Abstract
AbstractFlood retention areas are being increasingly promoted for flood risk management. People living in these areas will accept them if their interests are taken into account. The present study analyses the extent to which farmers' interests were taken into account in two flood retention projects in Thailand. A feasibility study was conducted in preparation for the first project which included public participation. The second project was a pilot project implemented in the same zone at a small scale. Participants in the public participation process and farmers living in proposed flood retention areas were interviewed for the purpose of the present study. Agreement could have been reached between the farmers and the public agencies concerning the flood retention areas. However, the participation process did not enable frank discussion about the conditions under which farmers would accept the project. The second project was designed without public participation and offered very little compensation to farmers. In countries marked by power imbalances in water resources management, public agencies may impose flood retention areas, but the absence of agreements with farmers can reduce the effectiveness of the measure. Reaching such agreements requires challenging the imbalanced power relationships between farmers and public agencies.
Highlights
In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid worldwide to nonstructural “soft” measures for flood risk management, alone or as a complement to “hard” engineering approaches (Challies, Newig, Thaler, Kochskämper, & Levin-Keitel, 2016; Wesselink et al, 2015)
In Europe, many projects involving flood retention areas have been combined with compensation schemes (Enjolras, Erdlenbruch, Grelot, Kast, & Thoyer, 2008; van DoornHoekveld et al, 2016; van Staveren, Warner, van Tatenhove, & Wester, 2014), and the schemes were designed without public participation only in a few cases (Ungvári, Kis, et al, 2013)
Opportunities for agreements between farmers and the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) were not discussed in detail and exploited in the public participation process conducted during the feasibility study and in the Bang Rakam Model 60
Summary
In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid worldwide to nonstructural “soft” measures for flood risk management, alone or as a complement to “hard” engineering approaches (Challies, Newig, Thaler, Kochskämper, & Levin-Keitel, 2016; Wesselink et al, 2015). The first project began in 2015, when the RID undertook a feasibility study to design large-scale flood retention areas in the central part of the Chao Phraya River Basin (hereafter referred to as the Yom-Nan flood retention project) This project included a formal public participation process. In 2017, the RID implemented a pilot flood retention project in an area located for the most part in Bang Rakam District, and which was covered by the feasibility study This initiative was called the Bang Rakam Model 60 and did not include a formal public participation process. Because of limited time and budget, the consortium in charge of the feasibility study did not organise workshops at village level Instead, they created 11 local working teams, which included representatives of the inhabitants and staff from administrations whose responsibilities were related to the project (e.g., departments of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives). The Prime Minister declared that a controversial planned dam on the Yom River, whose main role would have been to manage floods, would be cancelled and replaced by the expansion of the Bang Rakam Model (The Nation, 2017)
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