Reflexivity, habitus and vulnerability: Vietnamese farmers’ attribution of responsibility in a post-disaster context

Reflexivity, habitus and vulnerability: Vietnamese farmers’ attribution of responsibility in a post-disaster context

Reflexivity, habitus and

vulnerability: Vietnamese farmers’

attribution of responsibility in a

post-disaster context

Kien Nguyen-Trung

BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash Sustainable Development Institute,

Clayton Campus, Clayton, Australia

Abstract

Purpose– This article examines how farmers’ assignment of responsibility for the disaster in late 2015 – early

2016 connects with reflexivity, habitus and local vulnerability

Design/methodology/approach– This article uses semi-structured interviews with 28 disaster-affected

households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta to answer the question

Findings– This article finds out that Vietnamese farmers actively accepted their responsibility for the

disaster In their explanation, they link their action with the root causes of vulnerability embedded in their

socio-cultural traditions and collective identity

Research limitations/implications– This article makes a case for the importance of local culture and

epistemologies in understanding disaster vulnerability and responsibility attribution

Originality/value– This article is original in researching Vietnamese farmers’ responsibility attribution,

their aesthetic reflexivity, collective habitus and the socio-cultural root causes of disaster

Keywords Attribution of responsibility, Bourdieu, Disaster, Farmer, Habitus, Reflexivity, Responsibility,

Vietnam

Paper type Research paper

In early 2016, the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD), Vietnam’s rice bucket, whose production

is responsible for 95% of rice export ( General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2020 ) suffered from

a historic disaster that combined a 20-month drought and the worst-in-90-year saline

intrusion It heavily damaged the Winter–Spring rice crop (hereafter referred to as crop 3).

Crop 3 is the third rice crop of a triple cropping system, which was cultivated from December

to April in the dry season Local farmers suffered not just crop failures, economic losses, but

also food deficits, growing debt and livelihood disruption ( FAO, 2016 ; United Nations, 2016 ).

The disaster provided a great opportunity to understand how local farmers attributed

responsibilities and the underlying social, cultural and political reasons for why they did so.

Attribution of responsibility has been a topic of interest, especially in the sociology of health

and illness ( McClean, 2005 ), political science ( Arceneaux and Stein, 2006 ; Malhotra and Kuo,

Responsibility attribution

The author wants to thank Linda, Cherry and Jenny for their unconditional love, support, and

understanding Heartfelt thanks to Associate Professor Helen Forbes-Mewett and Professor

Dharmalingam Arunachalam (Monash University) for their tremendous support Thanks also go to

Monash University for assisting this work with the Monash Postgraduate Publication Award (2021)

Competing interests: The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

This work reproduces materials from Dr Kien Nguyen-Trung’s PhD thesis with permission

Author contributions: The author did all the works leading to this manuscript.

Consent for publication: All participants provided consent for publication of the data anonymously.

Funding: The author declare that Dr Kien Nguyen-Trung was received the fund from Monash

University’s Postgraduate Publication Awards to do this work

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/0965-3562.htm

Received 18 May 2022 Revised 11 November 2022

10 December 2022 Accepted 10 December 2022

Disaster Prevention and Management: An International

Journal

© Emerald Publishing Limited

0965-3562 DOI 10.1108/DPM-05-2022-0118

their roots in the historical evolution of the affected society, which could be traced back hundreds of years ( Oliver-Smith, 1999 ) or several decades ( Nguyen-Trung, 2019 ).

As a result, if limiting our analysis of attribution of responsibility to immediate single actions/events, it is likely to overlook the larger structural factors shaping why they do as they did As such, it is necessary to ask, “why do you think who is responsible for what?” This “why” question, as Lash (1993) would argue, helps research participants question their reflection on “who is responsible for disaster” and thus link the current actions to the deep-seated causes embedded in the social structures of their community ( Bankoff, 2001 , 2004 ;

Oliver-Smith et al., 2017 ) Figure 1 illustrates the link between these key concepts.

Data and methods This article draws on a case study ( Yin, 2014 ) conducted in 2018 in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) The study’s ethics application (Project number11022) was approved by Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC) in late 2017 Before conducting interviews, the author obtained permission from research participants to collect data and record the interviews Because not every farmer was familiar with the process of research ethics, oral consent was more frequently used To protect the participants, all the names of persons and villages cited in this article are pseudonyms.

The 2015–2016 disaster caused a devastating impact in 52 out of 63 Vietnam’s provinces, forcing 18 provinces to declare a State of Emergency ( Nguyen-Trung, 2021 ) Tan Hung commune in Long Phu district of Soc Trang province in the VMD was chosen for this study because of the following characteristics It is a typical agriculture-based commune, with 90.4% of its area (2,918 ha) devoted to agricultural production as of 2020 ( Nguyen-Trung, 2021 ) About 51.9% of the total 3,078 households were largely based on agriculture The commune is typical for a triple rice cropping system (cultivating three rice crops a year), with the Winter–Spring crop (or crop 3) being cultivated entirely in the dry season This crop is highly vulnerable to drought and saline intrusion and was the one affected most by the 2015–2016 disaster The commune has three ethnic groups, including the Khmer group, which makes up the largest share of the population (63.9%), followed by the Kinh population, the ethnic majority in Vietnam (35.2%) and Vietnamese Chinese (the Hoa) and others (0.2%) ( Soc Trang Division of Statistics Office, 2017 ).

As of 2018, the commune had 13.8% of households (424 households) classified as poor households and 5.1% as near-poor households (158 households) ( Tan Hung CPC, 2018 ) Under the impact of the 2015–2016 disaster, 40.3% (645 households) of total agriculture-based households in Tan Hung suffered heavy crop losses, making it the most severely affected commune in Long Phu district ( Tan Hung CPC, 2016b ; Tan Hung CPC, 2016a ).

This study uses semi-structured interviews with 28 farm households Households were selected based on three criteria: (1) They were more or less affected by the 2015–2016 drought

Figure 1

Understanding

disasters’ root causes

through aesthetic

reflexivity

DPM

vulnerability” ( Wisner, 2013 ) The importance of culture and localised knowledge production

as a barrier to farmers’ disaster-responding capability in this article contributes another structural blockage to the “circle of capacities” that aims to understand structural forces limiting or blocking people’s access to political, economic, social, human, physical and natural resources ( Wisner et al., 2012 ) Exploring local culture and their way of knowing (epistemologies) is of substantial importance in the project of decolonising disaster scholarship ( Gaillard, 2021 ) As such, by listening to, valuing and trying to “understand the plight and experience of ordinary people in everyday settings and the victims of disaster” and “who they are and where their experiences take place” ( Hewitt, 1983, p 330 ), this article contributes to the dismissal of Western discourses portraying the world as “dangerous places” ( Bankoff, 2001 ).

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Responsibility attribution