Vietnam Water Law Pilot Study

ABOUT

Background

The Australian Water Partnership (AWP) is supporting AWP Partners in assisting Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) with “road testing” two manuals to implement the water charging and asset management aspects of Vietnam’s new Law on Hydraulic Work.

Within MARD, the Vietnam Academy of Water Resources (VAWR) has been commissioned to develop the two manuals, with the ‘water charging’ manual being prepared by the Institute for Economics and Water Resources Management (IWEM), and the ‘asset management’ manual being prepared by the Institute for Water and Environment (IWE).

This activity is an extension of previous work undertaken as part of AWP’s support of the Water Efficiency Improvement in Drought Affected Provinces (WEIDAP) project. WEIDAP aims to modernise irrigation systems in five drought-prone provinces in the South Central Coastal and Central Highland regions of Vietnam. The project seeks to enhance climate resilience and water productivity in agriculture through improved and modernised agriculture and irrigation practices.

Objectives

A team of three Australian experts travelled to Vietnam for a two-week mission in January 2019 in order to jointly work with staff from IWEM and IWE in undertaking field trips to obtain data for inclusion in the manuals (as a worked example of the required approach), and to facilitate a plenary session to report back on findings from the piloting of each manual. The team’s objectives under this activity were therefore to provide Australian support in the field to assist Vietnam to develop a shared methodology to road test the two draft manuals for implementing the water charging decree and for asset management under the new Law on Hydraulic Work; and to provide remote support as well as feedback on reporting of the pilot by Vietnamese counterparts.