Thai universities do environmental communication in six roles, and the author argues that academics cannot stay neutral

What roles do Thai universities and their researchers play in communicating about the environment, which standpoints shape their research, which channels do they use, and what do they have to balance? A chapter in an edited volume on environmental communication in Asia.

A conceptual overview with no systematic data collection. It uses the six-role taxonomy of universities from the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (2017), Kanjana Kaewthep's framework for environmental communication in Thailand, and Cox and Pezzullo's two functions of environmental communication, illustrated with examples from Thai universities and Thai graduate theses.

• Six roles with Thai examples: educators (environment programmes that include communication courses), knowledge creators (an environmental research institute founded in 1974), societal problem-solvers (a net-zero-carbon strategy for 2050), innovators (a product to cut fine dust), connectors (projects with a United Nations agency, a city government and villages), and agents of change (a campus plan to cut waste by 30% in five years).
• Thai research reflects three standpoints. Conservationists see individual behaviour as the cause and study perceptions, attitudes and campaign effectiveness; this is the largest group of Thai work. Reformists work at the policy level and analyse how media frame environmental news; they appear from around 1987. Radicals use critical and cultural theory and focus on marginalised groups and local ritual, such as a Thai-Yuan community's river-conservation rite.
• Two functions and three methods. A pragmatic function (educating, alerting, helping to solve problems) and a constitutive one (the university's position defines what “the environment” means). The methods are mass media (faculty as spokespeople), public relations (research the issue, set objectives, choose media, evaluate at four levels from outputs to impact), and the environmental movement (faculty joining students against one university's development plan that threatened communities and historic shrines).
• Three balances: instructor versus facilitator (Thai culture places the professor at the top, but communication has to start with listening); lovers versus haters of environmental issues among audiences; and the “better environment” discourse versus the “never about the environment” discourse that blames social structure.
• The author's conclusion is that neutrality is impossible: “we are either the problem-makers or solutions providers”, and universities must lead rather than watch.

A map for a communication faculty deciding where to place its environmental work: choose the role, name the standpoint (the chapter notes that most Thai work sits at the conservationist end, so reformist and radical questions remain open), and pick a method with its evaluation built in. For students, the reference list is a reading list of Thai theses across all three standpoints.