Commoning or being commoned? Institutions,politics,and the role of the state in collective housing policy in Bangkok,Thailand

Abstract

This article theorizes the potential roles of the state in the urban commons through an analysis of a slum upgrading program in Thailand that employs collective forms of land tenure. In examining the transformation of the program from a grassroots movement to a “best practice” policy, the article demonstrates how the state has expanded from mere enabler of the commons to active promoter. In the process, the role of many residents has evolved from actively creating the institutions of collective governance—commoning—to adopting institutions prescribed by the state—being commoned. However, by comparing the work to two different groups of communities who work within the context of the policy, the article illustrates how active commoning can still take place in such contexts.

Keywords

affordable housing Baan Mankong commoning ethnography slum upgrading Southeast Asia Thailand urban commons

Introduction

As private property markets have led to crises of affordability in many cities, pollution of crucial resources has destroyed rural livelihoods, and climate change threatens the global ecosystem, scholars in many fields have turned to the idea of the commons for ways to protect or reclaim resources from exploitation. These evocations of the commons often cite as motivation a desire to refute the tragic prognostication of Garrett Hardin, which proposes that an unregulated commons will inevitably be overused due to the conflict between individual and collective interests. However, beyond this “common” impulse, those studying the potential of the commons to solve the problems of the day vary greatly, even on the most basic definitions of their objects of study. The commons are being imagined at multiple scales in contexts throughout the world. The objective of this article is to examine one important point of discord within this diverse literature on the commons: the role of the state in relation to the commons. While some scholars view the commons as an emancipatory alternative to the state (e.g. Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2003; Hardt and Negri, 2009), others view the state as an institutional actor that can enable the commons or even play a role in governing them (e.g. Huron, 2018; Ostrom, 2015). Through an examination of the Baan Mankong (“Secure Housing”) participatory slum upgrading program in Thailand, which operates through collective modes of land tenure, I provide an empirical example of how the state can become the driver of the creation of the commons. I argue that such a phenomenon constitutes being commoned from the perspective of residents. Being commoned means adopting institutions of self-governance that are prescribed from above, in contrast to commoning, meaning the collective production of shared resources and institutions of democratic self-governance by commoners themselves (Bruun, 2015; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Chatterton, 2010; Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; Hardt and Negri, 2009).

This examination of the relationship of the commons and the state addresses a question that is pertinent to planning, a field constantly in search of “best practices” to borrow and deploy: what happens when the commons are transformed from political project into policy prescription? While one aspect of the answer is that the commons can be co-opted to serve instrumental ends, this is not the end of the story. In my analysis, which is rooted in 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I compare the practices of two community networks involved in Baan Mankong. These networks serve as wide-reaching commoning movements that promote urban commons on a large scale. While one of these movements predates the policy and continues to use the commons as a basis for building the power of citizens to influence state institutions, another is an artifact of the policy and has been molded to a much greater extent to the institutions of collective management prescribed by the state. In analyzing these two networks, I demonstrate how an interaction of political principles and institutional arrangements can either enable or foreclose certain types of political action.

On one hand, this story demonstrates the limits of “scaling up” the commons and the process by which emancipatory ideals can be co-opted to serve state interests. On the other, it shows that the commons as a more radical political project can endure, even in a context of policy co-optation.

In what follows, I situate the case of Baan Mankong in commons scholarship by discussing how different strains of scholarship have conceived of the relationship between the commons and the state. I then trace the origins of the Baan Mankong policy from a grassroots movement to a well-known policy supported by several state agencies, focusing on the roles of community networks. In the final sections, I discuss the political and structural differences between these networks and how those differences impact their ability to effect institutional change.

The commons and the state

When Hardin (1968) pronounced the inevitable tragedy that would result from land and resources being held in common, he had in mind a “pasture open to all” (1244) that was free of any intervention by the state. Without private property guaranteed by the state or any means of “mutual coercion” (1247) provided by government, he presumed that collective action would be impossible. While this dubious prophecy has influenced planning and policy over the past 50 years, one of the fortunate legacies of Hardin’s unfortunate thought experiment is that it has prompted a number of scholars to call bullshit—or, quite literally, “pig shit” (Brinkley, 2020)—on Hardin’s conclusion. However, they have done so in divergent and often contradictory ways. A number of scholars have pointed to this divergence in the scholarship on the commons (Harvey, 2012; Huron, 2018; Linebaugh, 2014), with one camp studying the details of the management of what are often called common pool resources (CPRs), while the other advocates for the commons as an emancipatory political project. Huron (2018) usefully refers to the two camps as the institutionalists and the alterglobalizationists. Borrowing this typology, I focus on how the different bodies of thought have conceived of the relationship between the commons and the state.

The presence of the state in the commons as CPRs

The institutionalists are led by Elinor Ostrom and colleagues who apply the principles of the new institutional economics to CPR problems. What the new institutionalist economists set out to do was use empirical observation to build theories of how institutions—defined as “the rules of the game of a society” (North, 1992: 4, emphasis mine)—work. Ostrom (2015) took this approach to study how individuals and organizations might devise institutions to manage CPRs and adapt those institutions over time. She demonstrates that cooperative governance of the commons, contrary to the predictions of Hardin, is possible in a variety of contexts and concludes that the reason Hardin is wrong is that he got the rules of the game wrong.

