AbstractAccording to Fred Curtis (2003, p. 83), ‘the road to environmental sustainability lies in the creation of local, self‐reliant, community economies’, a phenomenon he has labelled ‘eco‐localism’. Eco‐localism focuses on place‐specific responses to place‐specific challenges, set at the scale of the community, with its place‐specific history, culture, social fabric and local ecosystem. It argues the need for a local social economics, which has the capability to protect, maintain, enhance or rehabilitate local resources and environments. Curtis identifies a need to explore the means and potential for taking the eco‐localism idea from principle to practice. This paper seeks to add some empirical meat to Curtis's theoretical bones. The paper uses a case study from North‐East Thailand to describe the sequential ‘crowding out’ and ‘clawing back’ of social institutional control of local development and its social and environmental consequences. It places worsening problems of environmental degradation, resource depletion and social differentiation in the context of the dynamics of spatial integration and modern economic development. It then describes how processes of neo‐localism, congruent with recent changes in the wider Thai and international context, have been responsible for reversing a number of ecological problems and strengthening sammakee, or communal harmony, principally by means of Buddhist institutions and principles. The empirical case‐study fits very neatly with Curtis's theoretical eco‐localism construct. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.