Mogens Buch-Hansen’s research while affiliated with Roskilde University and other places

This chapter will introduce the geographical conditions and economic characteristics of Central Vietnam. It proceeds to analyse the general economic development in the region, particularly since the introduction of economic reforms in the early 1990s. Both foreign investment and exports have risen dramatically, turning Vietnam into a major exporter of a range of agricultural and industrial products. Further, it shows how some of the paradoxes of development and globalization, such as high growth and simultaneous socio-economic differentiation, are also played out in the provinces of Central Vietnam. In a disaster prone region, the poor households are at risk of losing out when greater weather variability threatens agricultural and forestry production and increases overall economic losses. The rapid expansion of the hydropower generating capacity has stimulated economic development and thereby potentially enhanced social resilience, but at the same time has increased the ecological vulnerability and set in motion a range of processes not under control.

There is need for a new development concept that allows for the expected global population of 9–11 billion by 2050 to live within the ecological finite world. Since the concept of development became the Western countries’ mantra of human progress and modernisation, promising the undeveloped Third World countries materialistic welfare similarly to the developed countries, the poorest countries keep falling further behind in poverty. Rapidly growing emerging economies, however, that all together contain more than half of the world population, now adds up to existing mass consumerism and demand changing the established North–South hegemonic world order based on the linear concept of development. This creates two new scenarios. One is the rapidly growing challenges to the global ecosystems, including greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that with the expected global population by the middle of this century ‘probably will exceed all possible measures of available resources and assessments of limits to the capacity to absorb impacts’ [UNEP, 2011, Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth, Nairobi: UNEP.]. The second scenario is the changing world order promoted by the rapid economic growth of new emerging economies. Democratically sharing future room for development within a finite ecological planet calls for radical new thinking about development in terms of sufficiency, frugality and sustainability. The interdisciplinary approach of development studies can play a pertinent role in the necessary redefinition of development in rich and poor countries. This, however, implies that the economics of the re-conceptualised development takes its point of departure in the realities of an ecological finite world.

The hypothesis of this article is that managing agricultural landscapes for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a Payment for Environmental Services mechanism [PES] will be of major significance after the 2012 Kyoto Protocol era. The large number of small scale farmers in developing countries, and not least in Africa South of Sahara [SSA], will through this system get an opportunity for a triple win situation: contributing to national development, environmental protection and enhancing their own livelihoods. The big problem of relying on small scale farmers is organizing them to ensure service provisions that live up to the requirements of endurance, additionality and reliability. The Kenya Tea Development Agency [KTDA] for over almost 50 years has been successful in integrating 600,000 smallholders in tea production making tea number one income earner in Kenya, and enhancing the livelihoods of the involved contract growers. This article argues that lessons should be learned from the success of KTDA when trying to replicate the organizational model for other crops, but not least in PES schemes. The article emphasizes vertical integration and production diversification, enabling market conditions, and democratization as the main factors in KTDA's success. Thiscould possibly be replicated when promoting small scale farmers participating in the post-Kyoto carbon trade and other PES schemes.

Environmental science is shaped by the socio-political context in which it is produced. Environmental problems and explanations are context specific, and this article contributes to a critical political ecology by illustrating the changing relationship between conceptualisation of environmental problems and explanations of them, and the socio-political context in contemporary Thailand. During the 'development epoch' from the 1950s, both natural and social sciences became compartmentalised and the epistemology of environmental science became dominated by the demands of a growth economy and utilitarian values. The resulting impasse of conventional knowledge of natural resource management coincided with a socio-political and bureaucratic reform process pushed by various democratic movements. Together with a request for decentralisation and devolution of state power, these movements are also fighting for sustainable utilisation of natural resources, and sustainable agricultural practices. A precondition, however, for sustainable utilisation of natural resources is a change in conceptualisation and knowledge creation for resource management. The Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management (SLUSE) collaboration offers alternative ways of creating knowledge for sustainable utilisation of natural resources, that aim to support the present socio-political reform process in Thailand. Key Words: Thailand, natural resource management, transdisciplinarity

