview Date	Pseudonym in Text
1	50	M	Ba Tri	Shrimp, cattle	October 2014	Lâm
2	32	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp	October 2014	-
3	65	M	Ba Tri	Shrimp, cattle	October 2014	Anh
4	43	M	Ba Tri	Shrimp	October 2014	-
5	70	F	Bình Đại	Ducks	January 2015	-
6	39	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp	January 2015	Cường
7	71	M	Bình Đại	Coconut	January 2015	Minh
8	57	M	Bình Đại	Coconut	January 2015	-
9	45	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp, coconut	January 2015	-
10	84	M	Bình Đại	Coconut, shrimp	March 2015	-
11	48	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp	March 2015	-
12	46	F	Bình Đại	Shrimp	July 2015	Bình
13	50	M	Bình Đại	Rice	July 2015	-
14	46	F	Bình Đại	Shrimp	July 2015	Hoa
15	40	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp	July 2015	-
16	46	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp, coconut	July 2015	Đức
17	41	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp	July 2015	-
18	45	M	Bình Đại	Shrimp, ducks	July 2015	-
19	41	F	Bình Đại	Pigs, cattle, shrimp	July 2015	-
20	59	F	Bình Đại	Shrimp, trading	July 2015	-
21	64	M	Ba Tri	Rice, coconut, cattle	June 2016	Thịnh
22	52	F	Ba Tri	Rice	June 2016	-

). During this time, I conducted seven research trips to the area, each approximately one week in duration. This was followed by a short follow-up visit in June 2019.

It is important to note that this group of interviewees does not represent a random sample of the region’s population. Interviewees were instead recruited purposively, with a focus on those involved in shrimp farming, and opportunistically, based on their willingness to speak with a foreign researcher about their experiences. Thus, while the interviews are used to interpret the farmers’ responses to state infrastructure projects and the motivations underlying their livelihood strategies, they are not used to draw statistical inferences about any larger population.

When permitted by respondents, interviews were recorded, translated, and transcribed. When recording was not permitted or feasible, detailed notes were prepared after the fact. Interview notes and transcripts were analyzed using NVivo qualitative data analysis software and coded for key themes and ideas. In order to protect the anonymity of the research participants, pseudonyms are used for all interviewees quoted below.

To supplement these primary accounts, I use archival documents, news articles, and project reports to document the official narratives, rationales, and stated interests driving infrastructure projects in Bến Tre. These documents were also analyzed and coded for key themes. This secondary research was conducted primarily between 2014 and 2016 at institutions including the Vietnam National Archives Center II, the Southern Institute for Water Resources Planning, and the Southern Institute for Water Resources Research, all in Ho Chi Minh City.

3. Results

3.1. Infrastructure, the State, and Water Management

To answer the first research question about the drivers behind state investment in infrastructure projects, I analyzed secondary data, including government reports, for information about key projects in Bến Tre. Special attention was paid to the rationales for such projects expressed by state actors, and key quotations were extracted from the data to illustrate those views.

Over the past century, the succession of states that have ruled Southern Vietnam have made repeated efforts to overcome the natural limits on agriculture in the Bến Tre region through the control of tidal flows and saline intrusion. The French colonial government, for example, invested in the construction of works in Băng Cung, which successfully carved out a “casier” for intensive rice production in the 1930s [27], but this was relatively small in scale. After Vietnam’s independence and partition in 1954, the government of South Vietnam, with support from the United States, continued to build irrigation and salinity-control projects in Bình Đại and Ba Tri, some of which became the targets of attacks by Viet Cong guerillas [28]. In 1970, the American consulting firm PAE International drafted a comprehensive water management scheme for the province, which proposed the construction of “one large earth fill dam, approximately 600 m in length … across the Ba Lai River” [29], as well as 33 smaller salinity-control dams, the effect of which would be to seal off a large portion of northern Bến Tre from the influence of the tides and allow for the widespread adoption of high-yielding rice varieties, such as IR8 (the so-called “miracle rice”) [29].

Such large-scale plans were, however, never implemented during the war, due in part to Bến Tre’s status as one of the most hotly contested provinces in the Mekong Delta. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the new communist government in Hanoi inherited a province on the brink. At the end of the war, food shortages were a concern across the country, but the threat was particularly acute in Bến Tre. According to the official history of the province, the “biggest and most pressing problem” for the new authorities was that of feeding the province’s population of over one million [30]. To resolve this perennial food crisis, the new authorities invested heavily in the construction of new irrigation systems, which served to convey fresh water from the Hàm Luông and Tiền rivers to coastal districts such as Bình Đại and Ba Tri. The 1980s and 1990s saw modest investments in salinity-protection infrastructure, such as at Dinh Điền (1978) and Rạch Nò (1980), Vàm Hồ (1990), Châu Phú (1993), and Nhà Thờ (1998) [31]. Similarly, in 1997, a dike was constructed in the Thạnh Phú district that protected more than 6500 ha from saline intrusion, allowing for the cultivation of multiple crops per year [32]. However, the impact of these projects was minor and confined to an area immediately behind the works themselves.

