Vietnam is gifted with a tremendous amount of mountains, rivers, forests and a biodiversity with species that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Forests are mainly located in mountainous areas where most of the 25 million ethnic minority people live. Over centuries these ethnic minority groups have lived in close intimacy with forests and have always been highly dependent on forests for their livelihood. This intimacy inevitably shaped value-and belief systems, traditions and institutions which are not sufficiently understood and taken into account in interventions that aim to support these groups. Government policies and plans have often been formulated and implemented in a top down manner, usually failing to capture local dynamics and needs and they have at times even been conflicting with local values and customary laws. The consequence is that ethnic minorities’ right for self determination and cultural rights have long been undermined and tended to make them outsiders of their own development. At the same time the many government interventions have not been able to reach their envisaged development results among minorities. It is widely acknowledged that ethnic minorities are the most disadvantaged groups in the Vietnamese society accounting for the lowest level of education, high levels of poverty and poor living standards and that these figures are on the increase (Baulch et al., 2002, Writenet 2006, Kimai & Garia 2007, Dang 2010). Moreover environmental degradation, forest depletion and conflicts over natural resources are recurrent problems especially in areas where ethnic minorities reside.

There is an emerging notion in Vietnam that local traditions like customary law might be essential for sound development among ethnic minorities. These are however mere  presumptions because well grounded studies to prove their importance are rare in Vietnam. At the same time Vietnam is developing at a rapid pace and local customary laws are gradually getting lost. We therefore believe it is time to take a closer look at these traditions and therefore CIRUM and IPADE conducted this research on customary law in two communes in Vietnam. First is the Muong Phang Thai commune in the Dien Bien province and second is the Dzao commune Ta Phin in Lao Cai province.