Tambon maps inaccuracy

Rarely plagiarizing blogs have some good effects, but in this case it helped me to reread an article where I missed an interesting point at first reading months ago. The Huai Hee village blog copied an article without giving any sources, and as I vaguely remembered the maps included and also doubted that this would have been an original posting I searched with Google for the original source. Thus in fact that text was taken out of a the paper Maps for participatory planning in Thailand by Oliver Puginier. Higher resolution versions of the maps can be found at the older paper Can participatory land use planning at community level in the highlands of northern Thailand use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a communication tool?. Or, in the longest form in his dissertation, which also deals with the problems with the decentralization since 1995.

Anyway, the interesting part is the following:

It is interesting to note that Pa Kaa village lies outside the Tambon boundary (in neighbouring Pai district in fact), if the data provided by NNCO are correct. To date there exist no reliable maps from the Royal Survey Department indicating Tambon boundaries and work is in progress to produce this data, yet the provincial office gives the total area of Huai Poo Ling as 37,152 ha. As far as land use planning is concerned it is important to note that there are overlapping areas claimed by adjacent villages (marked in pink), which may lead to conflicting claims over its use.

So while the contradicting maps I had run into were a different case, in the lower scales the boundaries are sometimes not yet completely defined. Maybe the announcements in the Royal Gazette I spotted last year and dubbed "Tambon area clarifications" are the result of such mapping work mentioned as being in progress in the paper.