Content area
Abstract
Marginalized small farmers in northern Thailand face insecure tenure, landlessness and conflicts with other users and the state over the natural resources necessary to their livelihoods. The struggles to address those insecurities have taken a variety of forms, conditioned by globalized movements and local political opportunities, none of which have been entirely satisfactory in achieving their ends. In the "green" version, farmers on state lands highlighted their resource management and conservation strategies, and attempted to place themselves and stakeholders in the politics of forest management. In the "red" version, farmers pressed the state to live up to its responsibility to ensure productive use of agricultural land by directly challenging existing tenure relationships through land occupation. Initially confirming Keck and Sikkink (1998), they were successful in writing farmers into the conservation debate as stakeholders with the support of local and transnational allies. This position was highly constrained, and challenged by a coalition of globally-connected conservationists, forestry officials, and competing farmers. By highlighting some elements of their situation at the expense of others, farmers were able to do the conceptual and ideological work of identity articulation (Li 2000), and global framing (Tarrow 2005), but they could not defend the resultant construction from the conservation movement.
Farmers challenging the state in class terms were constrained by the danger of anti-communist state repression and the difficulty of courting cross-class allies from that position, but were able to form positive and mutually-beneficial horizontal relationships with other farmers and poor people domestically and internationally. The power of these coalitions to effect social change locally was limited by the domestic opportunity structure, but the potential avenues for scaling up to the regional and international level through the global justice movement were more numerous. From their class based-position, these farmers were moving into sustainable agriculture and reaching out to "green" consumers. This suggests that it is more effective for farmers to build environmental sustainability into livelihood concerns than to add livelihood to an established environmentalist agenda.
