Bupatip Chamnil

By building civic participation that is location-centered and child-led, Bupatip Chamnil is forming a sustainable base of informed and active citizens in Thailand to deal with challenges ranging from industrial pollution to endangered species.

Bupatip is building a citizen participation movement that addresses the two principal obstacles facing citizen action in Thailand: a multitude of complex and interrelated problems, and the challenge of building a sustainable movement that transcends and outlives any individual issue or campaign. Her solution to the first problem is to create groups that define themselves and their agenda according to place rather than issue. Any issue of public concern that might come up–forest encroachment, municipal corruption, local elections–is within the purview of a local association. She tackles the issue of sustainability by beginning with a community's most valued, most visible, and most renewable resource, its children. Essentially, what Bupatip does is to draw disengaged citizens out of their homes by turning children in semirural areas into visible, public advocates who eventually draw in their parents and neighbors.
Bupatip is fond of saying that her job is to "produce people," and by people she means citizens who are fully invested in their societies. Because her central strategy is to work with children, in one sense she means that she is producing the good citizens of tomorrow. At the same time, because the associations she builds incorporate everyone, not just the young, she means that she is changing how the citizens of today relate to their world. Preserve Kao Chamao, the first group she founded–it takes its name from the area surrounding a local mountain peak–shows Bupatip educating the young for tomorrow, and activating adults today. When local elections take place, most people keep their heads down and submit to the time-honored tradition of patronage. A race for local office can be a dangerous affair, and few voters are willing to embroil themselves in public discourse about candidates or election procedure. The young people in Kao Chamao, however, were able to carry out some innocuous public advocacy by interviewing candidates, reviewing their literature, and putting up public signboards comparing the candidates and their election promises. They then set up a day-long festival to which they invited candidates to take the stage, present their platforms, and answer questions. The audience, of course, was not composed merely of children, but of citizens from all the surrounding townships. The Kao Chamao group regularly stages similar forums on forest encroachment, natural resource use, and a range of public issues.
What Bupatip started at Kao Chamao is taking off throughout Thailand's eight eastern provinces. She made this spread possible by reaching out to traditional youth groups that already existed–those devoted to sports, camping, extracurricular activities–and promoting her more progressive activities through a program of exchange and exposure. Moreover, Bupatip's active involvement in a series of national youth development institutions allows her to contact and influence colleagues in the field throughout the country.

Thailand's ambitious development policy for eastern Thailand–the so-called "Eastern Seaboard" plan–has brought swift change to this traditionally rural part of the country. Industrialization, without significant concurrent social investment, has not only restructured the area economically (complicating long-standing rural problems like poverty), but also brought with it new conflicts over natural resources and created an influx of immigrants from around the country and the region. When coupled with government decentralization, implemented without the necessary institutions for local accountability, these changes have radically increased the potential for public irresponsibility and mismanagement. With the Thai government already planning to replicate this development model in the South, the challenges of this region–increasingly both urban and rural–have the potential to arise in other parts of the country.

Thailand's government has recognized both these problems and the need to develop local solutions, dedicating substantial financial resources to support community initiatives. However, there exist few citizen organizations in the eastern region that have attracted the widespread participation necessary to tackle these challenges. Neither extremely poor nor extremely rich, the citizens of this area have not had a single pressing issue around which they have felt compelled to mobilize. As a result, many organizations have failed for lack of local support. Women's groups, farmers' organizations, environmental advocacy groups–few, if any, have lasted beyond an initial flurry of activity.

Bupatip is overcoming this apathy by developing a process that mobilizes citizens around a segment of the population–its children and youth–rather than around a specific issue. Through her Preserve Kao Chamao group, Bupatip empowers youth to drive the formation of solutions to community problems in every sphere, while she engages adults and encourages them to become more involved, thereby creating community-wide action.

