POLICY BRIEF: "Can Chinese EV Investment Contribute to Thailand’s Green Transformation?"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Can Chinese EV Investment Contribute to Thailand’s Green Transformation?

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Author: Yuan Ye

This policy brief examines the governance structures and local implications of Chinese electric vehicle investment in Thailand. It intends to provide an evidence-based reference point for policymakers and stakeholders in both countries, for future research, analysis, and action towards a more inclusive, trusted, and equitable form of sustainable development.

POLICY BRIEF: "Connecting Thailand’s Community-based Tourism to Chinese Travellers: Local Voices, Emerging Trends, and Collaboration"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Connecting Thailand’s Community-based Tourism to Chinese Travellers: Local Voices, Emerging Trends, and Collaboration

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Author: Xueying Mai

Community-Based Tourism (CBT) in Thailand presents a culturally rich, locally driven alternative to mass tourism, resonating with the post-pandemic shift among Chinese travellers toward meaningful and immersive experiences. However, limited awareness, accessibility, and cross-cultural barriers hinder CBT's integration into the Chinese outbound tourism market. This policy brief draws on fieldwork in two CBT communities in Thailand and interviews with Chinese tourism professionals to explore how to strengthen CBT's visibility and relevance with the Chinese market. Recommendations target both market alignment and community readiness, offering a roadmap for deeper engagement through tailored promotion, value-aligned networks, and capacity building.

POLICY BRIEF: "Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands

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Author: 
SHAO Meng, Kassirin Phiboon

This policy brief examines how upland agricultural communities in Northern Thailand navigate climate-related and intersecting risks through community bonds that assemble existing resources and institutions, exploring the promises and pitfalls thereof. Findings from an Indigenous Karen community illustrate community-led adaptive responses oriented toward securing sustainable livelihoods. Recently this community has faced increasingly frequent weather changes and unstable water access, compounding existing vulnerabilities including insecure land tenure, limited community-based natural resource management rights, and barriers to access early warning systems and “damage and loss” compensation mechanisms. As climate change presents both slow-onset and abrupt changes while multiplying market and institutional risks, this research reveals that future climate adaptation policies should emphasize community characteristics and agency and avoid overly-centralized, top-down measures.

POLICY BRIEF: "From Trust to Recognition: Strengthening a Participatory and Community-Grounded Seed System in Thailand "

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
From Trust to Recognition: Strengthening a Participatory and Community-Grounded Seed System in Thailand

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Authors: Yuting Zhou, Kingkorn Narintarakul Na Ayutdhaya

This policy brief examines community seed systems in Thailand based on qualitative research, including field visits, workshops, and interviews with farmers, networks, academics, and practitioners. It highlights the experience of participatory and community-grounded seed systems at the grassroots level, which sustain biodiversity, livelihoods, and cultural resilience. However, these systems face significant structural barriers– legal, financial, and institutional – which continue to marginalize farmer expertise and reinforce dependence on corporate seeds. The brief argues for moving from trust to recognition by formally acknowledging, supporting, and expanding the space for these grassroots innovations. Policy recommendations focus on enabling inclusive governance, supporting farmer-led validation and exchange, safeguarding the diversity of seed practices, and ensuring accessible registration pathways. Strengthening smallholder farmers’ knowledge, networks, and agency is essential to creating a resilient, democratic, and culturally grounded seed system that combines innovation with tradition for Thailand’s sustainable future.

