/Project Abstract/

The project presents a guideline for academics to deploy multiple scales in conducting research and working with villagers on infrastructure development projects. Scales are contingent, contested, and incomplete spatial and temporal outcomes of social and ecological processes. However, the scales in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process often were chosen instead of allowing them to be transformed and remade in the process. In the case of the Yuam River Water Diversion Project, the scales in the EIA process were simply chosen to make claims on the benefits that the project would bring to other parts of Thailand and neglected the impacts to local communities. In order to synthesize different kinds of research that go into impact assessments, jumping between scales would be crucial to understand how scales are organized in a development project, thus unveiling the unknown and uncertainties. 

A landscape architect or designer would view scale as a representational tool, communicating the size, dimension and spatial relationships of their design. However, from a geographer’s perspective, Lamb claimed that scale is conceptual and analytical. It is multifaceted. On a spatial aspect, it ranges from local, regional, national, continental to global. The World Bank proposed a set of lexicons for the scope of impacts, which most EIA follows, stating that it could be a double-edged sword, acknowledging the nuanced specification of complexity while allowing planners to thoroughly investigate the impacts and effects that can be classified. Meanwhile, the only way to make a decision on what scale to use is through documentation of all the nuanced scenarios. 

The Yuam and Ngao river communities have been in the mix of the project’s influence throughout the last 20 years, in which they have resisted in different ways, both communal and scientific. The EIA contrasts with the fish ecology study done by a conservation ecologist, Aaron Koning. The scope of knowledge in the EIA is based on fieldwork done by consultants and past scientific reports on the area, while Koning’s research draws from on-site fieldwork done with villagers. It unravels the underlying ecological knowledge that the indigenous possessed. These are methods, or better yet institutionalized habits of thought, that try to come to grips with the ragged fringes of human understanding – the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the uncontrollable, for what is called the “technologies of humility”. 

Through learning from the previous research and knowledge gathering in the past two decades, a speculative framework and timeline of events are presented as the studies on the area continue to grow in the next 20 years. The operation manual presents the study of fish ecology in the Ngao river as an example to illustrate the scope of knowledge and research on different levels of scale, through jumping between them. The strategy of transforming and creating new scales in the process allows us planners to unveil the unknown and uncertainties in landscape planning. Through the collaboration between different levels of actors, including the locals, academics, non-governmental organizations, etc., the ambiguous and uncertain information would be stabilized and formulated in a presentable way to contribute to the EIA reviewing process. 

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