Citizen Empowerment: Institutional collaboration between Pak Kret Municipality and its community in the 2011 flood disaster management

Abstract

Thailand’s bureaucratic reform in 2002 has brought about a new dimension of disaster management. The Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Act of 2007 (B.E. 2550) has enhanced the role of local government organization and its citizens as key actors in a disaster managing process. This research aims to explain a role of the Pak Kret Municipality in building    collaborative action between the municipality and its community; Bang Pood Samakkee 2,during the flood disaster in 2011.The study grounds on a qualitative methodology which data were collected and analyzed from documents and reports. In addition, in-depth interview and field observations on site were carried out. The research reveals that while the municipality claimed their success in disaster management from municipality capacity. Also its role should be explained by ‘donor-recipient’ and ‘top-down’ model which treat its community as customer through hierarchical coordination. Institution collaborative model becomes third model to build collaborative action of community to cope with this problem in sustainable        development way. In contrast,  collaborative model did not clearly appear in the relationship between the municipality and its community in that situation. This is because active roles of people in disaster management process were actually excluded. This study suggests that citizen empowerment and collaborative action can help municipality manage the resources in efficacy by supporting them to help themselves. The Pak Kret municipality can empower communities by applying deliberative process to negotiate with its citizens, and changing its role from ‘donor’ to ‘facilitator’ in policy term. The perception of social trust should be replaced for developing people capacity as local government  priority in order to establish collaboration model in flood disaster management.