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

holdings include more than 1 million rai used for commercial and recreational
as well as more strictly military purposes (Nanuam 2020), while lesser but still
significant holdings by politicians are also indications of land concentration in the

hands of powerful interests (Laovakul 2016). At the other end of the spectrum,
there is reference to the large number of the country’s landless or land-short poor,
but reliable and systematic data in this case is harder to come by (eg Ekachai
2017).

Behind the headlines and common assumptions surrounding land and
inequality in Thailand, however, lie a number of puzzles and qualifying
considerations. One of the puzzles is why, despite inequality, the country’s
agriculture continues to be largely smallholder-based rather than concentrated
in large estates or agribusiness operations. Another puzzle is how a country
whose experience with the market economy and with transferable land
documents is much more continuous than that of neighbouring countries has
nevertheless not seen the large-scale land acquisitions and wholesale dispossession
manifest in Thailand’s neighbouring former socialist countries of Cambodia, Laos
and Myanmar. Among the considerations that suggest we need to qualify the
overall picture of land and inequality painted by use of measures such as the
Gini coefficient are the different meanings of inequality, the different ways in
which inequality is measured and understood, the very limited disaggregation
of data on which such measures are based, and a need to revisit some of the
common and time-bound assumptions behind the relationship between land
and livelihood.

At a policy and societal level, the ways in which land inequality is dealt
with are often placed under the rubric of “land governance”. Broadly speaking,
land governance is taken here to mean the range of ways in which authority,

laws, collective action, norms and societal practices shape the ways in which land
is held, used and managed by different sections of society. In turn, land governance
depends on understandings of what is appropriate or desirable, so that when we
address governance to deal with inequality it is important to understand the
nature of the problem prior to finding ways to address its solution.
This article seeks to address land governance and inequality in Thailand,

first by exploring different meanings, dimensions and measures of land
inequality. It then sets out various contexts of inequality, suggesting that a
problem- and place-specific rather than broad-brush approach is essential to

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Philip Hirsch

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