Social Science Research Council

International Conference on Poverty Alleviation, Migration, and Urbanization: Ho Chi Minh City in Comparative Perspectives, 25-28 February 2004

The Vietnam Program organized the International Conference on Poverty Alleviation, Migration, and Urbanization: Ho Chi Minh City in Comparative Perspectives in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) from February 25-28, 2004. This event capped the Council's five-year program of research, training, institution building and network creation with the Southern Institute of Social Sciences (SISS) (formerly the Institute of Social Sciences in Ho Chi Minh City). The longitudinal project examines urban socio-economic mobility and socio-economic differentiation in a context of a rapid growth, urbanization, and in-migration. The conference itself explored findings concerning poverty, migration, and urbanization; migration dynamics and urbanization; and socio-economics mobility opportunities for the poor and other social strata during urbanization.

Thirty-four papers illuminated the rapid changes taking place in Ho Chi Minh City and the surrounding areas, particularly exploring how—through what means and under what conditions—individuals, families and social networks alter their economic conditions and provided comparative perspectives from China and Southeast Asia. Population movement and processes, social services, education, health, religion, community and family life were each discussed. The papers also examined the economic processes themselves and looked at the shift from agriculture to small-scale enterprise with all that implies for traditional rural life.

The final day was devoted to analyzing the roles of social policies and governmental institutions in poverty alleviation and the policy implications of the research findings using an innovative strategy. Foreign and Vietnamese experts experienced at working in the nexus between research and policy were assigned to monitor each of the first four sessions as policy rapporteurs and tasked to draw out and interpret the policy implications and summarize them on the last day.

Craig Calhoun (President, SSRC) opened the conference along with Prof. Nguyen The Nghia (Director, ISSHO), Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tai (Vice-Chair, People's Committee of HCMC), Ms. Emi Lynn Yamauchi (US Consul General in HCMC) and Dr. Michael DiGregorio (Program Officer, Ford Foundation). Dr. Calhoun also co-chaired the policy session. Mary McDonnell (SSRC) served as discussant for the opening session overviewing poverty, migration, and urbanization. Before the start of the conference, international participants toured the research sites.

The conference accomplished a number of program goals by:

providing an opportunity to share the results of five years of research with colleagues working on similar issues in other places in comparable contexts;

-drawing the Vietnamese case more widely into the international arena;

-bringing Vietnamese researchers in touch with counterparts abroad; and

-creating a forum for the Vietnamese researchers and a broader constituency for social science research on our research themes, including Vietnamese social scientists, NGOs, and policymakers to interact, learn from each other, and network at both the national and international levels through the activities that we planned.

Already, plans are in the works on a spin-off research and training project between our local partner and some of the international participants who attended the conference to examine migration from Vietnam to Taiwan.

There were over 150 participants, of which 20 came from the U.S., Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. Participants included researchers, faculty members, practioners working in our research areas, and potential consumers of social science knowledge on our key issues, such as heads of departments at various ministries, members of the Party's social policy advisory body, high-ranking local, provincial, and national level officials, international non-governmental organizations, national non-governmental organizations, and other donor agencies, such as the Asian Development Bank and World Bank.

Various products will emerge from the results over the coming year, including a series of policy briefs, academic volumes in Vietnamese and English, and a self-sustaining network of researchers. The Council and SISS also plan to continue to mine the rich and reliable qualitative and quantitative data that we have amassed, which will shed much light on our multiple pronged research topic for years to come.