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The Urban Political Ecology of the 2011 Floods in Bangkok:
The Creation of Uneven Vulnerabilities
Danny Marks
Abstract
This paper uses an urban political ecology analysis to question the discourses used by Thai government leaders regarding the causes of the 2011 floods in Bangkok and the solutions that they have proposed in response. In contrast to their argument that the main causes of the floods in Bangkok were climate change and nature, I argue that the causes of the 2011 floods are compound. They are a result of human-nature interactions: while Thailand did receive heavy rainfall that year, a number of human activities interacted with this heavy rainfall to create the floods. During the past few decades, local political elite have risen to power and profited the most from Bangkok’s urbanization activities while changes to the physical environment of Bangkok have made those living there more vulnerable to floods. These activities include massive land use change and concretization which have drastically increased run-off, over-pumping of groundwater, and the filling of canals. Further, both the local and national government’s overreliance on antiquated and poorly maintained infrastructure made the city more vulnerable to the 2011 floods.
In 2011, human decisions, particularly by politicians, about where to direct and block water heavily influenced which groups were most vulnerable. As a result, the inner city was protected at the expense of those living in the city’s peripheral areas. Analyses of disasters in urban areas therefore need to consider how discourses, socio-political relations, and ecological conditions shape governance practices of disasters.
Keywords: 2011 Thailand floods, urban political ecology, disaster governance, social vulnerability, Bangkok urbanization, Thai flood management
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/2015883623
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Danny Marks is a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Sydney. Email: danny.marks@sydney.edu.au.
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“It seems like we’re fighting against the forces of nature.” 1
“They build their estates in low-lying areas that are supposed to be reservoirs and they throw up a dam or a dike, and they block the flow where the water is supposed to go in the rainy season.” 2
Introduction
In the second half of 2011, Bangkok experienced its worst flooding in many decades. Overall in Thailand, the floods killed over 800 people, affected millions and cost the economy at least US$45 billion.3 Much of this devastation occurred in Bangkok and its environs. The destruction wrought by the floods was certainly partially a result of heavy rainfall— significantly more rain fell in 2011 than average (43 percent more than the average rainfall from May to October, 1982 to 2002).4 However, there have been years where it rained more and the country faced more tropical cyclones than it did in 2011, but the magnitude of flooding was less severe in those years than it was in 2011.5 Further, the city’s western and northern outskirts were heavily flooded for many weeks but the inner part remained dry despite the areas lying at similar elevations. These phenomena suggest that this disaster was not natural but a compound disaster: a result of both natural and social processes, the latter of which occurred not only in 2011 but also beforehand, during the disaster’s incubation period. These social processes arose largely due to the poor governance of flooding in the urban transition of Thailand’s Central Plains. They include mismanagement and the failure of infrastructure, uncoordinated land use change, land subsidence, and the filling in of canals.
The prime minister, her Cabinet members, and some senior bureaucrats,6 however, blamed the external forces of nature and climate change for the
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1 Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra during the height of the 2011 floods. Seth Mydans, “Floods Lapping at Heart of Thailand’s Capital,” Seattle Times, 31 October 2011, http://www. seattletimes.com/nation-world/floods-lapping-at-heart-of-thailands-capital/, accessed 29 April 2015.
2 Smith Dharmasaroja, former director general of the Thai Meteorological Department. Seth Mydans, “As Thailand Floods Spread, Experts Blame Officials, Not Rains,” New York Times, 13 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world/asia/a-natural-disaster-in-thailand-guided-by -human-hand.html?_r=0, accessed 29 April 2015.
3 Voice of America, “Thailand Moves to Avoid Repeat of 2011 Flood Catastrophe,” 11 April 2012, http://www.voanews.com/content/thailand-budgets-12-billion-to-avoid-repeat-of-2011-flood -catastrophe-147139575/179378.html, accessed 19 May 2014.
4 Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, White Paper on International Economy and Trade 2012 (Tokyo, 2012) http://www.meti.go.jp/english/report/data/gWT2012fe.html, accessed 19 May 2014.
5 2011 Thailand Floods Event Recap Report—Impact Forecasting March 2012 (Chicago: Impact Forecasting, 2012) http://thoughtleadership.aonbenfield.com/Documents/20120314_impact_ forecasting_thailand_flood_event_recap.pdf, accessed 19 May 2014.
6 For example, in an interview with the author in October 2014, a senior Royal Irrigation Development official declared, “I think the main cause of the floods was climate change or climate
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floods. Science and Technology Minister Plodprasop Surasawadi stated that Thais “must continue living with the flood for now” and “would have to accept that climate change is occurring.”7 In another instance, Deputy Prime Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong declared that the flooding “has to be the result of climate change and global warming.”8 Blaming nature or climate change, rather than governance failures, as the main cause of floods not only absolves the government of any responsibility for causing or worsening the extent of the flooding but also leads to the belief that floods should be controlled and managed mainly by implementing structural measures to control water and protect populations from water.
The practice of governance, however, forms an essential component of compound disasters, not just natural forces and technical failures. While a vast literature exists on disaster management, there is little written so far on disaster governance. Based on the World Bank’s definition of governance, good disaster governance would be exercising power to successfully and fairly reduce vulnerabilities and exposures to disasters. However, throughout much of Asia, disaster governance by the state, which in many cases has a low institutional capacity and has been mostly captured by the elite, causes disasters to be more damaging and their effects unequal, hurting the poor disproportionately. The most marginalized members of society have become the most vulnerable while the elite suffer the least. Therefore, analyses of disasters in Asia need to include studies of power relations and contestations.
Further, the discourses used to govern disasters are also essential for understanding the causes of escalating failures before and during disasters. The discourse used by Thai national leaders depoliticizes disasters. By stating that unlucky victims happened to be in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” this discourse “conceal[s] the socio-economic processes that place vulnerable populations at risk and consequently, such processes are not regarded as policy issues because ‘natural’ hazards become the policy problem to solve.”9 This misplaced analysis can lead policy makers to propose engineering and structural solutions which often do not address underlying vulnerabilities and can have a number of negative repercussions. For example, engineering designs and operational planning norms are normally based on historically expected flood returns, but climate change and other factors may cause these estimations to be too low. Further, depending on flood-control
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variability.” In another interview in December 2013, a permanent secretary of a ministry said, “The major cause of the floods was excessive water – it was natural.”
7 Bangkok Post, “Plodprasop: Accept the Reality,” 3 November 2011. 8 NBC News, “As the Floods Recede, Bangkok Blame Game Begins,” 22 November 2011, http://
worldblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/11/22/8956474-as-the-floods-recede-bangkok-blame-game -begins, accessed 19 May 2014.
9 Fernando J. Aragón-Durand, “Unpacking the Social Construction of Natural Disaster through Policy Discourses and Institutional Responses in Mexico: The Case of Chalco Valley’s Floods, State of Mexico” (PhD dissertation, University College London, 2009), 21.
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infrastructure creates a false sense of security which suggests that changing the built environment through land use planning and ecosystem protection and improving flood-response capacity are not needed. This can lead to increased losses in urban areas when events exceed the projects’ design capacity of engineering projects.
In response to the problems arising from using the aforementioned approach, this paper proposes that we use an urban political ecology (UPE) approach, which rejects this separation of environment and urban. Instead, it views disasters as compound events that have cascading consequences with feedbacks to the local and wider political economy10 and the urban as a “site where ecology, economy, and society collapse on another and must be untangled.”11 Such an analysis can help reveal why high and unequal levels of devastation are experienced in disasters in urban areas throughout Asia as well as which types of responses are needed to reduce future vulnerabilities to disasters.
The 2011 floods in Bangkok provide a useful case study of the governance of disasters in Asia’s urban transition. A UPE analysis of the period before, during, and after the floods reveals how the exercising of power by the city’s elite through state and market institutions has not only changed the environment of the Bangkok metropolitan area so that those living there have become more vulnerable to floods, but also has created a spatial pattern of urban development which has led to uneven exposure to floods. Further, the case study shows how governance failures of water and land management made flooding worse in Bangkok, particularly to the city’s most vulnerable communities. Overall, poor governance elevated the floods in 2011 from being a minor disaster to a major one.