The first way in which Hardin’s rules are wrong, according to Ostrom, lies in his assumption of a “pasture open to all” (Hardin, 1968: 1244). In contrast, Ostrom (2015: 90) cites “clearly defined boundaries” as the first important design principle of CPRs. In this way, CPRs are governed by common property regimes and are quite distinct from open-access resources (Bromley, 1992), which is what Hardin describes. This line of thinking envisions the commons as a form of property, which is the first way in which the state creeps into the management of the commons in the institutionalist literature.

Property is widely described as a form of social relation (Blomley, 1998; Bromley, 1992; Macpherson, 1978). While not all would agree that such social relations necessarily must be codified in law or sanctioned by the state (Blomley, 1998, 2008), many do. Thus, when the commons are viewed as a form of property, as they often are in the CPR literature, those rights are respected and enforced by a state. This aligns with Ostrom’s (2015: 90) seventh principle of enduring CPR institutions, that those who appropriate resources have at least “minimal recognition of rights to organize” that “are not challenged by external government authorities.”

In the institutionalist literature, the state appears in relation to the commons in other ways, as well. Ostrom’s principles include having mechanisms for monitoring, enforcement, and mediation. These functions may be performed internally by communities, but they can also be provided by outside entities, including those of the state. According to Ostrom, “Institutions are rarely either private or public—‘the market’ or ‘the state.’ Many successful CPR institutions are rich mixtures of ‘private-like’ and ‘public-like’ institutions defying classification in a sterile dichotomy” (2015: 14). The inclusion of ‘public-like’ institutions becomes especially relevant in larger-scale CPR management regimes, in which nested enterprises come into play.

In sum, scholars writing in the CPR and institutionalist vein view management of the commons as something that is not done directly by the state, but neither does it necessarily occur completely outside the state. The state may ensure the right to collectively own resources and produce institutions for their management, and in some cases those institutions may overlap with public institutions. In other words, “the commons” is not antithetical to “the state.”

The commons as an alternative to the state

For others, however, one of the key purposes of the commons is to pose a challenge to the state. Called anticapitalists (Wall, 2014) or alterglobalizationists (Huron, 2017, 2018), this diverse array of writers see the commons as something “Beyond State and Market” (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015), an emancipatory alternative to the exploitative nature of global capitalism, as well as the oppressive potential of the state (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2003; Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Linebaugh, 2014). The commons, in this vision, represents a sweeping political vision of production and social reproduction described as “being-in-common” or more often, “commoning” (Bruun, 2015; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; García-Lamarca, 2015; Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011; Hardt and Negri, 2009). The commons produced by such practices, as opposed to the state, frequently emphasize non-hierarchical forms of democratic self-governance (De Angelis, 2003; Eizenberg, 2012; Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011; Hardt and Negri, 2009).

While such radical visions of the commons are shared as an aspirational goal of many on the left, the alterglobalizationists as a whole have done an inadequate job of describing how such a political project might be realized in concrete terms (Harvey, 2012; Huron, 2018). Those who have attempted to rectify this, while not often in direct conversation with Ostrom, still fundamentally agree with her first principle, that commons must have boundaries. In fact, many argue that commons require a defined community to produce and care for them (Blomley, 2008; Bruun, 2015; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; García-Lamarca, 2015; Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011; Wall, 2017). Harvey (2012: 71) points out an irony in much of the discourse of the commons, saying that “a common demand on the left for ‘local autonomy’ is actually a demand for some kind of enclosure.” Ensuring enclosure for the commons is where even proponents of the commons as an emancipatory political project from the state potentially must interface with the state. This is especially true in the case of urban commons.

The urban commons and the state

Much of the research on the commons, especially in the institutionalist vein, has looked at rural commons. However, interest in the urban commons has grown in recent years (Eidelman and Safransky, 2020). The idea of urban commons has been applied to everything from community gardens (Eizenberg, 2012) to the “metropolis” as a whole (Hardt and Negri, 2009), making it difficult to pin down exactly what constitutes the “urban commons.” Doing so is beyond the scope of this essay. However, I do follow Huron’s (2015) argument that one distinctive feature of the urban commons is that they are created in an environment that is “saturated” with institutions of both the market and the state. In this sense, Harvey’s suggestion that enclosure for the purpose of local control means that the creation of urban commons often requires engaging with the state in order to “carve out” a space for the commons (Huron, 2018). I follow several scholars in examining collective housing as an urban commons (Aernouts and Ryckewaert, 2018; Bruun, 2015; Huron, 2018). As Huron (2018: 165) argues, housing is a critical site for theorizing such commoning efforts, as housing is essential to existence in a way that community gardens are not. However, as I will demonstrate, commoning in conjunction with the state on a matter of state interest, such as producing affordable housing, can easily slide into co-optation.

Methods of studying the commons

The institutionalists and alterglobalizationists also differ in the methods they use to analyze the commons. As Huron (2018: 33) has detailed, alterglobalizationists tend to focus on the broad political intent of the commons, while the institutionalists tend to concentrate on the “nitty-gritty” (22) aspects of how common property regimes work without paying attention to the broader political and economic contexts in which the commons operate.