In the late 1990s, however, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development revisited the proposal that had been raised three decades earlier for the construction of a salinity-control dam at Ba Lai. A new structure—consisting of a metal and concrete barrier that spans 84 m and includes 10 individual gates and a 554 m long earthen dam, which is connected to the gate complex by a small island in the middle of the channel—was designed by the state-owned engineering firm HEC-2 and erected by a group of state-linked construction companies, including Công ty Tàu Quốc 2, Công ty Xây dựng 4, and Công Ty Xây Dựng Thuỷ Lợi Tiền Giang, over a two-year period between 2000 and 2002 (see Figure 2) [33]. The total cost of these works was approximately USD 92 million [34]. When the gates are closed, as during the dry season, the Ba Lai structure is designed to protect 88,500 hectares of agricultural land in the Bình Đại, Giồng Trôm, and Ba Tri districts from the impacts of saltwater intrusion by essentially converting Ba Lai River into a freshwater reservoir [31].

The objective of this project was to “fundamentally transform the basic ecology of the upstream region into a freshwater ecological zone”, reducing the salinity level so that “areas that grew one crop of rice could now grow two, and areas that grew two could now grow three crops” [30]. From its depiction in official media sources, this project would appear, at first glance, to have been successful. Not only did the completion of the dam “create a comprehensive change in the appearance of the land itself”, but it also “opened up the possibility for conversion to an intensive farming model and increased crop yields” [35]. Upon completion of the Ba Lai dam, for example, farmers in the nearby Phú Long commune who had only been able to produce one “pitiful” crop of rice per year were now able to produce two crops, with a total yield of 10 tons per hectare [36]. The stage was thus set, at least according to one account in a national newspaper, for an agricultural “breakthrough” (đột phá) in the province and the pursuit of a new development strategy based firmly on intensive agriculture [36]. As the supposed catalyst for such a transition towards agricultural intensification, the Ba Lai dam had immense symbolic and political value; hence, it was presented for a mass audience in a provincial tourist guide as a symbol of the “potential and future” (tiềm năng và tương lai) of the province [37].

3.2. Everyday Politics and Counter-Infrastructuring as Livelihood

To answer the second research question about the responses of farmers to large-scale infrastructure projects, primary interview data were analyzed and coded. This analysis focused specifically on how farmers perceived the Ba Lai dam and its impact on their livelihoods. Key quotations from the interviews are used to illustrate these perceptions, and secondary journalistic sources were consulted to provide additional context.

Contrary to all expectations, however, the area cultivated under rice cultivation in Bến Tre actually declined in the years following the completion of the Ba Lai dam, despite a decade’s worth of investment in water management infrastructure designed to support and protect intensive rice agriculture. In 2000, there were approximately 55,000 hectares under rice cultivation across the province, but by 2010, that figure had dropped to only 35,000 hectares [38]. After reaching a high of 392,100 tons in 2002, after the completion of the Ba Lai dam, rice production fell steadily over the next five years, declining to 304,800 tons by 2007 [39].

While there were technical faults with the dam, its failure to produce the intended results was due primarily to social reasons, namely, the everyday politics and resistance of farmers. While the rationale for the Ba Lai dam was to dramatically expand the production of rice and other crops, such as coconut, sugar cane, and fruit, such expanded production was not a compelling proposition for farmers. Even after the completion of the Ba Lai dam, returns on rice farming remained meager. Even with fresh water in the canals, salt remained in the soil, a legacy of the saline influence. Moreover, the decrease in water circulation had an adverse effect on the water quality in the newly “freshened” zone behind the dam and dike network [40]. In 2016, a hectare of rice land yielded an average of 5.68 tons per crop across the entire delta, but that figure was only 4.71 tons in Bến Tre [39]. Moreover, average farm sizes in Bến Tre were significantly smaller than in other areas of the Mekong Delta. In 2011, for example, the average rice-farming household in Bến Tre cultivated 0.69 hectares of paddy land, compared with 1.41 for an average rice-farming household in the Mekong Delta as a whole [41]. This combination of small farm sizes and low yields meant that rice agriculture remained economically nonviable for many small farmers in Bình Đại and Ba Tri. As Đức, a farmer in Bình Đại put it, “rice is not enough to make ends meet. Rice is just 5000 đồng [or about USD 0.25] for a kilogram. How can we live on that?” (Interviewee 16).

Many farmers turned from rice to other options. Bến Tre is a major coconut producer, and coconuts are cultivated throughout the Bình Đại and Ba Tri districts. Like rice, however, coconuts have a low yield and low value. Sitting in his family’s home, Đức pointed to his neighbors, who were piling coconuts on a cart to transport to a buyer for sale. “Coconuts are just 3000 đồng a piece”, he exclaimed, “that’s just 300,000 [about USD 15] for a hundred coconuts!” (Interviewee 16). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, farmers began to turn to other forms of commodity production. Bình, a farmer in the Bình Đại district whose land borders the Ba Lai River, then newly freshened, explained how she switched her rice fields over to sugar cane production in the early 2000s. Pointing to her small field, she remarked, “for one year, if we grew rice here, we could only make about 1 million đồng [about USD 50]. But the same field could produce 5 tons of sugar cane, which we could sell for 5 million đồng”, or about USD 250. “So”, she added, “of course we were more in favor of sugar cane” (Interviewee 12). After a few years, however, the yields from sugar cane began to decline. Other interviewees shared Bình’s experience; eight others mentioned the extremely low profits that local farmers can gain from agriculture. Bình, like many of her neighbors, made the switch to a new form of production that offered the potential for even higher profits: saltwater shrimp farming.