To make this argument, the paper will first summarize the theory of UPE and how it relates to urban flood governance. Second, it will describe the political economy of Bangkok’s urbanization processes and the city’s flood governance during the last few decades, the effects urbanization has had on the physical environment, and the pre-2011 flood conditions these processes created. Third, it will link Bangkok’s urbanization and water management schemes to the 2011 floods, arguing that actions and policy decisions by the country’s elite subjected those in the outer city to more extensive flooding to ensure that the inner city stayed dry. Last, it will briefly conclude with a discussion of the governments’ response after the floods. The paper uses a mixture of primary and secondary sources, drawing from interviews conducted with Thai government officials, academics, NGO activists,
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10 Michael Douglass, “The Urban Transition of Environmental Disaster Governance in Asia,” (working paper 210, Asia Research Institute, Singapore, 2013).
11 Saskia Sassen and Natan Dotan, “Delegating, Not Returning, to the Biosphere: How to Use the Multi-scalar and Ecological Properties of Cities,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 3 (2011): 825.
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community leaders, and community members from December 2013 to October 2014.12
Urban Political Ecology and Its Relationship to Flooding
The field of urban political ecology provides a useful framework for thinking about the creation and shape of disasters, particularly in an urban context. This field could be called a subfield of political ecology, which combines “concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy”13 and asserts that environmental change and ecological conditions are the outcomes of political processes. Prior to the development of this field of political ecology, both academics and policy makers mistakenly often sought to address environmental problems with technical or management solutions that did not tackle the political economy dimensions of these problems.
Blaikie pioneered the argument that environmental problems cannot be solved unless these dimensions are addressed.14 In The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries, he argues that soil erosion is a socio- political problem because of the involvement of a number of key stakeholders who live outside the affected areas, and of the state, which is never a neutral actor. Together with Bloomfield, Blaikie continued to analyze environmental problems through a political economy lens in Land Degradation and Society,15 arguing that not only was the state not neutral but also that it often bestows its power to the dominant group and classes while marginalizing the least powerful. Influenced by Marxism, political ecology focuses on unequal power relations and examines control over access to natural and social environments and to natural resources, thereby making conflict and contestation over resources central to most analyses.
Only in the last fifteen years have studies in UPE taken off. Before, most political ecology studies were conducted in rural areas. With a strong Marxist leaning, UPE developed from the work of Harvey (and Lefebvre). In his seminal work, Social Justice and the City, Harvey begins with the position that the city is a tangible, built environment but also a social product.16 Cities are built for the purpose of circulating capital, including human, commodities or finance. Using this Marxist framework, he argues that “cities are founded upon the exploitation of the many by the few”17 and posits that
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12 The identities of some of the interviewees have been concealed to protect confidentiality agreements.
13 Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987), 17.
14 Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (London: Longman, 1985).
15 Blaikie and Brookfield, Land Degradation. 16 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973). 17 Harvey, Social Justice, 314.
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the roots of urban inequality are the scarcity and high value of land in good locations.
Urban political ecologists expand upon Harvey’s theory of the city, perceiving landscapes and urban infrastructures of cities as hybrids and “historical products of human-nature interaction.”18 Thinking of the city as a socio-spatial hybrid enables us to see how the “social production of urban space unevenly spreads the vulnerability to hazards, exposure to risk and ecological breakdown.”19 For example, they argue that the spaces of environmental degradation and high exposure to hazards as well as those of protection to hazard threats are unevenly distributed over the topography of the city. One other important contribution they make is their conceptualization of the city as an ever-changing landscape of power. Swyngedouw argues that urbanization is a contested political-economic process of exclusion and marginalization, creating new landscapes of power, rather than manifestations of existing ones.20 Therefore, they focus on power relations and social actors who carry them out21 because these two factors largely determine who can access and mobilize scarce resources or other components of the environment and who is marginalized by being forced to live in spaces of high vulnerability.
Specifically in the case of urban flooding, uneven vulnerabilities experienced by different individuals during floods are largely due to the state and market institutions protecting the lives and the interests of the elite while failing to protect marginalized groups or making them more vulnerable. Normally the state, rather than the private sector, has undertaken investments in flood risk reduction, such as flood protection structures, designation of public floodways and land-use controls and therefore plays a key role in determining how vulnerable people are to floods. Hence, the state is a crucial arena of contestation over flood protection. In this contemporary landscape, the elites often have been able to use the state to accumulate social surpluses in areas where they live and work at the expense of other groups.22 However, the structures of power governing floods and their effects are not static. Rather, by opening political space, floods can act as catalysts or tipping points shaping “the future political trajectory towards an accelerated status quo or
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18 Roger Keil, “Urban Political Ecology,” Urban Geography 24, no. 8 (2003): 724. 19 Martin J. Murray, “Fire and Ice: Unnatural Disasters and the Disposable Urban Poor in Post-
Apartheid Johannesburg,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33, no. 1 (2009): 171. 20 Erik Swyngedouw, “Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political
Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880–1990,” Environment and Planning A 29, no. 2 (1997): 311–332.
21 Erik Swyngedouw, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
22 Timothy W. Collins, “Marginalization, Facilitation, and the Production of Unequal Risk: The 2006 Paso del Norte Floods,” Antipode 42, no. 2 (2010): 258–288.
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a critical juncture.”23 Consequently, as Pelling argues, while floods are physical occurrences, their form, magnitude, and location, and the people they affect are the outcome of ongoing and past socio-economic and political processes.24 Thus we must study these processes in order to fully understand floods.
Before 2011: The Flood’s Incubation Period
Many people suffered in Bangkok during the floods of 2011 at vastly different levels—some remained safe and dry at the expense of others. Given the key role of state and market institutions in determining this vulnerability, our analysis should focus on the governance processes that created, distributed, and reduced these vulnerabilities. Further, disasters do not simply occur because of a one-off phenomenon, such as a heavy rainfall event, but also because of “environmental unsustainable development projects over time.”25 Or, as Douglass argues, before each urban disaster’s onset, there is an incubation period when causal factors contributing to a disaster accumulate, interact in an unnoticed manner, and compound vulnerability.26 Therefore, analyzing the 2011 flood incubation period in Bangkok can shed light into this process. This section describes the political economy of Bangkok’s urbanization and the effects this had on the environment and on the creation of uneven vulnerabilities to flooding.
Founded in 1782 in the low-lying floodplain of the Chao Phraya Delta (see figure 1, next page), Bangkok is located in an area which has always been prone to flooding. However, during the initial period of the city’s establishment (1782–1890), flood damage was not a major problem and “excess water was a part of life and considered as benevolent nourishment.”27 Life revolved around an aquatic network of natural or dug canals (khlongs) and residents lived in amphibious dwellings. Further, plantation irrigation ditches and low-lying rice paddies served as drainage and water catchments, thereby reducing serious flooding.28
In the 1890s, the city began to change from a floating city to a land-based one. Over 135 roads and 41 bridges were constructed between 1890 and
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23 Mark Pelling and Kathleen Dill, “Disaster Politics: Tipping Points for Change in the Adaptation of Sociopolitical Regimes,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 1 (2010): 29.
24 Mark Pelling, “A Political Ecology of Urban Flood Hazard and Social Vulnerability in Guyana” (PhD dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1997), 3.
25 Greg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, and Dorothea Hilhorst, eds., Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development, and People (London: Earthscan, 2004), 3.
26 Douglass, “The Urban Transition.” 27 Danai Thaitakoo and Brian McGrath, “Bangkok Liquid Perception: Waterscape Urbanism in
the Chao Phraya River Delta and Implications to Climate Change Adaptation,” in Water Communities, eds. Rajib Shaw and Danai Thaitakoo, (Bingley: Emerald, 2010), 41.
28 Sidh Sintusingha, “Bangkok’s Urban Evolution: Challenges and Opportunities for Urban Sustainability,” in Megacities: Urban Form, Governance, and Sustainability, eds. Andre Sorensen and Junichiro Okata (Tokyo: Springer, 2011), 133–161.
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1935.29 Shop houses and mansions replaced their aquatic counterparts. In addition, the government allowed land tenure for the first time, which stimulated land-based settlements, on either side of the khlongs.30
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29 Porphant Ouyyanont, “Physical and Economic Change in Bangkok, 1851–1925,” Southeast Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (1999): 456.
30 Sintusingha, “Bangkok’s Urban Evolution,” 141.
Figure 1 The Chao Phraya Delta
Source: Kreeta Sroikeeree and Rattana Bannatham, “Flood and Flood Management in Bangkok, Thailand,” in Water- Related Risk Management in Urban Agglomerations, ed. Ulrike Kastrup (Bonn: UNU-EHS, 2006), 8.
