Contemporary Water Management Issues in Thailand in Comparative Perspective

Alin Chintraruck

doi:10.22610/jsds.v4i5.755

Abstract

Water management is a complex and multifarious issue that joins together a wide range of different problems and approaches. Since water is essential to human life, governments must make efforts to ensure that everyone receives the water necessary but, at the same time, they have to wrestle with the fact that water is a scarce resource that must be priced for consumption under conditions of constantly increasing demand from cities, industry, agriculture and tourism. Examination of three case studies, Australia, Singapore and Japan, indicates that contemporary water management issue may be considered in a number of categories and analysis has taken place on four such categories. These are global climate change, disaster mitigation, political and legal modernization and allocation of water resources. The case studies inform the discussion of water management practices and prospects for Thailand and it is shown that the country is progressing towards the examples represented by the more developed and advanced countries insofar as it is ever possible to import a water management solution into the very specific geographical, hydrological, social, political and cultural conditions in effect in a specific location.

Highlights

Water management will increasingly become one of the most critical issues of that century
This is taking place during a period of rapid economic change and industrialization around the world which has led both to increased pressure on the allocation of scarce water resources and on the need for emerging states to revamp their political and legal processes to meet with the exigencies of dealing with the contemporary international relations situation
This paper investigates the ways in which various countries have tackled contemporary issues of water management and derived useful and usable solutions for the specific problems faced

Summary

Introduction

Water management will increasingly become one of the most critical issues of that century. Global climate change will lead to increased unpredictability in the distribution of water through rainfall and intensification of disasters caused by extreme weather events, including storms, flooding and drought This is taking place during a period of rapid economic change and industrialization around the world which has led both to increased pressure on the allocation of scarce water resources and on the need for emerging states to revamp their political and legal processes to meet with the exigencies of dealing with the contemporary international relations situation. This situation, with respect to water management, has been described as the World Bank’s hegemony achieved through the Water for All discourse (Goldman, 2007; Zeitoun & Warner, 2006). This has led to the concept of the “... modernist belief in progress as mastery over nature, concerns of global and national environmental movements over dams and their impacts, and a galvanized Mekong environmentalism (Hirsch, 2010).” Hegemonic control over water management has led to prioritization of national and even trans-national over local scales as appropriate for solution development, technocratic approaches to water management and the integration of private and public sector actors, regulations and processes to manage provision of water services and allocation decisions

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion