Contemporary development approaches in many developing countries, including Thailand, have long been shaped by state-led modernization paradigms that prioritize economic growth, industrial expansion, and technological advancement as primary indicators of progress. Rooted in Western modernization theory, this paradigm emphasizes integration into global markets and large-scale infrastructure development as central strategies for national advancement (Rostow, 1960; Phongpaichit and Baker, 2009). In the Thai context, modernization has historically been pursued through a centralized development model in which state agencies and state-linked corporations play a dominant role in planning and implementation, often marginalizing local participation and place-based knowledge. Partnerships between government institutions and domestic or transnational corporations have formed what scholars describe as a “growth coalition,” driving resource-intensive projects framed as national necessities rather than subjects of democratic deliberation (Yang et al., 2015).

Critical development scholarship has increasingly questioned the presumed neutrality of such modernization trajectories, highlighting how technocratic decision-making and growth-oriented policies obscure social inequalities, environmental costs, and democratic deficits (Escobar, 1995; Pieterse, 2000). In Thailand, government-backed development projects have frequently encroached upon community lands, forests, water resources, and coastal ecosystems, fundamentally altering traditional systems of resource management and local livelihoods (Walker, 2001; Lunchaprasith, 2017). The environmental consequences of these projects including deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation extend beyond ecological damage to threaten human well-being, health, and cultural practices, particularly among communities dependent on agriculture, fishing, and natural resources (Rigg and Salamanca, 2011; Phongpaichit and Baker, 2017).

These tensions become particularly pronounced in the governance of high-risk energy technologies such as nuclear power. Unlike other contested infrastructure projects, nuclear development collapses the boundary between technical expertise and political authority, allowing state actors to legitimize exclusionary decision-making through claims of scientific necessity, national security, and risk management. This fusion of expert knowledge and sovereign power renders nuclear governance especially resistant to democratic scrutiny and meaningful local participation, thereby intensifying conflicts between centralized state authority and community-based claims to environmental safety and democratic accountability (Shrader-Frechette, 2011; Ramana, 2020). As a result, nuclear energy foregrounds fundamental questions of state legitimacy, moral responsibility, public accountability, and intergenerational justice. Decision-making processes surrounding nuclear projects are frequently characterized by limited transparency, restricted public deliberation, and an overreliance on expert authority conditions that tend to deepen public distrust and amplify community concern (Greacen and Footner, 2001). In this sense, nuclear power constitutes a distinctive site of political contestation rather than merely another form of centralized infrastructure development.

In response to the social and environmental impacts of state-led development, alternative paradigms emphasizing sustainability, participation, and community agency have gained prominence among scholars, civil society organizations, and affected communities. Contemporary sustainable development frameworks conceptualize development as a multidimensional process that integrates economic viability, environmental protection, and social justice, with an emphasis on preserving resources for future generations (Mensah, 2019). Central to these approaches is community participation, which recognizes local knowledge, cultural values, and lived experience as essential components of legitimate and effective development planning (Chambers, 1997; Cornwall, 2003). Such perspectives challenge top-down development models that impose externally defined priorities while neglecting local contexts and uneven distributions of risk and benefit an issue that becomes especially salient in high-risk energy governance.

Unlike other large-scale infrastructure projects commonly contested in Thailand such as dams, industrial estates, or coal-fired power plants nuclear energy occupies a qualitatively distinct position in the politics of development. In this study, discourse is understood not merely as language but as a practical mechanism through which authority, legitimacy, and acceptable knowledge are constructed and contested in everyday governance encounters. Nuclear projects are characterized by irreversibility, long temporal horizons of risk, and epistemic closure through expert-dominated governance. The risks associated with nuclear power exceed the scale of local mitigation or compensation and extend beyond the lifespan of existing institutions. In the Thai context, where energy governance is centralized within the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) and public participation mechanisms remain procedurally limited, nuclear development intensifies legitimacy deficits by concentrating authority, restricting deliberation, and depoliticizing risk through technical discourse. As such, resistance to nuclear power in Khanom cannot be understood as a generic infrastructure conflict, but as a confrontation with a development model that collapses democratic decision-making into technocratic necessity.

