The foreign economic policy stance of the Australian Government (and the protectionist coalition) towards Southeast Asia in the post-war period was in essence contradictory. On the one hand, Southeast Asia has always been a strategically important region for Australia because of its geographical proximity. This was etched in Australian consciousness by the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia during the Pacific War (Waters 1997, p. 42). Its importance intensified soon after the war: the end of the war meant the gradual end of colonial rule by European powers and the foundation of independent countries in the region. Under these circumstances, political and security considerations imbued Australia's relations with the Southeast Asian region with great significance. Australia supported the economic development of these newly independent countries. Economic development of these countries was thought to be the key to achieving stability in the region and to strengthening countervailing power against communist penetration. On the other hand, World War II had strengthened the policy idea of the protectionist coalition. Australia accepted the non discrimination and MFN principles and became an original member of the GATT. Yet Australia secured the right to maintain tariffs for protective purposes in the mid-1950s.

Assisting the economic development of newly independent countries in Southeast Asia and, at the same time, maintaining high levels of protection and assistance for Australia's domestic industries were potentially mutually exclusive tasks. When these new countries developed sufficient industrial capacity to export their products (most likely to be labour-intensive manufactured products given their relative abundance in labour over other resources), it was at least to some extent inevitable that they would demand that Australia open up its markets to their exports. This contradiction in foreign policy stance did not matter much until the 1970s because the competitiveness of the Southeast Asian economies remained limited and their trade was mainly dominated by primary commodities. The fact that most of the newly independent countries in the region struggled in their nation building in the early period and had conflicts with each other did not provide favourable conditions for economic development.

Introduction

Korea, as a country that achieved remarkable industrial growth out of a war-torn economy in the 1950s, owes much of its economic success during the past four decades to the assistance and support of the international community. Until the 1980s, Korea received development assistance worth over US$15 billion, which provided the country with strong momentum for rapid economic development. Its economy now ranks among the middle-level OECD countries, as the world's twelfth economy in terms of GDP and trade volume.

Korea has successfully transformed itself from an aid recipient to an emerging donor through rapid economic development with its outstanding economic and social performance. As a former beneficiary of development cooperation, Korea now acknowledges that its effort to extend ODA is in reciprocating what it received from the international community in the past.

Currently, most of Korea's official development assistance (ODA) is concentrated in the Asian region. In 2006, 60.5 per cent of bilateral ODA was disbursed to Asia and 24.2 per cent of bilateral grant aid was disbursed to Southeast Asia. This high level of concentration is partly due to the geographical and cultural proximity between Korea and the countries in the region. In particular, Korea has maintained close economic and diplomatic relationships with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is one of the Korea's important trade and investment partners. So, there are undoubtedly common interests and potentials for further cooperation between Korea and ASEAN.

Since the 1997 financial crisis, Korea and ASEAN have launched a number of different regional initiatives, such as ASEAN-Korea FTA and ASEAN+3, etc. In particular, Korea has participated in the global trend of RTAs by concluding an FTA with ASEAN that entered into force in June 2007. Korea is also focusing on promoting development cooperation between the relatively well-off ASEAN members and the CLMV countries (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam) to address a wide development gap within the region.

In addition, Korea has shared its experience of economic development with ASEAN members and made efforts to help apply its experience to the closing of the development gap among Southeast Asian countries.

During the campaign for the March 1996 general election, Australia's relations with East Asia became one of the most debated issues. The Keating Government boasted about its diplomatic channels that were developed through the Cairns Group and APEC activities and criticized the Liberal and National Parties’ inexperience in this area (Takeda and Mori 1998, p. 178). The Liberals and Nationals in the opposition accepted that engagement with Asia should continue, yet they attacked the government for attaching too much importance to Asia and pressed the public to change the national identity. The Liberals and Nationals asserted that Australia's traditional values should be maintained (or restored) (Takeda et al. 2007, p. 96).

By the mid-1990s, in fact, public disquiet about the “Asianisation of Australia” (Cotton and Ravenhill 1997a, pp. 12–13; Milner 1997, pp. 35–36) had grown to a level where it could no longer be ignored politically (Cotton and Ravenhill 2001a, pp. 6–7; Milner 2001, p. 35). On top of the decade-long implementation of economic reforms which had led to reform-fatigue particularly among the low and middle income earners in rural areas, there was growing public uneasiness that the Keating Government' “big picture” vision of Australia's engagement with East Asia had gone too far. This formed part of the background to the demise of the Keating Government and the rise of the Liberal/National opposition under the leadership of John Howard in the 1996 general election (Wesley 2004, p. 153; 2007a, p. 140).