While traditional forms of aquaculture have long been practiced in Vietnam, the cultivation of marine shrimp—mainly black tiger prawn and whiteleg shrimp—did not emerge as a significant production sector until the mid-1990s, just as Vietnam’s economic reintegration was opening up new export opportunities. Shrimp farming exploded across the Mekong Delta in the 1990s and 2000s, beginning in the Cà Mau Peninsula and spreading rapidly. Often this was in direct contravention to official land-use plans and required the circumvention or direct sabotage of infrastructure works that had been built over the course of previous decades. While these projects had been intended to keep salt water out of irrigation canals and rice paddies, marine shrimp need brackish water to thrive, and so shrimp farmers needed access to salt water as a resource. This conflict sometimes broke into open resistance, as occurred in Bạc Liêu province in 2001, where a crowd of shrimp farmers dismantled the Láng Trâm sluice gate [42].

In the face of the constraints to rice agriculture, shrimp aquaculture appeared to many farmers in Bến Tre as a form of salvation, offering incomes that could be exponentially higher than that from rice [43]. Lâm explained the difference this way: “My shrimp pond is only 1700 square meters [or 0.17 hectares], but in a single year, I can harvest two crops of shrimp and make as much as someone who has 4 or 5 hectares of rice” (Interviewee 1). The idea that shrimp can gain higher profits than alternative agricultural crops was also raised by nine other interviewees. Converting agricultural land to shrimp farming was, however, technically illegal, as it contravened the official land-use plan. However, this did not deter farmers such as Lâm and Đức. As the latter put it, “people are hungry, we are poor, we have to bear that without help from the government, so we grow shrimp spontaneously”. With shrimp, he explained, “there is still hope to change our life. Those other ways [growing rice and coconuts] are no way to live” (Interviewee 16).

Land conversion was, however, a costly process, entailing significant investments in transforming the biophysical forces of production. To dig out ponds, for example, farmers had to hire earth movers (called “Kobe” machines, named after their Japanese manufacturer), which could cost between VND 20 and 30 million (or from USD 1000 to 1500). Add to that sum the fees for shrimp stock and other inputs, and the costs could reach upwards of VND 50–60 million (Interviewee 14). In total, seven of those interviewed mentioned the high investment costs of shrimp aquaculture. This gave an edge to wealthier farmers (and those with more land, who could borrow against their holdings), but even modest farmers made the transition. Many invested all the capital they could muster in this new production system, and in transforming their immediate biophysical environments to make that production possible, even if doing so meant going into debt or mortgaging land. Debt was mentioned by six interviewees. As one shrimp farmer in Bình Đại explained to a journalist in 2013, “I borrowed 100 million đồng [or about USD 5000] from the bank, and to do that I had to put up my land-use certificate as collateral. I have a child who is going to school in Hồ Chí Minh City, and I have to use some money to support him. What remains I’m putting into raising whiteleg shrimp. It will never be enough if I just have these coconut trees, which are always failing anyway”. “The situation of my family is very difficult”, he continued; “it will take 50 million đồng to convert the land to shrimp ponds, but my household has six people now, six mouths to feed, and with all the other costs we have to bear, I must take this chance” [44].

It is important to reiterate that this shift from agriculture to shrimp aquaculture took place after the completion of the Ba Lai dam, which was designed to transform the water conditions in the river and canals so that they would be fresh year round. Marine shrimp, however, need salt water, and thus would-be shrimp farmers had to invest in technologies that would allow them to access sources of salt water within the new hydrological conditions created by the dam. Taking advantage of a natural feature of Bến Tre’s estuarine hydrology, farmers drilled wells to tap into sources of saline groundwater. They then used diesel-powered pumps and PVC piping to fill their ponds with this saline water, even as the canals and rivers around them were becoming fresh due to the construction of the Ba Lai dam and other salinity-control works. Tapping into saline groundwater had an added advantage for shrimp farmers, as this water source was free of the pollutants that had accumulated in the Ba Lai river and the irrigation canals it feeds [40].

Such efforts represent a form of counter-infrastructuring, in which the makeshift infrastructure of shrimp farmers (illicit wells, pumps, and tubing) become a “node of resistance” to larger infrastructure projects, or to the state’s “nodes of control”. In doing so, farmers engage in everyday politics around the distribution and nature of water resources. The surreptitious and evasive nature of this resistance sets it apart from the kind of direct confrontation that occurred in Bạc Liêu. However, it poses no less of a challenge to the infrastructural vision embodied in the Ba Lai dam and other water-control works.

The story of Cường, a farmer in Bình Đại who now cultivates three shrimp ponds on the banks of the Ba Lai River, just upstream of the Ba Lai dam, is illustrative of this trend. While Cường and his family had previously cultivated rice, they found little success, even after completion of the dam in 2002. In 2004, they hired an earthmover to dig out their first shrimp pond, and then in 2006, they dug out two more. Because the river itself had become fresh year round with the construction of the dam, he drilled a well to access salt water from underground. “There is only fresh water now”, he explained, pointing to the river, “that’s why we have to get salt water from the well, since it isn’t out there in nature anymore” (Interviewee 6). In total, 13 interviewees mentioned either drilling such illicit wells themselves or knew of neighbors who had.