Thailand has witnessed numerous social movements contesting mainstream development projects, particularly those perceived as threatening natural resources, livelihoods, and community autonomy. These movements have employed a range of strategies, including peaceful protest, legal action, public campaigns, and, in some cases, direct confrontation with state authorities (Forsyth, 2014; Carè and De Lisa, 2019). Social movement theory drawing on concepts such as resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, and framing processes offers valuable insights into how communities organize collective action, mobilize support, and challenge dominant development paradigms (Zurcher and Snow, 2017). However, existing studies often emphasize organizational dynamics and political outcomes, paying comparatively less attention to how resistance is grounded in everyday lived experience and the moral meanings communities attach to development, risk, and sustainability.

Nuclear power development in Thailand has generated particularly strong opposition from local communities, environmental groups, and civil society organizations concerned with safety, ecological protection, and democratic participation in energy planning. Proposed nuclear power plants have been met with resistance strategies that include scientific risk assessments, legal challenges, alternative energy proposals, and public education campaigns, often involving collaboration among local residents, academics, technical experts, and non-governmental organizations (Glassman, 2010; Nilaphatama, 2020; Kooyai and Jitpiromsri, 2024). These conflicts reveal not only struggles over specific projects but also broader debates about the meaning of development, sustainability, and the role of communities in shaping national energy futures.

In Thailand, nuclear energy planning has historically been centralized within state technocratic institutions, most notably EGAT, with limited institutional mechanisms for substantive public deliberation or community consent. Although nuclear power has not been implemented, recurring policy proposals, feasibility studies, and national energy plans have repeatedly revived public concern. These cycles of proposal and suspension reveal a persistent governance gap between centralized energy planning and local democratic accountability, rendering nuclear power a symbolic and political focal point for broader struggles over participation, transparency, and development legitimacy.

The case of Khanom District in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province provides a compelling illustration of these dynamics. Characterized by rich coastal, forest, and agricultural ecosystems, Khanom supports livelihoods based on fishing, farming, and tourism. The proposed nuclear power plant posed perceived threats to environmental integrity, public health, and the sustainability of local livelihoods, prompting sustained resistance from community members (Greenpeace Southeast Asia, 2014; Hirsch, 2010). Beyond organized protest, this resistance was rooted in residents’ lived experiences of environmental vulnerability, livelihood insecurity, and perceived exclusion from decision-making processes. By foregrounding these experiences, the study adopts a phenomenological orientation that treats resistance not only as political action but as an embodied and meaning-making process through which communities interpret, feel, and morally evaluate development and risk.

Despite a growing body of research on anti-nuclear movements and infrastructure conflicts in Asia, existing studies have largely emphasized organizational strategies, policy outcomes, and expert-driven risk debates. Far less attention has been paid to how community resistance is grounded in lived experience and how phenomenological meanings are translated into discursive practices that contest dominant sustainability narratives particularly in Southeast Asian governance contexts characterized by centralized authority and limited participatory mechanisms. As a result, the micro-level processes through which communities reconstitute development, risk, and legitimacy from below remain underexplored.

This article contributes to sociological scholarship by advancing three interrelated arguments. First, it reconceptualizes community resistance not merely as oppositional action but as a process of discursive reconfiguration through which local actors actively redefine the meaning of development itself. Second, it highlights the role of local university graduates as discursive intermediaries who translate technical knowledge into culturally resonant narratives grounded in lived experience, thereby enabling grassroots mobilization and collective meaning-making in the Global South. Third, it reframes sustainability as a contested moral discourse mobilized from below rather than as a technocratic policy objective imposed from above. In doing so, the article moves beyond descriptive accounts of resistance by offering a theoretically grounded explanation of how phenomenological experience, discursive strategy, and power relations intersect in contested energy governance in the Global South.

To guide the inquiry and ensure an analytically grounded examination of community resistance, this study is structured around the following research questions:

These questions are significant as they provide a foundation for understanding not only resistance to externally imposed development models but also how such resistance can serve as a site of local knowledge production. In a broader sense, these questions contribute to critical development studies by highlighting the importance of community agency, cultural sustainability, and participatory alternatives in the Global South in Figure 1.

