The Alignment of Traditions in Vietnamese Education and Socioeconomic Policy Making for Sustainability

• In Event: Spatial and Geographic Analysis in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Introduction & Objectives

The objective of the presentation is to adumbrate how the meaning of policy concepts and the transfer processes from policy to implementation is inevitably shaped by socio-historical traditions and tensions between these traditions. The purpose of the mapping of traditions and the alignment of traditions within the field of education and socio-economic policy making is to illuminate how conflicts inconsistencies and tensions in the meaning-making processes of policy making can be seen to a result of a incompatibility of perspectives on education, environment and development in the charted traditions.

Theoretical Framework(s)

The underlying framework for the analysis of formations within Vietnamese policy making is based on a discourse theoretical approach as it has been developed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Discourses are seen as to be specific to language cultures and to form signification systems. The tensions between different discourses, and the varied historical and cultural backgrounds within which meaning-making takes place, contribute to processes of imbrication between foreign and indigenous, which allows for a conceptualization of the spatial/geographic dynamics of globalization (Buenfil-Burgos, 2009).

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources

The underlying study of policy discourses in Vietnam builds on a mapping of patterns in the establishment of relations and discourses (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) within Vietnamese policy documents on education, socio-economic and sustainable development, environmental education, education for sustainable development (ESD). Mapping is facilitated through a qualitative analysis program, Atlas.ti, and emanates from close reading (Säfström & Östman, 1999) in which signifying chains are investigated. Based on tracings of deferred meanings (Derrida 1978), key signifiers and nodal points (Lacan, 2005) are discerned to which the meaning of policy concepts is partially deferred.

Results

Findings show that four key discourses can be discerned within socio-economic policy, education policy and the Vietnamese Agenda 21, the main sustainable development policy in the country. The four main discourses are: economist, socialist, globalist and nationalist. Key signifiers such as “socio-economic development” and “quality education” attain different and conflicting meanings when they are put in relation to nodal points of the four discerned discourses. The mapping also shows that existing tensions center around a frontline between demands associated with the socialist/nationalist discourses and the economist/globalist discourses.

Scholarly Significance

The presentation’s approach towards depicting the movement of policy from one context to another, i.e. recontextualization, deviates from other common approaches in environmental education research (EER), since its theoretical level highlights difference in relation to context. While other EER approaches focus on similarities as an expression of globalization, the underlying theoretical framework, methodology and subsequent findings are able to provide a basis for studying and providing evidence for both similarity and difference in regard to the spatial/cultural specify of meaning, since the study is based on a focus on context in which meaning-making takes place.

Author

• Stefan Bengtsson, Uppsala University