international NGOs and international donors of foreign aid, formally known as official development assistance or ODA, in applying pressure to involve more people and societal actors in the environmental movement has also been emphasized. Whether or not the environmental movement can be considered a civil society actor in its own right is unclear. This is because it has so far had mixed successes and failures in bringing about changes to positively address environmental issues in Vietnam. While a more detailed discussion of the bauxite controversy will proceed in the following section, it suffices to note here that the case of the anti-bauxite movement could be used to demonstrate the limits of bottom-up pressures from environmental activists. Nevertheless, there have been some successes, such as the involvement of the environmental movement in pushing for the Law on Environmental Protection which came into effect on 2015, expanding the space that civil society could occupy by legitimating the involvement of community-based organizations in environmental issues. Further on, the case of the environmental movement which pursued as its goal the preservation of the Reunification Park in Hanoi could show that civil society networks have developed in the Vietnamese context. Not everyone would agree that the Law on Environmental Protection was as significant for the environmental movement or for addressing environmental issues in Vietnam as it has been made out to be. A more cynical perspective claims that compliance with the new legislation merely took the form of nominal environmental divisions by economic agencies such as the Ministry of Construction18. Disparities and tensions also existed at different levels of government, such as between central and provincial authorities. Nevertheless, nominal or otherwise, there exists evidence, at least to a limited extent, of instances in Vietnam where environmental regulations, and enforcement of those regulations, were motivated because of community complaints or demands. Historians refer to this phenomenon as community-driven regulation, with a key example being the actions taken by the provincial Departments of Science, Technology and Environment (DOSTEs) in the 1990s. The way that community pressures or civic opposition came to bear upon authorities’ decisions and actions continued into the 2000s and 2010s. Beyond just environmental issues, however, the environmental movement has come to be understood as playing a contributory role to wider social activism in the context of Vietnam's civil society. Environmental movement groups such as Green Group Hanoi frame their campaigns by situating conservation and