I take inspiration from Huron’s efforts to combine aspects of these two methodologies. My analysis is based on 18 months of ethnographic research carried out across 3 years that included internships with the government agency that administers Baan Mankong, the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), as well as the Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN), one of the networks involved in the policy. Through the internship with CODI, I also conducted participant observation with the other community network, the National Union of Low-Income Community Organizations (NULICO).

Part of this participant observation included conducting case studies of four communities, two from the FRSN and two from NULICO. For each network, one case study community was well-established, having started their organizing when Baan Mankong was in its infancy or even before. These communities are referred to as FRSN A and NULICO A. The remaining case study from each network was just beginning the Baan Mankong process during fieldwork. These communities are referred to FRSN B and NULICO B. This strategic case study selection allows me to compare the experiences of communities across networks and also across time.

All of the case studies are located within the jurisdiction of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA). The case studies represent a variety of land tenure and project types. NULICO A and FRSN B are both cases in which residents from multiple settlements under threat of eviction came together and relocated to land that they purchased together. NULICO A residents were being evicted from privately owned land and resettled in the far western side of the BMA, whereas the residents that comprise FRSN B were evicted from a variety of public lands and resettled on the far eastern side. FRSN A and NULICO B are both cases of upgrading in situ in central Bangkok on government lands. FRSN A is on land owned by the State Railways of Thailand (SRT), and NULICO B is on Treasury Department land.

Participant observation and case studies have been supplemented with interviews and secondary sources in order to understand the overall evolution of the policy and its associated networks. In total, I performed 58 interviews with community members, network leaders, community organizers, CODI staff, and local government officials. I also reviewed a variety of policy documents and self-published historical accounts. Through this rich data, I came to understand the evolution of commoning in the context of Baan Mankong, as well as the nitty gritty details of how the individual communities and networks function. I place this information in conversation with the political motives expressed by the many actors involved in the different movements.

Baan Mankong: From grassroots movement to global “best practice”

The Baan Mankong policy has risen to prominence in the international planning literature over the past decade and is often held up as a “best practice” in participatory slum upgrading (Fokdal et al., 2015; Panday, 2020; Rahman et al., 2016). It began in earnest in 2003 under the auspices of CODI, which was established in 2000. CODI was created by combining two predecessor government organizations, the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) and the Rural Development Fund. Combining the funds of these two organizations with other government and international donor funds gave CODI an initial capitalization of 3.3 million baht with which to allot loans and grants to communities for development (Boonyabancha, 2003: 26).

Baan Mankong is the largest and most well-known program operated by CODI, with over 105,000 households having undertaken projects as of 2018 (CODI, n.d). Two key features are frequently emphasized in the literature on Baan Mankong. First, it works with communities, not individuals. It operates by providing subsidized loans of up to 360,000 baht per household (~12,000 USD) to communities for housing, along with subsidies for infrastructure and community management. To access this funding, communities must collectively save 10% of what they intend to borrow. With this financing, they then access land collectively through either purchase or long-term leases. In a majority of cases (61%), communities have used this funding to upgrade, re-block, or rebuild their housing in situ. In the remaining cases, households from one or multiple sites re-locate to form communities in new locations (CODI, n.d.).

Second, networks of communities play a prominent role in the upgrading process. Community networks serve to connect different communities to each other for the purpose of knowledge-sharing and support (Boonyabancha, 2009). They are also touted as building the power of the poor to negotiate with authorities (Boonyabancha and Kerr, 2015).

While many publications have told this high-level account of Baan Mankong and its history (Boonyabancha, 2005; Das, 2018; Yap and De Wandeler, 2010), the deeper origins of the policy are less well-known.

The early days of commoning

The collective nature of the production and maintenance of housing in Baan Mankong projects makes them examples of urban commons and the networks examples of commoning movements. However, the primary drivers of the creation of these commons has shifted over time, as have the roles of the commoning movements involved. When Baan Mankong was created, it began a process of formalizing a set of commoning practices that had been in the works for two decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, a slum-based movement gradually gained momentum in the urban areas of Thailand. The movement combined the collective work of many slum residents and a handful of organizers trained in the techniques of Saul Alinsky and led by a former ranger of the Communist Party of Thailand (Nitirat, 2007; Visetpricha, 2003, 2008). In 1998 many members of this movement crystallized into the Four Regions Slum Network (FRSN). Through gradual organizing, alliances with progressive insiders from the National Housing Authority, and direct actions to influence those in power, some communities of the movement gained recognition of their collective rights to occupy their original land, often through the nascent practice land-sharing (Angel and Boonyabancha, 1988; Visetpricha, 2008). In other early cases, community leaders, and organizers negotiated fair resettlements nearby (Visetpricha, 2008; Wattanu et al., 2003).

