Jonathan Rigg

Embracing the Global in Thailand: Activism and Pragmatism in an Era of Deagrarianization

Abstract Today, few “farmers” in Thailand rely solely on agriculture to meet their needs. Rural households are dividing their time between farm and nonfarm activities, constructing livelihoods that are increasingly hybrid, both spatially and sectorally. Many of the new opportunities also have an important “global” element. This paper contends that embracing the global is essential for many households who are land-short, farming-shy and consumption-inclined. This offers the prospect of a profound shift in the trajectory of rural change in Thailand as these processes intersect.

Living with transition in Laos : market integration in Southeast Asia

1. Managing and Coping with Transition Part 1: Setting the Context 2. New Poverty and Old Poverty: Livelihoods and Transition in Laos 3. Subsistence Affluence or Subsistence Struggle? Unpicking tradition and Illuminating the Past 4. Poverty, Inequality and Exclusion Part 2: Constructing the Argument 5. The Best of Intentions: Policy-Induced Poverty 6. Market-Induced Poverty: Market Integration and Social Differentiation 7. Making Livelihoods Work Part 3: Putting It Together 8. Summarising the Case Bibliography Appendices

Rural–urban interactions, agriculture and wealth: a southeast Asian perspective

The forces of economic and social change are reworking rural areas of the developing world, sometimes fundamentally so. Agriculture is being squeezed by nonagricultural pursuits, aspirations are increasingly informed by a wish to avoid farming and the ‘household’ is being restructured as the genders and generations contest and renegotiate their respective roles. The diversification of the household economy and the interpenetration of rural and urban have created multiple hybridities where individuals and households shift between agricultural and industrial pursuits and cross between rural and urban areas. Farm is in thrall to nonfarm, and industry is often dependent on ‘rural’ labour. Drawing largely on work from southeast Asia, the article reviews these changes to rural life and livelihood, discusses their impacts on agriculture and reflects on their implications for rural development.

Production, Consumption and Imagination in Rural Thailand.

The transformation of rural areas from zones of production to arenas of consumption is well established in the literature focusing on the developed world. Less so the developing world. The paper opens by providing a critique of the construction of the rural idyll in Thailand, tracing this back to what is sometimes suggested to be the first piece of Thai literature, an inscription dated to 1292. The discussion then turns to show how this construction of a (imagined) rural past infuses ideas about the present and the policies promoted by local NGOs and others. The consumption of rural Thailand by new classes, tacitly embodying this imagined past, is exemplified by reference to two case studies; a hotel with a ‘working’ rice farm and an elite school. The infiltration of new groups into rural Thailand, with new agendas has, in some instances, created tensions while also providing new opportunities for traditional rural classes. The paper concludes by considering, using Thailand as an exemplar, whether understandings of trajectories of rural change based largely on work undertaken in the North can be applied to countries of the South.

Critical Commentary. The World Development Report 2009

This is a report written by economists, which ignores previous quantitative economic geographers’ work on urban agglomeration. Agglomeration is viewed as an imperative for development and, most signifi cantly, an ‘engine of growth’, inverting past World Bank and Western aid agency thinking which saw ‘urban bias’ as a severe drain on development. Why the change of mind? Critical Commentary. The World Development Report 2009

A survey of the World Development Reports I: discursive strategies

This is the first of two surveys of the World Development Report series. Here we focus on the discursive strategies adopted by the Reports. We begin by setting the Reports within the wider milieu of development theory and practice. Behind the pragmatic, problem-solving image that the Reports aim to promote we identify a narrow and pre-framed position that eschews radical or alternative agendas. The Reports engage in numerous discursive ploys to undermine, ignore or manipulate other positions and establish the Reports (and, by extension, the World Bank) as the repository of development ‘common sense’. While the Reports are impressive synthesizing documents, they have lost their ability to play a truly leading role in thinking about development because of their failure to debate alternative positions or fully acknowledge the mistakes of the past.

The World Development Report II: continuity and change in development orthodoxies

In the second of two review papers on the World Bank’s series of World Development Reports (WDRs; 1978 to 2000/2001) we track some key themes and issues: North and South; state, market and civil society; and people, participation and values. Identifying clear trajectories in the series is made difficult by their characteristically mixed, and sometimes contradictory, messages. However, over time we identify a gradual weakening in the view that development is a global responsibility, with increasing emphasis placed on the choices (and shortcomings) of national governments. This is particularly evident in their very partial assessments of global regulatory institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. In relation to the emergence of the post-Washington consensus, we note that the WDRs have always paid some attention to institutions and the role of the state -although before the late 1990s this position was much less evident in other World Bank publications and indeed policy. Finally, we suggest that the substantial shift towards more participa-tory language and approaches, while welcome, is still underpinned by utilitarian values, in which a depoliticized version of ‘empowerment’ is valued primarily for its contribution to the main goal of economic growth.

External finance in Thailand's development : an interpretation of Thailand's growth boom

List of Tables and Figures - Series Editors Introduction - Authors Preface - Double Digit Growth - The Integration of Thailand in the Global Economy - Financing Economic Growth - Debt-Financed Growth and Structural Adjustment, 1975-86 - The Foreign Investment Boom, 1987-94 - The Macroeconomic Impact of External Finance: Summary of Findings and Model Simulations - Appendices - Notes - References - Index

Re-mapping the politics of aid: the changing structures and networks of humanitarian assistance in post-tsunami Thailand

The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami caused massive human and economic destruction. In this paper we argue that the international response to the tsunami exemplifies a shift in the way humanitarian aid is sourced and delivered, and tease out a framework for understanding the continuities and discontinuities that led to differential distribution across a range of sites in southern Thailand. On the one hand we examine the degree to which we can understand differential aid distribution in terms of persistent characteristics in the political economy, such as lack of transparency and corruption . We also consider the importance of ‘traditional’ structures, networks and resiliences and their role in influencing aid distribution. But these sorts of explanations must be nuanced in light of the emergence of new aid linkages and networks, particularly the move from formal organizations to individualized and direct donations. We suggest these patterns reflect new abilities of communities to mobilize trans-national networks, a more participatory approach to aid donation and an opportunity to re-map the multi-scalar politics of aid.

Connecting and Disconnecting People and Places: Migrants, Migration, and the Household in Sri Lanka

Domestic and international migration provide the point of entry for an investigation of social and economic transformations that are altering the function and functioning of the household at two sites in rural Sri Lanka. Based on a survey questionnaire of one hundred households complemented by interviews with a subsample of fifty migrants or their families, the article views migration not as just connecting people and places but being constitutive of those places. Domestic migration is shown to be an “escape” strategy, whereas international migration is pursued as part of a household livelihood strategy undertaken for the sake of the family. In the former, an individualization of activity occurs as young women and men become partially independent wage earners, whereas in the latter migration raises the bargaining power and status of the migrant but in the context of the household, rather than separate from it. We look inside the household to illuminate the status, place, and role of migration and keep doing so as household–migration interactions evolve. Taking this approach, we seek to explain a series of conundrums relating to migration.