Chitbundid, C, Thulathon, C & Eawsakul, T 2004, ‘The Thai Monarchy and Non-Governmental Organisations’, in S. Shigetomi, K. Tejapira and A. Thongyou (eds), The NGO Way: Perspectives and Experiences from Thailand, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization, Chiba, Japan.

Although some further editing would have been helpful, it is trully a wonderful source of information.

The evolution of the nature and especially the number of royal projects quite surprised me. So I did a little work based on the data presented in http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/1701/tab1.htm, which only span from 1952 to 1980 and is of unknown reliability. It appears the number of royal projects created per year first increased significantly in 1974 (1 yr after 1973….). It went from an average of 2 projects created per year between 1963 and 1973 to 18 between 1974 and 1976. Then, it ‘exploded’ after 1976 with an average of 69 projects/year between 1977 and 1980. The graph it makes illustrate very well the idea that royal projets were motivated, at least in part, by national security concerns.

When I compared this source of information with Chanida’s data, some discrepancy appeared, but the long-term trend looks the same. This might be due to Chanida’s use of a broader definition of ‘royal projects’.

Note also that you can get Chanida’s thesis in pdf format if you can get access to their network (this is not so hard to to).