[Tlc] Keyes response to Montesano

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Dear Mike,
 
    I realize that I never responded to this comment of yours.
There is a need for a study of all programs that were supposed
to benefit the rural poor going back to at least the 1960s
with the promotion of the government savings bank and the
so-called Tambon Development Program. These were almost
totally ineffective in offering villagers opportunities to
make decisions about how government monies should be used to
improve their lives. I agree that the Kukrit government's
ngoen phan program was a significant change and I take your
point about the role Boonchu played. However, I also know from
my own study of the successor programs in the late 1970s and
early 1980s that villagers (whom I interviewed in several
parts of the NE and North and in Songkhla in the south) still
found these to be overly managed by the government, and
especially by the district office. In other words, most
programs for the rural poor up to the Thaksin government were
manifestations of haut en bas rather than ones which villagers
felt they had any input into. While it may be possible to find
linkages at the policy level between Kukrit/Boonchu and
Thaksin, from the perspective of villagers -- based on my
restudy in 2005-06 of a village in Mahasarakham where I had
carried out fieldwork first in 1963-64 -- it was only under
the Thaksin regime that villagers really felt that they had
ownership of programs under the Tambon Administrative
Authority. I observed villagers deciding how loans should be
made and pushing strongly on representatives of the BAAC for
debt relief. This sense of ownership was the primary basis for
rural support of TRT, not payments by huakhanaen.
 
Biff (Charles Keyes)

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu