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Environmental social movements in developing countries are often portrayed as democratizing but may contain important social divisions. This paper presents a new methodology to analyze the social composition and underlying political messages of movements. Nearly 5,000 newspaper reports during 1968 2000 in Thailand are analyzed to indicate the participation of middle and lower classes, and their association with 'green' (conservationist) and 'red-green' (livelihoods-oriented) environmental values. Results show middle-class 'green' activism has dominated forests activism, but lower-class 'red-green' activism has grown for forests and pollution. Newspapers, however, portray all environmentalism as 'democratization,' suggesting that the possible exclusiveness of some environmental norms is unacknowledged. Key words--environmentalism, social movements, governance, democratization, Asia, Thailand doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.01.005

Future climate change policy in developing countries is likely to require both technology transfer and the achievement of a 'development dividend.' This paper analyzes how cross-sector partnerships between investors, municipalities, and citizens can enhance both technology transfer and local deliberation about development benefits. Adopting a political institutional approach, the paper compares examples of partnerships involving waste-to-energy investment in India, the Philippines, and Thailand to consider how more and less complex forms of contracting and deliberation may advance policy. Building partnerships that can reduce costs and increase local deliberation is an important complement to formal mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. Key words--environmental governance, climate change policy, technology transfer, India, Philippines, Thailand

A brief description on the debates about climate change policy and technology transfer by analyzing the success factors underlying collaboration between private companies and communities in developing countries is presented. Cases of collaboration concerning waste management and waste-to-energy in Thailand and the Philippines are described.

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co‐production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co‐production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state‐led expert knowledge and traditional local practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]