Project Team: Jes Hooper and Bao Truong

Lively Transitions, is an interdisciplinary research project exploring the rise in commercial civet trade in Vietnam. Specifically, this project seeks to understand the perspectives of interest groups operating in regions where commercial civet trade is expanding as well as to uncover the relationships between civet trappers, local communities (including ethnic minority communities), farmers, restaurant owners, consumers, and the civets that are commercially traded and consumed. Lively Transitions  is a collaboration between University of York, Nong Lam University and Save Vietnam’s Wildlife. This project involves multispecies ethnography, disease risk pathways mapping, (non-human) animal welfare and policy analysis. Fieldwork is set within four principle locations, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Dong Nai and Ninh Binh, regions identified as having increasing rates of commercial civet trade and/or consumption.This research will help to advance public and academic knowledge about the value of human-wildlife relationships and traditional farming for Vietnamese heritage, as well as providing a point of reference for policy makers to support sustainable farming practices in line with national commitments to the One Health approach and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: specifically, SDG12 ‘Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns’ and SDG15 ‘Life on Land’.