The production of an eco-city forest as a socio-ecological fix to pollution and development in Rayong, Thailand: populism and post-politics in Thailand’s Community Forests

This paper examines how a socioecological fix is produced within an urban community forest, focusing on Ban San Chao Community Forest in Rayong Province, Thailand. We argue that state and industrial actors, operating through Thailand’s Eco-Industrial City policy, mobilised populist postpolitical tactics to restructure the ideological, governance and political spaces of the forest in response to a legitimacy crisis generated by decades of industrial pollution. This crisis exemplifies capitalism’s second contradiction: the systemic degradation of the ecological and social conditions on which accumulation depends, politicised through sustained public protest and civil society activism. We show how the fix was produced through three interrelated mechanisms: the discursive homogenisation of the forest under populist ideals of coexistence and multi-sector cooperation; the hegemonic restructuring of Community Forest governance under municipal and industrial oversight; and a technocratic assessment cycle through which this restructuring is annually certified and reproduced. Together, these mechanisms temporarily restore institutional legitimacy for ongoing accumulation while depoliticising contestation over industrial pollution and deferring its material causes. Theoretically, the paper establishes populist postpolitical tactics as an operational mechanism through which socioecological fixes are produced at the local scale. Empirically, it identifies a form of eco-city fix, the absorption and restructuring of existing community-constituted green spaces, contributing to understanding of forest governance under green neoliberalism in Southeast Asia.