POLICY BRIEF: "Protecting the Customary Rights and Way of Life in Thailand’s Small-scale Fishery Communities"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Protecting the Customary Rights and Way of Life in Thailand’s Small-scale Fishery Communities

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Authors: Jiao Xiaofang, Ravadee Prasertcharoensuk, Varuntorn Kaewtankam

Small-scale fishery (SSF) communities in Thailand play a vital ecological and social role but face mounting threats due to overlapping laws, unclear tenure, and rising economic pressures. This research draws on participatory video and fieldwork conducted in Ban Yaimom village, where residents helped document their histories, spatial practices, and legal struggles. The project reveals how housing insecurity is deepening social and economic inequality, especially for women and low-income families, while administrative contradictions expose communities to eviction. Despite policy frameworks that nominally protect traditional settlements, implementation remains fragmented and exclusionary. By using video as both method and message, the research shows how communities can make their “invisible rights” visible asserting customary claims and collective knowledge in the face of legal erasure. The findings call for legal harmonization, recognition of customary housing right, and more inclusive governance mechanisms to protect the right to stay and sustain coastal ways of life.

POLICY BRIEF: "Co-Designing for Actionable and Accountable Data in the Tonle Sap Basin, Cambodia"

Publication: CSDS and Oxfam Mekong Water Governance Program Policy Brief

Publication date: December 2024

Authors: Carl Middleton and Mech Sreylakh

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Between October 2023 and August 2024, Oxfam’s Mekong Water Governance Program and the Center for Social Development Studies undertook an action research project applying a design thinking process in Kampong Phluk village and Bak Prea village located in the Tonle Sap flood plains in Cambodia. The project aimed to identify access to water data solutions that respond to community needs and context, including ensuring inclusion across sub-groups. This policy brief shows the benefits of design thinking as a bottom-up process for development practitioners to work with communities to co-define challenges and co-create solutions that are actionable, inclusive, and trusted. 

Citation: Middleton, C. and Mech, S. (2024). Co-Designing for Actionable and Accountable Data in the Tonle Sap Basin, Cambodia. Center for Social Development Studies and Oxfam Mekong Water Governance Program: Bangkok and Phnom Penh

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Guest Editorial: "Ecological knowledge co-production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia"

Publication date: January 2023

Publication: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Authors: Robert A. Farnan, Sally Beckenham, Carl Middleton

In Human Geography, there is growing interest in how accounts of development can be wedded to an understanding of society in which the material or technical is connected to the social. Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches this division by emphasizing the inextricable relationship between technology and society. This process of co-production—between science and technology on the one hand and social and political order on the other—drives the focus of the special section and its investigation of ecological knowledge and contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia that this guest editorial introduces.

See the full guest editorial here.

Citation: Farnan, R.A., Beckenham, S. and Middleton, C. (2023), Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co-production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 44: 37-43. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12469

JOURNAL ARTICLE: "Higher Education Institution, SDG2 and Agri- Food Sustainability: Lessons from Chulalongkorn University and Thailand"

Publication date: October 2021

Publication: Environment, Development and Sustainability

Authors: Wayne Nelles, Supawan Visetnoi, Carl Middleton, Thita Orn- in

This paper examines higher education efforts linking United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and agri- food system sustainability given reports of stagnant movement for SDG2 in Southeast Asia and lack of data for effective monitoring or evaluation to realize the 2030 Agenda. It discusses Thai contexts amid a growing global movement in academic theory, policy and practice to mainstream SDG knowledge and implementation across campuses presenting one case to illustrate broader concerns. Chulalongkorn University policies, faculty awareness, curricula, research, sustainability reporting and partnerships about SDGs have contributed to SDG2 objectives from different disciplines and academic units. However, some faculty still lack understanding of SDGs generally while SDG2 has not been an institutional priority. The university has made welcome progress since 2017 policy promoting SDGs but still needs to strengthen SDG2 data collection, teaching, research and community outreach capacities including links to governement and international reporting to address complex agri- food system sustainability challenges. Comparative studies could also help while critically debating SDG deficiencies and promoting socioeconomic, ecological, agri- food system, community and campus sustainability.

Read the article here.

Citation: Nelles, W., Visetnoi, S., Middleton, C., & Orn-in, T. (2021). Higher education institutions, SDG2 and agri-food sustainability: Lessons from Chulalongkorn University and Thailand. Environment, Development and Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-01892-1