The new Howard Government initiated a review of the foreign economic policy of previous governments. This came to provide the platform for a major shift in Australia's foreign economic policy. The policy shift preferred by the new government led by Howard, who had been one of the leaders of the “dry” movement in the Liberal Party since the early 1980s, did not involve a wholesale return to the old protectionism. Rather, the pace of reform slowed initially and there was an appeal to reciprocity in international economic dealings and the pursuit of trade liberalization. The government was inclined to promote Australia's “national interest” through bilateral means, including free trade agreements that sought reciprocal liberalization and short-term, concrete economic benefits, rather than through multilateral negotiations.

Vietnam was long absent or weakly represented in development approaches focusing on countries of the South, partly because of difficulties in accessing the field and to some extent due to geopolitical restrictions or doctrinal considerations. Now it is making a striking comeback as an ‘emerging country’ of Southeast Asia.

This general observation is also true of the field of urban studies wherein, up to the 1990's, Francophone scientific literature dealing with contemporary urbanization in Vietnam amounted to only a handful of early studies such as those authored by Lilian Halls-French, Nguyen Duc Nhuan, Langlet-Quach Thanh Tam and Christian Pedelahore (see comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book). On the other hand, subsequent to opening up under the Doi Moi economic reform, a lot of catching up has been done since the 1990s, thanks to studies carried out by doctorate-level academic scholars and leading public research agencies. Some of the latter include specialized research teams from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) [National Centre for Scientific Research] and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) [Institute of Research for Development, formerly ORSTOM], as well as schools of architecture that have had an impact in their own way, particularly through the architectural research network.

This book is published at the initiative of the Institut des Métiers de la Ville (IMV) [Cooperation Centre for Urban Development] and the Ho Chi Minh City Urban Development Management Support Centre (PADDI), under the scientific coordination of a team led by Patrick Gubry and including Franck Castiglioni, Jean-Michel Cusset, Nguyen Thi Thieng and Pham Thuy Huong, is a compendium of studies on this activity starting with the research results compiled between 2001 and 2004 by the Programme de Recherche Urbaine pour le Développement (PRUD) [Urban Research Programme for Development]. This collaborative work that got the ball rolling, with support from the Priority Solidarity Fund (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), coordinated jointly by the Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l'Équipement et de l'Environnement pour le Développement (ISTED) [Institute of Science and Technology for Infrastructure and Environment for Development] and by the Groupement d'intérêt scientifique pour l'étude de la Mondialisation et du Développement (GEMDEV) [Scientific Interest Group for the Study of Globalization and Development], is a groundbreaking contribution to urban research on Vietnam.

The present work was undertaken as part of two cooperation programmes between French and Vietnamese local governments: one involving the Ile-de-France Region and Hanoi People's Committee, the other the Rhone-Alpes Region and Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee. It was published with financial support from the Cooperation and Cultural Action Office (SCAC) of the French Embassy in Vietnam. Gathered here are the main results obtained by the Franco-Vietnamese research teams involved in the Urban Research Programme for Development (PRUD) funded by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the outcome of joint concertation, it illustrates the coherence between the various French cooperation programmes in Vietnam.

The research presented here attempts to define the issues at stake in urban development in Vietnam under the economic and demographic push induced by the transition from a centralized planned economy to a globalized market economy, and by strong urban population growth. Processes at work such as international integration and fast-growing metropolisation, speeded up economic development, devolution/decentralization of urban management authorities, modernization of housing patterns, poorly controlled peri-urban urbanization, mutations in the management of urban services, etc., all require strengthening of skills for urban project management and local government.

To respond to this need, IMV (Cooperation Centre for Urban Development) was created by Hanoi People's Committee and the Ile-de-France Region in 2001. PADDI (Ho Chi Minh City Urban Development Management Support Centre) was founded in 2004 by Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee and Rhone-Alpes Regional Council. Both organizations are jointly headed in situ by representatives from each collectivity and are responsible for developing programmes in such areas as continuing education aimed at government cadres specialized in urban management, consultancy and technical expertise, investment in pilot operations and pilot infrastructures projects, assistance to consultancy firms and BPW companies, and for promoting Vietnamese and French research in the field of urbanism.

The Mutating City: Getting to the Roots

Our research team focused its efforts on analysing a number of key factors behind the urban explosion in Vietnam. Based on multi-disciplinary approaches, we sought to identify and reconstruct the key names, events and development processes associated with it.

