Environmental Degradation and the Marginalization of Indigenous Communities in the Central Highlands
Phong Cầm wrote this Vietnamese article, published in Luật Khoa Magazine on May 28, 2025.
Though the Vietnamese government declared the Central Highlands “liberated” in 1975, conflict persisted for years. Indigenous communities were subjected to forced assimilation as state-run forestry enterprises swept into the region to extract resources throughout the 1980s.
By the 1990s, a wave of conservation efforts funded by international donors led to the creation of national parks and protected areas, further sidelining the region's ethnic minorities.
Ironically, this official “green discourse” coincided with severe environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and the collapse of livelihoods for these historically marginalized groups. This paradox is the focus of a study by Danish anthropologist Ole Bruun, a professor at Roskilde University with decades of experience researching environmental issues in China and Việt Nam.
Bruun presents his analysis in the chapter “Green Collusion and Ethnic Dispossession in Vietnam’s Central Highlands," (Collusion verte et privation ethnique dans les hauts plateaux du centre du Vietnam) featured in the 2024 book La Combustion du Monde : Peuples autochtones, conservation et marchandisation de la nature en Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est (Burning the World: Indigenous Peoples, Conservation, and the Commodification of Nature in South and Southeast Asia).
His fieldwork uses Yok Don National Park (in Đắk Lắk and Đắk Nông provinces) as a case study to explore the long-standing tensions between indigenous groups and Vietnamese authorities.
Forced Migration and “Green” Land Grabs
According to Ole Bruun, the state-driven displacement that has reshaped the Central Highlands is not a new phenomenon but a long-standing policy with historical roots. This colonizing approach, as he terms it, began as early as the 1950s under President Ngô Đình Diệm’s regime to relieve population pressure in coastal areas.
This policy intensified after 1975. Bruun identifies two dimensions of this post-war migration: the continued settlement of Kinh people to exploit "new economic zones" in the 1980s and 1990s, and the simultaneous expulsion of indigenous Montagnards from their ancestral lands.
The most intense period of exploitation occurred after the Đổi Mới reforms in 1986, when land grabs and religious repression—especially targeting Christian converts—fueled widespread protests and demands for ancestral land rights.
These same practices have continued under a new pretext: "green" development. Large-scale forestry and hydropower projects—over 700 nationwide—have encroached upon indigenous lands, with compensation policies that are often coercive, discriminatory, and haphazard. Promises to uphold indigenous autonomy have gone unfulfilled, as national policies on climate change and green growth are used to justify land seizures.
The results of this multi-decade policy have been consistent: indigenous uprisings met with violent crackdowns, forcing many to flee as refugees to Cambodia and Thailand, with both state-run and private companies, backed by the government, being complicit in the exploitation.
A Human Rights and Environmental Crisis
The full extent of this crisis is difficult to assess, as authorities actively prevent international donors, researchers, and journalists from freely accessing indigenous areas.
Visits are often limited to government-approved sites, a tactic that obstructs independent scrutiny of human rights abuses, particularly those linked to donor-funded projects. This suppression of information runs parallel to a suppression of culture under the guise of environmentalism.
Environmental rights cannot be separated from broader human rights. In the Central Highlands, indigenous languages are not taught in schools, while religious practices like Protestantism and Catholicism are stigmatized as remnants of colonialism.
The government’s push for reforestation—often a strategy to attract international carbon financing—disregards local cultural traditions by labeling indigenous agricultural methods as “primitive.”
State narratives frequently blame indigenous practices for deforestation to justify the creation of national parks and reserves, which effectively criminalizes indigenous land use. This is evident at Yok Don National Park, a project funded 80% by the state and 20% by hydropower and foreign donors, whose mission is officially not just environmental but also serves national security, scientific research, and eco-tourism.
As Ole Bruun states, this " ecologization " process does little to preserve biodiversity. Instead, its primary function is to boost the legitimacy of the Communist Party, attract international funding, and, most importantly, tighten state control over the land and its people.
Systemic Dispossession and Entrenched Inequality
The result of these decades-long policies is a state of systemic dispossession and entrenched inequality in the Central Highlands. Bruun’s research shows that 75% of households in the Yok Don area live in poverty. While Kinh migrants receive land and farming support from the state, the indigenous people are excluded from these programs, despite this being their ancestral homeland.
This forces a desperate reliance on forest resources—resources which are themselves in decline due to mismanagement and corruption that fuels illegal poaching and trafficking. The COVID-19 pandemic only deepened this dependency, and as the forests empty, food insecurity worsens.
Without access to farmland, many indigenous people are pushed into exploitative labor, often working for Kinh employers in environments that are hostile to their culture and language.
This reality exposes a profound hypocrisy. Though the Vietnamese state often denounces colonialism in its official rhetoric, its treatment of indigenous peoples—under the guise of environmentalism and development—is itself a form of internal colonization. Bruun calls it an “internal colonialist offensive”—one that has not only failed to protect biodiversity but has actively intensified the hardship for the Central Highlands' original inhabitants.