A study on the implementation of sister city relationship policy by Thai Provincial Government
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2021
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Putikan Kitkuakul (2021). A study on the implementation of sister city relationship policy by Thai Provincial Government. Retrieved from: https://repository.nida.ac.th/handle/662723737/6061.
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A study on the implementation of sister city relationship policy by Thai Provincial Government
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Abstract
In the past decades, The Thai government has realized the importance of globalization and international cooperation for economic and social development by including international cooperation as part of the national agenda. Thus, the Thai government, through Ministry of Interior, has imposed “sister city relationship policy” – a policy to be implemented by provincial governments? aiming to increase international cooperation at sub-regional and regional level to enhance local competitiveness and regional development.
Although the policy has been implemented by provincial governments for many years, the policy has yet to produce tangible results of a more positive and stronger regional development. Furthermore, the policy is viewed by Thai organizations to be ineffective. More need to be done to understand and identify way to strengthen the policy. Thus, this research aims to (1) examine the features and characteristics of implementing sister city relationship policy (2) determine an implementation process and best practices that will lead to a better execution of the sister city relationship policy and (3) provide recommendations to the central government and regional level administrations on how to increase international cooperation based on the sister city policy.
This present research used a qualitative method by conducting semi-structure interviews in four provinces with 19 key roles including high rank government officials and representatives from both the central and provincial governments, mayor and current employees from the city-municipality, and a representative from provincial chamber of commerce. Once data are collected, content analysis was performed to analyze the data.
The analysis reveals that although provincial governments are the main implementer of the policy, the central government and local organizations greatly contribute to the success or failure of the policy implementation. Challenges the provincial governments face to effectively implement the policy include limited rules and regulations by central governments, unclear strategic plans, unsuitable partnership, constant change of leadership, negative attitude toward relationship, limited working employee and resource, lack of participation, and missing evaluation process.
In order to overcome challenges of implementation and improve implementation process. This research proposes policy recommendations as follows: (1) implementing organizations must set up evaluation and monitoring process to determine the level of success of the policy in order to readjust or make improvement on the policy (2) functions and roles of involved organizations must be readjusted to ensure a clear authority and implementation process and (3) all involved organizations including central government, provincial government, and local organizations must integrate to uplift and overcome limitations and ensure policy’s goal is aligned.
Moreover, it was found that the concept of sister city relationship derives from strategic alliance where two private organizations aim to create positive strategic cooperation to achieve long-term relationship and continuous improvement of organizations. However, strategic alliance between public entities posed difficulty to attain the benefit derive from strategic alliance due to the involvement of different layers of governments which may lead to unclear function and roles of each involved organizations. In addition, the implementation process that involves with public entities is facing with excessive red tape, missing supporting environment from higher governing bodies, lacking supporting resources, lacking of integration among involved governmental agencies.
The research also provides an example of top-down implementation approach characteristics, success conditions, as well as its limitations. The evidences found in this research have confirmed many previous study on the theory of top-down implementation approach where this study confirms that top-down implementation approach are facing with limitations including (1) not suitable or adaptive to street level bureaucrats or local organizations (2) contain legal limitations and political mechanism which constraint the behavior of local organizations (3) neglect initiatives or contributions coming from the local organizations (4) unable to identify the main/dominant implementing actors with many layer of involved government agencies and (5) the local organizations may find the policy unsuitable or not useful and ignore the policy.
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Thesis (Ph.D. (Development Administration))--National Institute of Development Administration, 2021