The cumulative impact of these everyday technologies and practices has been enormous, serving to subvert the adaptation strategy pursued by the Vietnamese state, as embodied in the Ba Lai dam. Even as this structure was being built, both shrimp farming and the technologies necessary to make such production possible were proliferating rapidly. Between 2000 and 2005, the area under saltwater shrimp cultivation in Bến Tre increased from 18,696 hectares to 32,253 hectares [45], and the value of overall aquaculture outputs increased from VND 800 billion to 2.1 trillion (or approximately USD 1 billion) [38], with the Bình Đại district (much of which lies in the scope of the Ba Lai project) being the largest overall producer of farmed shrimp in the province. In 2013, it was estimated by the local government that there were 1677 saltwater wells in the Bình Đại district alone, supporting an estimated 730 hectares of saltwater shrimp ponds [46]. As a district official noted, however, “those are just preliminary statistics; the actual number could be much higher” [47].

Because “rice cannot compete with other crops”, as a 2015 report by the Bến Tre government found, people “spontaneously changed the use of land (and of rice land in particular) in contravention of the prescribed procedures” [48]. As Cao Văn Viết, the vice director of the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, put it in 2013, “People seek immediate benefits (lợi trước mặt) without looking at the long-term negative consequences” of their actions [49]. Standing amidst his shrimp ponds, on the banks of the “freshened” Ba Lai River, Cường put the competing perspectives this way: “We just care about the present. You know, that’s the farmer… We just care about having money and food to eat, but the government cares about the future, about long-term development”. While the timeframe of the individual farmer might be focused on immediate returns, “the government is thinking about hundreds of years in the future”, which is why, he reckoned, “they spent a lot of money on this”, he said, flicking his finger towards the Ba Lai dam, looming in the distance (Interviewee 6).

3.3. Crackdown, Conflict, and Resistance

To answer the third research question on the forms that farmer resistance to infrastructure may take and the long-term viability of such resistance, primary interview data were again coded and analyzed. These data both illustrate the key strategies in which farmers engage and the responses of state actors to these strategies. Once again, key quotations are drawn from the interviews to illustrate forms of farmer resistance and state response, and secondary sources, including journalistic reports and government documents, are used to provide additional context.

By the early 2010s, nearly a decade after the construction of the Ba Lai dam, it seemed that the purpose of this infrastructure project was nearly totally undermined. This is similar to how Kerkvliet describes resistance to and the collapse of collective farming. However, unlike the collectives, the Vietnamese state did not simply abandon its attempts to encircle Bến Tre with water-control infrastructure in the face of such everyday resistance. Instead, the 2010s saw a resurgent effort by the Vietnamese state to expand salinity-control infrastructure in the Mekong Delta and crack down on noncompliant forms of cultivation and everyday strategies of resource access.

In the years between 2010 and 2015, authorities launched a new wave of infrastructure projects, motivated by renewed concerns at the level of the central government over Vietnam’s long-term food security. This wave of infrastructure construction was accompanied by a crackdown aimed at reining in “plan-breaking” (phá vỡ quy hoạch), as violations of the official land-use plan were described in the official parlance of the Vietnamese state. One proximate cause for this renewed set of interventions was the food price crisis of 2007–2008, which heightened attention at the upper echelons of the Vietnamese state to issues of food security and climate change [50]. This shock, coupled with the rising threat of climate change, drew the attention of the Vietnamese state back to the challenges of food security, and Bến Tre—with its inordinate exposure to the impacts of climate change, and sea-level rise in particular—once again became the focus of its infrastructural interventions.

On the ground, this heightened concern would take two forms: the more stringent application of land-use planning to protect agricultural land and constrain the conversion of rice paddies to shrimp ponds, and the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at ensuring the long-term viability of intensive rice production in the province, even in the low-lying coastal areas most directly threatened by sea-level rise. In the immediate aftermath of the food crisis, the Vietnamese government launched a number of new large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at preventing saline intrusion and maximizing rice production in the Mekong Delta. In 2012, the prime minister’s office issued a new water resources development plan for the Mekong Delta region, which committed VND 107,700 billion (equivalent to over USD 5 billion) to the construction of hydraulic works, such as sea dykes, flood-control systems, and irrigation canals intended to mitigate the impact of climate change and maintain the region’s high level of agricultural output [51].

Among the largest of these projects was a new set of dikes and sluice gates in Bến Tre, which was intended to complete the work begun with the Ba Lai dam. The construction of this project, dubbed the North Bến Tre Irrigation System, was launched in 2010 under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The project consists of a network of dikes and sluice gates designed to completely seal off a large portion of northern Bến Tre (namely, the Bình Đại, Giồng Trôm, and Ba Tri districts) from the influence of the tides. In total, the North Bến Tre project encompasses 133 km of new dikes, 7 large gates, and 18 smaller gates, for an estimated total cost of VND 7.5 trillion (or about USD 330 million) over ten years, initially scheduled for completion between 2010 and 2020 [52]. The stated objectives of the project were to complete the process of environmental transformation begun with the construction of the Ba Lai dam, to seal off most of northern Bến Tre from the influence of the tides, and to create a freshened zone encompassing 139,000 hectares. While the government of Vietnam funded the construction of gates at Định Trung and Sơn Đốc 2 (completed in 2014 and 2015, respectively), it also began negotiations with the Japanese government on funding the remainder of the project.

