Project description

Title: Sustainable Management of Natural Resources in Central Viet Nam
Commissioned by: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Country: Socialist Republic of Viet Nam
Lead executing agency: Provincial People’s Committee of Quang Binh (PPC), technical line Departments Department of Agricultural and Rural Development (DARD) and Department for Planning and Investment (DPI) as implementing agencies
Overall term: 2004 to 2010

Context

From 1996 to 2002, GTZ implemented a successful food security programme in Quang Binh. To develop its achievements further in the sense of Sustainable Development, GTZ supports, since April 2004, the project “Sustainable Management of Natural Resources in Central Viet Nam”.

Objective

The rural population as well as government institutions and private service providers in Quang Binh province manage natural resources in a sustainable way.

Approach

The project develops innovate methods for a socially and ecologically sustainable management of natural resources. Thereby it contributes to the improvement of living conditions in the poorest rural areas of Quang Binh province. Lessons learnt are disseminated in the neighboring provinces in Central Viet Nam.

The outputs of the project are structured in three work areas:

• Participatory Socio-economic Development Planning
• Participatory Agricultural Extension Method and Regional Economic Development by Value Chain Promotion
• Community Forestry (Forest Protection and Development Regulations, Participatory Land Use Planning and Forest Land Allocation, Community-based Forest Management)

The challenges for the last implementation phase, and thus for the sustainability of the project approach, are to get the innovations introduced by the project officially approved by the responsible line departments (institutionalisation), and to ensure the large-scale application of these methods as standard procedure in the whole province (roll out).

Results achieved so far

In all work areas the line departments have established „Consultative Groups“ which integrate the innovate methods tested by the project into their implementation guidelines and standard procedures. Binding guidelines and technical implementation specifications are issued by official decisions of the heads of line departments. Widespread application by the technical staff of provincial and district department is ensured with the own financial resources of the departments and have so far reached (almost) all communes in the province.

To further increase the impact of the project beyond the period of the German support, and thus to improve sustainability, the “lessons learnt” of the project are systematically documented and disseminated by numerous workshops and with a bilingual project website. In close cooperation with other GTZ projects, the project team aims to disseminate the achievements in the core province of Quang Binh to other provinces (outreach). In addition, the implementation experience from the provincial level is fed into the ongoing reform agenda on the national level (leverage).

Further information

• Local website of the project
  http://www.smnr-cv.org