The hydraulics of power and knowledge : water management in northeastern Thailand and the Mekong region

Abstract

This thesis explores the dynamic relationship between the production of knowledge and the operation of power in the context of water management In northeastern Thailand and the Mekong region. Employing Weber's ideal types of legitimate authority in exploring the practices of hydrologists, hydro-bureaucratic agencies, and an Isan community, the thesis argues that knowledge and power in water management are omnipresent in different agents, expressed through different forms and mechanisms, and legitimized by different types of authority. This thesis examines three social institutions underpinning water management in Thailand and the Mekong region: the school, the state, and the sacred. The school component explores the history of Thailand's first irrigation school and contemporary practices of trainee hydrologists in the classrooms and laboratories. It shows that the institutionalization of hydrology schools and the construction of the community of water experts are a social process with a close link to regional cooperation and the process of state-making. In addition, in constructing legitimacy for their expertise in water management, different types of authority are socially devised and intermingled beyond the technical features of hydrological science. The state component deals with the implementation of water projects in northeastern Thailand. It argues that the modem Thai state had deployed water development projects as a political apparatus in counter-insurgency and to depoliticize contentious problems that beset its northeastern region. The thesis also explores the local interactions with the state, as seen through an ethnographic study of a village in northeastern Thailand. The ethnography shows that the villagers employed bureaucratic means in order to make the community legible to the state's development programs. The idea of how community is being simplified and reconstructed from within in order to gain benefit from state projects will be explored. outcomes. The sacred component focuses on the villagers' practices of community ceremonies to deal with different types of authority. Drawing on the ethnographic study of the villagers' participation in ceremonies of local government, water-related traditions and festivals and the community worship of ancestral spirit, the thesis argues that power does not belong to one particular agent but needs to be experienced through ritualistic associations with multiple forms of authority. The thesis also shows the ways in which local people manipulate and cooperate with different types of authority to ensure positive community development. In conclusion, the thesis suggests the necessity of looking beyond the conventional academic view of power as being monopolized, rigid, and repressive. Power and knowledge in water management can rather be viewed as hydraulics; that can be circulated, transformed and performed rather than only possessed by one particular agent or institution. This process of hydraulics of power and knowledge can be created through the association with different types of legitimate authority. Show more