School of Earth and Environment

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

Linking institutions and ecosystem resilience in transition economies: assessing social capital and adaptive capacity within mangrove systems of rural 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 to communities and in particular for protecting coastal areas against the impacts of natural hazards, events that are projected to increase with climate change. This issue is especially 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 efforts in Vietnam is disappointing. 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 interventions. Little research has studied the interrelated nature of the links between mangroves and social capital, and the influence mangrove restoration efforts have on establishing the necessary social networks for them to be sustainable. This is increasingly salient in countries under economic transition, such as Vietnam, where many traditional practices for coping with distress have been abandoned while new strategies may not yet developed enough to provide the necessary safety nets, hence increasing vulnerability to climate change.

Guided by sustainable livelihoods and institutional analysis and development frameworks, 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 to investigate the complex relationship between mangrove resources and social capital, and the extent to which mangrove restoration efforts are influencing adaptive capacity.