Extract

The introductory chapter presented a local social system as a set of locality groups, institutions, and resources in a local society. There must be a variety of locality groups, such as social organizations and local administrative organizations, each of which has a different capacity for mobilizing institutions and resources, including organizational experiences, into the local people’s collective actions for rural development. The differences in the composition of these groups were assumed to matter in the ways local people structure their organizations. This chapter examines this assumption by looking at case studies from rural Thailand. In Thailand, new types of development organizations have been created by the local people themselves and introduced by development agencies during the past several decades. Rural people have responded to the environmental changes stemming from the rapid economic growth after the 1960s. However, the way people organized themselves appeared to differ by region, especially in the lower central region compared to the north and northeast regions. In the north and northeast, the organizational activities for development usually occurred at the administrative village level. On the contrary, in the lower central region, the local people were more often organized in social groups other than local administrative units. Focusing on this difference between the regions, I here examine how local institutions and resources affect the process of organizing, which locality group facilitates these institutions and resources, and how the locality groups are composed in each local society.