A 2013 report, prepared by the Southern Institute for Water Resources Planning (a Vietnamese government office in Ho Chi Minh City) in collaboration with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), laid out the rationale for the North Bến Tre project: “The objective of the project is to protect the major industry, which is agriculture, and the people’s life of the North Bến Tre area from the threat of saline intrusion being caused by sea level rise under climate change, whereby [it will] serve for socio-economic development for the Bến Tre Province in general”, and in the project site in particular [53]. This intervention was justified by the extreme vulnerability of Bến Tre to the impact of climate change and sea-level rise; as the report puts it, “North Bến Tre is one of the most affected areas by saline water” but “[w]ith the high level of salinity, fruits which are very famous product in this area and also paddy will be seriously affected” [53]

In the wake of the food price crisis, the government also issued new, more stringent guidelines on land-use planning in an effort to stem the unauthorized conversion of agricultural land to other uses. In 2009, the prime minister issued a policy directive that called for 3.8 million hectares of rice-growing land across the country to be preserved as a permanent “fund” (quỹ), to be “kept and strictly protected” [54]. According to these new guidelines, provinces were required to develop detailed land-use plans that conformed to national land-use targets and submit them to the prime minister for approval. In Bến Tre, the rice production target for 2020 was set in 2011 as 33,000 hectares, of which 31,000 were to be devoted to intensive production (of at least two crops per year) [55]. These objectives were laid out on a land-use map, produced by the province and approved by the central government, which shows the target areas for different forms of production in 2020 [52].

Complying with these directives and realizing the vision of a highly productive “freshened zone” in North Bến Tre required not just state investments in infrastructure, or the issuing of official guidelines and policy papers. Rather, transforming the province into an area of intensive agricultural production would require a crackdown on noncompliant land use (i.e., “plan-breaking”). This campaign was largely carried out by provincial rather than local (district or commune level) officials, for the simple reason that many local officials were involved in shrimp farming themselves and were thus more than willing to turn a blind eye to violations of the land-use plan (Interviewee 1). Thus, the enforcement of these new restrictions was carried out by public security personnel sent from the province, along with officials from the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. These campaigns were driven by the issuance of a new set of guidelines by the national government in 2013, which outlined strict punishments for “plan-breaking” in the aquaculture sector [55].

The first of these sanctions was to fine those “plan-breakers” raising shrimp outside designated areas, with potential fines ranging from VND 20 to 30 million (or from approximately USD 1000 to 1500). In 2013 and early 2014, many shrimp farmers in Bến Tre were fined, and forced to sign pledges that they would abandon shrimp production. For shrimp farmers, this was a risk worth taking, given the profits that could be made from shrimp farming. As a 2014 newspaper article reported, many people are “willing to pay these fines because the amount is so little compared to the profit that can be made by growing shrimp” [56]. As Lâm, a shrimp farmer in the Ba Tri district explained, “we have to accept it, we can face a fine of 25 or 30 million đồng. If we want to make profit, we must spend millions of đồng as a fine” (Interviewee 1). Rather than resist paying the fines, shrimp farmers simply complied; that is, they accepted fines as a cost of doing business but then simply reverted to growing shrimp again once the authorities left. Five interviewees acknowledged paying fines themselves, while others received warnings from local authorities. This pattern was recognized by officials as well; as Phan Văn Bình, the head of the Agriculture and Rural Development office in the Thạnh Phú district explained, “with the level of the fine, people are prepared to pay it, because that amount of money isn’t as large as the very attractive profit that they can make from one harvest of shrimp”. In his estimation, 80% of the shrimp farmers who paid such fines simply continued to raise shrimp anyway [56].

The second sanction outlined in the decree, however, posed a much more serious threat to shrimp farmers and their livelihoods. According to the decree, farmers growing shrimp outside the designated area would be “forced to dismantle aquaculture enterprises that do not conform to the plan or have not been approved by the appropriate authorities” [55]. In the summer of 2014, provincial officials fanned out in key communes and physically destroyed illicit wells. Provincial security officials (công an) hacked at PVC piping with machetes, confiscated diesel pumps, and filled in wells with concrete. Six interviewees mentioned the destruction of wells, pumps, or piping in this campaign, either of their own equipment or that of neighbors. This campaign is captured in a video report from the provincial television station, which depicts a team of security officials destroying wells, interspersed with clips of government officials explaining that such plan-breaking will no longer be tolerated, alongside shots of dejected shrimp farmers [57]. In this way, the state suppression of farmers’ self-built “counter-infrastructure” had both a material dimension and a performative one.

