In this dissertation, I examine the recent conflicts over forest timber and non-timber forest resources among different social actors in a northwestern frontier valley of Vietnam. These conflicts have taken place in the context of resource ownership and management changes and the rapid development of the market economy in Vietnam's uplands after state renovation policy in 1986. Based on ethnographic data conducted in a village of Muang Tâ´c valley in 2003-2004 where the people belong to the Thái ethnic minority, the dissertation shows that like many other modernizing states in Asia, the new government of Vietnam has employed a number of strategies to control over the country upland resources since independence in 1954. In this process of 'internal territorialization', local customary forms of ownership and management institutions have been eliminated and many local ecological practices have been criminalized while forest resources have been highly controlled by centralized state forest agencies. The nationalization and institutionalization of forests in the upland areas and the simultaneous elimination of customary local institutions of ownership and management have created tension between local people and state management agencies and among the local people themselves. The problem lies in the major differences of ownership and management principles between the customary and state-led models. Unlike the ways in which forests were managed and used in the period prior to 1954, under the new ownership and management system, both local people and outsiders are no longer bound by customary management principles while state management agencies do not have the ability or 'legitimacy' to enforce the relevant rules and regulations. In a market economy context where forest products have become highly valued commodities and rural people have to struggle to find the cash required in the new socioeconomic environment, the competition among different social resource users over productive resources has intensified.

As shown in studies made in many other parts of the world, the meanings and laws defining and delimiting legal rights over forests created by state resource management agencies following policies ostensibly based on 'scientific' understandings of forests often create tensions at the local level with people whose socioeconomic and cultural life has long been tied closely to the forest. My case study allows me to offer a new perspective on the recent debate about how such tensions emerge. My case study provides a detailed account of how local people struggle to support themselves and their families by extracting forest resources that have high market value through acts that violate not only state laws but also customary practices. My study also demonstrates that conflict over forest resources is exacerbated when local people belong to an ethnic minority. Finally, I ask in the dissertation whether under given both the increased demand for forest products in a globalized economy and the tensions created by state forest policy it is possible for local people to engage in sustainable development.