Empowerment or responsibility? Collective finance for slum upgrading in Thailand

The Baan Mankong (‘Secure Housing’) programme of Thailand has been heralded as a model of participatory slum upgrading. Many scholars have praised its participatory and community-based processes, as well as its success in terms of going to scale. The celebration of the programme emphasises its particular model of housing finance, which includes community savings, housing cooperatives, and collective loans for physical upgrading provided through a government agency. This financial model, along with the collective and participatory processes it employs, form the foundation of the programme’s claims to ‘empowerment.’ In this article, I offer a sympathetic critique of Baan Mankong by analysing how this financial model actually plays out on the ground through an in-depth ethnographic study of the policy and its participants. I conclude that, despite the policy’s intentions to empower communities through access to collective finance, many participants find themselves struggling with debt and living under a new form of financialised community that reshapes their social relations with neighbours and burdens them with the responsibility for financing and carrying out development desired by the state.