In contrast to their attitude towards fines, shrimp farmers actively resisted these attempts to destroy the physical and technological base of shrimp production in the freshened zone. They did so first through the classic repertoire of “everyday politics” [22,23]: evasion, dissembling, and deception. A journalist pointed to the generalized nature of this practice, noting that “even farmers know how to use a diversion… so they make a fake well for the authorities to fill in, while at the real well still lies hidden in another place” [56]. Sitting on the porch of his comfortable, newly built home in the Ba Tri district, next to a small shrimp pond carved out amidst a sea of green rice paddies, another shrimp farmer named Anh offered a similar story: “They [the authorities] knew that we had dug a well, but when they asked us about it, we didn’t tell them, we said that we hadn’t dug any. When they asked whether we were telling the truth, I asked him to find it”. “We dug the well deeply”, he explained, “and then used a coconut shell to cover it, then we put soil on top to make it flat, whenever we want to use it we have to dig and then cover it again so that they can’t see it”. As a result, his well remained undamaged. “We just pump water at night and during the day we cover it again”, he explained (Interviewee 3).

Such destruction did not automatically direct shrimp farmers’ energies back into officially permitted forms of agriculture. Rather, they responded with a sort of “counter- infrastructuring”, buying new pumps and re-digging wells that had been filled with concrete, but this time carefully concealing them. Newspaper accounts, for example, describe shrimp farmers hiding wells and pumps under beds, or even in outhouses [56]. Minh, a shrimp farmer in his 70s from the Bình Đại district, explained:

“The authorities imposed a ban on using salt water. They don’t allow us to build new ponds and they stopped us from pumping salt water. But I have a pump in my house, and they don’t control what I do in my house. I drilled a well right inside my bedroom. At night, when everyone’s asleep, I run a pipe out to my pond, and then take it back inside at 4:00 A.M.”

The authorities, he continued, “can control it out there, I still can stay inside my house and pump water into the pond at night”. After all, he asked rhetorically, “how we can raise shrimp without salt water?” (Interviewee 7).

The reason that farmers continued to embark on such a risky strategy, investing resources into the reconstruction of illicit assemblages of wells, pumps, and pipes, was simple: they saw no alternative. Converting the shrimp ponds back to fields for agricultural production, as per the thrust of government food security and land-use policy, would require substantial investments of time and capital that offered little prospect of economic return. As Cường, the shrimp farmer on the banks of the Ba Lai River lamented, “how can we grow rice with this land?” “If we want to grow rice”, he continued, “we need to hire machines [earth movers] to fill in the ponds”. “Even then”, he continued, “the soil is still salty, and it probably takes 10 more years to grow plants again”. Instead of converting his ponds back to agriculture, Cường redrilled his well after the authorities filled it with concrete, but this time relocated the well to a concealed location. When asked what would happen if forced by the authorities to finally stop growing shrimp, once and for all, he shrugged: “I don’t know what I’d do” (Interviewee 6).

Not a single person interviewed had permanently abandoned marine shrimp farming due to the crackdown. For shrimp farmers, such counter-infrastructuring is not explicitly political, in that it is conceptualized as a rejection of the state or its legitimacy. Rather, it represents a range of everyday strategies by which farmers find a way to make a living, even when doing so contravenes state policies or requires the subversion of state-constructed infrastructure. For many farmers, their ability to act was constrained by debt and other economic pressures, which left them with little choice but to engage in acts of everyday resistance.

Just down the road from Cường, a shrimp farmer named Bình explained that she and her family made the switch in 2011, hiring earth movers to dig out their coconut grove and making two ponds in their place. “I saw other people making big profits”, of up to several hundred million đồng per pond, she recounted, “so I wanted that too. I did not know whether I could make the same profit, but I hoped so and that’s why I dug the pond. I hoped I my life could be changed like others”. More than anything, she said, she and her husband were determined “not to let ourselves live in the cycle of poverty forever” (Interviewee 12). However, as Bình explained, she and her husband had fallen deeply into debt as a result of a string of failed shrimp harvests, and owed VND 200 million (or about USD 10,000). Despite this debt, however, she continued to invest in shrimp farming, and had just restocked her pond:

“I have to keep trying, otherwise we have no money to pay off our debts. It is only shrimp which can help to pay off debts now… If we sell [our land] now, we will have nothing left. Working for other people does not pay enough, and so we have to try to pay the debts and keep our land… God would not let people fail constantly, and we have been in misery for a long time, so there will be a day that we will earn a lot to compensate for what we have lost… If we succeed once [with a good shrimp harvest], we will earn hundreds of millions of đồng and pay off our debts.”

In order to carry out this plan, however, she needed to keep farming shrimp. “The authorities banned shrimp farming”, she recounted, “but we begged them because we were so poor, we begged them to allow us to raise shrimp for two more years”. As a result, she had been able to avoid a fine, for the moment. With help from her son, who worked in Hồ Chí Minh City and sent money home each month, which they used to buy shrimp stock, and from their neighbor, who had dug five wells and let them tap into one of his to fill their pond with salt water, they were once again rolling the dice and hoping for a successful harvest. “Then”, she said hopefully, “we will pay off our debts and we will change to another crop” (Interviewee 12).

