From Streamlining to Delivery: Vietnam’s Second Administrative Test

Third plenums are ordinarily the quiet part of Vietnam’s political calendar. Between its five-yearly congresses, the 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 20 to 24 July 2026, 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.

The four shifts together describe the developmental state To Lam wants to build: one that steers growth through deliberate coordination rather than leaving it to markets alone. But the first shift — improving the Party’s leadership — is the hinge on which the others turn. The second, a unified development space requires local institutions capable of executing plans drawn up in Hanoi. The third, productivity-led growth, requires predictable regulation and quick approvals. The fourth, prevention over reaction, depends on the ability to detect problems early and respond coherently.

This is what makes the plenum a turning point in the “streamlining revolution” to cut the size of the state bureaucracy. In the past 12 months, the reform concentrated on structure: for example, reducing the number of provinces and centrally governed cities from 63 to 34, abolishing the district tier of government and consolidating commune-level units. It also removed people: nearly 210,000 civil servants and public employees took early retirement or severance under the restructuring. That was the first test, and the leadership passed it. The plenum poses a second, and perhaps harder one: whether the machinery emerging from upheaval would be effective.

Vietnam now has two tiers of local government, provinces and communes. The communes, the lower of the two, absorbed most of what the missing district tier used to do.  This constitutes more than 1,000 tasks, including issuing land-use certificates, granting construction permits and administering welfare. But the communes inherited the workload of the districts without inheriting its specialists. When the district tier was abolished, its staff had various options: move up to the provincial level, shift down to the commune level or leave the service altogether. Only a third of the commune’s 150,000 staff arrived that way. The rest had always worked at the commune level and had little experience in handling land titling or construction permits.

Nor did staffing keep pace with size. The average commune now has more than twice as many staff as before but three times as many residents, on top of the district’s old caseload. That leaves one official for roughly 700 people, against 490 before the mergers. This is why communes are so easily overwhelmed by their new tasks. In one documented case, a commune has 49 staff serving more than 66,000 residents, a ratio of one official for 1,350 people.

The strain is measurable. The Ministry of Home Affairs admits that only 30 per cent of commune staff fully meet the requirements of their new duties. This is already visible in service delivery. A nationwide survey found that only 71.1 per cent of land-certificate applicants received results on time, more than a quarter of applicants had to deal with multiple offices, and 12 per cent resorted to informal intermediaries. The figures do not suggest universal failure, but they reveal functional overload and uneven competence at the tier on which the new system depends.

The Central Committee’s Conclusion 76, issued days after the plenum, recognised the problem. It identified factors such as incomplete institutions, unclear decentralisation, mismatched staffing, thin resources and weak digital integration as obstacles to effective government. The Committee also sought to shift the reform’s emphasis from organisational streamlining (tinh gọn) to operating quality (chất lượng vận hành). The centre is to set the framework, the provinces will coordinate, and the communes implement.

The four shifts together describe the developmental state To Lam wants to build: one that steers growth through deliberate coordination rather than leaving it to markets alone.

The remedies match the diagnosis. Devolved responsibilities are to come with the resources to discharge them, staffing is to follow workload rather than adhere to a strict quota, and specialists are to be steered towards communes. Cadres will be judged by results and public satisfaction, and those who innovate in the public interest are promised greater protection. The Politburo’s Plan 06 turns this into a timetable, assigning institutions to revise laws and clarify authority in 2026, with integrated databases, commune-level digital systems and a new evaluation framework due in 2027. By naming the responsible bodies, it makes delays easier to track.

That improves the reform’s prospects. Success, though, is likely to be partial and uneven.

The first problem is sequencing. Communes have already carried expanded responsibilities for a year, while the legal, staffing and digital fixes run into 2027. Re-training commune staff will not be completed until 2031. The burden of transition, therefore, falls on communes before the tools needed to manage it are in place.

The second is that specialist capacity cannot be created by decree. The rotation of specialists from higher tiers and training can ease shortages, but land, planning, finance and technology require experience that many rural and remote communes cannot quickly acquire. Flexible staffing works only if local authorities have access to capital, recruitment powers and qualified personnel.

The third concerns discretion. Output-based evaluation and digitalisation improve accountability, but they also create new reporting burdens. Poor databases cannot produce reliable indicators, and artificial intelligence cannot reconcile unclear laws or contradictory instructions. Conclusion 76’s governing principle is that accountability and supervision extend as far as the authority granted. That is sound design. Yet the main constraint on officials is not too little supervision. Rather, it is uncertainty over which decisions are his to make, and whether he will be protected when a reasonable one goes wrong.

Vietnam’s streamlining revolution has produced a smaller state, and the plenum has correctly diagnosed why this is not enough to deliver the “strategic shifts” that To Lam wants. Whether the new state becomes more capable will depend less on what Hanoi can measure, but more on whether the appropriate resources, expertise and authority reach the communes.

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