To create a base for youth community involvement, Bupatip uses traditional activities like camping and the arts as a hook to involve young people in youth-scale and youth-driven versions of adult activities. Bupatip's first initiative, a community bookstore for youth, reflects the strategy she uses to engage children. Although kids originally came to borrow only comic books from her library, she would always lend them for free an additional, more substantive book–encouraging them to read it and discussing the contents with them when they came to return it. Young readers eventually decided to form their own reading and discussion group to analyze community problems. From this initial activity, Preserve Kao Chamao–now run and funded largely by youth members–has grown to include additional activities ranging from a savings group to the production of community newsletters.

While this hands-on civic education can help develop civic-minded future leaders, the youth activities are designed to engage adults in solving concrete problems, encouraging them to take the next step forward. To address the corruption that plagues local administrations in their region, Preserve Kao Chamao youth researched and publicized the platforms, promises, and actual accomplishments of candidates running for local office. With this information publicized, candidates agreed to participate in the area's first election debate, one attended by over 500 local citizens who subsequently approached the task of casting their votes with less fear and less indifference. In a similar manner, youth have encouraged adult action on issues ranging from cultural preservation to child abuse. For example, an event organized to allow the elderly to teach youth about the history of their community has led to more community members seeking to preserve local traditions, while members' community mapping of at-risk families allows local leaders to intervene before crises arise.

This strategy of bringing in adults as partners with youth has simultaneously served to spread Bupatip's work: as more adults are involved with the group, more parents encourage their children to join; the process feeds steady growth. As a result, Bupatip's work has spread to the district level: having begun with only six children, the Preserve Kao Chamao Group now involves over 200, representing 70-80 percent of the youth in the district. This increased base of support and broader range of partners in turn has allowed the youth group to initiate responses to district- and provincial-level challenges, notably from environmental degradation. In 1999 a development project in the Kao Chamao National Park, a reserve that sits on the border of five eastern provinces, encroached on the traditional habitat of wild elephants in the area. When the animals began wandering into these villages in search of food, destroying crops and property, villagers responded by killing the elephants. The youth group devised a solution to this problem–creating a nature path through the development that allowed the elephants to reach their traditional feeding grounds safely, without disturbing the new villages–and brought together park rangers, local government officials, and villagers to implement the project and restore coexistence.

To spread both the process and the solutions, Bupatip has incorporated the group into provincial, regional, and national youth and citizen sector networks. Bupatip cofounded "Youth in Development"–a national network of youth groups to provide a national forum to encourage the transition from local to national participation. Because she is seen as a civil society leader in the East, having been tapped to serve both as project coordinator for the World Bank's Social Investment Fund and as a regional adviser to Thailand's National Social and Economic Council (a body of experts that help draft parliamentary legislation on community issues), Bupatip's approach is being recognized beyond her area. For example, Bupatip's youth group model has been adopted by a local government administration in Supanburi province (in Thailand's central region) whose participants and leaders were trained by the Preserve Kao Chamao Group. Also, Mahidol University in Bangkok is studying the Kao Chamao model for joint community and government efforts toward environmental protection, collecting and synthesizing their experiences for shaping national resource conservation policy.

Bupatip was born in 1967 into a middle-class family in a small village in Rayong Province on the fringes of Kao Chamao park. She was inspired to enter the field of community development by a well-known novel she read in high school. While at Ramkamhaeng University in Bangkok, Bupatip took part in university-sponsored camping trips to rural areas and became actively involved in Thailand's civic movement.

In 1992 Bupatip returned to eastern Thailand where she began to organize activities for youth in her community, while taking a leading role in establishing adult citizen sector networks in the region. Although Bupatip originated the ideas for the youth group at the outset–like the library and community center she established in her family's drugstore–as the group's members became more involved in community affairs, they initiated their own activities. When children proved pivotal in encouraging reluctant adults to join an election debate, Bupatip realized the leading role that young people could play in the broader civil society movement.

With this insight and the youth group's early successes, in 1998 Bupatip began turning over responsibility for Preserve Kao Chamao to its members, training youth leaders both to manage the group and to interact and communicate with adults in the community. Since then, she has focused on integrating the group into regional and national youth networks, helping them secure additional partners to address larger issues.