Framing the environment: a critical analysis of news media in Vietnam

When citizens are enabled to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, the outcomes of government policy and programmes are improved and society benefits from greater stability and increased well-being.

This thesis studies public participation in governance but is ultimately a study of power. The processes of participation in governance necessarily entail a redistribution of power from government to citizens. The study explores how state power affects public participation in Vietnam - a one-party Communist State - and applies its findings to a re-evaluation of theory as it relates to the practice of participation in the study's unique political context.

In this context, the study conducts a critical discourse analysis, comparing explicit political discourse in the official texts of legal and policy documents with implicit discourse in the news media. The primary research method - a quantitative/qualitative news discourse analysis - analyses how news reports on environmental issues frame public participation in governance.

Findings from the primary research indicate that news reports on environmental issues in Vietnam overwhelmingly characterise the public as victims while state authorities are portrayed as the dominant actors. The news allocates responsibility for addressing environmental issues solely with the State with citizens acting under the direction of state authorities.

The findings suggest a dominant news discourse that avoids the allocation of causal responsibility, portrays individual citizens and communities as victims, and places the responsibility and power to act exclusively with state actors. The dominant news discourse, which I term a 'dominance of the State' discourse, stands in sharp contrast to the political discourse explicit in the official texts of legal and policy documents, which represents a 'right to participate' discourse. While the inconsistencies between the discourses appear irreconcilable, an analysis of the socio-political context demonstrates the influence of the 'dominance of the State' discourse on the practice of participation in Vietnam.

The study concludes by proposing a model of public participation appropriate to Vietnam's unique political context. The model is prescriptive and meant to benefit practitioners by facilitating better planning, implementation, and assessment of public participation in Vietnam.