Since the 1990s, the Vietnamese government has launched thousands development projects across all sectors to reduce poverty and modernize the countryside. The results are everywhere very visible: new roads and infrastructures, renovated markets, etc. But the authorities also highlight the high level of participation of local populations (the "base") in all these projects. An effective means of showing to the international institutions which finance a large part of these projects that Vietnam brilliantly fulfills the criteria of the UN Millennium Goals (2000) of "governance, participation, ownership, empowerment and accountability. But on the level of communes and families, participation is experienced in a very different way. The great Program for Socio-economic Development in Communes faced with Extreme Difficulties (1998-2015) which applies to several thousand communes throughout the country, allows us to study the specific relations between peasants and the State in Vietnam in the North of the country. Several questions will provide precise anthropological elements on the positioning of local ethnic populations in their interactions with projects: How can the participation of local populations be expressed in a clearly top-down system? How does the diversity of the forms of participation observed inform us about the extent of local political actions? Who are the real actors in local participation ? In the end, it is the forms of articulation between a top-down development model with a "totalizing" aim and the place of rural civil society in Vietnam that will be questioned.
