Rural Crossroads: Class and Migration in Peri-urban Chiang Mai

Peri-urban Thailand is a site for the coming together of rural and urban people from various class, economic, and value backgrounds. In many ways, the peri-urban is Thailand’s new frontier to which people are migrating from diverse directions and with different expectations of the place. Its physical and social changes have been even more dramatic than urban and rural areas. The previously agricultural communities in the countryside surrounding Chiang Mai have increasingly been drawn into the city’s peri-urban zone through connections by roads. Despite the pace of change, there is limited scholarly attention to peri-urban areas. Studies of migration in developing countries including Thailand also mainly focus on rural to urban migration through the process of agrarian change. This case study shows similar movements of urban middle class people from city to non-urban areas to that observed in the wider field of counter-urbanisation in developed countries. The processes of mixing of different groups in the peri-urban village help to redefine the village as place, both in physical and social dimensions. Physically, place is remade as a result of proximate residential patterns bringing together different groups previously living far from one another. Socially, as revealed through a partly auto-ethnographic study, peri-urban place-making today is an outcome of everyday processes of class formation. A key tension in the peri-urban village is between the expectations and desires of different social groups. While local aspirations are towards modernity and livelihood enhancement, urban middle class migrants still hold on to rural images shaped by public representations of the elites. Class defines how people position themselves in relation to one another through values and lifestyle, and study of social relations in the peri-urban village thus differs from the productionist emphasis of earlier agrarian studies

Rural Crossroads: Class and Migration in Peri-urban Chiang Mai

Peri-urban Thailand is a site for the coming together of rural and urban people from various class, economic, and value backgrounds. In many ways, the peri-urban is Thailand’s new frontier to which people are migrating from diverse directions and with different expectations of the place. Its physical and social changes have been even more dramatic than urban and rural areas. The previously agricultural communities in the countryside surrounding Chiang Mai have increasingly been drawn into the city’s peri-urban zone through connections by roads. Despite the pace of change, there is limited scholarly attention to peri-urban areas. Studies of migration in developing countries including Thailand also mainly focus on rural to urban migration through the process of agrarian change. This case study shows similar movements of urban middle class people from city to non-urban areas to that observed in the wider field of counter-urbanisation in developed countries. The processes of mixing of different groups in the peri-urban village help to redefine the village as place, both in physical and social dimensions. Physically, place is remade as a result of proximate residential patterns bringing together different groups previously living far from one another. Socially, as revealed through a partly auto-ethnographic study, peri-urban place-making today is an outcome of everyday processes of class formation. A key tension in the peri-urban village is between the expectations and desires of different social groups. While local aspirations are towards modernity and livelihood enhancement, urban middle class migrants still hold on to rural images shaped by public representations of the elites. Class defines how people position themselves in relation to one another through values and lifestyle, and study of social relations in the peri-urban village thus differs from the productionist emphasis of earlier agrarian studies

Property rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis revisited

More than two decades ago, Schlager and Ostrom (1992) developed ‘a conceptual schema for arraying property-rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights’. The conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance, common property, and community resource management. However, currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically, challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema. There are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis. Additionally, resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context, including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results-based payments for REDD+. These changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework. Those changes of governance process demand addition of property right to original framework. This paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance, proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights, control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights. We apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in China and Laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources. The empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people’s outright dispossession, since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources. However, local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights, which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors. The latter make available indirect benefits to local people, which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy-based entitlements. The empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of ‘compensated exclusions’ in natural resource governance

Geographical Distribution and Status of Actias Moths in Thailand

Geographical distribution and status of Actias moths was assessed at 46 forest stations throughout Thailand from January 2004 to December 2006. At each station, an eighteen watt black light was operated against a white sheet from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am daily. All Actias moths were observed and collected twice during the trapping period at 10:00 pm and 6:00 am. Distribution, abundance, seasonality and status were analyzed. Three out of the four Actias species previously encountered in Thailand were collected: A. maenas Doubleday, A. selene Hübner and A. rhodopneuma Röber. A. maenas was the most widespread species in the country with an average of 0.001037 individuals/spot sample and was found all year round. The highest abundance was in Narathiwat province, the northernmost border of the Sundaic region. A. selene was found at higher latitudes ranging from 20 °N at Doi Chiang Dao, Chiang Mai to 13 °N at Prachub Kirikhan province with an average of 0.003303 individuals/spot sample and were found all year round, with the highest abundance in July. By applying IUCN Categories & Criteria A. maenas and A. selene were designated as Vulnerable (VU) and Near Threatened (NT) species respectively. A. rhodopneuma moths were found only at Doi Phuka National Park, Nan province with 0.000263 individuals/spot sample from February to April and are therefore designated as a Critically Endangered (CR) species. A. sinensis was not found during this study and is therefore assigned the status of extinct (EX)

RPE Indigenous Peoples (Asia)

Meeting: International Workshop on Community - Based Natural Resource Management, 10-14 May 1998, Washington, DC, USIn IDL-3134

Causal factors affecting vaccine acceptance behavior of people in Bangkok, Thailand

Vaccination does not only reduce the severity of the disease, severe morbidity and mortality rates but it also help building herd immunity. This is why the government is trying to push people to get the COVID-19 vaccine as much and as fast as possible. However, what is interesting is that some people refused or do not accept to be vaccinated. The objective of this research was to study the causal factors affecting vaccine acceptance behavior. This research used the quantitative research method. The sample group was people in Bangkok who received the COVID-19 vaccine at least 1 dose for a total of 380 persons. The data were collected with questionnaires and analyzed with a structural equation modeling. The results revealed that cues to action had the greatest overall effect on vaccine acceptance behaviors, followed by perceived barriers, recognition of benefits of treatment and self-efficacy, respectively. The findings can be applied by Ministry of Health to planning operations or guidelines for communicating and understanding with people through various channels to raise knowledge, understanding, and attitudes that will lead to people’s behavior of vaccination acceptance. This is a desirable behavior that is absolutely necessary in the present situation