Constructing Forests at Water's Edge : Mangrove Rehabilitation and More-than-human Life in theVietnamese Mekong Delta

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines mangrove rehabilitation in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta through multi-sited ethnography conducted across Trà Vinh and Sóc Trăng provinces. Drawing on multispecies political ecology, it asks how mangrove imaginaries in international and national sustainable development strategies differ from those lived and cared for by local communities, what kinds of landscapes rehabilitation produces, and what forms of life emerge in the process. The thesis argues that mangrove rehabilitation constitutes a distinct form of plantation: a socioecological formation that forms subjects, normalises displacement, simplifies ecological complexity, standardises species, exerts control through delegated care, and renders both forest and farmer legible to state and market logics through the same structural operations as plantation formations, despite its conservation moral register. Despite this, the Mekong Delta’s own forces – tidal rhythms, erosion, silt movement, different species – continuously exceed and redirect the projects designed to govern them. Within these conditions, a form of human-mangrove entanglement that constitute genuine companion species relationships exist. The thesis contends that the plantation and the companionship are not contradictory but complementary as the mangrove rehabilitation depends on the human-mangrove relationships the development regimes refuse to recognise.