How governments preserve resilience while adapting to successive crises remains a central question in contemporary governance research. Existing studies have largely explained democratic resilience through institutional arrangements, political actors, or regime characteristics. Less attention has been paid to the role of enduring governance principles in shaping how governments adapt policy over time. This paper argues that governance principles should not be understood as static political values but as institutional resources that can be continually reinterpreted to sustain policy adaptation under changing conditions.
Using Vietnam as the empirical case, the study examines the evolution of the people-centred principle (vì dân) across three critical junctures: the Đổi mới reforms, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing digital governance transition. The study's main puzzle is How has the people-centred principle been reinterpreted through policy adaptation across successive critical junctures, and how has this process supported democratic resilience?
The analysis combines Historical Institutionalism with Wolfgang Merkel's concept of democratic resilience. Historical Institutionalism explains how enduring governance principles are preserved while adapting to new institutional contexts, whereas Merkel's framework provides an analytical lens for examining whether policy adaptation maintains responsiveness, legitimacy, and public-oriented governance during periods of systemic change.
The research adopts a comparative historical policy analysis based exclusively on official primary sources. For each critical juncture, the analysis examines Party documents defining the people-centred principle, government policies translating that principle into governance measures, and official socio-economic reports assessing policy outcomes. The analysis focuses on how policy adaptation reflects changing interpretations of the same governance principle across different governance challenges.
The paper argues that Vietnam's experience demonstrates a process of adaptive institutional continuity, in which an enduring governance principle is repeatedly reinterpreted rather than replaced. This perspective shifts the analysis of democratic resilience from regime characteristics to the mechanisms through which governance principles shape policy adaptation. By conceptualising governance principles as adaptive institutional resources, the paper offers a new framework for analysing democratic resilience across successive critical junctures.
