Watershed management in Thailand: concepts,problems and implementation

Problems of water resource management are becoming increasingly severe in most countries of the developing world. Already from early in this century it was recognised, wherever water resource management problems began to manifest themselves, that the most appropriate level upon which to study and confront these problems was the river basin. This paper reviews various approaches that have been taken to river basin management and the way in which these have surfaced from the particular range of problems and the political context from which they emerged. Since the end of the 1970s, the rapid development of Thailand has brought into focus the need for integrated resource management as a basis for overcoming increasingly severe problems of drought and flood. Deforestation is seen as a major cause of these problems and so it is in watershed management that the first initiatives are being taken. The paper describes in some detail the system which has been adopted and finally discusses the political and administrative problems facing implementation of the system. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.