A study of local urban phenomena was therefore framed in order to gain insight into the dialectic relationships between cultural continuities and economic developments. This, we felt, would enable us to interpret social transformations in the physical and symbolical forms evident in the spatial mutations.

Against this backdrop, our mission concentrated on a relatively unexplored field in Vietnam — the analysis of spatial cultures, operational modes and thinking patterns of the people involved in local urban development.

Using field observations as our primary tool, we looked for ways to explain the reference points and operations of two specific categories of persons. On the one hand, architects and urban planners who have an academic knowledge of and relationship with the city. On the other hand, the citizens, investors and builders who are a repository of customary knowhow and intuitive, pragmatic, down-to-earth modes of invention.

Cities in Vietnam Today

“No transparency” “can't make head or tail of it”; “nothing certain, always changing”; “inconsistencies everywhere”; “a hodge-podge of ad-hockery and tacky formalisms”; “orders and counter-orders”. Those are a few of the expressions routinely used to describe the urban development scene in Vietnam.

Since our aim was to conduct collaborative research in this area, we took as the starting point for our study of spatial production and the interplay of urban affairs stakeholders, what outsiders had to say on the subject, including foreign investors, international experts and representatives of bilateral or multilateral cooperation arrangements.

Their appraisals highlighted the existence of complex, hard-to-penetrate situations wherein urban spaces are both the obvious venue and means of promoting internationalization processes as well as the brewing pot for the identity reactions that oppose them.

For nearly two decades now, the “decentralization, privatization and liberalization” triangle touted in adjustment policies has become the new paradigm for development in all parts of the world. Yet, effective implementation of institutional decentralization coupled with an appeal to the private sector to promote open competition and growth is failing to impact all countries uniformly. A case in point is Vietnam with its socialist-oriented market economy. Is it going through a gradual transition towards a liberal economy? Compromising between internal constraints and external demands? Or, rather, going the way of innovation, seeking a specific model that has not yet fully taken shape?

In Vietnam, the “transition/compromise/innovation” pathways are fraught with complexity and uncertainty, something we can confirm by taking a look at urban water distribution.

To begin with, in the early 1990s transition was the buzzword in neoliberal strategies applied to contexts that were still recently collectivist. Transition was needed on two fronts — from collectivism to capitalism and from underdevelopment to development. But it is noteworthy that the transformations that took place in Vietnam (Doi Moi, 1986) predated generalization of the notion of transition. Chronologically, the notion of transition was not the force behind the remake that took place in the late 1980s. Rather, it sprung from new national public policy directions and gave them a meaning they did not previously have (the march to liberalism). The transition idea in a way came to the rescue in a story of radical upheavals, the like of which had not been planned or anticipated. But perhaps not wanting to lose out on any new history-making advancement and convinced that valuable lessons could be learned from the recent remake, it was thought that transition should be something predictable and applicable to social action in general.

From both the economic and political standpoint, the concept of transition came to mean both a liberal and democratic model that had become unavoidable and toward which economically collectivist countries were invited to turn.

Projects implemented with the support of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are a powerful urban development driver in Vietnam's big cities. The facts show that since the Asian crisis, private investors are tending to back away from long-term investments such as urban infrastructure projects that do not guarantee a quick return. On the other hand, ODA-supported projects may be very large in scale, from urban highway to water supply and sanitation systems, and thus have a significant impact on spatial structures as well as on social and political strategies.

The projects studied involve a variety of stakeholders from international donors to bilateral cooperation arrangements and obviously include the national authorities, corporations, the concerned communities and their more or less formalized advocacy groups. Our goal was to get a clear picture of the design of these projects and their objectives and take stock of their performance. The key findings are presented herewith.

The researchers sought to find answers to questions about delegation of authority within these projects, more specifically decentralization, involvement of the communities and degree of independence of the Vietnamese stakeholders in relation to the funding agency. We also wanted to identify the forms of skills and technology transfer associated with these projects and their validity. Generally, questions were asked regarding the effectiveness of development assistance mechanisms, as well as identification and exposure of obstacles encountered during project implementation.

Our analytical framework and methodology comprised a review of public policies and an action research approach, along with qualitative surveys of the key stakeholders in the projects selected as case studies. We interviewed persons from the Project Management Units (PMUs), households affected by the project, economic sector officials and local authorities (districts and sub-divisions), as well as a number of associations. Over sixty qualitative interviews were conducted with project stakeholders.

A seminar to pool the findings of the research was held at the Institute for Economic Research in Ho Chi Minh City, which enabled the researchers and field men to compare their findings.