According to Decision No. 69/2025/QD-UBND of the Hanoi People's Committee, from December 2025, 30 environmental sanitation packages previously managed by districts will be transferred to communes and wards. From the coordination role, the commune level now has to take full responsibility, including quality supervision, work acceptance and implementation of funding payments according to regulations.
Implementing this decision, the Hanoi Department of Agriculture and Environment has handed over complete legal documents, volume documents, payment documents and technical infrastructure systems to localities. At the same time, the specific workload is allocated in detail to each commune and ward, ensuring that it can be implemented from the beginning of the month.
To ensure uninterrupted operations, Hanoi has temporarily allocated more than 211 billion VND to the budget of communes and wards to serve environmental sanitation in December 2025. This is a key solution to help the locality avoid being passive, especially when the amount of household waste is always highest at the end of the year.
This decentralization of management creates a real change in environmental sanitation. Instead of centralized management in districts, household waste is assigned to each commune and ward - the grassroots level has the clearest understanding of the time of high occurrence, areas prone to congestion as well as areas that need to increase collection frequency, thereby improving the efficiency of management and quality of the urban environment.
However, along with being empowered, the responsibility of grassroots authorities has also increased significantly. As soon as he took up the task, three great pressures were identified.
First, the ability to manage contracts. Most commune and ward officials have not directly operated large-scale public service packages, so the monitoring, acceptance, and payment stages all require expertise and experience.
Second, the pressure on the progress of contractor selection for 2026. Immediately after receiving the volume for the 2026-2030 period, communes and wards must urgently prepare estimates, develop documents to invite bids, bid or place orders in accordance with regulations. If it is delayed, the risk of collection interruption is entirely possible.
Third, the pressure of direct feedback from the people. All problems with odor, leachate, unreasonable collection points... will be immediately reported to the local authorities.
However, these pressures themselves become the driving force for the grassroots apparatus to operate more substantially and closer to the people. When properly decentralized, communes and wards have the opportunity to proactively adjust the collection route, frequency and time to suit the characteristics of each residential area.
From the perspective of professional management, Deputy Director of the Hanoi Department of Agriculture and Environment Nguyen Minh Tan commented that when the commune and ward are the direct investors, the responsibility for the volume, quality and collection progress will be " tightened" to the place of generation of waste. The city will strengthen post-inspections; any commune or ward that leaves waste behind and causes prolonged pollution will have to be responsible to the City People's Committee, no longer having a mechanism to push responsibility to the district or county as before.
The core of this decentralization is not only changing the management level, but also transforming the urban environmental management model. However, along with power, there must be an independent, transparent monitoring mechanism for volume, unit prices, and acceptance to prevent group interests in ordering and appointing bids. If implemented seriously, this will be an opportunity for Hanoi to restore discipline in environmental sanitation, overcome the situation of long-term collection and handling of waste.
In Kieu Phu commune - the locality officially received the task from December 1, the commune leaders admitted that there was great pressure, but affirmed that this was a political task that could not be delayed or expected.
In the inner city, the challenge is even more obvious when the population density is high, the amount of waste is generated, while the gathering space is limited. Wards are forced to simultaneously increase the frequency of collection, tighten the responsibility of transportation units and step up propaganda so that people dump garbage at the right time and place. Many wards have established environmental sanitation self-management teams in each residential area, assigning specific responsibilities to each residential group.
According to Director of the Hanoi Center for Agricultural and Environmental Engineering Ngo Thai Nam, in the early days, it was inevitable that there would be confusion, with some locally generated garbage, but the locality handled it immediately, not allowing it to continue to become a "hot spot".
In essence, this decentralization period is a test of the leadership at the grassroots level. The city has empowered, assigned money, assigned work - and at the same time set clear requirements: Do not let garbage stay, do not let pollution continue, do not let negativity arise from seemingly the smallest things. Keeping the capital clean right from the small alleys is a sustainable way to affirm a civilized city with modern governance.
