Centralization, Decentralization and Public Administration in Thailand: Conceptual Review, Debating Issues and Implications for Reform

Abstract

     This article intends to give a brief review on how the ideas relating to centralization and decentralization affect the design of administrative system in a certain society. This article tries to argue that these two concepts should not be conceived as being opposed to each other. Rather, both of them are very important for structuring and designing the way in which the state should allocate and distribute its powers amongst
administrative mechanisms. The key question, therefore, is not about which one is better but is on how to balance the centralized structures with the decentralized one or on how to build a proper relationship between these two structures. And these questions should be the focal point of debating on how to reform public administration in Thailand. This article propose that the concept of ‘Intergovernmental Relations’ could be adopted as the core idea for reform in which the government mechanisms at all levels should be reassigned their roles and functions as well as their coordinating and cooperating mechanisms should be redesigned. Additionally, ‘National Interest’ and ‘Subsidiarity’ could be instrumentalized as the basic framework for identifying a set of state functions that should be administered under the centralized structure or those that would be more suitably if they were managed by the decentralized one.