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consolidating its power. All its institutions started extending themselves. One of the
applications of this extending state institution was also to take control over certain
resources, which other ways we deal with sort of jurisdiction and control of the
people. So, if you look at the control of our land, control of our water, control of our
forest, those resources which were intensively linked to the livelihood and the
sustainment of the self-reliant community. Those were, in a way, appropriated by the
State. And people had to ask for those resources from the State which other way
was under their control. That’s one part of the story.
The second part of the story was that State identified itself as a welfare State.
Therefore the expectation from the State was to provide certain kinds of services to
the community. Because of its colonial history and the less developed economy, State
was not in the position to provide all those resources, all those services to the
community. Therefore, at that point in time, some kind of dissension, some kind of
dissolution started creeping within the society. Therefore, in the 70s and 80s we
experienced a lot of people’s movements, the popular movement, whether it’s around
the access to and control over the natural resources or asking for more public
services from the State. Also, in a way, an acknowledgement from the State, the
inherent power of the citizen. So, it’s a kind of challenging the State to renegotiate
the relationship between State and the citizens.
Going back to 80s and 90s, you might recall that was the era what we called
participatory development. I’m personally aware that a lot of experimentation was
done even in Thailand. Let say, for example, participatory forest management,
participatory irrigation management, where the development resources, development
programs, invited community and citizens to take control over the management of
those programs to a large extent. That’s the era in 80s and 90s. The international
development community, various national governments, they have their flashy
programs, which in a way created some space for the citizen participation, people’s
participation to manage those development programs.
Then in 90s and the millennium in continuing with that tradition what they call
participatory democratic governance. And in a way, it was a radical shift from the
project-based participation to a governance-based and democratic participation. I’ll
come to this aspect in a moment. But, just to sort of underlining the fact that as a
research of the history of the participation in our country and that could be well
applicable to many other countries. That we have two sets of spaces. One space
which we can call invited or institutional space, which means that the State invited
people and the citizens to participate. So, it’s the invitation from the State. But
perhaps, as we started defining participation, we also started defining participation
ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ times, those who are marginalized, those were unable to participate. They had to
from the marginalized point of view. So, even the State invited people, but many
create their own space. And that’s the space they invented on their own to radius
movements. We can also say that it’s a claimed space by the citizens. So, just to
summarize that one is invited space where State is inviting citizens to participate and
