We might compare the values of the rural majority in Thailand as revealed by the survey data with de Tocqueville's description of citizen par?ticipation, still a principal source of Americans' continuing vision of gov?ernance. Participatory governance in America is associated with belief in civic (if not social) equality, tolerance of' conflict, accountability to local communities of electors, and distrust of traditional hierarchy, large institu?tions, and expert administrators. In almost every respect, the rural Thai majority's traditionalism influences them to hold an opposing view. The powerful urban, educated minority are more sympathetic to modernism and participatory representative governance when it reflects their values, but they are skeptical of any form of participatory governance dominated by the rural electorate. Further, the strong aversion of both urban and rural Thai to conflict and intolerance of opposing political views evidenced by the survey data strongly suggest a lack of trust in fellow citizens. In contemporary Thailand, it is hard to imagine that lay participation in the legal process-especially by average citizens rather than experts-would increase the legitimacy of courts or the rule of law.⁷⁸

Surveys of public opinion offer one kind of evidence of the prospects for participatory forms of governance and the rule of law, but other forms of evidence help us understand how these orientations toward democracy and law may influence daily social life as well as interactions with legal and political institutions. A recent ethnographic study of the way that ordi?nary Thai respond to injuries caused by strangers (for example, an auto accident) illustrates how traditional values and globalization have com?bined in a unique way to reduce the likelihood of accountability under the law.⁷⁹ Contrary to expectations, globalization has led to a decline in will?ingness among Thai interviewed in this study to invoke rights in response to injury. This is because changes associated with globalization uprooted traditional forms of dispute resolution that operated in the shadow of law by destroying the relationships that made them meaningful.⁸⁰ Instead, injured individuals found resolution in an evolving form of Buddhist prac?tice. The return to Buddhism in a new form suggests the continuing impact of the modern Thai civic religion on legal consciousness.

Scholar Peter Jackson, who has studied Buddhist influence on contem?porary Thai social movements,⁸¹ concludes that while religious diversity has increased in Thailand, and the state has become secularized because Buddhism itself is no longer controlled by the state, Thai society remains deeply religious, strongly suggesting that legal consciousness will continue to be influenced by elements of Thailand's "civic religion."⁸² Even if other institutional elements favor greater reliance on law or the court system for addressing injuries, Buddhism may well have its impact on the meaning of injury or injustice and the adequacy of remedies offered by law.

Globalization and differences between rural and urban social organi?zation and values have intertwined in other ways to create a two-track envi?ronmental movement in Thailand. The engine of social change has been Thailand's booming economy following the end of the Vietnam War, and the subsequent decline of communist influence in the rural areas of North?eastern Thailand.⁸³ Rapid growth accelerated exploitation of timber, waterways, and other natural resources, with two profound political effects. First, the former political periphery, including the rural poor and ethnic minorities living within the forests, or on its margins, or whose vil?lages were in the future floodplain of a proposed dam, has become politi?cally active. After years of contact with activist NGO workers, they have been motivated to seek redress from the government, and if none is forth?coming, to undertake direct action to save homes and livelihoods.⁸⁴ They have been supported by international human rights and environmental NGOs opposing massive development projects worldwide that are planned and implemented without input from the affected communities. The World Bank, one of the world's chief dam builders and a source of funding for the Pak Mun Dam in Northeast Thailand, is a particular target of NGO opposi?tion. The Pak Mun Dam project threatened to inundate many villages and became the focus of the Assembly of the Poor's most widely known campaign.⁸⁵

The Assembly of the Poor, an important rural movement in opposition to destructive government-sponsored development projects, has con?structed its claims for justice from traditional concepts of popular welfare and moral accountability. Rather than formal law and litigation, its leaders deployed demonstrations, petitions to government officials, and media campaigns.⁸⁶ In rural Thailand, where adversarial legalism is less familiar or common, Thai social movements have seldom relied on litigation to advance their goals. Both before and after the ratification of the "People's Constitution," many groups of rural Thai citizens have preferred to take their grievances directly to government officials and the King by means of petitions and demonstrations at Government I-louse, rather than by invok?ing political and legal means afforded by law or by the Constitution. As recently as April 2006, the King departed from prepared remarks to admonish petitioners to use their constitutional means of redress. These remarks served as a monarchical reminder about the power afforded by law: use it or lose it.⁸⁷ Even the rights-advocating Lawyers Council of Thai?land has encouraged such traditional appeals to the paternalism of govern?ment bureaucrats by acting as a go-between for petitioners on behalf of traditional communities but rarely using the courts to seek redress on their behalf.⁸⁸