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The city’s land-based urbanization and population expanded rapidly after World War II as the country transformed from an agriculture-based to an export-led manufacturing and service economy. This transformation accelerated from the 1960s onwards when the government successfully wooed foreign direct investment (FDI) in export-oriented manufacturing. During the 1980s, facing rising manufacturing costs domestically and an increased value of the yen especially after the 1985 Plaza Accords, Japanese companies significantly invested in manufacturing.31 Much of this investment occurred in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR), consisting of the metropolis of Bangkok and the five surrounding provinces. To attract investment, the government concentrated transportation and telecommunications infrastructure in this area, giving it a competitive advantage over the rest of the country.32 The expansion of roads into former agricultural areas around Bangkok plus the high cost of land in the city centre spurred rapid urban and industrial expansion into Bangkok’s hinterlands. 33 The majority of multinational companies decided to locate their industries here given its infrastructure advantages, the lower cost of land and labour, and the weaker enforcement of regulations.34
The newfound opportunities to accumulate wealth, infrastructure expansion, the massive wave of migrants to the BMR,35 and the lower cost of land contributed significantly to a real estate boom in the peri-urban areas of Bangkok, particularly in the form of townhouses and detached housing. The real estate market exploded during this period and eventually overheated. As an example of this massive land change, in peri-urban Pathum Thani Province, a province above Bangkok, non-agriculture land use burgeoned from 25 percent in 1980 to 31 percent in 1990 and 39 percent in 2000. This trend has continued until the present. To build these new roads and estates, developers filled in paddy fields and many of the khlongs or reduced them to drainage ditches and open sewers.36 Overall, the built-up area of the BMR ballooned from 67 km2 in the 1950s to 683 km2 by 2007.37 ____________________
31 The Japanese constituted 44% of the total investment in manufacturing in Thailand from 1960–1992. Michael J. G. Parnwell and Luxmon Wongsuphasawat, “Between the Global and the Local: Extended Metropolitanisation and Industrial Location Decision Making in Thailand,” Third World Planning Review 19, no. 2 (1997): 127.
32 Gavin Shatkin, “Globalization and Local Leadership: Growth, Power and Politics in Thailand’s Eastern Seaboard,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 11–26.
33 Suwanna Rongwinriyaphanich, “Effects of Land Policy on Hybrid Rural-urban Development Patterns and Resilience: A Case Study of the Territorial Development in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region,” (paper presented at Regional Studies Association European Conference, Delft, Netherlands, 15 May 2012).
34 Parnwell and Wongsuphasawat, “Between the Global,” 119–138. 35 A daily average of 30,000 from 1985 to 1990. 36 Edsel E. Sajor and Rutmanee Ongsakul, “Mixed Land Use and Equity in Water Governance
in Peri-Urban Bangkok,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 782–801. 37 Shlomo Angel, Jason Parent, and Daniel Civco, “Urban Sprawl Metrics: An Analysis of Global
Urban Expansion Using GIS,” (paper presented at ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference, Tampa, Florida, 7–11 May 2007).
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However, the BMR developed in a haphazard and sprawling fashion. It grew outwards in a ribbon-like fashion along the three major transportation routes leading out of the urban core with these corridors becoming heavily congested while underutilized land remained between the corridors.38 The expansion resulted in a situation in which all types of urban land uses, including individual houses, housing estates, and commercial and industrial buildings were located beside each other. Development was “influenced as much by ‘who owns land where’ as by any sound urban planning principles.”39
This pattern of unregulated and sprawled-out urban development has had a number of negative effects on the physical environment and has increased the city’s overall vulnerability to flooding. Previously agricultural lands had contributed to flood retention by holding up surplus water during times of heavy rain.40 The widespread paving of the surface for roads or residential, commercial, and industrial buildings decreased water infiltration, has increased run-off and hastened it into channels.41 On land with natural ground cover, 50 percent of precipitation infiltrates into the ground whereas in a surface that is 75 to 100 percent impervious, only 15 percent infiltrates the ground.42 In particular, the illegal construction of houses and factories in floodways and green zones (discussed below) has harmfully encroached onto natural drainage channels and flood storage areas. Further, the filling and degradation of khlongs which previously played a major role draining storm run-off water has also shrunk the city’s capacity to cope with rainfall. A number of illegal settlements encroaching upon the remaining khlongs has limited their drainage capacity and made it more difficult to dredge them.43
Another damaging effect has been the city’s heavy land subsidence, which began in the 1970s. The city’s ground has already sunk more than one metre since then. This has occurred mainly because of excessive groundwater pumping, particularly by industries. The state has failed to manage expanding water demand, which rose as a result of the city’s expansion. Demand for
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38 Charles A. Setchell, “The Growing Environmental Crisis in the World’s Mega Cities: The Case of Bangkok,” Third World Planning Review 17, no. 1 (1995): 1–18.
39 Craig Plumb, “Bangkok,” in Cities in the Pacific Rim, Planning Systems and Property Markets, eds. Jim Berry and Stanley McGreal (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1999), 154.
40 Vudipong Davivongs, Makoto Yokohari, and Yuji Hara, “Neglected Canals: Deterioration of Indigenous Irrigation System by Urbanization in the West Peri-Urban Area of Bangkok Metropolitan Region,” Water 4, no. 1 (2012): 12–27.
41 Judith A. Rees, Urban Water and Sanitation Services; An IWRM Approach (Stockholm: Global Water Partnership, 2006), http://www.gwp.org/Global/ToolBox/Publications/Background%20 papers/11%20Urban%20Water%20and%20Sanitation%20Ser vices;%20An%20IWRM%20 Approach%20%282006%29%20English.pdf, accessed 20 May 2014.
42 Joachim Tourbier and Iain White, “Sustainable Measures for Flood Attenuation: Sustainable Drainage and Conveyance Systems SUDACS,” in Advances in Urban Flood Management, eds. Richard Ashley et al. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 14.
43 Thongchai Roachanakanan, “Floodways and Flood Prevention in Thailand,” (paper presented at the World Flood Protection, Response, Recovery and Drawing up of Flood Risk Management Conference, Bangkok, 12–13 September 2012).
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groundwater surpassed the threshold of the city’s aquifer system and consequently over-extraction occurred. This problem was exacerbated by the lack of a proper city plan to manage the city’s land usage and infrastructure development. While the government did succeed in curbing the pumping rate during the early 1990s, it rose again in the late 1990s due to the city’s expansion into new outer areas where no surface water supply was available (see figure 2 above). Until the early 2000s, the Federation of Thai industries had succeeded in limiting a tax increase of well-pumping charges.44 The subsidence has debilitated the city’s flood protection. Flood walls and dikes subside steadily as the ground sinks and the city therefore needs to make greater efforts to pump and drain potential floodwater through khlongs and tunnels.45 The World Bank estimates that 70 percent of the increase in Bangkok’s flooding costs in 2050 will be due to land subsidence.46
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44 François Molle, “Scales and Power in River Basin Management: The Chao Phraya River in Thailand,” The Geographical Journal 173, no. 4 (2007): 35–73.
45 N. Phien-Wej, P.H. Giao, and P. Nutalaya, “Land Subsidence in Bangkok, Thailand,” Engineering Geology 82, no. 4 (2006): 187–201.
46 World Bank, Climate Risks and Adaptation in Asian Coastal Megacities: A Synthesis Report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010), http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/ Resources/226300-1287600424406/coastal_megacities_fullreport.pdf, accessed 20 May 2014.
Figure 2 Groundwater Pumping Rate in the Bangkok Plain
from 1955–2004
Source: N. Phien-Wej, P.H. Giao, and P. Nutalaya, “Land Subsidence in Bangkok, Thailand,” Engineering Geology 82, no. 4 (2006): 191.
