Change from Within: Adaptation and Self-Determination in Three Rural Communities of Northeast Thailand, 1900-1992

Abstract

This thesis examines changes and development that have taken place in three communities located in a marginal area of the poverty-stricken Northeast Thailand. It focuses on farmer experiences, particularly their critical thought and action, in coping with both a challenging environment and a rapidly changing world. The aim of the study was to learn from the rural population local socio-cultural processes-the way in which they have attempted to improve their own livelihood. This knowledge could then be used to improve and re-assess the goals and objectives of poverty alleviation programmes which aim to influence behavioral changes of disadvantaged, rural people. Conventionally, development interventions have been provided by outsiders, namely policy makers, trained scientists, urban-based social activists, and so on, and local strengths and capabilities were generally overlooked. The livelihood of the population in the three study communities as in other rural areas of Thailand is largely affected by two levels of change: people's interaction with the local environment and structural relations with the outside world through government and non-government institutions. The latter is regarded as a profound process of social integration which is part of overall national transformation in response to political and economic changes at regional and global levels. This integrative process, a historical and cultural product, creates certain lived experiences, knowledge, cultural values and so on most of which have been dominated by the Capital's cosmopolitan world view. It is this very Process that is most often neglected and inadequately understood in agrarian research. The integrative or structural process helps explain farmers' different responses. The combination of Thailand's democratization, economic transformation, urbanization and government-promoted rural development programmes blended with economic objectives within a broader political agenda create a wide range of options from which marginal farmers can choose their response. Accordingly, farmers in these villages are, contrary to what is generally understood, neither passive recipients of change nor predictable prisoners of culture; they are not trapped in a "culture of poverty." Rather, they are literate and active agents of change. A household often engages in diverse activities centred around that which gives the highest cash return. Farmers constantly try to adopt household strategies from the outside, adapt them to local environments, and reject those unsuitable or superfluous to local realities. However, most households still maintain semi-subsistent rice cultivation with a shift towards broadcasting seed in preference to the traditional transplanting technique. A diversity of household strategies is the result of how individual farmers respond to integrative Processes and structural relationships. Two modes of change are identified. First, many households are so caught between the cosmopolitan world view perpetuated on one hand by centralized policies and urban migration of the people themselves and on the other by the difficult conditions of a marginal environment that they rely heavily on replication and imitation rather than invention. As shown in the adoption of commercial farming and, to some extent, export oriented enterprises, this can be seen as a weak form of adaptation characterised by instability and opportunistic, short-lived prosperity. Second once people begin to become aware of the extent of their marginalisation, self-critical and resolved to tackle problems on their own, they focus on factors in the economic and agricultural environment that can be controlled and work towards establishing specialized and stable production systems. In application, rural/human development should aim at enhancing people's capacity to analyze situations and work towards self-realization with an informed determination to come to terms with the world as it really is. Development of grass-roots organizations such as NGOs and Peoples' Organizations (POs) must be formed as an integral part of these self-critical and self-realization processes. Group support should be linked with relevant urban-based interest groups as part of the overall social transformation. Social change and development needs to be thought of not in terms of concrete rural-urban divisions or sectors, but rather as an ambiguous overlapping of the two. In the Northeast, rural development processes have largely been dominated by the latter, urbanization characterised by the cosmopolitan world view. The outcome of social development must be viewed as transitory and cumulative, a process of national transformation in which all segments of the population must be prepared to change. This need not involve the violence of dislocation, alienation and anomie but can take place by peaceful means such as political lobbying, group consensus and on-going negotiation: a silent revolution from within.