From this early work through the early 2000s, the slum-based movement and allied government insiders worked to create pathways to legal occupation of land by slum communities. The progressive government insiders focused on solving the problems of financing collective housing by enrolling the help of international NGOs and institutes from the global North (Interview, former CODI Director 2018; Interview, Human Settlements Foundation Staff 2018). Meanwhile, the more radical slum-based movement that would become the FRSN worked alongside other land rights activist groups throughout the country to fight evictions and change laws to recognize collective land rights. Collaboration between the government insiders and the activists has been frequent but tense over the years, as their end goals have elements in common, but their politics differ. While the progressive insiders were seeking a pragmatic solution to housing and the creation of communities that were empowered to be “self-reliant,” the activists pursued collective land tenure as a critique of private property and the capitalist development that was displacing poor populations throughout the country.

By the time CODI was created in 2000, several collective housing pilot projects had been created by these two groups, with varying degrees of direct collaboration occurring between them but a considerable amount of learning flowing across them. Long time CODI Director Somsook Boonybancha describes the period of time when these pilot projects were being created as “the search and struggle stage” (Interview with Somsook Bonyabancha 2018). Communities were designing forms of self-governance, finding means of financing physical upgrading, and fighting for legal recognition of collective land rights. Early communities going through the program had only a few examples to draw lessons from and a great deal of flexibility in designing institutions of self-governance.

The election of Thaksin Shinawatra marked a shift in the dynamics of these movements and in the momentum behind what would become Baan Mankong. As prime minister, Thaksin relied on a form of populism that was at once redistributive and neoliberal, creating policies such as the universal 30 baht health care scheme while seeking to include the nation’s poor into the modern economy through a variety of credit schemes (Elinoff, 2014b; Phongpaichit and Baker, 2008). Baan Mankong aligned within this political strategy and was taken up by the administration. This moment in Thai national politics was thus crucial to the take-off of Baan Mankong as a large-scale upgrading strategy.

As Baan Mankong was getting off the ground, some of the early communities were members of the FRSN. However, leaders of other communities disagreed with the FRSN’s often confrontational tactics and close relationships with professional NGO activists. This group, with the assistance of early CODI leaders, created NULICO. Community members themselves were not the only ones to split in the early years of CODI. Some NGO organizers that had been involved in the slum-based movement also decided to join CODI (Interview with Human Settlements Foundation Staff 2018).¹ This common history explains many of the shared practices of early communities.

The early commoning practices of the FRSN and NULICO

Community members of both FRSN A and NULICO A recount the period of time in which Baan Mankong was getting off the ground as being filled with stress and uncertainty. However, they also describe a sense of excitement at creating something new and forging deep bonds with their fellow community members, their networks, and the professionals who supported them. These early projects had many things in common. In terms of process, they both involved struggling to gain legal access to land. They also both ran into snags that pushed their project timelines back and required them to spend more than their allotted grants on infrastructure.

These early communities also adopted some of the same institutions of self-governance. Both utilized community savings groups to create collective resources and accumulate the requisite 10% of what they intended to borrow. They both relied on outside professionals to mediate internal disputes and create mechanisms of enforcement for the repayment of loans. These professionals also helped them negotiate with government entities.

These processes comport with descriptions of commoning in both the alterglobalizationist and the institutionalist literatures. Both FRSN A and NULICO A were learning self-governance (Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011; Huron, 2018), designing institutions from the ground up (Wall, 2017), demanding that the collective property of the poor be recognized and, in a sense, enclosed (Blomley, 1998, 2008; Harvey, 2012), which amounts to “carving out” space within existing state institutions (Huron, 2018). They also created their common property in concert with the nested institutions of their networks and relied on external professionals to act as mediators and enforcers, comporting with Ostrom’s (2015) design principles. In these senses, the early case study communities from both networks were actively engaged in commoning. However, the two networks diverged in ways that would prove consequential in the context of the scaling up of the policy.

The FRSN: Internal democracy and independence from the state

The political commitments that have allowed the FRSN to unite and endure can be summarized as democracy (prachathibotai), fairness/justice (khwampentham), and independence (khwampenitsara). These terms and are brought up regularly by FRSN members and are reflected in the institutions and practices of the network.

Democracy is both an internal practice and an external goal of the FRSN. Internally, the network is governed by leaders chosen by the members that rotate regularly. For the network at large, leaders are chosen through elections at a yearly assembly. Sub-networks and individual communities are free to choose their own methods of selecting leaders and representatives to the various FRSN committees, so long as the positions rotate on a regular basis to allow newer members the chance to lead.

Internal democratic institutions reflect a political commitment to democracy on a larger scale. As one FRSN leader explained to me during a conversation early in my fieldwork, the FRSN is committed to engaging in three pillars of democracy: representative democracy (prachathibotai baeb tua thaen), participatory democracy (prachathibotai baeb mi suan ruam), and direct democracy (prachathibotai baeb trong). Participatory and direct democracy are employed as a means to influence state policy at multiple levels in order to achieve outcomes for member communities that are more just. Though observation reveals that the FRSN spends the bulk of its time working hand-in-hand with officials, they are more well known among officials and CODI staff as agitators. This is because when they cannot achieve “fairness” or “justice” through existing channels, they engage in direct democracy through rallies and protests. These acts of direct democracy are used to force negotiations and often allow the FRSN to create institutional change at a higher level by influencing state policy.