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An underlying driver of this ineffective planning system and subsequent degrading urbanization is a change in the country’s political economy beginning in the second half of the 1970s, which reshaped the urban political ecological landscape. Up until this period, Thailand’s political system had been described as a bureaucratic polity: bureaucrats and the military dominated the political process and monopolized power at the local level through almighty central government ministries, particularly the Ministry of Interior. During this period, three changes occurred that led to the decline of the power of the bureaucratic polity and the rise of local politicians- cum-businessmen who gained enormous wealth and power. 47 First, after the middle class agitated for change and launched large-scale street protests, the national government devolved power to the local level, including significantly increasing the budgets of the elected Provincial Administration Organizations (PAO) which were created in the 1950s. PAOs soon began to be dominated by local businessmen since they were given the responsibility to allocate state funding for local infrastructure projects, which became more important as the country rapidly invested in infrastructure during this period. Second, democratization occurred from this period onwards as the power of Parliament grew. This change enabled provincial elites to run for national office or exert informal power by financially backing parliamentary candidates. Third, the aforementioned industrial transformation provided new opportunities for provincial elites to accumulate wealth, particularly in the construction, transportation, and real estate sectors, and translate this wealth into political power.48 Largely due to the concentrated economic boom in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region, a number of these local elite operated in this area.49
The rise of the local political elite has had a strong influence on the haphazard form of Bangkok’s urbanization and the city’s increased vulnerability to flooding. First, they often either acted as brokers for outside investors wanting to buy a big piece of land or invested in a number of housing and industrial projects.50 They would consolidate land for these projects either through legal purchases or graft and intimidation. Their excessive pursuit of property development, however, contributed to overbuilding in the BMR, including in the green zones, and in floodways, such as industrial estates in Ayutthaya. Second, members of Parliament have protected illegal communities encroaching upon khlongs in order to gain their votes. According to a local government officer in Don Muang, one of
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47 Shatkin, “Globalization and Local Leadership,” 11–26. 48 Shatkin, “Globalization and Local Leadership,” 11–26. 49 Of a list of the seven most influential local strongmen compiled by the military, five operated
in the BMR. 50 Sombat Chantornvong, “Local Godfathers in Thai Politics,” in Money and Power in Provincial
Thailand, ed. Ruth T. McVey (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2000), 53–73.
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Bangkok’s northernmost districts, this is why a number of communities still are allowed to encroach upon a major canal, Khlong Prem Prachakorn.51 Third, local elected politicians in Bangkok and surrounding areas often have responded to the electorate’s desire to adopt road-led development by giving higher priority to infrastructure development and income-generation projects over long-term conservation. Last, in public hearings and meetings between government officials and business interest groups, landowners and developers have pressured government officials to change land-use plans from green zones to other areas so that they can build in these areas.52
Besides the rise of the local elite, another, albeit interrelated, underlying driver of the city’s lack of planning is the limited power and interest of the state institutions governing Bangkok’s urbanization. As Askew argues, city planning “remained a highly symbolic modernistic ritual for sections of the western-educated municipal and state-level bureaucracy, but it is effectively impotent as policy.”53 Until 1992, Bangkok was probably the largest city in the world without an official development plan. The first Bangkok General Plan was delayed numerous times and was in draft status for fifteen years until it was officially adopted. However, even after its passage, there was “no actual commitment to the plan.”54 The lengthy delay in adopting the plan and lack of enforcement after its implementation occurred because of not only strong resistance from powerful local elites but also the persistently fragmented and feeble government institutions governing urbanization.
Government regulations curbing degrading forms of land use have been weak. Until the creation of the city’s 2006 Comprehensive Plan, the plans themselves have been vague without any detailed or quantifiable goals, such as set floor area and open space ratios, and the plans have not been linked with wider policy goals.55 For example, the 1992 plan merely has an objective that the plan should “be used as a guide to the development of the city.”56 While the 2006 Bangkok Comprehensive Plan positively provides a clearer framework, including spatial ratios and plot sizes,57 it will be difficult to modify previous infringements. Legal and tax provisions also do not encourage environmentally sound land usage. Legally real estate developers who purchased land are entitled to take any action on their land, including filling khlongs. Consequently, of the filled khlongs, 97 percent of them have
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51 Don Muang District deputy governor, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 16 July 2014. 52 BMA city planning official, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 4 April 2014. 53 Marc Askew, Bangkok: Place, Practice and Representation (London: Routledge, 2002), 63. 54 W. Konisranukul, “Successful Urban Design: The Case of Bangkok” (PhD dissertation,
University College London, 2006), 106. 55 Plumb, “Bangkok,” 129–156. 56 Comprehensive Plan for the Bangkok Metropolis (Bangkok: Bangkok Metropolitan Administration,
1992), Clause 4. URL no longer available. 57 Cassidy Johnson et al., “Private Sector Investment Decisions in Building and Construction:
Increasing, Managing and Transferring Risks,” in Global Assessment Report 2013 on Disaster Risk Reduction, UNISDR, 33 (Geneva: UNISDR, 2013).
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been filled on privately owned land.58 However, despite the clear influence of ownership on khlong degradation, this policy remains unchanged. Further, taxes on residential properties fail to control land use because the tax rates are too low and the tax base excludes unutilized property. This system has encouraged speculative land holding.59
Also, the state’s fragmented institutions have a limited capacity to enforce land-use regulations. The numerous Thai government ministries responsible for urban governance operate like small kingdoms, with fragmented and competing jurisdictions. They rarely coordinate with each other. Additionally, the long-winded approval process and rigid review procedures mean that the city plan’s drafting and implementation process is constantly slowed down—evident by the 17-year period it took Bangkok to pass its first city plan after the initial draft.60 Further, provincial governments of the BMR have not coordinated land-use plans. For example, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has designated a water catchment area (green and grey areas) to be undeveloped in northwestern Bangkok, but north of this area, the Nonthaburi provincial government has allowed extensive development (yellow, orange, and red zones), thereby rendering this catchment area ineffective.
A strong example of the state’s limited capacity to enforce land-use regulation is the illegal development in designated swathes of eastern and western Bangkok. The BMA has set these areas as green zones in order to keep these as drainage areas which would reduce the city’s risk of flooding. Under this designation, the BMA has prohibited nearly twenty uses of the land, including housing estates. However, an investigation found developers have built housing estates on both sides of roads and disregarded spacing regulations.61 Another study counted over 28,000 houses constructed in the eastern floodway.62 According to the head of a major real estate company, in previous decades, a number of developers paid bribes to government agencies in order to obtain housing permits in these areas, although this practice has mostly ceased during the past few years.63 During the floods in 2011, water diverted to these green zones not only severely damaged these houses but also was blocked by all of these buildings from flowing south into
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58 Davivongs, Yokohari, and Hara, “Neglected Canals,” 20. 59 Orapan Srisawalak-Nabangchang and Warin Wonghanchao, “Evolution of Land-use in Urban-
Rural Fringe Area: The Case of Pathum Thani Province,” in The Chao Phraya Delta: Historical Development, Dynamics and Challenges of Thailand’s Rice Bowl: Proceedings of the International Conference (Bangkok: Kasetsart University, 2000), 8–9.
60 Plumb, “Bangkok,” 137. 61 Charles Mehl and Banasopit Mekvichai, “Contemporary Issues in Urban Land Management
in Thailand,” (paper presented at the International Symposium on Emergent Cities in Southeast Asia, Vientiane, Laos, 26–28 November 2013).
62 Sutat Weesakul, “Thailand Flood in 2011 and Mitigation Strategies,” (lecture, Asia Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, 16 September 2013).
63 Real estate developer, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 27 August 2014.
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the Gulf of Thailand.64 Thus, these practices by developers who profited handsomely from building these estates contributed to those residents in northern Bangkok being exposed to the floodwater longer.
While these powerful politicians and businessmen who have profited the most from the BMR’s rapid growth often live in the better protected inner city of Bangkok (as discussed below) or in the outskirts in houses with high floodwalls, the rest of the population in the BMR, which has risen rapidly during the past few decades to at least 15 million (as of 2010), has become more exposed to floods due to these land-use practices. Further, those most vulnerable to floods are low-income slum communities. They have a low level of capacity to cope with floods due to their community’s limited infrastructure, poorer quality of housing, low level of financial resources, lack of access to decision makers, and in the majority of cases land tenure insecurity.65 The geographic pattern of slum settlement has made them highly vulnerable to floods too. While the number of slums has shrunk in the city core, new slums have emerged in suburban areas, particularly near industrial areas in the east and north, areas which have less flood protection infrastructure than the core does.66 The majority of slums are in low-lying, unfilled land which often floods during the rainy season. It is a common practice for real-estate developers to fill the land of new housing estates before they build them, thereby making low-lying communities more exposed to floods.67 Many slum settlements can be found in the strips along either railway lines or khlong banks. The latter is particularly the case in Pathum Thani, which has many public irrigation khlongs. This is because the squatters do not have to pay rent in this publicly owned land and cannot afford to move to less exposed areas.68
The slum communities along canals in the peripheral areas of the BMR are the ones that are most exposed to the overflowing of khlongs due to heavy rainfall or pluvial flooding69 and, due to their lack of assets, their coping capacity is also the lowest. Thus, the urbanization pattern of Bangkok has created vast inequalities in vulnerability to environmental harms, particularly floods. The next section argues that it has also created inequalities in access to environmental goods, such as flood protection infrastructure.
