Q&A: Albert Salamanca on 25 years of socio-economic change in Northeast Thailand

 In 1982-83, a Ph.D. student named Jonathan Rigg surveyed households in two villages in Northeast Thailand, learning about their living conditions, household assets, livelihoods and pathways out of poverty. In 2008, as part of The Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia, a collaborative project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Rigg — who had gone on to join the faculty of Durham University in the UK (he is now with the National University of Singapore) — returned to those villages. He was accompanied by postdoctoral fellow Albert Salamanca, now a research fellow in SEI’s Asia Centre. A new journal article documents their findings. Q: How much had the households changed, and do they reflect changes across Thailand?
AS: Our focus was on the rural, village side of Thai societal change, and behind much of what we discuss is a growing engagement with the urban, in all respects.In an earlier paper we write how this has resulted in settlements becoming “thoroughly economically and spatially integrated, dependent on resources and opportunities situated beyond the boundaries of the village”. Due to growing migration and heightened levels of mobility, we note the emergence of “shadow households” wherein children of household members are left to be cared for by their grandparents, while the parents are away working elsewhere in Thailand.

Surprisingly, the value of land as a vehicle to transmit wealth to the next generation remained secure. But with so many younger household members working away, we also see the “geriatrification” of farming; many active farmers are now over 50 years old. While the availability of non-farm work is part of the explanation, also important are shifting preferences against farming as a livelihood among the youth, declining fertility rates, and the simple unavailability of land.

 Q: You found a dramatic change in livelihood assets, and much less distinction between the richest and the poorest in this regard. Can you tell us more?
AS: We used assets as a marker of wealth in the village. We found that some assets, such as TVs and motorbikes, were rare in 1982, and were useful markers of relative wealth, but they were widespread in 2008 among both poor and non-poor households. Their affordability and accessibility was partly facilitated by the availability of cash earned from migration; also important, though, was easy access to credit. The problem is that households are now heavily indebted. Some households we interviewed said that assets in themselves do not mark the wealth of a household; it is rather how those assets were acquired.Q: How much social mobility did you find, and did you associate it with particular policies or socio-economic trends?
AS: When we looked at the processes that attended to the lives of the households, we saw that general propositions about the evolving structures of poverty and prosperity were hard to identify. We saw a surprising level of turbulence in wealth transitions. Some life events fundamentally altered the well-being of individual households. Some formerly wealthy households became impoverished by the death of the most productive family member. Others were only “an illness away” from poverty. But some manage to sustain themselves by turning their initial land endowments into productive assets. Others migrated and formed new households elsewhere but maintained relationships in the village through social and financial remittances. This, of course, would not have been possible in the absence of Thailand’s wider economic development “story”, but we were intent on showing how this high-level story becomes imprinted at the personal and household levels.

 Q: How has the shift away from agriculture changed livelihood opportunities within the villages?
AS: The specialization/diversification story is a complex one. The farm economy has become less diverse — farm households are not planting the range of crops or raising the range of livestock that they were in the 1980s. So the farm economy has tended towards greater specialization. But if we widen our viewpoint and include non-agricultural (but on-farm) and off-farm activities then the household livelihood portfolio has diversified. Gender differences do exist, but starker today are the generational differences.Q: Your current work focuses primarily on climate change adaptation. What implications might the dynamics you found have for households’ adaptive capacity and resilience?
AS: There are number of implications. For example, it is important how we understand household dynamics and the role of time when we look at risk and vulnerability. Taking a longer view, one sees that many different dynamics affect households and their individual members, sometimes strengthening them and other times depleting their adaptive capacity and resilience. Also, the household is never immune to the changing social and political circumstances of its locality and economic development in the country. It is never a neutral space. These insights can help us understand the contexts of household decision-making in a changing climate.

 Q: As you note in the introduction, this is a rare kind of study, but very fruitful. Should studies like this be done in the adaptation context in particular, perhaps at shorter intervals?
AS: There are many ways a study like this could contribute to understandings of adaptation. A re-study can help us understand what constitutes a household’s adaptive capacity and how it responds to various sources of vulnerability. A household’s resilience is not static. The risks and vulnerabilities that characterized a household could change over time. Lessons may have been learned to help a household address shocks and stressors. Or that certain forms of adaptation may have been useful over the short-term but became mal-adaptations over time, or when seen from other household members’ perspectives.Read the article»