Smart Cities in Thailand: Why Certification Has Outpaced Integration

Background

Thailand’s smart city programme took formal shape in 2017, when smart cities were designated a national agenda item under the country’s Thailand 4.0 strategy, aimed at transforming Thailand into a high-income nation with substantially improved urban quality of life [1][9]. The Digital Economy Promotion Agency (Depa) was positioned as the central hub connecting national government, local administrations, private sector partners, startups, and academic institutions in pursuit of that goal [8]. Early momentum was rapid on paper: from 27 designated smart city areas in 2019, the country reported more than 100 smart cities under development by 2023 [7]. Depa’s own framing of the mission remains broad by design, spanning smart energy, smart living, smart environment, smart people, and smart mobility as the five pillars meant to attract both public and private investment through 2026 and beyond [4].

The current phase of the programme is guided by Smart City Development Master Plan 1, covering 2024 to 2027, which targets 105 smart cities across 77 provinces and an estimated 200 billion baht in direct and indirect investment [1]. As of late 2025, Depa reported 37 certified Smart City areas across 25 provinces, representing more than 11.9 billion baht in investment, with 43 additional Smart City Promotion Zones recognised nationwide [2]. A parallel, narrower initiative anchored in the Eastern Economic Corridor targets at least 15 smart cities by 2027, drawing significant foreign investment interest in infrastructure, transport, and energy technology [6].

Current Statistics

Thailand’s own competitiveness index gives a granular view of where progress concentrates. Depa’s 2023 assessment of 30 cities across 23 provinces found that Wang Chan Valley in Rayong and Phuket led the province-based rankings, both scoring 83.6 percent, while Samyan Smart City in Bangkok topped the city-based category at 79 percent [1]. Despite this activity, Bangkok remained the only Thai city to appear in the IMD Smart City Index as recently as 2019, placing 75th out of 120 cities surveyed globally, a benchmark Depa has explicitly targeted improving alongside Phuket and Khon Kaen [9].

Digital foundations continue to expand unevenly. Thailand’s digital economy accounted for about 17 percent of GDP as far back as 2018, and the country has been described as hyperconnected, with roughly 69.5 percent of the population online and 74.2 percent of users aged 16 to 64 having made an online purchase or accessed digital services [15]. Yet a 2025 World Bank roadmap on Thailand’s digital data infrastructure found that digital skills shortages and uneven broadband access continue to constrain progress, particularly for rural communities, small and medium enterprises, and government agencies moving toward cloud- and data-driven systems [13]. The same report noted that AI adoption among individuals and firms in Thailand remains far below the regional average [13]. Separately, a 2026 academic study assessing data governance readiness across 36 certified smart cities in Thailand found a persistent imbalance between high demand for urban data and low actual data availability across every one of the seven nationally defined smart city domains [12].

The Core Challenges

A widening scope that outpaces genuine integration. Depa’s own panel discussions have acknowledged that beyond Bangkok, most smart city initiatives remain limited in scope. The director of Thailand’s Department of Local Administration has noted the need for smart city development to extend well beyond digital services alone, into urban mobility, clean energy transition, pollution control, waste management, and disaster mitigation, areas that remain underdeveloped in most participating cities [3].

Fragmented data systems undermining certified cities. Even among Thailand’s 36 officially certified smart cities, data ecosystems remain uneven, with substantial variation in the existence, coverage, and usability of key datasets across domains such as smart mobility, smart living, and smart energy [12]. Researchers attribute this not to a simple absence of data, but to fragmented systems, inconsistent definitions, weak metadata practices, and limited interoperability between institutions [12]. A related government-linked report found that Thailand’s Government Data Exchange platform connects only 13 agencies and lacks integration across social sector databases, leaving digital government initiatives constrained by institutional bottlenecks that delay service delivery [11].

Regulatory uncertainty around data sharing. Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act took effect in 2022 after a prolonged and repeatedly postponed rollout [15]. While the law strengthened data privacy protections, it is often misunderstood by the private sector and can function as a barrier to efficient data sharing rather than an enabler of it, compounded by unclear cross-border data flow rules and limited open data policies [11][13].

A digital divide sharpened by an aging population. Thailand’s demographic profile adds a distinct dimension to its digital divide. Population studies point out that older residents, particularly in rural areas, often lack the skills to conduct financial transactions, access government websites, or navigate multi-step digital verification processes, and they remain more vulnerable to scammers exploiting the pace of digital transformation [10]. Separate research into government e-service utilisation similarly found that a majority of the population had adopted at least some digital public services, yet uptake remained sharply uneven across demographic groups, echoing the same generational divide [14]. Researchers studying the ageing-society dimension have cautioned that governments should not rely solely on families and community goodwill to close this gap, and instead need structured support for older people’s associations and digital literacy training [10].