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64 Mehl and Mekvichai, “Contemporary Issues.” 65 Norio Saito, “Challenges for Adapting Bangkok’s Flood Management Systems to Climate
Change,” Urban Climate 9 (2014): 89–100. 66 Utis Kaothien and Douglas Webster, “The Bangkok Region,” in Global City Regions: Their
Emerging Forms, eds. Roger Simmonds and Gary Hack (New York: E. & F.N. Spon, 2000), 23–37. 67 Real estate developer, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 27 August 2014. 68 Kioe Sheng Yap and Koen De Wandeler, “Self-help Housing in Bangkok,” Habitat International
34, no. 3 (2010): 332–341. 69 Shaikh M.M. Ahsan, “Resilient Cities for the Poor or by the Poor? A Case Study from Bangkok,”
(master’s thesis, Technology University of Berlin, 2013), http://www.urbanmanagement.tu-berlin.de/ fileadmin/f6_urbanmanagement/Study_Course/student_work/Thesis_Ahsan_Resilient_Cities_for_ the_Poor_or_by_the_Poor.pdf, accessed 20 May 2014.
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Bangkok’s Flood Management
Because Bangkok is prone to flooding and has faced heavy flooding since its inception, in recent decades both the national government and the BMA have mostly sought to reduce the exposure of the population of Bangkok and surrounding areas to floods by putting in place structural measures such as dams, dikes, and flood tunnels. Unlike a number of governments of Western cities, such as those in the US, the UK, and Canada, they have mostly overlooked nonstructural measures, such as prohibiting development in high-hazard areas, acquiring and relocating buildings in high-hazard areas, and restoring natural habitations such as wetlands. When they have implemented such measures, such as the gam ling (King’s monkey cheek) scheme of building retention ponds to hold water, they have not been expanded sufficiently. However, this over-reliance on infrastructural measures without building the population’s coping capacity can have devastating impacts if the infrastructure fails, as it did in 2011. Governance failures further weaken the government’s flood management. Moreover, the spatial pattern of this infrastructure development is uneven, protecting the inner city, the location of the palace, shopping malls, and government buildings, at the expense of the outer city.
One major strategy the government has used to protect Bangkok from floods is by constructing dams upstream, particularly the massive Bhumibol and Sirikit dams, which were built in 1964 and 1972 respectively. However, the multi-purpose nature of the dams, providing irrigation and energy primarily and flood protection secondarily, can cause this strategy to backfire. This occurred both in 2006, when the dams were already full and could not retain any more water, and more recently in 2011. As the dams began to fill by August due to heavy rainfall, the Thai Meteorology Department informed the Electricity Generation Authority of Thailand (EGAT), the managers of the dams, that more heavy rain would likely come. The dam manager said in an interview that he wanted to release water in order stop the dams from overfilling. However, the Agriculture Minister Theera Wongsamut overruled him, ordering him to delay releasing water so that farmers in the central plains would have sufficient time to harvest a second crop of rice.70 However, this strategy backfired due to heavy rainfall in August and September which forced the managers to release 7,000 million cubic metres of water from the dams in October to stop them from breaking. This outpour of the dams’ water combined with the heavier than usual tropical rainstorms in the second half of 2011 caused a huge amount of water to flow into the Chao Phraya Basin.71
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70 EGAT and Thai Meteorology Department senior officials, interviews by Danny Marks, September and October 2014.
71 Suluck Lamubol, “Thailand: Floods Expose System Failures: Academics,” University World News, 4 November 2011, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20111104093419380, accessed 20 May 2014.
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The city has also sought to prevent water from flowing outside into the city or in some cases to temporarily divert the water elsewhere. Recently Bangkok endured large floods in 1983, 1995, and 2006. After each of these floods, the city administration constructed more infrastructure to protect the city. In response to the 1983 floods, a polder system was built, including a major dyke running from the east bank of the Chao Phraya from Pathum Thani to major areas of Bangkok and the King’s Dyke at the northern and eastern boundaries of Bangkok.72 In 1995, the BMA used central government funding to build a 77 kilometre barrier along the Chao Phraya River, which was completed in 2010. In 2006, after extensive flooding, the BMA built a series of additional flood barriers along the main khlongs and pumping stations.73 Most of the flood protection infrastructure is concentrated in the central core of Bangkok, which is where the majority of the city’s upper- income segments live, work, and shop.
However, this strategy has multiple drawbacks. While those inside the dykes are better protected, conditions are worse for those outside. Starting in the 1980s, urbanization occurred beyond the King’s Dyke in the form of housing estates and industries. But without the construction of additional dykes and pumping stations in these areas, they became unevenly exposed to pluvial and fluvial floods.74 For example, in 2006, areas outside the King’s Dyke in eastern Bangkok, such as Minburi and Nong Chok, suffered heavy flooding. In Pathum Thani, a local NGO leader said that the area “was being drowned to protect Bangkok.”75 With water being diverted from the protected zone, the outer zone was transformed into a retention area to store the region’s excessive water.76 Also, Suvarnabhumi Airport has polders blocking major khlongs which could have been used to drain flood-prone areas, as was the case in 2011.77 The importance placed on keeping the airport dry causes areas outside the polder system, particularly those closer to the airport,78 to become more flooded.
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72 Louis Lebel et al., “The Promise of Flood Protection: Dykes and Dams, Drains and Diversions,” in Contested Waterscapes in the Mekong Region: Hydropower, Livelihoods and Governance, eds. François Molle, Tira Foran, and Mira Käkönen (London: Earthscan, 2009), 283–306.
73 Archana M. Patankar et al., Enhancing Adaptation to Climate Change by Integrating Climate Risk into Long-Term Development Plans and Disaster Management, (Kobe: Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, 2012), 80, http://www.apn-gcr.org/resources/files/original/06516ed9ac5850386 cdd0d5d73f7033f.pdf, accessed 20 May 2014.
74 Hiroyasu Ohtsu, “Construction and Development of Social Infrastructure” in Challenges for Human Security Engineering, eds. Yuzuru Matsuoka and Mamoru Yoshida (Tokyo: Springer Japan, 2014), 61–78.
75 Lebel et al., “The Promise,” 287. 76 N. Preyawanit, “Planning in the Sprawling Zone of an Asian Mega-urban Region: The Case
Study of Bang Kachao, Bangkok Metropolitan Region” (PhD dissertation, University College London, 2007), 107–108.
77 Jon Fernquest, “Bangkok’s Drainage System,” Bangkok Post, 1 November 2011, http://www. bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/264228/bangkok-drainage-system, accessed 20 May 2014.
78 Lebel et al., “The Promise,” 283-306.
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Additionally, as seen in 2011, the existing system insufficiently protects large areas of Bangkok from major flows of water. For example, the King’s Dyke (mapped in figure 3 above) is designed primarily to address low-level flooding rather than infrequent but high-level flooding events79 and subsequently was breached in two places in 2011.80 Also, achieving artificial drainage through water gates, khlongs, and pumps in flat-lying Bangkok is not only expensive but also “complex and full of agents that respond to problems in their own areas of jurisdiction,”81 which means that the drainage system is less than optimal. The number and size of the retention ponds were
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79 Patankar et al., “Enhancing Adaptation,” 81. 80 Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute official, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 18 July 2014. 81 Lebel et al., “The Promise,” 289.
Figure 3 Flood Protection Infrastructure in Eastern Bangkok
Source: Jon Fernquest, “Bangkok’s Drainage System,” Bangkok Post, 1 November 2011.
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too small to hold the floodwaters in 2011 and they are less effective than they could have been because they are not connected to a network of other ponds and khlongs.82
Further, in 2011, infrastructure failed along the Chao Phraya River upstream of Bangkok. At least thirteen dykes and water gates broke because local government agencies had not adequately maintained these ageing structures. The breaking of this infrastructure, especially of the Bang Chom Sri water gate in Singburi, caused flood protection embankments along the river to be breached.83 For a number of weeks afterwards, over 300 million cubic metres of water flowed daily through these breaches on the eastern bank of the river, causing large parts of Lopburi and Ayutthaya to be inundated and making it much more difficult to control the water.84 In addition, the government had neglected to dredge many irrigation canals for a while and remove weeds from them, causing them to have less than maximum flow capacity in 2011.85
Similar to the situation of land management in Bangkok, poor governance further enfeebles flood management. At the national level, there is no single regulatory framework for water management in place; at least eight different agencies—none of which coordinate with each other—are responsible for regulating water policies. Technical weaknesses, such as inaccurate methods of measuring rainfall and river flows, also hinder the government’s ability to manage water.86 Likewise, within the BMA, there exists no systematic coordination between departments, who instead work independently in “silos.”87 Moreover, national-level and provincial-level agencies often have fundamentally different objectives. For example, the Department of Water Drainage of the BMA aims to achieve zero flooding within Bangkok, but this makes it more difficult for the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) to manage in surrounding provinces. The city administration has so far had little interest in aligning dyke infrastructure inside its boundaries with those outside of it.88 As seen in 2011, the two agencies are often at loggerheads and rarely cooperate with each other. Last, prior to the 2011 floods, neither the national government nor the BMA had a flood emergency plan.
