Scientific Expertise and Citizen Participation in Deliberative Policy Analysis: The Case of Khon Kaen, Thailand
By Piyapong Boossabong and Frank Fischer
In 1997 Thailand introduced a new constitution, which endorsed a decentralization of administrative structures throughout the country. The new structures provided local communities with the opportunity to determine their own course of development. Several local governmental bodies were introduced to play a role in developing local infrastructures, and in particular to take care of the ecology of local government, from developing and maintaining public parks; keeping footpaths, food markets, canals and lakes safe and clean, to managing city wastes and coping with disasters (such as fire protection and flood water drainage). In addition, the delivery of basic services to citizens was established, such as civil registration, primary education provision and elderly care services.
A good example of how this approach was put into practice comes from the Municipality of Khon Kaen, which took special advantage of these administrative arrangements. The mayor, Mr Teerasuk Teekayupan, was convinced that representative democracy was insufficient. Rather than just having representatives make decisions for them, he argued that people should have a right to deal with their needs through their own decision-making processes. He and his staff not only implemented the decentralization mandate in the Constitution, but further decentralized it politically. Toward this end, he spoke of his own mayoral role as facilitator rather than leader. He built collaborative networks of established development agents in the city, public agencies, traditional city leaders, local businesses, the local universities and schools, as well as community committees, community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, ethnic groups, some international organizations, representatives of migrants and other active citizens.
Deliberative policy analysis is an analytic method designed to facilitate collective deliberative processes in public policy-making. Related to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, deliberative policy analysis emerged as an alternative to the use of standard empirical-analytic methods of the social sciences to solve public policy problems. Not only has this conventional approach failed to produce the promised results, it has generally operated with a technocratic, and largely an anti-democratic, bias (Fischer 2009). Basic to deliberative policy analysis is a method for bringing together a wider spectrum of citizens and experts in the pursuit of policy decisions that are both effective and legitimate.
Expertise through policy analysis has largely failed to meet its original promise, namely to provide usable knowledge for policy problem solving. In addition, a technocratic perspective largely privileges isolated empirical data over the interpretative perspectives and stories of both the politicians that it aims to serve and the citizens who provide the cornerstone of democratic governance. Could an alternative solution be to turn away from official social scientific investigation, towards a focus on policy arguments themselves as the main currency of the political policymaking process?
Towards this end, various policy analysts have developed procedures and methods for facilitating such exchanges. This would not mean dismissing or neglecting the traditional empirical role of policy analysis, but rather supplementing the analysis with the facilitation of public spheres for various policy actors to exchange and deliberate policy proposals. In addition to the standard tasks of the empirical-analytic approach, the analyst would seek to include a variety of modes of reason and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise.
The example of Khon Kaen illustrates how these theoretical discussions can be implemented. A form of deliberative democracy emerged in the municipality to assist local residents and administrators in formulating and guiding their governance activities. The foundation for these deliberative activities was the establishment in 2001 of a people’s council, which can be likened to a town meeting. Involving roughly 160 organizations, associations and groups in deliberative fora, the people’s council complemented the formal municipal council meetings based on a system of representation. Although the city’s mayor has changed since 2001, the town meeting format has remained active. Indeed, it even continued during the intervention of an authoritarian form of military rule at the national level, which the municipalities are accountable to.
Accompanying the people’s council process was a form of deliberative policy analysis. A group of academics from the local universities played an important role in facilitating the discussions in various ways with a form of deliberative policy inquiry. Their work began with the collection of data, both from the available literature and from research they conducted. This involved assembling relevant, objective knowledge and information needed for effective policy decisions. After examining the relevant scholarly knowledge related to the policy problem at hand, they engaged in original research at times to better understand or clarify particular issues, especially as they pertain specifically to Khon Kaen. They sought to integrate different types of modes of knowing in this research, including local forms of knowledge indigenous to the community. One such example concerned the development of disaster and emergency warning systems for flooding. The observations of community members — such as on whether the flood waters had reached to their windows — were shared alongside information on flood modelling information from the City Water Draining Agency. The collection of these empirical data and normative assumptions, and the translation of different types of knowledge, helped to create a disaster and emergency warning system based on mutual understanding and cooperation. With this information at hand, they then examined the relation of the empirical dimension of the problem to the normative implications of competing decisions. Toward this end, they mapped out the decision processes and likely implications of each decision. All of this was done with the aim of facilitating the community discussions.
As the example of Khon Kaen has shown, the approach has moved from a theory to a practical method for policy decision-making. From this analysis it is clear that deliberative policy analysis can play an important role in bringing citizens and experts together in a process of collective policymaking. More research is therefore needed to advance the understanding of this important relationship and its importance for democratic governance.
Further reading
Fischer, F. 2009. Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Fischer, F. and Boossabong, P. 2017. “Deliberative Policy Analysis,” in J. Dryzek et al., eds, Handbook of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, transl. T. McCarty. Cambridge, Polity.
Hajer, M., and H. Wagenaar, eds. 2003. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Dr Piyapong Boossabong is an assistant professor of policy analysis and planning at the College of Politics and Governance, Mahasarakham University, Thailand. He is also the director of the Centre for Collaborative Local Governance Studies. He got his PhD from University College London.
Frank Fischer has until recently been Distinguished Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at Rutgers University in the USA. Currently, he is research scholar at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is co-editor of Critical Policy Studies journal and Handbook of Public Policy Series editor for Edward Elgar. In addition to widely lecturing around the world on environmental politics and policy analysis, he has published 16 books and numerous essays. These include Citizens, Experts and the Environment (Duke 2000), Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices(Oxford 2003), and Climate Crisis and the Democratic Prospect (Oxford 2017). In addition to research in the United States and Germany, he has conducted field research in India, Nepal and Thailand on citizen participation and local ecological knowledge. He has also received numerous awards, including the Harold Lasswell Award for contributions to the field.
