Flying start for natural resources reform

The committee convened a day after the initial meeting of all 11 newly appointed reform committees on August 30 and it addressed issues of immediate concern as well as laying the framework that will point to future reform in one of the country’s most critical areas: natural resources and environmental management.
According to an internal note received by The Nation, the committee, comprising noted reformers as well as environmental experts in various fields, addressed the importance of natural resources and the environment as being fundamental to social and economic security.
However, these problems have long accumulated, partly due to human activities. The government, it noted, has been trying to reform the country in all areas by coming up with various plans and bodies to push the work forward, including the National Reform Council and National Reform Steering Assembly, the NRC’s successor, which are now defunct. The committee was established to continue the work. It would follow up and review what has been done and the results already achieved, while proposing what needs to be done further to complete the task, the meeting was told.
The meeting decided to divide the work into six sub-areas so that they would be thoroughly taken care of. They are: land resources (land, mining, forests and wildlife), marine and coastal resources, water resources, biodiversity, environmental quality, and environmental management.
“Our goal is to manage our natural resources and the environment to be more sustainable and effective to support the country’s sustainable development and security,” the meeting noted.
The challenge now was how to reach that goal, especially when the committee has to take into account the work done by previous bodies.
Buntoon Srethasirote, a freshly recruited member of the committee, told The Nation that the new act clearly addressed how the future work would be linked to what had already been done.
As a former member of the NRC, and now a member of the sub-panel on structural reforms under the supreme body for reform, reconciliation and national strategy, chaired by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, Buntoon sees this first link very well.
He said several members of the 11 committees have worked in the reform sector before and they have been recruited again to help complete the task. Nearly half of the 11 members of his committee are ex-reformers.
But more critically, the work will be linked by its content, he said.
The new act clearly stipulates that before the reform committees start working, they must take into account previous work, including studies and recommendations of various reform bodies, in their new five-year reform master plans. That means that what is left to be done will be continued, and what still needs to be done will be begun, Buntoon explained. 
For instance, the defunct NRC and NRSA had been pushing reforms in the forest sector by amending related laws, including the National Parks Act, to allow more co-existence and harmony between forests and people. 
These proposals are still with the government, and the new environmental reform committee would push them forward until they become law, he said. But the environment also needs good governance and management. This is the area that the committee has suggested needs work, as the two former bodies had hardly touched on it, he said. What would be seen in the future are thorough reform plans that would be implemented and assessed, something beyond what has been done but becomes possible because of what has been lined up in the new act.
“It’s something that we will see in the five years from now – not just plans but implementations, assessments and reviews,” said Buntoon.
Asked which issues in this sector needed to be tackled first and fast, Buntoon said there were critical issues in all six sub-areas. However, forest issues seemed to be among the most important, and conflicts between people and forest officials that have long existed remain unresolved.
Former chief of the Royal Forestry Department and former permanent secretary of the Agriculture Ministry, Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, is reportedly responsible for reform work in this area, along with a noted forestry academic, Assistant Professor Khanchai Duangsathaporn of Kasetsart University’s Forestry Faculty, who drafted key law |amendments, including the National Parks Act.