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82 Thongchai Roachanakanan, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 16 December 2013. 83 Nipon Poapongsakorn and Pitsom Meethom, “Impact of the 2011 Floods, and Flood
Management in Thailand,” in Economic and Welfare Impacts of Disasters in East Asia and Policy Responses, eds. Yasuyuki Sawada and Sothea Oum ( Jakarta: ERIA, 2012), 247–310, http://www.eria.org/ publications/research_project_reports/FY2011/No.8.html, accessed 22 April 2015.
84 Bangkok Post, “Up to 50,000 May Have to Quit Sing Buri,” 3 October 2011. 85 Pithaya Pookaman, Mungman Tam Ngaan Borehan Jat Gan Nam Phua Prachachon [Commitment
to Work on Water Management for the People] (Bangkok: The Office of National Water and Flood Management Policy, 2013), 12.
86 Danny Marks, “Climate Change and Thailand: Impact and Response,” Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs 33, no. 2 (2011): 229–258.
87 Saito, “Challenges for Adapting Bangkok’s Flood,” 89–100. 88 Lebel et al., “The Promise,” 283–306.
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There are a number of reasons why the government prefers structural solutions rather than non-structural ones. First, citizens’ incomplete information affects the type of disaster policies governments undertake and reduces political awards for them to pursue prevention policies. It is difficult for citizens to observe the implementation and effects of improving building codes, early warning systems, land-use planning, and floodplain management. Second, because voters tend to reward politicians for strong relief efforts which they can evaluate more easily, politicians tend to prioritize relief over prevention. Third, incentives drive politicians to favour infrastructure solutions even if they are not the best policy. Infrastructure is easy for beneficiaries to observe and can be located in areas of favoured constituencies. Further, many local Thai politicians, such as PAO council members, have their own construction companies and so addressing flooding through infrastructure projects aligns with their business interests. PAO councils have been nicknamed sapha phu rap mao, or contractors’ councils.89 Infrastructure projects are also a lucrative source of rents: politicians can dole out contracts for infrastructure projects to their key supporters or earn money from bribes and infrastructure can increase the value of flood-protected land to owners.90 In 2008, Nishimatsu Construction confessed that it gave a bribe of more than US$4 million to senior BMA officials in order to win the right to build a drainage tunnel in Bangkok.91 Thus, disaster governance is particularly subject to perverse political incentives which have driven BMR politicians to favour structural projects over non-structural measures.
During the 2011 Floods: Creation of Uneven Vulnerabilities
These urban inequalities and governance failures once again starkly manifested themselves during the government’s response to the floods. It was clear—to the chagrin of local residents in the outer parts—that the government sought to protect the inner city at all costs. Further, conflicts and miscommunication arose between government agencies, particularly between the BMA and the RID, which undermined the state’s response.
The large amount of water that flowed into Bangkok and its surrounding areas would have been much less without political interference. Numerous academics and NGOs believe that Banharn Silapa-archa, a well-connected former prime minister and veteran politician, used his connections within the Royal Irrigation Department and commanded them not to open the
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89 Shatkin, “Globalization and Local,” 11–26. 90 Philip Keefer, Disastrous Consequences: The Political Economy of Disaster Risk Reduction, special
paper commissioned by the Joint World Bank Report – UN Project on the Economics of Disaster Risk Reduction, 24 January 2009, https://www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr/files/Keefer_Disastrous_Consequences. pdf, accessed 22 April 2015.
91 Weerawong Wongpreedee, “BMA Asks Japan to Aid Bribery Probe,” Bangkok Post, 9 July 2008.
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water gates to Suphanburi, his home province and often referred to as “Banharn Buri,” in order to allow farmers there enough time to harvest their crops.92 Statistics of the amount of water flow suggest that the RID did not open the three water gates in the western side of the Chao Phraya to their maximum capacity until the beginning of October.93 Not fully opening these gates caused more water to flow downstream.
Following months of heavy rain and the release of water from Bhumibol and Sirikit dams, a massive run-off slowly swept towards the capital in October. In response, the BMA erected huge sandbag barriers, closed water gates, and diverted water to the west to protect the city’s central districts. For example, in mid-October, after a big sandbag wall had been placed near an air force base at the boundary between Pathum Thani and the city of Bangkok, the level of water was almost one metre lower on the BMA side.94 While this scheme kept the centre dry, those outside of the centre heavily bore this cost: these walls and water gates held up the floodwaters in the northern and western areas, submerging these areas for weeks.95
This decision generated significant discontent among local residents in these areas, who had seen on the news that the inner city was still dry but their area had been flooded for weeks.96 One elderly woman in a low-income community in Don Muang believed that the “the government unfairly divided people. People in the inner city are big people and big rich companies but they did not protect the small people.”97 One middle-class resident of Don Muang complained, “The government was only concerned about impacts to the economy. It did not think about how much people outside the inner city are suffering. And the assistance provided was not enough.”98
In response, throughout October and November, these residents frequently expressed their anger through petitions and protests and attempted to destroy the sandbags or open water gates. For example, in early November, after enduring protracted inundation, hundreds of residents of a housing estate in Western Bangkok blocked a major road, insisting upon the removal of a sandbag barrier and only dispersed after the police agreed to remove
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92 Kasetsart University professor, Rangsit University professor, Chulalongkorn University professor, and two local NGO leaders, interviews by Danny Marks, Bangkok, January-March, 2014.
93 Poapongsakorn and Meethom, “Impact of the 2011 Floods,” 258. 94 INN News, “Jao Naa Ti Waang Bik Bak Yack Sah Por Au Fang Pathum” [FROC Officials Place
Big Bags at the Pathum Thani Side], 11 October 2011. 95 Damon Wake, “Misery Lingers for Bangkok’s ‘Forgotten’ Flood Victims,” ABS-CBN News, 27
November 2011, http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/global-filipino/world/11/27/11/misery-lingers -bangkoks-forgotten-flood-victims, accessed 22 April 2015.
96 Chatnarong Wisitku, “Jat Gaan Banhaa Namtuam Yaang Mai Ben Thaam … Saang Kwamdtackdtang Nai Sangkhom” [Managing the flood Problem is Not Just … Creates a Rift in Society], Krungthep Turakij, 22 November 2011.
97 Phrom Samrit community member, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 5 October 2014. 98 Yu Chareon community member, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 16 August 2014.
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99 Bangkok Post, “Govt Apologises to Flood Victims,” 12 November 2011. 100 Krungthep Turakij, “Chao Lum Luk Ka Ruu Nao Gan Nam Tuam Khet Sai Mai” [Lam Luk Ka
People Removes the Water Barrier. Floods in Sai Mai District], 17 November 2011. 101 Yu Chareon community leader, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 12 March 2014. 102 Nation, “Bang Khae Residents Block Expressway,” 25 November 2011, http://www.
nationmultimedia.com/national/Bang-Khae-residents-block-expressway-30170601.html, accessed 20 May 2014.