Such acts of resistance pose a grave threat to the larger North Bến Tre project. This dynamic is illustrated by the case of Hoa, a shrimp farmer in Bình Đại. From her porch loomed a newly constructed sluice gate, which blocked the flow of salt water from the Mekong into the neighboring irrigation canal. Before the gate, one of a series constructed between 2012 and 2015 as part of the North Bến Tre project, she could simply access salt water as it flowed unimpeded into the canal. With the construction of the gate, however, she found herself, and her shrimp ponds, inside the newly freshened zone. “In here”, she explained, “we’re supposed to farm rice or coconut”, but on the other side of the gate, “people are allowed to keep growing shrimp”. She was, however, able to overcome the impact of this massive and expensive piece of infrastructure with a simple bit of ingenuity. When asked how she was able to keep raising the shrimp in her pond, despite the construction of the dam, she pointed to a length of PVC piping, which ran, she explained, to a point out beyond the gate, where there was still fresh water. Rather than relying on a well, she explained, “I pump the water in from out there, and into my ponds here” (Interviewee 14).

Like Bình, however, Hoa’s resistance was motivated not by the attractiveness of shrimp farming per se, but by the lack of other viable options for her and her family. She had, she explained, experienced several disease outbreaks in her shrimp ponds, and lost harvests as a result. “In reality”, she said, “we don’t gain anything [from shrimp farming] but just lose a lot and we keep moving backward”. Nevertheless, she was continuing to grow shrimp and had recently spent about VND 50 million (or about USD 2500) on feed and stock for a new shrimp crop. “We are trying”, she explained, “to regain the money we lost” and thus break the cycle of debt with a good harvest. When asked why she did not abandon shrimp farming and switch back to rice, she explained that doing so would be as much or even more expensive than gambling on another shrimp crop. “I would have to hire a Kobe machine [an earth mover] to dig the soil and cover the pond, or pump sand in from the riverbed… Just like when we had to drill wells to get salt water for shrimp farming, if we want to grow rice again, we’ll have to flatten out the land so that we can scatter rice seed”.

Engaging in such practices, such as by digging ponds for shrimp or filling them in for rice cultivation, requires, however, both capital and an economic rationale on the part of the individual producer. As Hoa concluded, “no matter what we do”, speaking either to the possibility of raising shrimp or going back to rice, “we need money to do it”, along with a plausible pathway to development to justify the investment (Interviewee 14).

In recognition of this unwillingness to make such investments in transforming the land back to rice agriculture (and in lieu of official support for such reconversion), though authorities banned the digging of new ponds, the drilling of wells, and the pumping of saline groundwater, they permitted and promoted the adoption of another alternative crop in existing ponds: giant freshwater prawns (tôm càng xanh) [58]. These can be cultivated in existing ponds, thus sparing shrimp farmers the immediate expense of converting their land back to agricultural production. The cultivation of freshwater prawns thus serves as an intermediate production strategy, balancing the priorities of the state—in halting the degradation of soils and their future agricultural capacity—with the economic needs of farmers.

Freshwater prawns, however, take a much longer time to mature than their saltwater counterparts (six months, compared with just two) and fetch a lower price (Interviewee 1). Five interviewees mentioned either cultivating freshwater or knowing of others who had, and all but one expressed skepticism about its economic viability. Correspondingly, few saltwater shrimp farmers have made the switch to freshwater prawn production; even as late as 2021, only 1800 hectares of land were being used for freshwater prawn cultivation in Bến Tre, or about 3% of the total area used for aquaculture in the province [59]. Moreover, the promotion of freshwater prawn makes the business of rooting out and eliminating nonconforming production systems difficult, as saltwater shrimp ponds and freshwater ponds look the same at first glance. Thus, the existence of this intermediate production strategy provides cover for marine shrimp farmers, rendering their activities “illegible” to the state and its agents [17].

4. Discussion

As climate change intensifies, the long-term viability of salinity-control infrastructure is increasingly called into question. In the face of rising seas, intensifying saline intrusion, and frequent droughts, some prominent officials have advocated a shift in tactics, away from the prioritization of water control and intensive rice production in the coastal Mekong Delta. Instead, they call for a new strategy of “living with salinity” (sống chung với mặn), such as by adapting to changing conditions and embracing saltwater shrimp farming [60]. Such a shift has received official support from some of the highest levels of the Vietnamese policy establishment. In 2017, Vietnam’s new Minister of Agriculture, Nguyễn Xuân Cường, argued that while the “higher seawater level caused by the climate change” would bring challenges to Vietnamese agriculture, it “will allow us to expand the shrimp farms” that produce Vietnam’s “leading agricultural product”, in the form of high-value seafood exports [61]. In the same year, the central government of Vietnam adopted Resolution 120, a master plan for the “Sustainable and Climate-Resilient Development of the Mekong Delta”. The resolution calls for a reduction in the area under rice cultivation in the delta and a “shift from basic agriculture production, of mainly rice, to the development of diversified agricultural industry to meet market demand” [62].

The intensification of climate change, however, poses massive challenges to Bến Tre, and not just in the coastal zone, but farther and farther inland. Severe drought has plagued the province in recent years. Coupled with rising seas, this has produced extreme saline intrusion. Investment in salinity-control works continues, despite the focus on “living with salinity”. In 2013, the JICA funded the “Project for Climate Change Adaptation for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development in the Coastal Mekong Delta”, which included preliminary research on the North Bến Tre project, and in 2015 prepared a preparatory survey for the proposed Bến Tre Water Management Project. In July of 2017, the governments of Vietnam and Japan signed an agreement in which Japan pledged USD 216 million in loans to support the construction of sluice gates and other salinity-control infrastructure in the province. Four large gates, at An Hóa, Bến Rớ, Tân Phú, and Bến Tre, are slated for construction by 2023 [63].