The network has a complex relationship to representative democracy, and this relates to its commitment to independence. While it has frequently joined with movements to fight for free and fair elections, they eschew alliances with political parties. To the FRSN, independence means that the network maintains separation from both government entities and political parties, because political parties seek to become the government.

This distancing from the government in order to be able to influence it from the outside extends to the FRSN’s relationship with CODI. Though CODI is often a close partner in executing projects and pushing for policy changes from the inside, it receives no special treatment from the FRSN. One organizer explained, “I need to emphasize that CODI is a state agency. . .Therefore, when the FRSN organizes and works with CODI, it’s not different from when the people organize and work with a state agency.”

The principle of independence is reflected in the organizational arrangement of the network. The FRSN is comprised of nine sub-networks that have gradually taken shape over time. Some are made up of communities that originally joined together to struggle against eviction at a certain time. Others united to pursue a particular policy, such as the homeless network, which worked with CODI to push the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security to create a new homeless version of Baan Mankong. The most important aspects of the network’s organization are that it reflects the political strategies of network members, and each sub-network is created through the mutual agreement of member communities, who commit both to each other and to the broader mission of the FRSN (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The network structure of the FRSN.

NULICO: Self-reliance and meeting basic needs through cooperation

While the FRSN focuses on holding entities of the state accountable and fighting for justice, NULICO has always put meeting the “basic needs” (pajjai si) of the poor above making overtly political claims. Leaders work closely with CODI to promote what they hold to be the most expedient ways to meet basic needs: self-reliance and cooperation.

The principle that “communities must be self-reliant” (chumchon tawng pheung ton eng) is frequently repeated by leaders of both NULICO and CODI. This rhetoric of self-reliance is closely related to the philosophy of sufficiency economy, a theory of sustainable and ethical capitalism articulated by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej which emphasizes self-restraint and collective subsistence (Avery and Bergsteiner, 2016). Sufficiency economy also underlies state policy, as evidenced by 20 occurrences of the term “sufficiency” (phaw phiang) in the most recent 20-Year National Strategic Plan (Royal Thai Government, 2018). In the context of Baan Mankong, Elinoff (2014a: 94) has astutely argued that sufficiency does the work of “substitut[ing] moderation for politics and temperance for more radical economic critiques.” Sufficiency is invoked by NULICO community leaders while trying to encourage community members to live within their means in order to meet their Baan Mankong savings and repayment requirements.

Cooperation is espoused by NULICO and CODI through the rhetoric of “building partnerships” (kan sang phaki) between the network and government agencies. As one NULICO leader explained. “At first many communities don’t connect with other organizations, so we will go and help them and suggest that they connect with local government.” (Interview 4/21/2018).

Partnering with government agencies is easier if the jurisdictions of the different organizations align. The NULICO network, like the FRSN, can be described as a nested enterprise, comprised of numerous sub-networks. However, far from being determined by the political strategies of the network, NULICO’s nested networks follow the jurisdictions of CODI and the government. At the lowest level, communities are aggregated into sub-networks at the city level (or district, in the case of Bangkok). These city networks are then joined together at the level of the province, region, and nation. In short, the network structure mimics the jurisdictions of the state (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The network structure of NULICO.

This structure has implications for the functioning of the network. The fact that the sub-networks are pre-determined means that the member communities do not join together out of mutual agreement after building shared interests and trust. Unless they choose to join the FRSN or another network based on their tenure on a particular type of government land, new Baan Mankong communities are simply assumed to be members of certain sub-networks of NULICO based on their location. In some observed cases, new community members were not even aware of their membership in NULICO because there had been no active recruitment or outreach on the part of the network.

In contrast to the FRSN’s emphasis on maintaining an independent and at times adversarial stance vis à vis the Thai state, NULICO emulates it, both in terms of rhetoric and organizational structures. This, paired with the larger organization and looser forms of affiliation between members, has had significant implications on how commoning works in the context of Baan Mankong’s growth.

The expansion of Baan Mankong: From commoning to being commoned

Since FRSN A and NULICO A began their Baan Mankong projects, the program has grown, evolved, and become less flexible. Its early success in producing housing that is legally secure and physically desirable to both local governments and residents has convinced higher levels of the Thai government of its efficacy as a solution to the nation’s slum problems. It has been taken up as key component of urban policy. Baan Mankong features prominently in the country’s 20-year Housing Development Strategic Plan, which states that the program is to eventually house 690,000 households (Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, 2017: 48). The main focus of CODI is “city-wide upgrading,” which was successfully carried out in smaller cities in the early days of the program. These more comprehensive efforts had fallen by the wayside for a period of time (Boonyabancha and Kerr, 2018), but a major citywide effort is now being pushed in the Yannawa District of Bangkok. In this vision of upgrading, communities are expected to manage their own projects while coordinating with each other to survey the city for available land and drive the process of working with local officials to undertake Baan Mankong projects in multiple areas simultaneously (Boonyabancha, 2005, 2009)

The envisioned scaling up of the program relies on these hundreds of thousands of households adopting a set of increasingly rigid internal institutions and adapting to external ones. A prime example lies in the requirement that communities formally register their savings groups as cooperatives. Creating cooperatives has always been one of the desired conditions Baan Mankong projects, but from the outset, the intention of the program was that they are “not high-pressure conditions, and all aspects of the program are kept very flexible” (Boonyabancha, 2005: 42) FRSN A, for instance, was able to carry out their Baan Mankong project using only a savings group. NULICO A, as an early cooperative, was able to inform the ways in which CODI, communities, and the government agencies overseeing cooperatives interact. The first leader of their cooperative speaks with great pride at being able to influence these agencies.