The arrows in this framework indicate analytical relationships rather than deterministic causal pathways, reflecting the dynamic, relational, and non-linear nature of discursive struggle observed in the field.

Figure 1 presents the analytical framework guiding this study’s examination of community resistance to the proposed nuclear power plant in Khanom District. The framework conceptualizes resistance as an emergent and relational process arising from the interaction of four interrelated dimensions: discursive practices, cultural ecological knowledge, marginalized group participation, and alternative development imaginaries. These dimensions are not treated as linear stages or independent causal variables, but as mutually constitutive analytical processes that together shape collective action and meaning-making.

At the center of the framework, community resistance is understood as an emergent process produced through the dynamic interaction of these four dimensions. The arrows in Figure 1 represent ongoing analytical relationships, indicating how discursive practices, knowledge systems, participation, and imaginaries continuously shape and reinforce one another over time. Resistance is thus conceptualized not as a fixed outcome, but as an ongoing process of negotiation, reinterpretation, and discursive reconfiguration. The framework was developed inductively from empirical analysis, while being theoretically informed by social movement theory, discourse analysis, and critical development studies. By integrating lived experience, discourse, and power relations, the framework enables a nuanced sociological analysis of how communities contest nuclear development and actively redefine sustainability from below.

This study adopts a qualitative research design to examine how community resistance to the proposed nuclear power plant in Khanom District is constructed, experienced, and sustained through everyday practices, meanings, and discourses. Resistance is approached not as a fixed outcome but as a socially produced process shaped by lived experience, local knowledge, and power relations. Methodologically, the study is informed by phenomenological sensibilities, particularly its attention to participants’ meaning-making, without advancing a strong transcendental phenomenological claim. This positioning allows the analysis to foreground experiential perspectives while situating them within broader socio-political and discursive contexts (Finlay, 2012; van Manen, 2016). The approach is therefore interpretive and inductive, informed by development studies and social movement theory.

Based on the findings of this study, the following policy recommendations are proposed to enhance the legitimacy and inclusivity of energy governance in Thailand:

This study uses the Khanom nuclear power plant conflict to advance sociological debates on community resistance, knowledge, and sustainable development within contested energy governance. Rather than treating resistance as a reactive response to state-led infrastructure, the findings demonstrate how resistance operates as a productive social process through which meanings of development, sustainability, and authority are actively reconfigured. The contribution of the study thus lies not in documenting opposition to nuclear power per se, but in theorizing how development conflicts function as sites of discursive struggle and moral contestation. By integrating insights from Foucauldian discourse analysis, social movement theory, and critical development studies, the Khanom case illustrates how power operates through knowledge, legitimacy, and meaning-making, rather than through coercion alone (Foucault, 1977; Escobar, 1995).

The first contribution concerns the reconceptualization of community resistance as a process of discursive reconfiguration. The Khanom movement did not merely reject a nuclear power plant; it challenged a dominant development narrative that equates large-scale energy infrastructure with progress, national security, and modernization. While global mitigation discourses increasingly frame nuclear energy as a necessary instrument for decarbonization (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), the Khanom case reveals how such technocratic justifications often overlook local socio-ecological conditions and lived vulnerabilities. Community actors redefined development in terms of environmental safety, livelihood continuity, food security, and intergenerational responsibility. This finding extends scholarship on discursive politics and environmental conflict by demonstrating that resistance is not only oppositional but generative, producing alternative development imaginaries rooted in everyday experience (Hajer, 1995; Dryzek, 2013).

The second contribution lies in identifying the role of locally embedded university graduates as discursive intermediaries. These actors translated scientific, legal, and policy knowledge into narratives that resonated with local concerns and moral frameworks. This brokerage process is critical because, as the International Atomic Energy Agency emphasizes, stakeholder involvement is a formal pillar of nuclear governance (International Atomic Energy Agency, 2007). The Khanom experience demonstrates, however, that institutional participation mechanisms alone are insufficient to generate legitimacy without intermediaries who possess social capital, shared identity, and accountability to place. Epistemic authority in this context is not simply derived from technical expertise but is socially produced through trust and relational embeddedness. This finding contributes to sociological debates on knowledge and power by showing how expertise circulates horizontally within communities, rather than flowing unidirectionally from experts to lay publics.