Meanwhile, Bến Tre continues to suffer through devastating droughts that make the farming of rice, as well as sugar, coconut, and other crops, increasingly untenable. The effects of these droughts were particularly apparent in 2019, when the author and a research assistant revisited the area, meeting again with a rice farmer in his 60s named Thịnh, with whom we had spoken in 2016 (Interview 21). As Thịnh explained, yields had fallen steadily, as fresh water in the irrigation canals, routed from the Ba Lai River some 15 km away, dried up during that year’s dry season. Some of his neighbors, he explained, had simply left, seeking work in Hồ Chí Minh City and its neighboring industrial zones. Meanwhile, an excavator was operating in a neighboring field, digging up a new shrimp pond. “Why don’t you and your wife do the same?”, we asked. “We’re old”, he replied, “and besides, we don’t have the money” (Interviewee 21, reinterviewed in June 2019).

5. Conclusions

This study set out to answer three interconnected questions around the contentious everyday politics of infrastructure in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, focusing on the construction of the Ba Lai dam and associated infrastructure in Bến Tre province. The sections above have drawn on primary and secondary data to offer specific explanations around the motivations for state infrastructure projects, responses to these projects on the part of farmers, and the future prospects of large-scale infrastructure projects in regard to the case study region. However, these findings can also be formulated into general hypotheses that can be applied and tested in other contexts.

In regard to the first research question on the drivers of state investment in large-scale infrastructure projects, this study demonstrates that a succession of state authorities (from the French colonial era to the contemporary Socialist Republic of Vietnam) have long engaged in water management and infrastructure schemes aimed at limiting saline exposure and protecting agricultural land in the coastal zone, with the aim of boosting food production. These efforts have culminated in recent plans to seal off a substantial portion of Bến Tre through the construction of the Ba Lai dam and associated water management infrastructure, creating a “freshened zone” suitable for intensive agriculture. From this case, we can hypothesize that state concerns over food security serve as an important driver of large-scale infrastructure projects. These concerns are heightened by global climate change, and they also intersect with the political–economic actors of state-connected actors, such as construction and engineering firms. For these reasons, we can expect continued investment by states in large-scale infrastructure projects, especially in coastal zones affected by global climate change and in areas considered important to national food security.

As for the second research question on the drivers of farmer resistance to state infrastructure projects, the data presented above illustrate that small-scale farmers have a limited ability to benefit from intensive agriculture. Despite massive state outlays on infrastructure projects designed to transform hydrological conditions and allow year-round access to fresh water for irrigation, farmers have instead continued to pursue the export-oriented farming of marine shrimp, as it offers the potential for higher returns. These findings highlight the importance of economic factors in shaping farmers’ perception of state infrastructure projects and their responses to such projects. We can hypothesize that, in other contexts, when such large infrastructure projects impose a cost on farmers, such as by limiting their capacity to engage in economic activities that offer substantial returns, such projects are likely to encounter farmer resistance.

Finally, in response to the third question on the forms that resistance takes and its prospects for long-term success, the above study has documented numerous individual acts of “counter-infrastructuring” on the part of farmers, such as the digging of illicit wells to access saline groundwater for shrimp farming. It also details the extensive crackdown undertaken by Vietnamese authorities on such “plan-breaking” activities, arguing that the destruction of illegal wells and other forms of counter-infrastructure by authorities demonstrates the stakes of small-scale resistance and the challenges it poses to state strategies for development and climate change adaptation. From this case study, we can hypothesize that, in similar contexts, farmer resistance to large-scale infrastructure will also take the form of everyday politics. Specifically, we can expect that farmers will engage in the surreptitious, unorganized forms of everyday politics that undermine, subvert, or circumvent large-scale infrastructure projects without subjecting individual farmers to the full extent of state repression.

As the above account has demonstrated, these acts of resistance and subversion are not rooted in an ideological challenge to state power itself, or to the infrastructures that symbolize the state; rather, they arise from the everyday practices of households attempting to survive within the constraints and incentives imposed by Vietnam’s economic liberalization and integration into global markets. Despite their relatively modest scale and aims, these everyday acts of counter-infrastructuring can serve to undermine large water management schemes and thus foil state strategies for development, food security, and climate change adaptation. Just as highland communities in Southeast Asia have long practiced what Scott [64] calls the “art of not being governed”, so too have shrimp farmers in Bến Tre developed a similar repertoire of practices to counteract state policies of “freshening” the coastal zone.

In Weapons of the Weak, Scott argues that such everyday practices can serve, when “multiplied many thousand-fold”, to “make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up … in the capital” [23]. By elucidating the motives for farmer resistance, which are rooted in economic rather than ideological or explicitly political aims, and the means they employ (namely, covert and largely uncoordinated acts of counter-infrastructuring), this study contributes to our understanding of environmental politics in Vietnam and the future viability of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as those aimed at adapting to climate change and sea-level rise in the coastal Mekong Delta and other regions facing similar threats.