It is an urgent task to find a suitable approach to helping ethnic minority communities in developing countries to aid in the alleviation of poverty while at the same time conserving biodiversity and preserving and respecting traditional cultures. In the Mekong area this is of critical importance. The current situation is bleak. National governments as well as a number of international organizations focusing on rural development and poverty reduction are ineffective in terms of sustainable community development, particularly for ethnic minorities in highland areas. Their approaches are often short-term and largely top-down and based on outsiders’ ideas about how to reduce poverty. The consequence is both that the community does not benefit from the efforts and there are unwanted social impacts such as a loss of confidence (as the people are made passive rather than active members of their own development) and loss of cultural values. Natural resources are also further degraded (SPERI & MECO-ECOTRA proposal, 2005-2015).

The indigenous ethnic minority societies have the tools and practices necessary for the conservation of biodiversity as they are the traditional protectors and preservers of biodiversity (SPERI & MECO-ECOTRA proposal, 2005-2015). Specifically their botanical knowledge may hold some of the keys for the sustainable utilization of the ecosystem and its consequent conservation as it remains an important part of their cultures (SPERI & MECO-ECOTRA proposal, 2005-2015).

To aid in the process of addressing these issues, research studies are needed which look specifically at the cumulative, collective body of knowledge, experience and values held by these traditional societies (Brahy 2006). Moreover, in order to ensure a collaborative and unbiased process these researches should be undertaken without preconceived judgments, theories, or biases of the investigators (Vayda & Walters 1999; Walters 2008; Hastrup & Walters 2012; Walters 2012), and should be guided by open questions about why events occur rather than confined to possibilities prescribed by any single or simple agenda or theory (Hastrup & Walters 2012). They should aim to analyze connections between human actions and environmental changes in location and time specific contexts, ‘following causal influences back in time and, if relevant, outward in space’ (Hastrup & Walters 2012), and they should recognize that an adequate understanding of contemporary social-environmental problems can be gained only if they are seen as part of ‘a complex of interacting causes and effects’ (Vayda 1983). Such studies should also actively look for ideas that were missed when preparing for fieldwork (Vayda 1983).

It is recognized that in order to ensure comparable and reliable results, it is important that research studies have knowledge of the methodologies and designs of previous related ethnobotany studies (Belovsky et al. 2004; de Albuquerque & Hanazaki 2009), but in order not to cloud the research with an extraneous research agenda, the current study has attempted to work with the the Tày, Dzao, Sách, Kinh, Thái, Mã Liềng, H’mong, Xinh Mun ethnic communities of Northern Vietnam and Lư ethnic group from Laos to record their traditional cultural practices in the uses and conservation of native plants in a direct and unbiased manner as possible.