‘Hot Science, High Water’ explores the work of different generations of Vietnamese scientists as they engage with local and international efforts to conserve nature, address climate change, and carry out scientific research. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in universities, government offices, and foreign embassies, as well as the muddy intertidal zones of coastal Vietnam, the study reveals scientists engaged in a politics of nature that is local and global, contemporary and historical, and natural and social. More generally, this book is an ethnography of science in a developing country grappling with the local implications of global networks of knowledge production, and shifting trends in international development policy.