Study title

The data in this ReShare archive presents the governance part of the NERC project. It focussed on how governance arrangements modulate systems resilience. To halt the environmental decline of the delta, the Vietnamese government has developed a strategic spatial plan, which has led to significant changes in the policy and planning landscape. Drawing on insights from the literature on strategic spatial planning (Hersperger et al. 2019), social-ecological systems resilience (Wyborn and Bixler 2013), and policy implementation (Conteh 2011), we focussed on three areas of enquiry that explored changing central-local government relationships: (i) how provincial officials understand and comply with central government policies to steer economic and environmental sustainability of the Mekong delta; (ii) how the re-organisation of the planning architecture, principally influenced by changes in the Law on Planning and the attempt to create a new regional governance mechanism, is perceived on the local governance level; (iii) to understand the effectiveness of these planning changes and the position of local government towards them, and therefore to understand challenges and opportunities for implementation. To this end we sought interviews with provincial government officials directly involved in developing and implementing policies for climate resilience in the Mekong delta.The world's major river deltas are hotspots of agricultural production that support rural livelihoods and feed much of the global population, but as 'climate change hot spots' deltas are facing a major sustainability crisis. Specifically, there are concerns that many deltas may in the coming decades be 'drowned' by rising sea levels as the oceans warm (up to 20% of land is projected to be lost in the major deltas of south and southeast Asia alone). The process of delta 'drowning' is a slow onset hazard where relative sea-level rise progressively exacerbates fluvial and coastal flood risk while...