The third contribution concerns the reconceptualization of sustainability as a contested moral discourse. While policy-oriented approaches often treat sustainability as a technical objective to be optimized through expert planning, the Khanom case reveals sustainability as a normative field structured by competing moral claims. State and corporate actors mobilized sustainability through technocratic language emphasizing energy security and national development. In contrast, community actors articulated sustainability as a moral commitment to health, dignity, ecological integrity, and the continuity of everyday life. This supports broader critiques in political ecology and energy democracy scholarship that sustainability is not a neutral concept but a site of political struggle, where global scientific consensus must be negotiated against the lived realities of communities at the frontlines of energy transitions.

Taken together, the Khanom case advances sociological theory by integrating discourse, knowledge, and collective action into a unified analytical framework. By conceptualizing resistance as discursive reconfiguration, highlighting the role of intermediary actors, and reframing sustainability as a moral discourse, the study demonstrates how development conflicts function as dynamic arenas in which alternative futures are actively imagined and negotiated. These contributions directly address the study’s research questions by showing how lived experience is translated into discursive practice and how such practices contest technocratic authority within centralized governance regimes. In comparative perspective, the Khanom case shares similarities with anti-nuclear movements in India, Taiwan, and South Korea, particularly in its emphasis on risk, democratic deficits, and technocratic dominance. However, it also reflects context-specific dynamics shaped by Thailand’s centralized energy governance, the institutional authority of EGAT, and constrained participatory mechanisms under semi-authoritarian conditions. These features help explain why resistance in Khanom relied heavily on discursive strategies and intermediary actors rather than sustained mass mobilization, contributing a Southeast Asian perspective to comparative scholarship on nuclear politics.

Finally, the findings remain highly relevant beyond the immediate temporal scope of the study. The discursive struggle that intensified between 2016 and 2023 reflects broader patterns in Thai environmental governance, where state reliance on technical-led sustainability narratives continues to prompt the emergence of counter-discourses grounded in lived experience. As of 2026, these dynamics persist, underscoring the enduring significance of discursive contestation in shaping the legitimacy of energy transitions in the Global South.

This study examined how community resistance to the proposed nuclear power plant in Khanom emerged, operated, and reshaped development discourse through locally grounded yet politically consequential forms of collective action. In response to Research Question 1, the findings demonstrate that resistance in Khanom took the form of a discursive reconfiguration of development, whereby local actors challenged state-led narratives of progress and articulated alternative meanings of sustainability rooted in environmental safety, livelihood security, and intergenerational responsibility.

Addressing Research Question 2, the analysis highlights the critical role of locally embedded university graduates as discursive intermediaries who translated technical and scientific knowledge into culturally resonant narratives. Through this process, they mobilized collective action, produced localized epistemic authority, and enabled community members to contest expert-driven energy governance on their own terms. With regard to Research Question 3, the study shows that these discursive and organizational practices exposed enduring structural tensions between centralized energy governance and local participatory aspirations, revealing sustainability not as a neutral policy objective but as a contested moral and political discourse.

Situated within a broader historical perspective, the Khanom case reflects a contemporary manifestation of global green ideas and movements that have evolved since the nineteenth century through recurring critiques of industrial modernity, technocratic authority, and environmentally destructive development trajectories. While differing from early conservationist or post-materialist environmental movements in the Global North, resistance in Khanom resonates with a longer genealogy of green thought by foregrounding moral claims about nature, risk, and responsibility for future generations. In this sense, the case illustrates how globally circulating green ideas are re-articulated through local histories, social relations, and livelihood concerns in the Global South.

Taken together, the findings underscore the importance of understanding development conflicts as sites of discursive struggle in which meanings of sustainability, progress, and collective futures are actively negotiated. Beyond Thailand, the analytical framework advanced in this study contributes to broader debates on community resistance, knowledge brokerage, and the evolving politics of green movements, demonstrating how global environmental ideas gain political traction through locally embedded struggles over development and energy governance.