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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King's Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Experiencing and Knowing in the Fields How Do Northern Thai Farmers Make Sense of Weather and Climate-change? Vaddhanaphuti, Chaya Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Experiencing and Knowing in the Fields: How Do Northern Thai Farmers Make Sense of Weather and Climate-change? Chaya Vaddhanaphuti A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Geography Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy King’s College London May 2017 Abstract Recent studies from the social sciences and humanities have interrogated the construction, spatialisation and governance of global climate knowledge through offering accounts of the intimate human-weather-landscape inter-relationship. This approach is currently lacking in Thailand, where the National Climate Change Master Plan’s adaptation and communication strategies are largely infrastructurally-oriented, and science-driven, respectively. To rectify this situation, in this study a group of Tai Yuan (Khon Muang) farmers in Nan province, Northern Thailand, were selected to explore with them their weather experiences and interpretations, through a 13-month- long ethnographic study, a focus group, and a series of photo-elicitations. To answer how facts and ideas of climate-change were mobilised, framed, and communicated to these farmers, representatives of external climate-related organisations were subsequently interviewed. The study found that weather was understood sensually, culturally and morally in relation to agrarian landscapes, Muang culture, Buddhist-animist beliefs, and farming practices: a winter of nostalgia; a summer of perseverance; and a rainy season of hope and fear. Unwelcoming changes in weather were believed to be local problems that required adjusting minds, worshipping deities, and reviving traditional beliefs and morality. NGOs tended to appreciate and respect these understandings by creating a hybridised local-science knowledge to empower and build resilience to external changes and injustices. Contrarily, most governmental and science-based climate organisations’ communication strategies tended to impose, upon villagers, claims of global climate knowledge through technical terms, numbers, and climate policy, thereby redefining local weather conceptualisations. This hegemonic standardised knowledge reflects a modernist ideology that places lay Thai villagers at the periphery of global climate knowledge production. The Thai government’s deforestation-maize-haze-global warming narrative exemplifies this standardised framing. The thesis concludes that if climate adaptation projects in Thailand are to matter culturally to local people, knowledge pluralism needs to be taken into account and environmental narratives and communication strategies critically examined. i Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................i Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................i List of Figures......................................................................................................................... vii List of Boxes ............................................................................................................................ ix List of Tables ........................................................................................................................... ix Thai Glossary ............................................................................................................................ x List of Acronyms .................................................................................................................... xi Acknowledgement ................................................................................................................. xii Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 The Intimate Universality of the Weather ....................................................................... 1 The Plurality of Thailand’s Climate Change .................................................................... 3 Knowing and Governing Climate ..................................................................................... 5 Layout of the Thesis ........................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review.................................................................................................. 8 2.1 A Non-Modernist Approach to Knowledge, Ontology and the Epistemology of Weather and Climate........................................................................................................... 8 2.1.1 A Non-Modernist Approach to Climate Knowledge ................................ 9 2.1.2 Ontology and Epistemology of Weather and Climate ............................ 14 2.2 The Place for Farmers and Their Weather ............................................................ 18 2.2.1 Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of Place .......................................... 19 2.2.2 Dwelling in the Plant-world ........................................................................ 23 2.2.3 Dwelling in the Weather-world................................................................... 25 2.2.4 Hybrid Climate-change ................................................................................ 29 2.3 Summary and Research Questions .......................................................................... 33 Chapter 3: The plurality of Climate in Thailand................................................................ 37 i 3.1 Climate-change from the Perspective of Southeast Asia and Thailand ............. 38 3.1.1 Climate Governance in Southeast Asia and Thailand .................................... 38 3.1.2 Climate Adaptation Studies in Agricultural Sector ......................................... 39 3.1.3 The Human Dimensions of Climate Adaptation: The Thai Context .......... 40 3.1.4 The Research Gap: Thai Climate Perceptions and Adaptations in the Agriculture Sector ......................................................................................................... 42 3.2 Culture, Environment and Climate in Nan ............................................................ 43 3.2.1 The Underrepresented People of Northern Thailand ................................... 44 3.2.2 Muang Cosmology and Relationship with Supernatural and Nature .......... 45 3.2.3 Representations of Nan ...................................................................................... 48 3.3 Environmental Movements and Organization in Nan ........................................ 51 3.3.1 The Realities of Nan: Physical, Socioeconomic and Cultural Characteristics ......................................................................................................................................... 51 3.3.2 Grassroots Environmental Movements ........................................................... 54 3.3.3 Key International Organisations Tackling Nan’s Food Security and Climate- change ............................................................................................................................. 55 3.4 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 4: Methodology ....................................................................................................... 59 4.1 Problematising Methodology ................................................................................... 59 4.2 Ethnography: an Approach for Exploring, and Creating an Account of, Muang Chang Weather Stories ..................................................................................................... 60 4.2.1 Ethnographic Research ................................................................................ 60 4.2.2 Method 1: Participant Observation ............................................................ 62 4.2.3 Method 2: Life Story Interview ..................................................................
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