Papers (Part 1)

• ASEAN ICT Masterplan 2020 and Discourses on ICTs and Development: Policies and Practices in Mainland Southeast Asia Worapoj Wongkitrungruang Thammasat University

  The establishment of ASEAN Community in 2015 marked a major milestone for the economic, socio-cultural and political integration in Southeast Asia. The ASEAN ICT Masterplan (AIM 2020) was designed at this juncture to support aspirations in steering ASEAN towards a digitally-enabled, innovative, inclusive, and integrated ASEAN community. The key objectives of AIM 2020 is to create an integrated digital economy and develop the human capacity, facilitate the emergence of a single market attractive to investment and talent, and build a safe and trusted digital environment. Though inclusive and sustainable development strategies are incorporated in AIM 2020 as ASEAN and its members have committed themselves to common global development goals, the neoliberal discourses on the roles of ICT in development seem to be more pronounced.

  This presentation aims to analyze key discourses on ICT and development in AIM 2020. It provides an overview and discusses dynamic interactions of organizational structure connecting regional and national implementation of AIM 2020. It illustrates how local appropriation of policies yield to or challenge policy discourses at national or regional level across three areas of study: smart urbanization in Thailand, financial inclusion in Lao and ethnic diversity represented through local content in Vietnam. Mainstream, technology-centric discourses overemphasizing the role of ICT in propelling material growth may be dominant in AIM 2020 and national ICT Masterplan but social imagination on alternative vision focusing on people’s capabilities to use ICT in a way that is inclusive, equitable and participatory can be emerging at local level.

• Rendering Ethical: Global Saemaul Undong and the Spirit of Korean Developmentalism Jakkrit Sangkhamanee Chulalongkorn University

  This paper is a reflection based on my research on the role of Korean ODA and Saemaul Undong (SMU) projects in development intervention outside Korea. Based on case studies in Myanmar, I look into the processes of transfer and implementation of Korean’s experience in rural development, dated back to the authoritarian regime of Park Chung-Hee, and argue for the distinctiveness of Korean development intervention, characterised by the strong imposition of Saemaul Undong spirits onto local authorities and communities in recipient countries. I argue that, while the Korean’s rural development program, like other donors', seems to render complex development issues technical, examining its implementation at the ground reveals a much more nuanced aspect of ethical re-education and enforcement.

  The anti-politics machine of Korean’s rural intervention, as the cases illustrate, operates by reposing political questions not only in technical but also in ethical terms. The hybridization of the technical and ethical intervention is done through a series of well-crafted curriculum and activities at the SMU training centers and carried out in daily life through community development operations and evaluation. Seeing not unlike a state, this process of rendering ethical through technical intervention in livelihood improvement operations, eventually, help to reinforce state apparatus in controlling and turning the citizen into a desirable subject. This, therefore, allows the Korean’s ODA and its developmentalism to be able to work well with, and integrate into, authoritarian development regimes where the states seek to establish their power and regulation onto local agencies and communities.

• The Smart City and its Citizens: The Participatory Dynamics of Smart Urbanisation in Khon Kaen, Northeast Thailand Richard L. MacDonald Goldsmiths, University of London

  The development of smart urbanism in Khon Kaen in Northeast Thailand has been accompanied by a diverse range of novel mechanisms for the participation and consultation of citizens in matters of urban design and development including: hackathons, datathons, smart city forums, smart expos, innovation labs, participatory action research projects and so forth. These diverse platforms for citizen engagement, participation and consultation have been funded, supported and promoted by multiple agencies, from the city administration and the university, to the national digital economy promotion agency (DEPA) and United Nations Thailand via its SDG Action Plan. They have also brought to prominence a loose network of civic consultants, NGO activist-facilitators, social entrepreneurs and urban design and architecture experts.

  Drawing on ongoing fieldwork started in April 2018 this presentation critically examines the efflorescence of platforms for citizen engagement associated with smart urbanism in Northeast Thailand. I situate this research in relation to both emerging scholarship on the neoliberal logic of smart citizenship in Europe and South Asia (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018; Datta, 2018) and the recent theorisation of consultative mechanisms as a containment of conflicts over capitalist development in Southeast Asia (Roden, 2018). My presentation foregrounds the processes through which knowledge is shaped and managed by civic intermediaries in the participatory platforms of smart urbanism in Northeast Thailand. It develops the argument that as well as being carefully managed, citizen knowledge repeatedly dissipates in the recursive citizen engagement process, leaving only a generalised aura of engagement having been performed. Who are the primary beneficiaries of this aura, and how might citizen-focused knowledge production be done differently, are fundamental questions with which this research grapples.