103 Sasin Chalermlarp, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 18 July 2014. 104 Terry Fredrickson, “Flood Management Controversy,” Bangkok Post, 25 November 2011. 105 They were 67% of the total number of protests (126) in the country. Former FROC member,
interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 17 July 2014. 106 Bangkok Post, “Inner City Spared from Floods, Says Yingluck,” 20 November 2011. 107 Terry Fredrickson, “Saturday Flood News,” Bangkok Post, 5 November 2011.
the barrier.99 In mid-November, over 200 residents in Pathum Thani removed the sandbags by Khlong Hok Wa as well as demanded a nearby water gate to be opened by 20 cm.100 In late November, almost a thousand residents in Don Muang demolished a sandbag dyke after the government reneged on its promise to lower the level of the dyke.101 And on 24 November, in the western area of Bang Khae, residents blocked a section of the Western Outer Ring Road, demanding that the government explain its unfair flood mitigation measures. They said that they had to endure chest-high putrid floodwater for over five weeks without any explanations or response from the government.102 Further examples abound. The last example suggests that an additional problem was that the government did not communicate clearly its plans with communities. It neither articulated its method to drain the water in flooded areas, the duration these areas would be flooded, and the location of where it would place sandbags. Nor did it give strong rationales for its mitigation measures.103 This lack of clear information frustrated residents because they did not know how much longer their areas would stay flooded and why their area had remained flooded while others remained dry.104 Overall, eighty-five flood-related protests occurred in the BMR.105
The government’s priority of protecting the inner city at all costs was also reflected in Prime Minister Yingluck’s statement in mid-November 2011 at the ASEAN Summit in Indonesia. She said, “it’s certain the inner zone of Bangkok will be safe from floods, as the measures to hold floodwaters have been successful.”106 She declared success even when those in the peripheries of the city were still suffering from the floods and residents of these areas who had evacuated had still not returned.
At the same time, conflict and lack of cooperation between different agencies in the national and local government hampered the government’s response.107 The national government, the BMA, and provincial governments had differing objectives and strategies to address the floods and often did not collaborate, especially at the beginning. For example, some khlongs which pass through Bangkok are under the responsibility of the RID, yet BMA officials were reluctant to ask the RID to help divert water from the
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city.108 In other instances, the Flood Relief Operation Center (FROC), created by the national government to respond to the floods, ordered the city administration to open water gates at the northern border of the city to ease flooding in Pathum Thani, such as at Khlong Sam Wa, but the BMA resisted, saying that they were afraid of further rainfall, and did not open them for a week.109
The BMA and the FROC also disseminated contradicting information. For example, during the height of the flooding, the national government spokesperson told the public in Bangkok’s Taling Chan and Laksi districts to go to work while the Bangkok governor, Sukhumbhand Paribatra, announced that people in these districts should evacuate and said that people should listen to him only.110 A large source of the conflict is that Sukhumbhand hails from the opposition Democrat Party whereas Yingluck was the head of the ruling Pheu Thai Party and these two leaders bickered frequently. Deep- seated polarization between the two parties exists and each sought to blame the other for the heavy flooding in the BMR. Conflicts, however, did not only occur between the Democrats and Pheu Thai but between local politicians who all sought to protect their own turf. They led their constituents to destroy flood protection dykes or open water gates so that water would be diverted to other areas. In many instances, local Pheu Thai leaders disobeyed the commands of the relief centre. Their actions undermined the overall management of the flooding.111
The flood relief centre also worsened the losses incurred by flooded communities in Bangkok when it proclaimed it could handle the floods (ao yu) and that they would not be flooded. For example, satellite imagery in late October showed that some parts of Bangkok faced severe, lengthy flooding but the centre still incorrectly announced that the level of the water would decrease by the middle of November.112 A number of these residents, such as those in Don Muang, trusted the government’s announcement and consequently did not protect their houses and possessions as much as they would have if they had been warned earlier that their communities would be flooded.113
The uneven vulnerability of Bangkok residents to the flood is suggested in a study conducted by the National Housing Authority after the floods. The study found that while 21 percent of the total population living in the
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108 Fernquest, “Bangkok’s Drainage System.” 109 Former FROC member, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 17 July 2014. 110 Wang Lin, “Grassroots Innovation in Disaster Crisis Communication: A Case Study of 2011
Thailand Floods” (master’s thesis, Asian Institute of Technology, 2013), 43. 111 Poapongsakorn and Meethom, “Impact of the 2011 Floods,” 247–310. 112 Samchai Sirisan, “Kwam Pitplaat Khong Rathabaan Nai Gaan Jat Gaan Wikkrit Nam Tuam:
Mum Mawng Taang Sangkhom Wittaya” [The Failure of the Government to Deal with the Flood Crisis: a Sociological Perspective], Prachathai¸ 30 October 2011.
113 Don Muang district officer, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 30 June 2014.
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city of Bangkok were affected by the floods (this number is higher in three other provinces of the BMR: Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, and Nakhon Pathom), 73 percent of Bangkok’s low-income population were affected.114 One statistic which supports this finding is that the nine districts in Bangkok which have the highest number of slum communities (and are all in northwestern, northern, or northeastern Bangkok) were all flooded, some very heavily, such as Don Muang, Sai Mai, and Nong Khaem districts.115 While certainly middle-class and upper-class housing estates were badly flooded as well as factories in the northern and western parts of the BMR, these owners could easily evacuate to other cities or could better cope with losses because of possessing higher assets. In these mixed communities, where the rich and middle-class live near the poor, slum communities were the worst affected. A Don Muang district official and a slum community leader agreed that Don Muang slum communities living along a canal faced the highest amount of water and for the longest period.116 This is because these communities do not have floodwalls to protect their houses, their land is the lowest-lying, and they have the fewest assets. Further, their vulnerability was compounded by two other factors. First, there was the issue of unemployment, because many of them work as day labourers and could not work for a few months because they could not access their workplaces or their workplaces became inundated and subsequently closed. Second, there was the problem of theft: in one slum community in Don Muang about half of the community’s houses were robbed by outsiders who arrived on boats at night and broke into their houses.117 In addition, for the majority, the compensation they received after the floods was inadequate to cover the costs of renovating their houses and buying new furniture and other possessions. Some had to use all or most of their limited savings.118
In sum, socio-economic conditions prior to the 2011 floods, especially uneven power and economic relations and governance weaknesses, can largely help explain the flood’s effects, which unequally hurt the poor the
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114 UN ESCAP, “The Thailand Floods of 2011: While Businesses Lost Millions, the Urban Poor Lost Out Most from the Floods,” Working Paper (Bangkok: UN ESCAP Sustainable Urban Development Section, 2012).
115 The number of slum communities by districts is found in: The Statistical Profile of Bangkok Metropolitan Administration 2011 (Bangkok: Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, 2011) http:// office.bangkok.go.th/pipd/05_Stat/08Stat(En)/Stat(En)54/pdf%20(not%20edit)/stat_eng2011%20 (not%20edit).pdf, accessed 28 October 2014. The flooding of those districts is based on BMA’s flood alert map on 1 November 2011 and the news article: Bangkok Post, “470 Spots Under 80cm of Water,” 7 November 2011.
116 Don Muang district official and Phrom Samrit community leader, interviews by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 30 June and 29 August 2014.
117 Phrom Samrit community leader, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 29 August 2014. 118 In the slum community in Lamlukka, surveys (n=25) conducted by the author from June to
August 2014 revealed that losses ranged from 50,000 to 200,000 baht while none received more than 25,000 baht from the government and some less than this amount. The majority in the community receive the minimum daily wage of 300 baht per day.
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119 Peter Janseen, “Two Years after Deluge, Thailand Braces for More Floods,” Oman Observer, 29 September 2013, http://main.omanobserver.om/?p=17234, accessed 20 May 2014.
120 Ron Corben, “Thai Flood Prevention Dam Draws Criticism,” Voice of America, 26 September 2013, http://www.voanews.com/content/thai-flood-prevention-dam-draws-criticism/1757489.html, accessed 20 May 2014.
121 Cleanbiz.Asia, “Strong Whiff of Corruption from Thailand’s Water Mega-project,” 21 February 2013, http://www.cleanbiz.asia/news/strong-whiff-corruption-thailand%E2%80%99s-water-mega -project#.U3rrutKSy-0, accessed 20 May 2014.
122 Ploenpote Atthakor, “Samut Songkhram Pressures Govt over Water Project,” Bangkok Post, 25 November 2013, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/381525/samut-songkhram-pressures -govt-over-water-project, accessed 20 May 2014.
most. In particular, these conditions help reveal why various government agencies rarely cooperated and even clashed with each other and why the government committed to protecting the inner city, which meant that those in the peripheral areas suffered more. Rising political tensions and anger against the government during the last few years once again flared during the floods as numerous local communities protested and sought to destroy flood barriers and water gates.
After the Floods: Has Anything Changed?
