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

commodity. Seeking to make governance more equitable requires that we
understand land inequality as the consequence, not the cause, of deep-rooted
injustice in a country’s political economy. Any lasting solution therefore needs to

address deep-seated causes and issues, and to do this it also needs to take account
of the meanings and contexts of land inequality rather than to take an over-
generalised approach.

Transparency and participation are two key tenets of good land governance.
These tenets are as relevant to a nuancing of research as they are to land
administration. They point toward a number of specific requirements for targeting
research to relevant contexts of land inequality.
First, ready and transparent access to data held by public agencies is
required, whereby researchers can utilise disaggregated data to address questions

that at present cannot be answered due to the difficulties in securing the data in
the first place, and then in differentiating between relevant categories. For example,
the aggregation of land size distribution of titled land to include both urban
and rural areas makes it impossible to derive meaningful measures of inequality
based on size of landholdings. The Department of Lands and the Agricultural
Land Reform Office are the two main agencies that need to establish transparent
practices and, ideally, collaborative arrangements with researchers in order for
this to happen. There is no reason for confidentiality issues to serve as a barrier
to such practices, given the possibility of anonymising ownership information –
just as is normal practice in release of disaggregated census data. Ideally, the
research purpose of data collection should be considered in the design of
expensive census-type exercises, and – especially in light of the experience of
the 2013 agricultural census – a greater degree of quality control and oversight
should be given attention. Given the impending 2023 agricultural land census,

it is a strategic time to be considering such matters and to bring a wider
range of stakeholders into the data collection and database design process.
Second, research on unequal land access needs to open up to considering
the different conceptualisations of inequality, and this in turn means addressing
a number of assumptions. For example, are we only or mainly talking about
farmland, when 70 per cent of Thailand’s population and 90 per cent of its

economy is non-agricultural, and where land is the basis for livelihood, identity
and living space beyond its agricultural function? This then also takes us into
areas where longstanding provisions may need to be addressed, for example

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