Local bodies no panacea

The Progressive Movement’s leader, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, recently floated the idea of abolishing local administrative positions, which are appointed by the Interior Ministry, as their authorities overlap with those of members of local administrative bodies, which are elected by the people.

These positions include provincial governors, district chiefs, as well as tambon and village chiefs. The proposal, Mr Thanathorn contended, is aimed at ending what he called “state centralisation” — a model of governance that the group is trying to abolish.

Mr Thanathorn questioned why governors, who are appointed officials, are more powerful than elected chief executives of provincial administrative organisations (PAO).

He also noted redundancies at lower levels of administration, with village, tambon and district tambon chiefs essentially tasked with responsibilities which could be done by elected mayors and chiefs of tambon administrative organisations (TAO).

The problem, he noted, is that elected officials have less powers than appointed ones — as such, their powers should be handed over to elected officials.

The Progressive Movement Party has also launched a petition to amend Chapter 14 of the constitution, which deals with local administration.

Without a doubt, the central government should tone down its top-down management approach.

That said, however theoretically sound Mr Thanathorn’s proposal was, local governance in Thailand is extremely complicated, so his idea might be out of touch with the reality on the ground.

Yes, Thailand needs change. But such an abrupt change could actually deal more harm than good, unless real democratic reforms in all levels of governance have been achieved.

A decentralised government is good, but decentralisation isn’t a panacea.

At present, many elected officials at the local level — down from the tambon level to the provincial level — are merely proxies acting on behalf of local patrons and influential families with close ties to businesses and national politics. As such, vote-buying is known to be rampant in local elections.

Furthermore, conflict of interest is unfortunately the norm, and so is corruption and graft, as many elected chiefs usually own construction firms or other businesses in their area. As a result, news of shootings due to unsettled conflicts of interests and personal animosity regularly make headlines.

The results of the latest PAO elections in late 2020 gave the impression that at a local level, people do not care about changing the way things are run. Despite the fact that it was the country’s first local elections in some seven years, about 40% of the winners were familiar faces from old political parties.

Make no mistake. Relying on the Ministry of Interior to micro-manage governance at the local level is definitely not the way to go.

What needs to happen is a rebalancing of power between the central government and local administrative bodies, especially when it comes to managing local resources and taxation.

Multi-level elections have a steep learning curve, so they won’t be an overnight success as some have envisaged. In the meantime, there needs to be more effort to educate voters on how to elect more responsible representatives at all levels and what channels through which they could punish politicians who fail to keep their campaign promises.