EXIT, VOICE, AND THE DEPLETION OF OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES - THE POLITICAL BASES OF PROPERTY-RIGHTS IN THAILAND

The authors argue that the depletion of the open land frontier in Thai land has not led to the development of a strong central state, even th ough it has led to demands for innovations in the formal-legal order g overning access to land. Institutional factors preventing the state fr om providing formal rule enforcement for the population combined with the lack of a landed aristocracy have maintained the discrepancy betwe en legal rules and customary practices that prevailed when an open lan d frontier allowed people to avoid conflict by moving away. Since the mid-1980s, when the Royal Forestry Department drafted a new policy to promote commercial tree plantations, conflicts over forest reserves ha ve increased, centering on the commercial tree plantations, on squatte rs who refuse to leave the reserves, and on the preservation and manag ement of so-called community forests.