The role of freedom of choice within the Baan Mankong program

The aim of the present research is to understand to what extent a real degree of freedom of choice exist within the Baan Mankong program and whether, it influences the beneficiaries’ perception of the acceptability and justice of the housing outcomes. To do so, this research focused on the single case study of the relocation of the community called Kaen Nahkon. Therefore, the research questions that this study investigated in order to answer the main research question are the following: What are the individual and collective BMP levels of freedom of choice in the relocation process of the Kaen Nahkon community? What are the factors constraining or supporting the freedom of choice at the individual and collective level in the relocation process of the Kaen Nahkon community? What is the communities’ perception regarding the acceptability the justice of the process, in terms of housing outcome? The data collected about the independent and dependent variables was both of qualitative and quantitative nature in order to describe, explain and explore properly the research question throughout triangulation. Primary quantitative data was collected by a face-to-face Survey while primary qualitative data was collected by semi-structured interviews to few key actors. In the end, Secondary qualitative data was collected to support the primary data collection. The Quantitative data collected though the Survey was analysed by the statistical analysis software SPSS, in order to answer to the main research question throughout inferential statistics and descriptive analysis. The analysis carried out with inferential statistic, presented that a statistical correlation exist between the freedom of choice and the jointly effect of perceived acceptability and perceived justice. The jointly effect is supported by a large experimental literature about psychology, where it has been demonstrated the causal relation between the procedural justice and the level of acceptability. The presence of a statistical correlation between the above-mentioned concepts represents the first step into the unexplored field of freedom of choice applied to urban development issues. So far, this field has been highly recognising the importance of participation, especially for the evaluation of the level of satisfaction in terms of housing outcomes, overlooking the role of freedom of choice. These findings, whether further investigated, would bring the importance of freedom of choice at the same level of active participation, drawing useful insights about the role of freedom of choice within procedural justice dynamics. Notwithstanding the provisional nature of these findings, due to the correlational nature of this study, these represent an initial important step towards the exploration out the influence of freedom of choice on the beneficiaries’ perception of an acceptable and just process, in a housing program setting.