Lê Thị Phương Dung ‘26

Summer 2025

Brewing Hierarchies: Knowledge, Power, and the Political Ecology of INGO Interventions in K’Ho Indigenous Coffee Farming Households in Vietnam

What does “development” look like when it arrives from elsewhere? What assumptions does it carry about knowledge, modernity, and who gets to define progress? What is lost when technocratic models overwrite place-based wisdom?

This summer, Dung will return to Vietnam’s Central Highlands to explore how Indigenous K’Ho coffee farmers navigate the promises and pressures of international development. Her project critically examines how international NGOs (INGOs), sustainability certifications, and national land policies reshape farming practices and knowledge systems in Lạc Dương District. Guided by a political ecology framework, Dung’s research interrogates whether these interventions foster true resilience—or merely reinforce hierarchies of expertise, culture, and power. Through semi-structured interviews and policy/media analysis, Dung traces the contours of these questions, attentive to the dissonance between externally imposed visions of improvement and the grounded knowledge of everyday life. “People here don’t have the luxury of being wrong,” she writes. “Their environment is their lab. Their everyday decisions are hypotheses tested in soil, weather, kinship, and history.”

Through this project, Dung challenges conventional development narratives and uplifts the quiet, grounded intelligence of those who farm not just for markets, but for memory, meaning, and survival. Because in a world racing toward linear, mobilized solutions, sometimes the most radical act is to pause—and listen to those who never stopped knowing.