Sustainable Development in Thailand

• Author: Akihisa Mori,Aki Tonami
• Published date: 01 September 2007
• Date: 01 September 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1070496507306223
• Subject Matter: Articles

269

The Journal of Environment

& Development

Volume 16 Number 3

September 2007 269-289

© 2007 Sage Publications

10.1177/1070496507306223

http://jed.sagepub.com

hosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

Sustainable Development

in Thailand

Lessons From Implementing Local

Agenda 21 in Three Cities

Aki Tonami

Akihisa Mori

Kyoto University, Japan

This article examines the effect of development assistance programs on Local Agenda

21 (LA21) programs in three municipalities of Thailand. First, the article examines

institutional changes in Thailand geared toward decentralization. Second, the article

analyzes the effect based on the frameworks of Noda and Ouchi for the level of partici-

pation. The results indicate that participation was a top–down participation of local res-

idents who presumed some benefits from the municipality in exchange for their

attendance in meetings. Third, the article evaluates the effect in terms of project

efficiency. The results show that municipalities conducted most of the actions declared

in their LA21 but the sustainability of these actions is questionable. It is contended that

LA21 has its limitations as a planning guide for sustainable cities in developing

countries. An assistance program should be designed that helps the government of a

developing country to institutionalize meaningful involvement for a participatory envi-

ronmental policy formation.

Keywords: development aid; Local Agenda 21; Thailand; subsidiarity principle;

public participation; project efficiency

Sustainable development requires the balance between economic, environmental,

and social needs. For creating the balance, an initiative called Local Agenda 21

(LA21) was proposed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and

Authors’Note: This study was conducted under the research project “Consensus Building and Coordination of

Interests in the Environmental Governance” at Kyoto University, funded by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific

Research (A) (2), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No.15201005). The Showa Shell Sekiyu

Foundation for the Promotion of Environmental Research partially funded the first author’s research at the

Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies of Kyoto University. The authors would like to acknowledge

the cooperation of Korat, Lamphun, and Trang municipalities in Thailand and to thank our anonymous reviewers.

270 The Journal of Environment & Development

Development (UNCED) in 1992. LA21 is “an agenda that sets tasks and a vision in

order to promote sustainable development at the local level and shows the menu of

action” (Nakaguchi, 2004, p. 28). It is an attempt to set development agendas at the

local level for a better “quality of life” and “liveability” (Selman, 2000). The stake-

holder participation was considered essential in the agenda-setting process for qual-

ity environmental planning and management (Sandbrook & Quarrie, 1992). For

cities in developing countries, however, development and implementation of such a

program had been particularly difficult because of lack of resources and capacities

required. For instance, few municipalities had the ability to collect quantitative

data on the city’s environmental pollution, which was a prerequisite for developing

LA21.

Against this background, international development agencies of developed

countries began supporting pilot projects to develop and implement LA21 in

Thailand since 2000. The central government chose the first four municipalities to

receive the assistance to implement the pilot program, namely, Korat, Trang,

Lamphun, and Bangkok. In the next few years, local governments of these cities

developed and implemented LA21 through public participation at the local level

with the help of international agencies and the central government.

However, the effect of LA21 in these municipalities in Thailand remains unclear.

It has not always been articulated whether such efforts in developing countries lead

to the promotion of sustainable development at the local level. A case analysis of

LA21 in a developing country tends to be an ad hoc description of best practices,

making it difficult to draw meaningful lessons from them.

This article aims to answer the following questions: First, what sort of institutions

did Thailand have at the time to enable municipalities to develop and implement

LA21? Second, to what extent did the development assistance programs on LA21

promote public participation in setting the tasks, vision, and menu of action to pro-

mote sustainable development at the local level? Third, to what extent did the

programs realize the tasks, the vision, and the menu of action set in LA21?

To answer these questions, this article examined the effect of LA21 programs

from three perspectives that support the concept of sustainable development—

namely, the subsidiarity principle, public participation at the local level, and project

efficiency. First, we examined the development and implementation of LA21

programs in terms of the subsidiarity principle. The subsidiarity principle states that

“policy measures should be determined by the lowest level of authority suited for a

given problem” (Zylicz, 2000, p.145); in other words, it could be regarded as a

“decentralization principle” (Zylicz, 2000). It requires local municipalities to

assume responsibility for public duties such as environmental management. In this

article, we carefully reviewed the decentralization process in Thailand and its adher-

ence to the subsidiarity principle.