Nong Khai is an emerging city located along the Mekong River in Thailand at the border with Laos. Many of the population in Nong Khai province aspire to live under the concept of the Sufficiency Economy created by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej as a model of development in order to achieve community empowerment and reduce social inequality. The Tourism Authority of Thailand, for example, recognizes communities such as Ban Wang Nam Mok in Nong Khai province because of their aim “to raise the consciousness of villagers and visitors about the preservation of natural resources, self-sufficiency economy, and conservation of local culture”. The community achieved the Thailand Tourism Award in 2010 because of their agro-tourism attractions.
The Sufficiency Economy, which is more commonly applied in a rural context, is an approach to life and conduct which is applicable at every level and has three components:
1. Moderation, which is linked to the idea of sufficiency and that has two meanings: enough in the sense of not too little, and enough in the sense of not too much. It conveys the idea of the middle way, and implies both self-reliance and frugality.
2. Wisdom or insight, which means reasonableness and implies the need to evaluate the reasons for any action, and to understand its full consequences. Such wisdom includes accumulated knowledge and experience along with analytic capability, self-awareness, foresight, compassion and empathy.
3. Self-immunity, which means building-up resilience against risks that arise from internal or external change, and being able to cope with events that are unpredictable or uncontrollable.
Such initiatives raise the question whether it is possible to learn from rural areas and the concept of the Sufficiency Economy to build a sustainable lifestyle in urban areas?
There have been apparently successful projects implemented in the Mekong Region, including in Thailand where the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the Department of Environmental Quality Promotion have implemented the Thailand Sustainable City Project since 2004. This particular project has strengthened the capacity of local governments in environmental management in order to develop specific strategies to make emerging cities more sustainable. Some of the most successful Sustainable City Projects have received awards from the ASEAN Working Group on Environmentally Sustainable Cities2, and these draw on strategies that encourage a sufficiency economy lifestyle. Cities in Thailand that have been recipients of the ASEAN Environmentally Sustainable Cities Awards include Bangkok (2008), Phuket (2011) and Chiang Rai (2014), while smaller cities such as Phitsanulok (2011), Nakhon Sawan (2014) and Roi-et (2014) have won Certificates of Recognition.