This thesis is about gathering and organising the raw materials necessary for effective local energy planning, and then testing them to engage the people of thirteen villages in north-east Thailand in local energy planning. Its contribution is first of all to provide a contemporary and detailed picture of the energy economy of relatively poor Thai rural communities. Eight-four percent of over a thousand households in the villages were interviewed and completed a detailed questionnaire analysing their use of and expenditure on energy; The managers of all three rural industries in the area (a rice mill, a charcoal producer and a maker of cooking stoves) were also interviewed. Secondly, and in order to address planning for local sustainability, the thesis integrates GIS into the planning process. This also meant fieldwork to upgrade the available geographical information about the study area. Thirdly, the thesis develops user-friendly software modules which organise the information from the questionnaires with other relevant information so that planning options and their environmental and economic impacts can be assessed. Finally, these modules then became key tools enabling informed participation in a local energy planning workshop at which representatives from all the villages came together over three days to develop a plan which was then adopted by the local government.
These four aspects of the thesis: understanding the local energy economy and its sustainability with respect to the local environment, creating new planning tools and running a successful real-life local energy planning workshop overcome problems with local energy planning previously identified by the literature. In particular, the new understanding of the local energy economy enabled by the major primary research in the thesis proved to be a powerful tool for local energy planning: as the villagers came to understand their current
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interactions with their local environment they could also appreciate the rationales for change and appreciate the importance of their roles in that process. Relatively, the preparation for local energy planning is shown to be much more about the time required for gathering and organising the data than about organising the planning workshop itself. The workshop is in this sense the “tip of the iceberg” .The contributions of the thesis are also significant in a much wider context. The survey of the thirteen villages also revealed that they were in transition to higher levels of income and expenditure and identified how that transition might impact on future energy consumption, sustainability and environmental degradation. Given that many other villages in Thailand and elsewhere in the world have reached similar stages of development, the approach to local energy planning developed in the thesis could usefully be adopted elsewhere and offer a significantly higher level of sustainability and lower levels of energy consumption compared to „business as usual” scenarios.