RAKS THAI FOUNDATION

Their core work

RAKS THAI Foundation is a Bangkok-based NGO that provides on-the-ground research access and community networks in Southeast Asia's major migration corridors — a capacity no European institution can replicate. They contribute field data, qualitative research, and local partnerships to large EU-funded projects studying migration, displacement, and rural livelihoods. In AGRUMIG they investigated how labour migration reshapes agricultural systems and household economies in Thai sending communities. In HABITABLE they are helping model climate-driven displacement, linking habitability thresholds in rural Asia to broader global migration scenarios.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their first H2020 engagement (AGRUMIG, 2019) centred on the socioeconomic mechanics of labour migration — remittances, inequalities, and how agricultural communities reorganise when workers leave. Their second project (HABITABLE, 2020) marks a clear pivot toward climate science and displacement futures, with keywords shifting from governance and rural livelihoods to habitability modeling, social tipping points, and asylum. The trajectory is unmistakable: RTF is moving from documenting existing migration to anticipating climate-forced movement, positioning itself at the intersection of climate adaptation and human mobility policy.

RTF is actively bridging climate science and migration research — future collaborations on climate adaptation, loss-and-damage, or displacement policy in Southeast Asia are a natural fit.

How they like to work

RTF participates exclusively as a non-coordinating partner, contributing field expertise rather than leading research design. Despite only two projects, they have accumulated 34 distinct consortium partners across 22 countries — averaging 17 partners per project — indicating they join large, geographically ambitious consortia rather than small, tight-knit groups. This pattern suggests European project leaders actively recruit them for their Southeast Asian fieldwork access, not for project management capacity.

With 34 partners across 22 countries from just two projects, RTF's network is disproportionately wide for its project volume, reflecting the global scope of migration research consortia. Their connections almost certainly span European universities, Southeast Asian NGOs, and policy institutions from both migrant-sending and receiving countries.

What sets them apart

RAKS THAI is one of the very few Southeast Asian NGOs embedded in the H2020 research ecosystem, giving European-led consortia direct access to Thailand's migration communities — a primary source region for intra-Asian and international labour flows. No European academic partner can substitute for their on-the-ground community trust, local language capacity, and institutional relationships with migrant workers and rural households. For any consortium needing real-world case data from a major migrant-sending country in the Global South, RTF fills a gap that is otherwise very hard to bridge.

Highlights from their portfolio

• HABITABLE
  Highest-funded project (EUR 200,000) and the most policy-urgent topic — linking climate thresholds to displacement scenarios at a moment when climate migration is moving from research to EU legislative attention.
• AGRUMIG
  RTF's entry into H2020, anchoring the Thai case study in a multi-country comparative project on migration governance and rural agricultural change — a topic with direct relevance to food security and rural development policy.