By Carl Middleton, Somporn Pengkam, and Areeya Tivasuradej

This chapter illustrates how the Khao Hinsorn community in Thailand have undertaken a CHIA as a means to challenge an expert-led EHIA that backs a proposed coal-fired power station near their community. Through the CHIA, the community successfully revealed analytical shortcomings in the EHIA, and in the process broadened the definition of legitimate knowledge considered within formal state-led decision-making processes. We argue that CHIA has emerged as an important and strategic collective action response in Thailand, which has contributed towards social learning and community empowerment, and thus enabled the contestation of unequal power relations within knowledge production with implications for social justice outcomes.

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Gendered eviction, protest and recovery: a feminist political ecology engagement with land grabbing in rural Cambodia

By Dr. Carl Middleton and Zaw Aung

The focus of this chapter is a water storage dam proposed at Ka Lone Htar village, located outside of the Dawei SEZ itself, intended to supply freshwater to the SEZ’s industries. If built, the dam would fully submerge the village consisting of 182 households, along with several thousand acres of plantations and natural forest. In response to the threat of dispossession and relocation, the Ka Lone Htar community members successfully mobilized and resisted the dam.

By Carl Middleton

The chapter explains the creation and resistance to change of Thailand’s centralized and fossil-fuel intensive electricity regime through a Sustainability Transition and Multilevel Perspective lens, with an emphasis on the sector’s political economy.

On May 22, 2014, Thailand underwent its most recent military coup that prompted the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) to govern the country. This research demonstrates that Thailand under military rule has entered a period of re-monopolization of political, economic and civil society power, that is in contrast with the measures of democracy as understood through the lens of Asian Democracy Index (ADI).

By Naruemon Thabchumpon (Director, CSDS), Jakkrit Sangkhamanee, Carl Middleton (International Researcher, CSDS), and Weera Wongsatjachock.

In recent years, explanation of Thailand’s democratization has been subject to intense debate. Some political experts say that Thai politics is monopolized by a few groups of political elites (see for example Thitinan 2014). Others have argued that various politically influential movements exist in Thailand, including those that support elections and that oppose corruption. In this paper, we argue that Thai democracy is no longer a game of elites, but that to a certain but significant extent laypeople have become involved in different spheres to assert their political, economic, and social influence or, through the lens of Cho (2012), acted to de-monopolize power. 

What are the existing conditions of ethnic rural women in two villages in the downstream area of the proposed Mong Ton Dam project in relation to men in their day-to-day life? How do women control and get access to resources at home, in the community and the country? What would be the implications for them if the large-scale dam is built?

By Peter, MK31 Fellow

The political transition in present-day Myanmar has brought forward tremendous economic, social, and environmental change and an associated expansion in challenges and opportunities: accelerating capital investment, intensifying resource use and extraction, and heightened conflict partly due to non-inclusive development model.

By Nang Shining, MK31 Fellow

In this blog, Nang Shining presents the perspective of a youth researcher who is working with her in her participatory action research-designed fellowship project on women’s engagement and their role in water governance particularly at the proposed Mong Ton hydropower project in Shan State, Myanmar. Nang Shining highlights both some of the initial findings of the field work, and also the lessons learned by the researcher herself.

By Hannah, MK31 Fellow

Chinese politics and civil society can seem both complex and difficult to understand for outsiders. However, my curiosity to better understand what is happening in the world’s rising superpower led me to choose women’s civil society in China as the focus for my fellowship research on water governance on the Salween River (known as the Nu or Nujiang in China).

By Hnin Wut Yee, MK31 Fellow

Wan Hsala is a secluded village along the Wan Hsala Stream housing a little over 30 households with a total population of approximately 100. As one of the small villages along the Salween River in the Eastern Shan state, the majority of its villagers are part of the Shan ethnic minority, while a few are ethnic Lisu and Bamar. Today, these villagers are facing actual and potential negative impacts from a hydropower construction project started about a decade ago. The local villager's limited knowledge of their rights and their lack of participation in the project have caused them to be taken advantage of. It is crucial that a solid framework of national and international standards reinforced with a strict enforcement vehicle is in place before any further project decisions are made.