(iPoster) Theorizing Governance of Public Markets in Historical and Contemporary Vietnam

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Health Politics and Policy & Wartime Violence, Armed Actors, and Civilian Agency
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Health Politics and Policy

Abstract

Valued for their key roles in ensuring food security and livelihoods for urban populations, public institutions known as public markets are found in many countries around the world, and remain primarily funded by state agencies. Although many of these public markets have disappeared in Europe and the United States in the past century, these trading sites are frequently remembered as emblematic of government's decisive role in regulating the private market. However, the historical political economy of public market creation and regulation in Asia is less understood, even though public markets and petty trade continue to persist across the region, even in the midst of rapid economic growth, and as global health actors increasingly call for more restrictions on these marketplaces. Research to date has primarily theorized the governance of these public markets through motivations to sanitize (e.g. with the term “wet markets”), or through theories of clientelism.

This paper proposes an institutional theory for the governance of public markets and the petty trading they support. I argue that state variation in public market governance can be analyzed between state understandings of enforcing order, which is often masked as public health interventions, and the perceived political importance of petty traders to regime stability. I examine these two paradigms of what I term place- and people-oriented policy through a historical comparative study of Vietnam. Through a paired comparison of the French colonial regime’s regulations of markets and traders, and those of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam following independence, this paper shows how two different political economies resulted in surprisingly similar outcomes which rested on the state’s perceived threat of petty traders to regime stability. I rely on data gathered from eight months of in-country fieldwork, interviews with scientists and bureaucrats, and primary and secondary historical sources in French and Vietnamese. The paper concludes with evidence on the lasting impacts of colonial reconfigurations on local economic institutions, and complicates the notion that public markets in some countries are “unregulated.” The paper’s theory troubles global health motivations to regulate public markets through the logics of place-based policy which rely on interests in hygiene rather than political interests.

Author

• Emma Louise Willoughby, National University of Singapore