From Local Participation to Legitimate Timber Trade? The Case of the Cambodia-Vietnam Timber Trade in the EU-Vietnam Voluntary Partnership Agreement

The EU-Vietnam Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements contains commitments by the EU and the Vietnamese government to halt trade in illegally logged timber and to establish a timber legality verification and certification system. This system not only addresses the plantation timber production within Vietnam, but also its cross- border timber trade with neighboring Cambodia. To ensure legitimacy of VPA agreements, the EU has relied heavily on the involvement of domestic non-state actors, both through mandatory stakeholder consultations and the provision of FLEGT-related project funds. Questions however arise on the suitability of such an approach in the Vietnamese context, where political space for civil society actors is severely limited. This paper assesses the EU’s political response to the challenges of the Vietnamese context from a practice perspective. It finds that the EU has systematically contributed to the empowerment of Vietnamese NGOs through diplomatic leverage and donor funding yet has failed to fully address the inherent limitations in the Vietnamese NGO’s political mandate, especially in relation to the cross-border timber trade. As such, civil society promotion in FLEGT becomes a performative act, which may obscure other VPA-objectives and challenges. The paper argues that, in order to go beyond civil society empowerment towards an effective response to illegal forest destruction at the Cambodian frontier, the EU needs to reduce its dependency on Vietnamese civil society and increase political scrutiny of the VPA implementation process.