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The pursuit of rural development has been a central tenet and tool of legitimacy for both the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Lao People’s Democratic Republic since their respective revolutions. Both regimes relied on the support of predominantly peasant populations through struggles for independence, and later sought to harness the rural sector as a means to socialist transformation, reassembling war-shattered economies and nation building. This chapter traces rural policies and their consequences through different developmental phases in post-revolutionary Laos and Vietnam, joined by shared ideology yet facing differing national circumstances that would shape their approaches to the management of rural spaces and people. As command planning began to unravel in both countries in the late 1970s, the countryside underwent a seismic reversal from the setting of experiments in collective farming …