The role of cooperatives has changed over time, though. As compared to savings groups, cooperatives require fairly in-depth knowledge of accounting and finance on the part of community leaders, as well as a good deal of labor to administer them properly. Some communities’ inability to manage their cooperatives has led the Cooperatives Promotion Department to make the training requirements for registering housing cooperatives more stringent (Interview, Bangkok Cooperatives Promotion Department Staff, June 2018). The process of registering as a cooperative and maintaining their books to be in compliance with regulations is a major challenge for communities. This important institution of self-governance has thus proved onerous for communities but makes community affairs more amenable to oversight by both CODI and the two separate government agencies that handle the promotion and auditing of cooperatives.

Other processes have become more lock-step than they were initially, and they frequently must be undertaken with great speed, even in cases when fire or other disaster has not necessitated immediate rehousing. Examples of this are initial savings for projects and the self-enumeration and documentation of member households. As Baan Mankong has come to be viewed as a solution to slums by those in power, it has been worked into other urban development plans. NULICO B, for instance was given 2 years to get their projects underway or else face eviction by the Treasury Department, which owns the land they occupy. They have also been enrolled as leaders in a citywide upgrading process in their district, which is attempting to move forward multiple projects as once. FRSN B is also undertaking Baan Mankong due to the threat of eviction. In their case, four different original settlements are relocating to an area on the outskirts of the city, primarily from land overseen by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) that is being redeveloped for “public use,” meaning parks or beautified canal banks. In both cases, the initial organizing that took years for earlier communities is now expected to be done in mere months.

The drivers of this larger, faster, more rigid process of creating urban commons come from the state at multiple levels. Some leaders of CODI itself are the driving force behind the push for citywide upgrading based on the belief that the urban poor can rise up and take control of the urban planning in cities that do not plan for them. However, CODI is also under its own pressures. Some of these are merely bureaucratic, coming from the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security’s demands to meet budget disbursal timelines and indicators of progress, a fact that leaders believe stifles the ability of the program to be flexible (Boonyabancha and Kerr, 2018).

Meanwhile, other drivers come from higher up. Since the 2014 coup placing the Prayuth Chan-ocha-led military junta at the helm of the national government, CODI has become imbricated in the administration’s pracharath programs (Kongkirati and Kanchoochat, 2018).² These include major infrastructure developments of the military administration and the governor of Bangkok, Aswin Khwanmeuang. The most notable of these is a series of major canal redevelopments (Thai Post, 2021). In this era, for entities like the BMA or the Treasury Department, which own or oversee land that houses many informal settlements, Baan Mankong can be used either for enforced formalization and beautification—as is the case in NULICO B—or as a tool for gently coercing resettlement elsewhere in lieu of politically difficult outright eviction, as is the case in FRSN B.

Creating the commons is labor-intensive (Huron, 2012), and Baan Mankong is a prime example of this. Seeing projects through is onerous for communities, especially their leaders (Endo, 2014; Shelby, 2020). In planning for 690,000 households to undergo Baan Mankong, the multiple entities involved in creating the 20-year National Housing Development Strategic Plan take into account the tremendous need for secure housing in the country, but not whether so many households would be willing and able to undertake this form of collective housing program. The increasingly rigid institutional requirements of Baan Mankong projects, along with the taking up of the program as a tool of urban development by a conglomeration of state agencies, means that an increasing number of communities are having this form of collective property pushed on them from above rather than creating it from below. Wall (2017: 126) argues that “Commons can be destroyed from above and may be defended by political action, but they cannot be built from above. . . Rules to provide communal property rights do not, on their own, allow the creation of effective collective management.” Baan Mankong is testing this assertion. I argue that the collective property created through Baan Mankong still constitutes examples of urban commons. However, from the perspective of many commoners, the process by which they are created has shifted in many ways from commoning to being commoned.

Commoning at the edges

That the state has become a primary driver of the commons in Baan Mankong is not the end of the story. While all communities that go through the Baan Mankong process are subject to elements of being commoned through the necessity to adhere to certain institutional requirements and the fervor of state agencies to push projects forward, some are able to push back more than others. A comparison of the FRSN B and NULICO B demonstrates that a combination of political intention and the right institutional arrangements can open up room for commoning. However, unlike earlier forms of commoning, in which an entire institutional infrastructure was being created from the ground up, the commoning that now takes place is more modest in scope. These efforts amount to demanding increased subsidies or changing minor processes, a phenomenon I call commoning at the edges.

