This research links to a wide range of conceptual literature, as outlined above. The fieldwork is embedded in a particular geographical location (rural, Northern Thailand), and has a special focus on one key aspect of life in that location (handicrafts), but this brings to bear a range of debates across the spectrum of the social sciences. This makes the research particularly challenging because it crosses disciplinary divides. One way to make this more manageable is to explicitly link the research questions to the conceptual literature, as set out below in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Research Questions and the Supporting Literature and Conceptual Frameworks
Research Questions Supporting Literature/ Conceptual Frameworks Main research question:
To what extent, and how, does handicraft production support rural development in Thailand?
This core research questions links with the broad debate over Rural Development, and how best to conceptualise, promote and achieve rural development. For Thailand, as a fast-growing, rapidly-changing, middle income developing country there are important questions about whether rural development needs to be re-conceptualised. Are established models appropriate for an increasingly prosperous, modern and connected rural population and rural spaces?
With a research focus on handicrafts in rural development, the more specific literature on Rural Industrialisation is relevant. Cottage industries have traditionally constituted a significant component of the rural non-farm sector and rural industrialisation, usually in handicraft and artisan activities, is often viewed as a means of employment generation for the rural poor. Supplementary research questions:
1. What is the role of handicrafts in
livelihoods?
In order to explore the way in which handicrafts insinuate themselves into rural spaces, a Livelihoods perspective will be adopted, drawing on the work of Chambers and others. This also links with those aspects of the Rural Industrialisation literature that deal with the role of rural industries in reducing rural-urban migration. More particularly, the debate over Farm – Non-Farm Relations (virtuous or immiserating?) and Urban Bias are relevant. Finally, the role of handicrafts must be seen to emerge out of particular cultural contexts, thus requiring that the work considers the literature on Culture and Development.
2. How does handicraft production
help in the alleviation of rural poverty?
The research cannot ignore the debate over Rural Poverty, how it is produced and reproduced and the role that Rural Industries in general and handicrafts in particular might play in ameliorating poverty through employment generation and income generation and, in turn, through generating economic growth rooted in the countryside. At the same time, the literature on Urban Bias raises the question of whether national policies work systematically against the interests of rural areas and rural people.
3. How far does rural handicraft
production raise the skills of rural labour and the quality of rural resources?
The literature on Rural Industrialisation and Indigenous Knowledge engaged with this question over the long-term development potential of handicrafts and rural industries. Do we see in handicraft production a sustainable and appropriate deployment of Indigenous Knowledge in the interest of rural development that might challenge mainstream views and initiatives based on modern technology and external inputs and influences?
4. What is the role of indigenous
knowledge in supporting rural industrialisation?
Handicraft production is often presented as an activity which is local in provenance and appropriate in its application of technology and in its scale. The literature on Culture and Development engages with various forms of cultural thinking, of which one element is Indigenous Knowledge
5. What is the potential of rural
industrialisation to support rural development?
This research question links with the literature on Rural Development and Rural Industrialisation and more particularly on the manner in which rural industrialisation supports and/or compromises (undermines) some aspects of rural development. 6. Can rural industries help to narrow
the divide between rural and urban areas and within rural areas?
The particular focus here is with the inequalities that characterise Thailand and many other developing countries: rural-urban inequalities and intra-rural inequalities. Are rural industries pro-poor in their effects? This, therefore, brings into play the literature on Rural Industrialisation, Farm – Non-farm Relations and Urban Bias.
7. How does the Thai government
support rural development in general and rural industries in particular?
Rural development is shaped by the policy context that exists. This links with the broad debate over Rural Development and how to achieve it and with the policy-related aspects of Urban Bias and Rural Industrialisation. Identifying the policies that exist, how they have changed over time, and the realities of their implementation are important aspects of the study. 8. How is rural handicraft production
being integrated into global production networks?
Rural Industrialisation is traditionally seen as a cottage industry. But the experience of Thailand is that the sector is being integrated into wider flows and networks, some operating at a global level.
2.7 Conclusion
This chapter has reviewed the key conceptual debates, which are drawn upon in this thesis in order to examine the role of handicrafts and rural development in Thailand. It has also attempted to combine these fields of study. The definitions of development by different scholars have been reviewed and compared. The literature on culture and rural development has been used in thinking about how handicraft production evolves over time in supporting rural development in Thailand. Rural industrialisation and urban bias have been considered to better understand how handicraft production is being integrated into global production networks, and how it raises the skills of rural labour and the quality of rural resources. The question of farm – non-farm relations has been raised in order to better understand the dynamics of poverty and industrialisation in rural development. Debates about indigenous knowledge have been examined in thinking about the evolving role of different technologies in supporting rural industrialisation. Livelihoods have been explored in thinking about the role of handicrafts in the alleviation of rural poverty. Rather than following a single guiding conceptual model, I combine the use of multiple conceptual and theoretical models and approaches. Instead of creating confusion, the interconnections between the different strands of the literature help to better understand the study of the role of handicrafts in Thailand. The next chapter turns to the wider history of development in Thailand and, more specifically, to the introduction of a focused Thai government handicrafts project, namely the OTOP programme.