The second effect of development on environmentalism has occurred because Thailand's boom has expanded greatly Thailand's "middle class." Thailand's varied social strata do not correspond to Europe and America's classes of property-owners and salaried tiers. Instead, an emerging middle class, comprised of salaried and professional workers in government, uni?versities, and industries, together with a rapidly growing number of entre?preneurs, is beginning to flex its political muscle. This middle class supports causes that express their values and, frequently, take critical views of government. On the one hand, the environmental movement has been characterized by rural activism, supported by transnational and Thai NGO's and, significantly, activist monks whose actions and words mobilize the Thai civic religion with great power.⁸⁹ On the other hand, a more tech?nocratic, nonconfrontational environmentalism is supported by the contri?butions of the "salariat,"⁹⁰ including entrepreneurs who have found environmentalism a useful accommodation, and by transnational NGOs advocating "sustainable" or "responsible" development.⁹¹

Willingness to "take on" participatory rights may be influenced by culture-the framework of values and expectations created through shared experience, but also, as the study of Thai injuries showed, by changing patterns of opportunity and risk. The government has used force against peaceful resistance to its authority. For example, the administration of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra faced serious charges of human rights abuse for his administration's treatment of protesting Muslims in Southern Thailand and other groups.⁹² His government also faced accusa?tions of widespread corruption that undermined responsible public admin?istration.⁹³ James Klein's review of the prospects for increased public participation after the 1997 constitution concludes by observing that there was an unbroken pattern of indifference by bureaucrats to the legal rights of the public to participate in government decision making.⁹⁴ Local polit?ics was long renowned for the use of strong-arm tactics to induce compli?ance with the wishes of the powerful, a practice which also continued after the reaffirmation of local democracy and participation rights in 1997.⁹⁵

Footnotes

78. further, the Asian Barometer data for other countries included in the survey suggest that the same pattern exists in many developing Asian societies, namely the existence of two cultures (and perhaps two ideals of democracy or rule of law) characterized by modern versus traditional values, urban versus rural cultures, more education and western acculturation versus less education and traditional acculturation. Albritton & Bureekul, supra note 58.

79. David Engel, Globalization and the Decline of Legal Consciousness: Torts, Ghosts, and Karma in Thailand, 30 LAW & Soc. INQUIRY 469 (2005).

80. Id. at 469, 502.

81. Peter Jackson, Withering Centre, Flourishing Margins: Buddhism's Changing Politi?cal Roles, in political Change in Thailand: DEMOCROCY AND PARTICIPATION (Kevin Hewison, ed., 1997).

82. Frank Reynolds, Dhamma in Dispute: The Interaction of Religion and Law in Thai?land, 28 LAW & Soc'Y REV. 433 (1994).

83. Philip Hirsch, The Politics of Environment: Opposition and Legitimacy, in Political Change in Thailand: Democracy and Participation (Kevin Hewison ed., 1997). See also Philip Hirsch, Environment and Environmentalism in Thailand: Material and Ideological Bases, in SEEING FOREST FOR TREES: Environment and Environmentalism in Thailand (Philip Hirsch ed., 1996).

84. Jumbala & Mitprasat, supra note 36. See also Bruce Missingham, The Assembly  of the poor in Thailand (2003).

85. See Missingham, supra note 84, at 38-41.

86. See generally, id. at 38-41.

87. See Roundup: Thai King Criticizes Current Political Mess, People's Daily. Online, April 26, 2006, available at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200604/26/cng200604 26 261157.hunlN.

88. Id.

89. See generally Susan M. Darlington, The Ordination of a Tree: The Buddhist Ecology Movement in Thailand, 37 Ethnology 1, Winter 1998; Philip Hirsch & Larry Lohmann, Contemporary Politics of Environment ill Thailand, 29 ASTON SURVEY 439 (1989).

90. Pasuk and Baker use this term to describe one of the relatively educated and well to do groups that make up the middle class in Thai society. Pasuk Pongpaichit & Chris Baker, Power In transition: Thailand ill the 1990s, in Political Change in Thailand: DEMOCRACY AND PARTICIPATION 32-35 (Kevin Hewison ed., 1996).

91. Jumbala & Mitprasat, supra note 36, at 196.

92. See generally HUMAN Rights Watch 2006 Report ON Thailand, available at
http://hrw.org/english/does/2006/01/18/thaila12251_txt.htm; THE ASIAN HUMAN Rica ITS COMMISSION REPORT, available at http://www.ahrchk.net/pr/mainfile.php/2006mr/35b/.

93. Specific charges of corruption have included deals that favored members of the Prime Minister's family, but corruption reached as far as the non-partisan National Elec?tion Commission and led to the invalidation of an election. For a discussion on Tha?kin's money policies see Pasuk Phongpaichit & Chris Baker, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand 197-224 (2004).

94. See Klein, supra note 49.

95. Id. Klein describes skillful disrespect for the right to participate in government decision making: narrow interpretation of prior law, perfunctory hearings without sig?nificant effect, SLAPP litigation against critics of private development, resulting riots and demonstrations outside government offices. Where the power of' government offi?cials and private power-brokers has been seriously challenged, violent reprisals are not unknown.