As of 2018, NULICO B found itself stuck in the middle of commoning efforts by the state on two levels. On the first, the community’s project originated not by their own initiative, but rather through an agreement between CODI and the Treasury Department to develop several communities on treasury land. The 370 households on the land have had varying levels of enthusiasm for the project. The leader of the community has struggled to recruit help in the administration of the project from her fellow residents. She has been aided almost exclusively by CODI staff in her efforts. When NULICO leaders offered advice, they often invoked the concept of self-reliance and the need for communities to mobilize to meet their needs and not wait for the government to do things for them. The capacity of the community to mobilize its entire membership to be self-reliant, however, has its limits. The two-year time frame in which the community must get their project under way was quickly coming to a close, and the community had just begun to form their cooperative with a sub-section of 50 households. Numerous members were not willing or able to save the requisite amount, while still others remained unconvinced that eviction was truly imminent if they did not pursue the project, having been threatened with eviction on and off for decades.

On the second level, the community is one of a handful in its district that has been chosen to pilot a city-wide upgrading effort. The leader had been active in attending meetings with the other community members and CODI staff about this city-wide effort, but she found the idea that she and leaders of other communities were supposed to lead such an endeavor overwhelming. When asked about her feelings about their ability to carry out the project, she replied ruefully that it was “funny” (talok). She did not know how to do that, and the community leaders did not have adequate mentors (phi liang) to point the way. Despite these frustrations, she and several community members remained hopeful that the sketches of their new houses would someday be theirs, along with legal rights to their land. The path forward, though, seemed fraught with bureaucracy and internal resistance.

FRSN B, likewise, has had to deal with its share of frustration at trying to fit its messy and informal modes of inhabitance into the neat categories required by the CODI, local governments, and agencies in charge of cooperatives. However, they have had more success in pushing back against some of the elements of the program that do not suit them by organizing resistance and presenting alternatives at different levels. This includes demanding greater resources for basic services and pushing for larger changes in land policy on the part of land-owning government agencies.

At the level of their own community, the leaders have worked closely with FRSN leaders and organizers to negotiate delayed eviction to allow them more time to save money and get their housing construction underway. They have also built a relationship with the Assistant Secretary to the Governor of Bangkok in order to convene a committee to solve the longstanding issue of insufficient grant funds for infrastructure to Baan Mankong communities. Whereas older communities had to scrape together funds from other sources to cover these costs, FRSN B has become a pilot project through which several government agencies are waiving installation fees and other costs of extending services to Baan Mankong communities. In this way, the community, with the support of the network, is pushing to alter practices of state agencies to meet their needs.

On a larger scale, FRSN B has taken part in the network’s movements to push to open more land from the State Railways of Thailand to legal long-term rental at a below-market price by communities that now occupy the land informally. These demands are rooted in the belief that state land that is not being used for other purposes belongs to the people, so the urban poor should have a right to inhabit it. Participation in direct actions pushing for such policy changes do not directly benefit the case study community. Rather, they represent participation in a larger movement to shape the institutions of the state in order to create the commons.

These commoning efforts by the FRSN must be looked at in perspective, however. Operating a tighter-knit network is time and labor intensive, and thus the FRSN, with fewer than 100 communities, is roughly one tenth the ostensible size of the loosely affiliated NULICO. Though the FRSN arguably punches above its weight, victories are often ambivalent. As for FRSN B, their own struggle did not bring about a glorious resistance to eviction, only a slowing down of the process in order to gain more time for relocation and greater financial concessions from local government and landowners. Thus, their commoning often does not look like whole-scale appropriation of space and resources. Nonetheless, they do pull the commoning efforts of the state to be more in line with their own needs.

Commoning and being commoned

As the work of “search and struggle” by the combined forces of a grassroots movement and progressive government insiders has been developed into a firmly rooted state policy, the driving force behind the creation of the commons has shifted. I argue that from the perspective of commoners, this constitutes a shift from commoning to being commoned. However, this shift is not complete. As a comparison of the more recent communities from NULICO and the FRSN demonstrate, there is still room for active commoning—shaping of institutions of collective governance. The degree to which communities can still actively common, however, depends on both the political intent and internal institutions of their commoning movements.

In the cases of both the FRSN and NULICO, the state serves an enabling function for the commons by providing funding and a clear path to having collective property recognized legally, similar to what Huron (2018) finds in the case of LECs in Washington, DC. This recognition amounts to a form of enclosure for the commons (Harvey, 2012). However, an analysis of the two networks demonstrates different possibilities for how commoning movements can relate to the state. In the case of the FRSN, the network uses Baan Mankong to meet the material needs of its members while maintaining the network as a movement aimed at achieving greater justice for the urban poor by holding the state accountable for providing for their rights. NULICO, on the other hand, has come to serve the state’s interest in expanding Baan Mankong as a pragmatic means of enrolling the urban poor in not only producing their own housing, but also in practices of self-reliance as a substitute for making demands of the state.

