In 2011, I was on my motorbike in Hanoi when I witnessed students protesting air pollution and emissions from motorized traffic. Ten years later, in 2021, I was in Central Vietnam and the Mekong Delta and finally able to understand what environmental action means in Vietnam and which narratives and understandings are used. A lot and yet not much has changed since then. Hanoi looks different now, with its new highways, high-rises and SUVs on the streets. My friends now live in condos instead of socialist housing. They continue to strive as socialist citizens and active participants in the capitalist market economy. Power has shifted a little from INGOs to VNGOs, and the political context in Vietnam becomes harder to act in. Environmental action, in general, and climate action, in particular, are more necessary and urgent than ever before, though the action taken is still insufficient. Climate change and the human responses continue to be complex, and other crises have increasingly happened alongside climate change. Mapping the complexity and identifying all the entry points for action remains inevitable; social scientists and researchers have a responsibility alongside natural scientists and their data findings to find ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Through my research, I have sought to understand how power structures inform environmental narratives and thereby shape our understanding of the problems and solutions to ecological crises. This research is a clipping from a large landscape of knowledge needed to understand the environmental map of our world with its sociocultural contexts and political-economic implications. It uses the Area Studies approach to first understand a place in its own specificity, without drawing a theoretical blueprint for use beyond the context.

Within this specific context, I have argued that Sustainable Development is a powerful narrative that has become universal. Derived from a longstanding discourse about “development” and the debate around its meaning for different actors, Sustainable Development finds itself in the same tradition and confronted with similar critiques. Deriving from the Brundtland Commission's report in 1987, the term has since spread and has been adapted and filled with different meanings by various actors. It is now central to environmental rule in Vietnam and used by the authoritarian government and NGOs to navigate state-society relations.