How Vietnam’s ‘streamlining revolution’ may lead to uneven success

Third plenums are ordinarily the quiet part of Vietnam’s political calendar. Between its five-yearly congresses, the Vietnam" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="12806" data-entity-type="organization">Communist Party of Vietnam governs through numbered plenums of its Central Committee (CC): the first two settle personnel decisions, and the third, six months on, usually does no more than ratify the term’s work programme.This time, the third plenum of the 14th CC, held from July 20 to 24, did more. It set out the next phase of the country’s most sweeping administrative overhaul in decades: the move from streamlining the apparatus to building the capacity to govern.An unusually crowded agenda of 13 major items includes issues such as the development model, the land law and national security. These were organised around General Secretary To Lam’s “four strategic shifts”: improving the party’s leadership capacity and the state’s operating quality; unifying the governance of development space and national resources; shifting growth towards productivity, technology and human capital; and moving from reactive crisis management towards prevention and resilience.