Strategic Spatial Planning for Social-Ecological Systems: Implementing the Mekong Delta Plan in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, 2019-2021

The data in this ReShare archive presents the governance part of the NERC project. It focussed on how governance arrangements modulate systems resilience. To halt the environmental decline of the delta, the Vietnamese government has developed a strategic spatial plan, which has led to significant changes in the policy and planning landscape. Drawing on insights from the literature on strategic spatial planning (Hersperger et al. 2019), social-ecological systems resilience (Wyborn and Bixler 2013), and policy implementation (Conteh 2011), we focussed on three areas of enquiry that explored changing central-local government relationships: (i) how provincial officials understand and comply with central government policies to steer economic and environmental sustainability of the Mekong delta; (ii) how the re-organisation of the planning architecture, principally influenced by changes in the Law on Planning and the attempt to create a new regional governance mechanism, is perceived on the local governance level; (iii) to understand the effectiveness of these planning changes and the position of local government towards them, and therefore to understand challenges and opportunities for implementation. To this end we sought interviews with provincial government officials directly involved in developing and implementing policies for climate resilience in the Mekong delta.