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The powerful Thai politician Banharn Silpa-archa has been disparaged as a corrupt operator who for years channeled excessive state funds into developing his own rural province. This book reinterprets Banharm's career and offers a detailed portrait of the voters who support him. Relying on extensive interviews, the author shows how Banharm's constituents have developed a strong provincial identity based on their pride in his advancement of their province, Suphanburi, which many now call "Banharm-buri," the place of Banharm. Yoshinori Nishizaki's analysis challenges simplistic perceptions of rural Thai voters and raises vital questions about contemporary democracy in Thailand. Yoshinori Nishizaki's close and thorough examination of the numerous public construction projects sponsored and even personally funded by Banharn clearly illustrates this politician’s canny abilities and tireless, meticulous oversight of his domain. Banharn’s constituents are aware that Suphanburi was long considered a "backward" province by other Thais—notably the Bangkok elite. Suphanburians hold the neglectful central government responsible for their province’s former sorry condition and humiliating reputation. Banharn has successfully identified himself as the antithesis to the inefficient central state by promoting rapid "development" and advertising his own role in that development through well-publicized donations, public ceremonies, and visits to the sites of new buildings and highways. Much standard literature on rural politics and society in Thailand and other democratizing countries in Southeast Asia would categorize this politician as a typical "strongman," the boss of a semiviolent patronage network that squeezes votes out of the people. That standard analysis would utterly fail to recognize and understand the grassroots realities of Suphanburi that Nishizaki has captured in his study. This compassionate, well-grounded analysis challenges simplistic perceptions of rural Thai voters and raises vital questions about contemporary democracy in Thailand.
Assessments of the United States–led effort to create a democratically governed Iraq following the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 have generally been negative. However, these criticisms have, for the most part, ignored the progress Iraq made on putting in place basic public administration practices and political processes that better serve its citizens, particularly at the subnational level. This paper reviews the experience of the Local Governance Program in strengthening the capacities of subnational councils and provincial offices to develop legislation and to plan and budget for capital investments. The discussion reveals how contestation over the legal interpretations of decentralization constrained the autonomy of provincial actors, and how mastery of administrative tools and methods enabled them to maneuver more effectively within evolving provincial governance structures. This experience offers several lessons for international stabilization and reconstruction operations: constitution-making in divided societies paves over differences with ambiguities in order to reach agreement, which pushes the unresolved conflicts into political, legislative, and administrative arenas; decentralization debates are ultimately about the distribution of political power and control and cannot be addressed solely as technical and administrative governance questions; and basic public administration capacity is critical to meeting citizens’ expectations for services, security, and economic opportunity. A final observation is that international governance improvement templates can only be effective if they recognize that technical interventions must account for politics and the incentives facing local actors.
Estimates for 1907-1909 (Oct.), 1910/1911 (separately paged and with separate t.p.) issued with 1907-1908, 1909/1910.