The data in this ReShare archive presents the governance part of the NERC project. It focussed on how governance arrangements modulate systems resilience. To halt the environmental decline of the delta, the Vietnamese government has developed a strategic spatial plan, which has led to significant changes in the policy and planning landscape. Drawing on insights from the literature on strategic spatial planning (Hersperger et al. 2019), social-ecological systems resilience (Wyborn and Bixler 2013), and policy implementation (Conteh 2011), we focussed on three areas of enquiry that explored changing central-local government relationships: (i) how provincial officials understand and comply with central government policies to steer economic and environmental sustainability of the Mekong delta; (ii) how the re-organisation of the planning architecture, principally influenced by changes in the Law on Planning and the attempt to create a new regional governance mechanism, is perceived on the local governance level; (iii) to understand the effectiveness of these planning changes and the position of local government towards them, and therefore to understand challenges and opportunities for implementation. To this end we sought interviews with provincial government officials directly involved in developing and implementing policies for climate resilience in the Mekong delta.The world's major river deltas are hotspots of agricultural production that support rural livelihoods and feed much of the global population, but as 'climate change hot spots' deltas are facing a major sustainability crisis. Specifically, there are concerns that many deltas may in the coming decades be 'drowned' by rising sea levels as the oceans warm (up to 20% of land is projected to be lost in the major deltas of south and southeast Asia alone). The process of delta 'drowning' is a slow onset hazard where relative sea-level rise progressively exacerbates fluvial and coastal flood risk while simultaneously enhancing saline intrusion. However, progressive environmental change is punctuated by the occurrence of extreme weather events such as droughts or extreme rainfall and climate models project that these will occur more frequently. The co-occurrence of slow onset hazards with extreme events creates a 'perfect storm' that makes agriculture ever more challenging, but we have almost no insight into how slow onset changes interact with extreme events. A key question is the extent (much like a boxer 'softening up' her opponent with repeated body blows before landing the knockout punch) to which, in systems facing progressive reductions in resilience as a result of ongoing change, the additional burdens caused by occasional but damaging climatic extremes may cause a 'tipping point' to be crossed which makes it difficult for agricultural production to recover after severe episodes of drought or flooding. This is a critical issue because if we cannot correctly attribute the cause of major change we run the risk that 'solutions' will also be applied incorrectly. This NERC-funded project developed a new model to examine how agricultural production and livelihoods are affected by combinations of progressive environmental change punctuated by extreme weather events. In particular we focussed on episodes of drought and flooding. Flooding is the most dangerous and costly of natural hazards, accounting for over 500,000 fatalities and economic losses of more than $1 trillion since 1980. Their low lying nature, alongside their location at the interface between coastal and fluvial environments means that deltas are disproportionately exposed to these risks. However, in the developing world, where agricultural production forms the mainstay of national economies and is central to livelihoods, drought can be a key driver of water and food (in)security, but we know significantly less about how droughts develop, persist and recover. We will further our understanding of the vulnerability of delta systems to extreme events by exploring how crop production and livelihoods are affected by the interplay between episodes of drought and flooding and ongoing environmental stress linked to upstream catchment management and climate change. Our project is focused on the world's third largest delta, the Mekong. The Mekong delta is SE Asia's rice basket and home to almost 20 million people, but it is exposed to severe environmental risks as a result of climate change and rapid economic development. We collaborated with our Vietnamese partners, including in key government agencies, to bring UK expertise in (i) the modelling of droughts and floods; (ii) agricultural livelihoods; (iii) participatory stakeholder engagement processes and (iv) social-ecological systems dynamics to bear on this challenge. We defined policy relevant scenarios of future change and quantify the links between drought and flooding and agricultural livelihoods, delivering an integrated assessment of the factors driving changes to livelihoods and explore the effects that adaptations could make to help make the Mekong delta more resilient to climatic extremes.

In order to understand the changing policy and governance context in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, we first conducted a policy review. Our focus fell on key decisions with long-term impacts on strategic spatial planning in the Mekong delta: the 2013 Mekong Delta Plan, the 2017 Law on Planning, the 2017 Resolution 120/NQ-CP on Sustainable Development of the VMD, the 2020 Decision 825 on the Establishment and Operation of a Mekong Delta Coordination Council for the period 2020-2025, and the 2020 Decision 1163 that led to the 2022 Mekong Delta Master Plan. We then proceeded to select interviewees in provincial governments representing upstream, midstream, and coastal locations. Interviewees were selected based on their knowledge of laws and practices with respect to climate resilience in the delta. Our focus fell on officials with direct knowledge of provisions for strategic spatial planning since release of the 2013 Mekong Delta Plan, focussing on the key policies set out above. We then conducted a total of thirteen semi-structured interviews during November and December 2021. During this time, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, international travel to Vietnam was not possible, and travel within Vietnam was still restricted. Interviews were therefore conducted remotely by the Vietnamese research team. Interviews were held in Vietnamese and translated into English.