Papers (Part 2)

• Digital Inclusion in Remote Villages in Malaysia: A Rural-Urban, Ethnic or Political Divide? Christine Horn Swinburne University of Technology

  Most Southeast Asian countries have made rapid progress in the uptake of ICTs and use of the internet, and Malaysia’s remote Indigenous communities have not been exempt from this process. However, differences in access between urban, rural and remote areas remain significant across Southeast Asia. The lack of reliable and affordable ICT infrastructure is a key barrier to full participation in the digital world, and a key determinant of social and economic disadvantage for rural and remote communities. This impacts on the ways people engage with ICTs and the benefits they can derive from their use.

  At first glance the main barriers in providing access to remote communities appear to be technical, with remote location, geography and weather complicating the provision of technology. However, there are also political obstacles, as the provision of infrastructure to some villages under Malaysia’s Universal Service Provision suggests. The lack of transparency and community involvement in the process of infrastructure planning leads to inequitable distribution of projects. The lack of maintenance for existing infrastructure and obscure channels of responsibility in the case of breakdown prevent members of the community to become involved. Three years of research between 2015 and 2017, including in-depth interviews, observational data and a baseline survey form the background to this paper on the dynamics of digital inclusion in remote Sarawak.

• Ethnic Inclusive ICT Policy: Politics of Digitizing Ethnic Tai Scripts in Vietnam Yukti Mukdawijitra Thammasat University

  Focusing on ethnic Tai in northwestern Vietnam, I examine how Vietnam’s ICT policy facilitates the Tai to build and use the font of their ancient scripts and how the Tai apply this policy to serve their cultural demand. The policy on ethnic script in Vietnam has long developed since the 1950s. Currently, the ethnic minorities have built fonts for typing their traditional scripts. The ecology of Tai fonts in Vietnam is diverse due to the political formation of Tai chiefdom in the past that caused the diversity of Tai dialects and scripts. Nowadays, three sets of Tai fonts in the Unicode were disseminated—Viettai, Tai Viet, and Lai Tay—for typing three different Tai dialects and scripts. Based on the framework of linguistic ideology and digital ethnography, identity and politics of ethnic script that persist from the past are crucial to the emerging revival and the digitization of Tai writings. The politics of Tai fonts is a result of “the powers of association” that demonstrates how society as well as power are “in the hands of the people; each of these people may act in different ways” (Latour 1986: 267). As a result, rather than the diffusion of the policy from the government downward, I investigate how the government agents, the international NGOs, the local government, and the local intellectuals and villagers “translate” and “displace” the ICT policy, limited funding, and material conditions to create and use Tai fonts.

• Invisible Money and the “Financially Invisibles”: Digital Payment and Financial Inclusion in Lao PDR Panarai Ostapirat Thammasat University

  This presentation engages with one of the goals of Lao PDR’s Financial Inclusion Roadmap (2016-2020): reducing the percentage of those who are ‘excluded’ from access to financial services. Considering that the Roadmap has been promoted as an outcome of an evidence-based policy development process, it is interesting to explore how institutional dialogues between international development organisations, Lao government agencies and private financial sectors have envisioned an idea of financial in/exclusion. The presentation traces back to FinScope survey (2014), the country’s benchmark survey on financial access, usage and attitudes to financial services. The survey illustrates how financial inclusion in Laos is largely driven by informal financial services whilst a quarter of respondents are classified as ‘excluded’ from both formal and informal services. By dismissing savings and credits among kin and social networks, the survey does not only understate the role of local financial practices but is also inclined to render the ‘unbanked’ a ‘financially invisible’ population. (Musaraj and Small 2018)

  Drawing on anthropological approach to the materiality of documents (Hull 2012) and a more recent use of documents as a source for ethnographic research on finance (Tischer, Maurer and Leaver 2018), this presentation situates the development of digital payment eco-system as one of the tasks set out to enhance access to formal financial services. It discusses the contingencies of discursive practices embedded in global, state and private sectors’ campaigns to transform financial infrastructure. Finally it looks at the prospect and challenges of these emerging forms of ‘invisible’ money in fostering a more financially visible population for a more inclusive Lao society.

Abstract

Keywords

• Development
• Infrastructure