Resource and communication gaps at the municipal level. Case studies of Thai municipalities highlight a recurring operational pattern: cities struggle to identify and address infrastructure problems effectively due to limited resources, while citizens simultaneously face difficulty reporting civic issues to local government through traditional channels [5]. Nakhon Si Thammarat’s experience with eight years of recurring flood damage, costing more than 100 million baht, illustrates how resource constraints and weak issue-reporting systems can compound rather than resolve a city’s most pressing vulnerabilities [5].

Uneven adoption among small and medium enterprises. Most Thai small and medium enterprises now use digital platforms for daily operations, but adoption of advanced tools such as data analytics, automation, and export-oriented e-commerce remains limited, restricting how much of the private sector can meaningfully participate in a city’s smart economy pillar [13].

Three Lessons Thailand Should Avoid

1. Do not equate certification counts with integration depth. Expanding from dozens to more than a hundred designated smart cities is a meaningful signal of national commitment, but certification alone does not guarantee that a city’s underlying data systems, energy infrastructure, or mobility networks are actually connected. Thailand should avoid treating the number of certified cities as the primary measure of success while data readiness across core domains remains uneven even among cities that already hold certification.

2. Do not let data protection law and data sharing infrastructure develop out of step with each other. A regulatory regime introduced without a matching, well-understood data-sharing framework leaves businesses and agencies uncertain about compliance, which in practice slows the very data exchange that smart city systems depend on. Thailand should avoid strengthening privacy law while leaving the technical and institutional plumbing for lawful data sharing, such as a fully integrated national data exchange, several steps behind.

3. Do not scale digital services faster than digital inclusion for older and rural populations. With a rapidly aging population and a persistent urban-rural gap in skills and connectivity, rolling out advanced digital government services without parallel, well-resourced digital literacy support risks leaving a substantial share of citizens further behind rather than better served. Thailand should avoid measuring smart city progress purely by the sophistication of new digital services while treating inclusion for older residents and underserved provinces as a secondary concern.

Thailand’s smart city programme has built genuine institutional infrastructure, a dedicated agency, a national master plan, and a growing base of certified cities that few countries in the region can match in scale. What will determine whether that infrastructure translates into a smarter Thailand is not how many cities carry the label, but whether data integration, regulatory clarity, and digital inclusion are treated as prerequisites for certification rather than challenges to resolve afterward.

What would it take for Thailand’s certified smart cities to close the gap between designation and genuinely integrated operation?

References

1. Thailand Crowns Leading Smart Cities, Bangkok Post. https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/2815356/thailand-crowns-leading-smart-cities
2. Depa Pushes Smart City, Targeting 105 Inclusive Cities by 2027, Nation Thailand. https://www.nationthailand.com/blogs/sustaination/40057822
3. Smart City Development in Thailand: Progress and Challenges. https://www.academia.edu/117553085/Smart_City_Development_in_Thailand_Progress_and_Challenges
4. Home, Thailand Smart City Expo. https://www.thailandsmartcityexpo.com/
5. Thailand’s Citizen-Centric Smart Cities: Lessons in Resilience and Livability, UNCRD. https://uncrd.un.org/sites/uncrd.un.org//files/2025sctw_s1-cp1.pdf
6. Inside Thailand’s Smart City Plan: EEC, Infrastructure and Investment Trends, Ande Aditya. https://andeaditya.com/inside-thailands-smart-city-plan-eec-infrastructure-investment-trends/
7. Digital Economy Promotion Agency, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Promotion_Agency
8. Full Thailand Smart City Handbook, Urban Studies Lab / FCDO. https://www.scribd.com/document/530640440/Full-Thailand-Smart-City-Handbook
9. Mastercard Takes in 27 Potential Smart Cities, Bangkok Post via PressReader. https://www.pressreader.com/thailand/bangkok-post/20200121/281960314710763
10. Digital Divide a Major Challenge Facing Thailand Amid Ageing Society, Nation Thailand. https://www.nationthailand.com/business/tech/40038801
11. Thailand Digital Data Infrastructure Roadmap Report, World Bank. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099120225122096554/pdf/P506116-d380e34f-1660-4004-b91a-26acfee94750.pdf
12. Prioritizing Core Data Sets for Smart City Governance: Evidence from Thirty-Six Cities in Thailand, MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2624-6511/9/1/15
13. Thailand Digital Data Infrastructure Roadmap, World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/thailand/publication/thailand-digital-data-infrastructure-roadmap
14. Addressing the Digital Divide: A Study on the Predictors of Government E-Service Utilization in Thailand, ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308596125001119
15. Background, Asia Society Policy Institute. https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/raising-standards-data-ai-southeast-asia/data/thailand