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The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XII, 2020

Land Governance and Inequality in Thailand:

The Need for Context

Philip Hirsch

Abstract
Unequal ownership of land in Thailand reflects the country’s more
general high level of inequality in wealth and income. Land inequality is often
described publicly with reference to the large holdings of wealthy families
and other powerful interests. At the same time, agriculture remains largely
smallholder-based. This article shows that there are different meanings and
dimensions of inequality, including those resulting from representational and
procedural injustice as well as from skewed distribution of land ownership.
Differences in the ways we understand inequality raise questions about how to
measure or otherwise describe it. Standard measures such as the Gini coefficient

may be useful for international comparisons, but they are compromised by
over-aggregation of data that makes meaningful indices hard to come by,
particularly when the values of land vary so much between regions, between
urban and rural areas, and between different kinds of land use and tenure within
and beyond agriculture. Questionable agricultural census data quality also
presents problems for measurement. Meaningful understanding, discussion
and governance of land inequality and its associated problems requires a
contextual approach, whereby issues are understood with reference to particular
situations. For example, the situations of titled land, land reform areas and
occupied forest land each raises different issues of inequality. One way to take a
more contextual approach is to focus on particular sites of conflict, for example
special economic zones, and then to generalise outwards. Research-informed
land governance to deal with issues of inequality requires both more transparent
and better quality of publicly accessible data and a participatory approach

that seeks to understand inequality first and foremost from the perspectives
of those who bear its consequences.

Keywords: inequality, land governance, context, tenure, region

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