School of Earth and Environment
Untitled Document

Steven Orchard Steven Orchard

Postgraduate Student

Telephone number: +44(0) 113 34 35572
Email address: eeseo@leeds.ac.uk
Room: 9.124

Qualifications

  • MRes Sustainability (University of Leeds)
  • MSc Development Anthropology (Durham University)
  • BA (Hons) Business & Economics (Northumbria University)

Project details

Project title

NGO mangrove restoration interventions and their influence on social capital: implications for climate change adaptation in coastal villages of Vietnam

Supervisors

Dr Claire Quinn and Dr Lindsay Stringer, Dr Evan Fraser (external)

Funding

ESRC 1+3 scholarship

Project outline

There is growing recognition of the advantages mangrove forests provide in protecting coastal areas against the impacts of natural hazards, events that are projected to increase with climate change. This issue is particularly important in the highly exposed coastal areas of Vietnam, with high dependence on climate sensitive agriculture and relatively low levels of development. However, the success of mangrove restoration projects is disappointing when compared to the quantity of mangroves that have been planted. A reason for this could be that conventional mangrove intervention efforts tend to focus on disaster mitigation and livelihood aspects of mangrove restoration, overlooking the social dimensions of such actions. Little research has studied the influence such interventions have on social capital, and specifically the role of NGOs in establishing the necessary social networks for interventions to be sustainable. This is increasingly salient in countries under economic transition, such as Vietnam, where many people have abandoned traditional practices for coping with distress, having not yet fully developed the necessary modern strategies required to act as a safety net.

This study will investigate the influence of NGOs on social capital, specifically the role they play in linking local and non-local actors, and the extent to which this can increase adaptive capacity. Guided by an Adaptive Co-Management (ACM) framework, and employing a comparative case study of three villages in Dung Riu, Da Loc and Giao Xuan communes, this research will use a mixed methods approach.