Resilient Ecologies and Urban Vulnerabilities in Thailand. Politics, Space, and Adaptation in the Anthropocene
Type
Single PanelSchedule
Session 9Wed 18:30-20:00 Classroom B 50
Convener
- Ladawan Khaikham Kasetsart University
Save This Event
Add to CalendarPapers
-
Disaster Response and Urban Resilience to Earthquakes: A Case Study of Bangkok Metropolitan
Ladawan Khaikham Kasetsart University
This paper investigates urban disaster response and resilience among Bangkok residents during earthquake events, integrating urban resilience and disaster risk reduction frameworks. It highlights both institutional constraints and community capacities in preparing for seismic risks.
-
Constructing Resilience through Green Infrastructure: The Political Ecology of Public Parks in Bangkok
Thasita Supatanarungsan Sukhothaithammathirat Open University
Examines how Bangkok’s public parks—particularly Chulalongkorn Centennial Park and Benjakitti Forest Park—embody the politics of resilience and reveal tensions between ecological adaptation and socio-spatial inequality.
-
Sacrificed Zones of Development: A Political Ecology of Flood Governance and Human–Nature Relations in the Lower Chao Phraya River Basin
Thianchai Surimas Thammasat University
Explores how flood governance has produced “sacrifice zones” where agrarian communities bear the cost of protecting industrial and urban regions, revealing new hydrosocial landscapes of injustice.
-
Restructured Spaces under the Bang Ban Floodplain Policy in the Age of Capitalocene
Artit Phuboonkong Ubon Ratchathani University
Analyzes how state and capitalist interventions reshape hydrosocial spaces in central Thailand, transforming water governance, agrarian livelihoods, and environmental activism.
-
Rights to the City as a Civic Duty Beyond Legal Citizenship
Phianphachong Intarat Songkhla Rajabhat University
Investigates urban citizenship and civic participation among non-registered populations in Songkhla, proposing an expanded understanding of the “right to the city” as civic responsibility in rapidly urbanizing contexts.
Abstract
This panel examines how resilience, adaptation, and environmental justice are being reimagined in Southeast Asia amid intensifying climate disruptions, disaster risks, and developmental transformations. Across the region, “resilience” has become a buzzword in both urban planning and environmental governance, often masking tensions between sustainability narratives and socio-political realities. The panel brings together case studies from Thailand that interrogate how governance systems, local communities, and social movements negotiate the meanings and practices of resilience within urban and ecological landscapes.
The contributions move from the politics of flood governance and urban green infrastructure to the redefinition of citizenship and civic participation in disaster contexts. Together, they illuminate how disaster management and climate adaptation policies intersect with power, inequality, and everyday life. By engaging with frameworks of political ecology, urban resilience, and governance, these studies reveal the contradictions embedded in state-led adaptation strategies that privilege economic stability and urban security over social inclusion and ecological justice.
Through diverse methodologies—ranging from mixed-methods disaster research to discourse and policy analysis—the panel explores multiple scales of resilience: from households and communities in flood-prone provinces to metropolitan institutions in Bangkok and emerging civic spaces in southern Thailand. These empirical inquiries show that resilience in Southeast Asia is not merely a technical process of infrastructure or risk management but a deeply political practice involving negotiation, resistance, and redefinition of human–nature relations.
By situating these cases within broader regional and global debates on the Anthropocene and the depoliticization of adaptation, this panel contributes to rethinking resilience as both a material condition and a moral–political project. It calls for critical reflection on how Southeast Asian societies can move beyond resilience as survival toward resilience as justice—grounded in inclusion, participation, and coexistence.