However, despite this widespread anger and devastation and high number of deaths, after the floods subsided, the Yingluck government did not significantly alter its strategy to prevent floods. It continued to view structural measures as the best way to protect populations and industries from floods. It built higher flood walls around previously flooded industrial estates. It also proposed a massive US$11.3 billion water infrastructure improvement plan to increase protection, with almost 90 percent of the budget allocated to manage water in the Chao Phraya River basin. Included in the plan’s nine modules were 20 new dams and two 300-km diversion khlongs to divert water from the north to the west and east and then to the sea, the conversion of land into water retention areas, and the cleaning up of khlongs and waterways.119
The plan, however, was met with fierce criticism from civil society, academics, and local communities and resistance from the judiciary. Civic engineering groups lambasted the plan for being too expensive and poorly conceived, focusing too much on improving irrigation rather than preventing floods.120 A water specialist of the Japan International Co-operation Agency asserted that from an integrated water management perspective neither the new dams nor the floodways are necessary. Civil society advocates charged that the government has not sought adequate public input on the plans.121 In Samut Songkhram and Nakhon Pathom provinces, thousands protested against the western flood diversion channel, declaring that the water from the floodway would hurt their fishing and agricultural activities.122 Backed by these communities, a local NGO, Stop Global Warming Association of
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123 Janseen, “Two Years after Deluge.” 124 Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute official and RID official, interviews by Danny Marks,
June–August, 2014. 125 Patsara Jikkham and Apinya Wipatayotin, “Flood Projects Run Aground,” Bangkok Post, 20
October 2014, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/environment/438532/flood-projects-run -aground, accessed 28 October 2014.
126 Santi Nindang and Teigan Allen, “Ahead of Flood Season, Thailand’s Communities Demand Greater Preparedness,” In Asia, 8 August 2012, http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia/2012/08/08/ ahead-of-flood-season-thailands-communities-demand-greater-preparedness, accessed 20 May 2014.
127 Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute official, interview by Danny Marks, Bangkok, 18 July 2014.
128 In the World Bank’s Control of Corruption Indicator (http://info.worldbank.org/governance/ wgi/index.aspx), Thailand fell from 54 (out of 100) in 2005 to 43 in 2007. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview), the country dropped dramatically from ranking 59th worldwide in 2005 to 84th in 2007.
Thailand, filed a lawsuit in Thailand’s Administrative Court, claiming that the bidding procedures for the megaproject violated Thailand’s constitution because the government had not adequately included local communities in the decision-making process and failed to carry out mandatory environmental and health impact assessments. In late 2013, in agreement with the lawsuit, the Administrative Court ruled that the plan must be put on hold until public hearings and environmental and health impact assessments are conducted.123
The scheme was suspended after the military coup in May 2014. In June, the new prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, ordered agencies to draft a new national water management plan. However, senior government officials revealed that several of the modules of the previous projects are likely to be included in the new plan.124 While the military government released 11 billion baht (US$338 million) in late June to repair water management infrastructure such as floodwalls, water gates, and pumping stations, it has yet to release any money for non-structural measures. “We don’t have new tools for water management, despite the fact three years have passed since the flood disaster,’’ said Suwatana Chittaladakorn, an adviser to the Water Management and Policy Committee.125
The new government’s response raises the question of why its approach to flood protection remains unchanged. One reason is that political leaders continue to see rehabilitation to floods as a political opportunity and a source of rents. The previous government’s reconstruction efforts were tainted by accusations of corruption. For example, the National Anti- Corruption Commission warned that the government’s short timeline for reviewing projects and its hurried approval of consultants generated opportunities for corruption.126 Without any agencies to monitor the military government, there are fears that the procurement of the new plan will be corrupt as well.127 Global indices suggest that corruption became worse after the 2006 military coup.128
Another reason is that, while the leadership at the top of the political
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129 By argument I refer to both public statements and answers given by leading policy makers to my interview question of what were the causes of the 2011 floods.
130 In interviews, senior BMA and RID officials said that the poor and rich were equally affected by the floods.
structure has changed, the structure itself remains the status quo. It is still highly unequal, even more autocratic, and there is even less political space for reform. Consequently, those in power will continue to be able to have the greatest access to both natural and man-made resources and to decide how to use them. They will therefore continue to use land in ways that are most profitable—yet degrade the environment and apportion flood protection infrastructure to areas where they live or invest in. Simultaneously, the poor will continue to suffer the most: they will continue to live in areas of high vulnerability without receiving additional assistance or will be forced to relocate due to new projects, such as planned dykes along the major canals.
Conclusion
This paper has used an urban political ecology analysis to challenge the discourses used by Thai government leaders about the causes of the 2011 floods in Bangkok and the infrastructure-heavy solutions that they have proposed in response. In contrast to their argument129 that the main causes of the floods in Bangkok were climate change and nature, it argues that the causes of the floods are multiple. They are a result of human-nature interactions over time, particularly the last half-century: while Thailand did receive heavy rainfall that year, a number of human activities interacted with this heavy rainfall to create the floods. During this time period, fuelled by industrialization and a real-estate boom, Bangkok’s rapid urbanization was haphazard and environmentally degrading. Components of this urbanization included massive land-use change and concretization which drastically increased run-off, over-pumping of groundwater, and the filling of khlongs. The underlying drivers behind this form of urbanization are the decline in influence of the bureaucratic polity and the rise of the local politicians- cum-businessmen, who profited handsomely from this urbanization, and the perpetual limited capacity of state institutions governing land use and water management. Further, both the local and national governments’ overreliance on antiquated and poorly maintained infrastructure made the city more vulnerable to the 2011 floods.
The discourses used and solutions proposed by these leaders, and the statements they made in interviews, suggest that they believe the risks of the floods were distributed equally across different socio-economic groups of the urban population.130 However, while certainly many middle-class and wealthy households were adversely affected, the poorest suffered the most from the floods. This is because they have the fewest assets to cope with the
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131 Here I draw on Mustafa’s notion of the hazardscape which expands analyses of disasters beyond the material to include the discursive realm. Daanish Mustafa, “The Production of an Urban Hazardscape in Pakistan: Modernity, Vulnerability, and the Range of Choice,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 3 (2005): 566–586.
132 Anja Nygren and Sandy Rikoon, “Political Ecology Revisited: Integration of Politics and Ecology Does Matter,” Society and Natural Resources 21, no. 9 (2008): 767–782.
floods and the majority live in low-lying land, sometimes near canals, in the areas which have the lowest level of flood infrastructure and where in 2011 the government blocked the water from entering the inner city. The vulnerability of some slum community members was compounded by unemployment and theft. In contrast, while certainly some elites suffered from flooding of the factories and housing estates, the majority were protected by the government’s decision to protect the inner city or by high floodwalls around their houses and the raised land below them. They also possessed the most assets to cope with the floods.
The value of using the UPE lens to analyze the 2011 Bangkok floods in contrast to a focus on more conventional politics is twofold. First, this analysis highlights the unevenness and unjust spatiality of exposure to the floods. The peripheral areas of the Bangkok Metropolitan Region were the ones which received heavy FDI and immigrants from the countryside. They were also made more vulnerable to floods due to heavy land use, land subsidence, and their location outside the King’s Dyke. Moreover, these were the areas where the government blocked the water from entering into the inner city and where people suffered the most.
Second, this lens draws attention to the multiple ways in which ecological conditions, which conventional political analyses tend to ignore, and socio- political relations interacted with each other to form Bangkok’s hazardscape131 to the floods. In particular, power geometries and discourses constructing the environment have shaped the use of natural resources and the control of the environment.132 Examples include the building and manipulation of water gates, dykes, and temporary sandbag walls which helped shape the uneven geography of the floods in 2011, the filling of canals by developers to build housing estates, and the use of infrastructure projects, from which local elites profited, to protect the city from flooding but which actually made it more vulnerable when this infrastructure failed. All of these examples are laden with uneven power relations and underpinned by elite discourses which consequently shaped uneven vulnerability to the floods.
By using an UPE analysis, this research suggests for a more inclusive and more comprehensive approach to urban disaster governance in Asia than conventional disaster risk management approaches. Such an approach takes into account the multiple causalities, both social and environmental, and compound nature of disasters. Specifically, analyses of disaster governance need to consider how socio-political relations, discourses used to interpret
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Political Ecology of Bangkok Floods
and address disasters, and ecological conditions shape governance practices. Understanding them provides insight into how, where, and for how long disasters are likely to unfold and what must be done to reduce the vulnerability of the most vulnerable from these disasters. In most Asian cities, where power structures and assets are still highly unequal, and where urbanization has been highly degrading, urban governance practices need to be reformed so that they are more ecologically sustainable and so that power and the benefits of urbanization are shared more equally.
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, May 2015
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Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs
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