Sufficient Citizens: Moderation and the Politics of Sustainable Development in Thailand

Abstract

The "afterlives of development" are varied responses to a series of simultaneous transformations that undermined the teleological modernization narrative of the postwar development project (see this volume, Schwittay and Rudnckyj 2014:3-9). The apparent "end of development," as declared by Wolfgang Sachs (1992), occurred amidst a period of expansive democratization, as well as during global explosions of rapid, unequal urbanization and widespread fluctuations in the economies of socalled developing countries.1 In many parts of the world, economic growth gave way to collapse and then to structural adjustment, disrupting the linear temporal flow of the developmentalist narrative of progress (Ferguson 1999). In Thailand, the 1990s brought democratization and deepening urban growth, both of which were situated against a backdrop of economic boom. A chorus of activist calls for a new model of development accompanied this conjuncture of economic, social, environmental, and political upheaval. With the collapse of the Thai economy in 1997, these calls for a

‘Cukup for me to be successful in this country’: ‘staying’ among left‐behind young women in Indonesia's migrant‐sending villages

“…Much like Thailand's 'sufficiency economy' (Elinoff 2014) approach, which parallels the United Nations Development Programme's 'middle way' endorsement of 'a people-centred and sustainable path toward human development' (UNDP 2007: xiv), here we found some members of local communities affected by out-migration who are resisting its continuance for the sake of keeping their families intact. As with Elinoff's (2014: 94) 'moderating politics', these women are responding to excessive outmigration and family separation by reclaiming 'individual morality and community responsibility' (Rose 1999: 476) through cukup.…”

Urban Space and Exclusion in Asia

“…57-58). In Thailand, discourses of environmental sufficiency are also polyvalent-sometimes used to exclude the poor from consumer society and sometimes used by the poor to demand access to land and substantive citizenship rights (Elinoff 2014). Similarly, Choy's study of international conservation in Hong Kong shows how environmental advocacy can take on different meanings, sometimes being construed as a force of social and environmental protection and sometimes being cast as a threat to "indigenous" practices (Choy 2011).…”

Forced evictions, spatial (un)certainties and the making of exemplary centres in Indonesia

“…Residents in neighbourhoods with substandard infrastructure services may not be keen to leave because of place‐based social relationships, as well as the practicalities of being closer to jobs and opportunities. However, residents of lower‐income areas are not immune to the internalisation of dominant ideologies and may well aspire to live in an ‘exemplary’ city as imagined by the privileged (Elinoff, ). This is observable in the excerpt from field notes at the beginning of this paper, in which one of the residents expresses a belief that the river would be neater after eviction of the settlement and the reform of the embankment.…”