Chapters 2 and 3 focused on Vietnam's national context, and the state governance and actors as well as society are mainly involved in national politics. But to understand the connection between narratives and power, we need to move our analysis beyond the national context. The nation-state is indeed very important in environmental governance—in previous and later descriptions we can see how the institutions form actual realities on the ground. Nevertheless, Vietnam as a nation has always been embedded in transnational flows, connected with international actors and formed part of processes that cannot be assigned to only one scale.

As Tsing (2005, p. 1) states, “Global connections are everywhere” and contends that we reflect on our methods to find and understand the universal. We must resist the temptation to homogenize the global and heterogenize the local; instead, we must see “the global” as something that is co-made in the local, and vice versa. Sassen (2008, 2014) reassesses and disaggregates scales in her analyses because the presumption of them can bring biases into investigations. As an alternative, she scrutinizes foundational components as the starting point of her processes across scales; she puts theory at the end, and not at the beginning, of her work to truly understand the reason behind.

To avoid categorizations, I examine environmental narratives and study how they are coproduced by actors across different scales in Vietnam and beyond. My research shows that using some scales and categories is inevitable to understanding power relations. But we need to pay equal importance to processes that move across scales and to connections between actors in different geographic location. Therefore, this chapter expands the analysis on environmental narratives and the constitution of actors beyond the nation-state to the international level.

Grounding Contemporary Environmental Narratives in Historic Context

The narratives that exist today need to be understood in their historic context. Trade, migration, wars and colonialism have shaped narratives and our understanding of nature in Vietnam today. Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and many other belief systems came to Vietnam and formed unique philosophies in combination with the local animistic beliefs. These beliefs have demonstrated the nature-human relations. For example, the Yin and Yang (dương âm) belief in reference to Daoism is itself not part of a single belief system or religion, but rather the result of the different influences in Vietnam (Jamieson 1995, p. 16).