The global 'development epoch' began with an emphasis on formal development planning in the 1950s, and it ended with the onset of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, under the political leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. It corresponds to what the World Bank calls the "second phase" of globalisation (World Bank, 2002), which were experienced in Thailand and other countries in South-East Asia. During Thailand's thirty-year "development epoch", commercial agricultural development became the backbone of economic development. Specialised agricultural sciences, working in a variety of institutions across Asia, developed widely-disseminated "Green Revolution" technologies, and growth in the agricultural sector helped lay the groundwork for the subsequent boom in export-oriented manufacturing that led economic growth from the mid-1980s. It is our aim in this article to illustrate how perceptions of environmental changes and environmental problems in Thailand have been created and deployed in this socio-political context. We argue that agricultural environments and their management have become contested domains in contemporary Thailand, but often this contestation has occurred because of narrow positions corresponding to the academic disciplines. We explore an alternative, transdisciplinary approach to knowledge creation that is more akin to the current thinking on resource management offered by critical political ecologists. This approach was developed in SLUSE (Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management), a collaboration among universities in Denmark and Thailand, and the approach it develops combines analysis with knowledge "creation". When General Sarit took power in Thailand in 1958, he oriented the economy to export-led growth, and Thailand soon became the fifth biggest exporter of agricultural commodities among the developing countries. The agricultural sector was quick to adopt the technologies of the Green Revolution, and the driving force of many government agencies was to increase agricultural output. The vocabulary of Thai agriculture and natural resource management subsequently became dominated by Western rational thinking, and by a drive to higher levels of production that had much to do with post-War American-led modernism and its economic growth ethic. This major change in national economic orientation was written on the landscape. The development discourse under authoritarian military rule during the 1960s and 1970s (paused by the students' revolt and political turbulence from 1973 to 1976) had real effects, transforming the major part of Thailand's forests to arable land. Linked to this, the number of small-scale land holdings doubled from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s (Phongpaichit and Baker, 1999). Since this time there has been an ongoing struggle between smallholder communities that are attempting to continue their livelihood practices in an era where export agriculture has now become less important to the national economy, and the efforts of the Royal Forest Department (RFD) that is trying to control access to the remaining, unconverted forests and asserts the rights to manage them. A prominent part of this struggle is a twenty-year old debate over the Community Forestry Bill. At the centre of this struggle are contested definitions of natural resources - of forest and forest cover, as well as differing views over the sustainability of community forestry, shifting agriculture, and other traditional farming practices. The RFD has been claiming that the local communities living within the forest reserves have been depleting forest resources by pursuing their traditional farming practices. In many parts of the country, however, the right to livelihood of forest communities has also been asserted as a counter-narrative, and it has received support from non-governmental organizations, who challenge the right of the RFD to

This paper shows how the control over land and resources in rural Thailand in the present phase of globalisation is a struggle between economic, social and political powers at the global, national and local level. Ever since Thailand was integrated into the world market by signing the Bowring Treaty in 1855 and especially after it embarked on rapid development in the late 1950s economic growth has changed the rural (and urban) landscapes. Since the mid 1980s, export-oriented manufacturing industry has led Thailand into the present phase of globalisation by further liberalising its economy and increasingly leaving natural resources open to be exploited. Two socio-political tendencies have been competing in influencing territorialisation of rural Thailand. However, decentralisation and devolution of power promote local institutions that emphasise various degrees of self-reliance and sustainable utilisation of natural resources opposed to further liberalisation on the world market as promoted by national and transnational businesses and global institutions like the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. Territorialisation of rural Thailand and management of local natural resources is therefore contested space where institutions at the local level operate in a contextual framework of policies formulated at the global level and implemented through national government agencies. The conflicts inherent in the multi-layered process of local territorialisation are blurred by the different institutions at different geographical levels having different perceptions of the environment. Political ecology or political environmental geography – promoted by a ‘counter-coalition’ of potentially like-minded actors operates on various levels in developing alternative territorialisation premised on socially just and sustainable livelihoods. Such approaches, it is proposed, are crucial to the study of local development in the context of globalisation.

Thailand has pursued a conventional, but rapid economic development model, based on extraction of labour and economic surplus from the agricultural sector. This has happened to a degree where agriculture has been absorbed into the urban economy, producing for urban based agribusiness companies and with a majority of rural households dependent on migrant work. The conventional development model was successful from an economic point of view, making Thailand the world's fifth largest exporter of agricultural commodities. The development model, however, has left a significant portion of Thai farmers outside the mainstream of economic success and social development. When the financial crisis doomed on Thailand in 1997 due to overheating of the economy, unwise short-term investments and financial mismanagement, the Thai population had an opportunity to review the development model. The maldevelopment in terms of degradation of natural resources and human values following the rapid economic growth and urbanization, together with many years of authoritarian government rule, triggered an ideological debate among the rapidly growing urban middle class on the direction of development.As environmental issues increasingly legitimize a discourse for social protests and for protection of vested interests by grassroots, government agencies and elite social forces alike, it becomes pertinent to analyze these issues in a socio-economic and political context. The Eight Development Plan introduced the concept of “Sustainable Agriculture” as a tribute to those not benefiting from conventional agricultural development. Hence it becomes essential to include economic, socio-cultural, institutional and political analyses along with biophysical resources and production methods. We raise a number of questions as to whether Sustainable Agriculture is economically viable, whether it is socially acceptable and whether it is politically feasible. There is need of a holistic approach integrating biophysical analyses in a framework of social science analyses of the enabling policies and socio-cultural studies of development.

The present paper is a draft working paper based on a fieldwork that I conducted in Thailand during a couple of months in the second half of 1999. During that period I interviewed and discussed with very many people having helped me to form my ideas about the feasibility of sustainable agriculture in Thailand. However, since the issue is politically sensitive I have not mentioned any names, which they may appreciate. Also the interpretation of what they have told me is my own and I of course take the full responsibility for the way I have put the ideas together. This, however, should not restrain me from thanking everyone who has spent time with me. The purpose of the draft working paper is to present my interpretations and ideas to colleagues and concerned parties in Thailand, for them to correct me in whatever issue I might have misunderstood. The nature of the subject, however, implicates that not all will agree with my interpretation.