• Thoughtful community-based adaptation to climate change and flood
• Disaster risk management and resilience
• Multi-level environmental governance
• Geography & behavioral perspectives
• Mobility/migration and rural restructuring.

Community-based Adaptation of Repeated Flooding Communities in the Yom River Basin, Thailand

The main research question draws upon the relationship between individuals and other wider stakeholders in the regime of flood and climate governance, as well as development schemes affecting flood characteristic in the Yom River Basin. It aims to explore in what ways individuals are able to collaborate in community-based adaptation, as a fundamental to multi-level governance for adaptation to climate change in the context of repeated flooding.

According to the main question, I emphasizes a robust connection of scale and governance. Due to the context of flood and water resources management, as well as the articulation of neoliberal and sustainable development in Thailand, social relationship for water resources management has been illustrated in terms of unequal power relations in traditionally hierarchical structures, dominated by state discourses of macro-scale development and structural mitigation to exclude other forms of knowledge from different actors in flood and irrigation systems. In promoting local communities and individual to engage with governance, multi-level governance primarily determines to encourage vertical and nested relationship at the holistic point of view. Another point is that multi-level governance promotes a capacity not only for adaptation, but also approaches to transformation of social and political structures, which requires ongoing negotiation of interests. A picture of horizontal collaboration will not be enlightened if the arguments of ‘bounded rationality’ among human in building governance and ‘the inadequacy of individual participation’ in community-based adaptation were not applied to support that importance. To understanding individuals I cannot employ only declarative knowledge in adaptation to flood, but their subjectivity from values, beliefs, norms, experiences, and behaviors – reflected as performativity – should be understood as well. Forming divergent social identity, based on performativity, of each subgroup in the community is able to problematize the heterogeneity of adaptation in a community level, which collaborate and articulate a gap among individuals and subgroups for redesigning individual-oriented community-based adaptation as pro-environmental behavior in the future.