Power and Inequality: Social Dimensions of Thailand’s Renewable Energy Transition

Thailand’s climate action policy, the Alternative Energy Development Plan (AEDP2018), aims to reduce Thailand’s carbon footprint, transitioning from traditional fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and vitalizing economic growth sustainably (Department of Alternative Energy Development and Efficiency, 2018). The plan was announced in 2018 in tandem with Thailand’s broader National Strategy 2018-2037 (Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, 2018). As Thailand’s foremost environmental action initiative, it is vital that these goals are realized in order to mitigate the effects of environmental degradation on Thailand, which ranks 9th in countries most affected by climate change (Zou & Utaipipattanakul, 2025). What is the state of Thailand’s rural, renewable energy transition, then, if little to no progress is being made to switch to renewables? Drawing on case studies of local participation and, most prominently, of a rural community’s energy struggle (a community called Pa Deng) I argue that Thailand’s renewable energy framework struggles to address the realities of renewable energy transition because of a disregard of the political nature of participation and rural needs. To make this argument, I employ an analytical framework inspired by Ferguson (1994) and Li’s (2007) notion of depoliticisation to examine how renewable energy policies frame environmental challenges in technical rather than political ways. Drawing on Pa Deng and other cases, the paper examines how local investigations reveal limitations in the implementation of national policies like the AEDP2018. The analysis suggests that Thailand’s renewable energy transition is framed as a technical problem, revealing a blind spot in Thailand's policy approach specifically concerning rural communities.