Character Sets and Collations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 255

The following parameter defines the default connection collation:
$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_unicode_ci';
The Database View
We can also use the Database view's Operations sub-page to change the default
character set for the database:
We can see the collation used for each table on the Structure page for the database:
On the Sum line, it makes sense to display the total number of records and the total
size, but the Collation information is not a "total collation"; phpMyAdmin uses this
space to display the default collation for the current database, as can be seen by
hovering over this collation name.