The first aspect of the difference between commoning and being commoned has to do with the different positions the networks hold with relation to the state. These positions are, in turn, due to the reciprocal relationships between their politics and their institutional arrangements. The FRSN employs internal mutual aid along with the language of rights and justice to serve the political aim of demanding greater resources from the state. This amounts to what Harvey (2012: 87) calls a “double-pronged political attack” in which those who organize the commons self-organize to supply what is needed for a good, common life, along with demanding that the state supply what is needed for social reproduction. In order to demand resources from the state, the FRSN maintains institutional distance from it. This institutional distance takes the form of the nested sub-networks that follow the alliances and political strategies of the network’s member communities. In addition, internally the network relies on tight-knit subnetworks that are formed through mutual agreement of members to work together toward common goals and are governed by democratic institutions.

The politics and institutions of NULICO, on the other hand, work in a reciprocal relationship that brings the network closer to the state and makes it subject to state control. The belief in cooperation has brought them into the fold of the state in two ways. The first is through a close relationship with CODI, in which the distinctions between the goals of the network and the state agency have blurred. The second is through the decision to base the structure of its nested sub-networks on government jurisdictions. This results in initiatives of the network being largely driven by CODI and other state agencies. The close relationship to the state is also reflected in the moral rhetoric that surrounds NULICO, which echoes the Thai state’s emphasis on self-reliance, driven by a commitment to the concept of sufficiency economy.

The FRSN and NULICO demonstrate two different possibilities of how commoning movements can relate to the state. Many scholars have described commoning as a process of learning democracy through practicing self-governance. Gidwani and Baviskar (2011: 43), for example, emphasize the importance of the urban commons “to ‘learning’ how to do democracy through practices of creating, governing and defending collective resources.” Likewise, Huron (2018: 151), discusses the process of “learning self-governance” as part and parcel of understandings of democracy since the time of Jefferson.

However, learning self-governance and learning democracy are by no means one and the same. In the absence of a commitment to democracy, mere self-governance promoted by the state becomes what Caffentzis (2010) calls “Neoliberalism’s Plan B.” I argue that in the case of Baan Mankong, the commons have become an instrument to enroll citizens in the provision of resources that the market fails to supply and the state refuses to provide. While some have celebrated the “co-production” of services by citizens and the state for its potential to increase efficiency (Ostrom, 1996) and provide openings for political engagement (Boonyabancha and Kerr, 2018; Mitlin, 2008), this political potential is not always realized. In the case of NULICO, state agencies and network leaders, through the dissemination of both a moral framework of self-reliance and a prescriptive set of institutional arrangements, enmesh communities in the agencies of the state at multiple scales, creating commons that are imposed from above.

A frequent critique of both the study and practice of the commons is their inability to solve what Harvey (2012: 69) calls the “scale problem.” Furthermore, in arguing that the property of the poor is seldom recognized as such, Blomley (2008) argues that policies such as coops and land trusts offer the possibility to recognize the collective property of the poor, making it visible on the same level as private property. Baan Mankong represents both a policy that recognizes the property of the poor, as well as a scaling up of the commons through nested enterprises in the form of networks. In this way, on the surface it fulfills the desires of many of proponents of the commons to create a more just and democratic alternative to private property on a large scale. However, the process of expansion has necessitated an imbrication of the commons and the state, and in that process the driver of the commons has shifted from community members to state agencies. In this sense, Baan Mankong serves as a cautionary tale to planners and activists hoping the commons might serve as a scalable solution to crises of affordable housing and urban inequality more broadly. However, this case also offers reasons for hope, as the transfer of the momentum behind commoning is not complete. Adherence to democratic ideals and independent organizations can leave room to maneuver, to shape the higher-level institutions of the state, and to maintain a hold over the process of commoning, even in an environment where being commoned has become the norm.

This research raises important issues that call for further investigation. First, as I have outlined, the FRSN, CODI, and NULICO hold different political positions that are often at odds with other. Nonetheless they have worked on Baan Mankong in a tense alliance for many years. This raises the question, why does this work? The nature of these alliances and the respective roles of each organization in the scaling up of the policy demands further explanation. In addition, the account I have offered of the origins of Baan Mankong and how its networks operate departs from much of the cited policy literature that seeks to learn from the “best practices” of Baan Mankong, This points to the need to understand how knowledge around participatory slum upgrading programs is produced and circulated among practitioners, academics, and even community participants.

Finally, though this article focuses on how a single policy plays out in Bangkok, Thailand, building housing commons is a growing global phenomenon. Whether through participatory slum upgrading in the Global South or through community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives in the Global North, communities and practitioners throughout the world are attempting to expand the reach of these commons, be it through “scaling up” or “going viral” (Moore and Mullins, 2013). However, as such practices have expanded, recent research points to a dilution of the ethos of strong community control as the aim of creating affordable housing overtakes the transformative politics that originally underpinned the models (DeFilippis et al., 2018). This investigation speaks to these concerns and the need to pay close attention to the political content of commoning practices as such housing models spread throughout the world.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

Hayden Shelby is now affiliated with University of Cincinnati, USA.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The article was funded by Chulalongkorn University (ENITS Scholarship), Social Science Research Council (Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellows) and Fulbright Association (US Student Program-Thailand).

ORCID iD

Hayden Shelby

Notes

Author biographies

Hayden Shelby is an assistant professor of planning at the University of Cincinnati. She studies issues of land and housing rights, democracy, and social justice, in both the United States and Southeast Asia.

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