Policy design as deliberative practice: learning from Khon Kaen (Thailand)

Abstract

Policy design is often top-down in orientation and promotes one-way communications. Some new instruments for designing public policies have proposed to deal with these problems by including more participants. Most of these initiatives, however, have emerged in experimental policy settings outside existing political struggles and governmental practices. Evidence shows that good policy formulation and design - both instrumentally effective and democratically legitimate - benefits from participatory processes that bring together a wider spectrum of citizens, politicians and experts in the pursuit of co-decision making. Participatory deliberation is thus offered here as a productive method that can extend the boundaries of the theory and practices of policy designs. This goes beyond perceiving policy design as a way to choose policy instruments of the state by which communication is recognized largely as an effective tool by the policymakers with a technocratic focus. To illustrate that deliberative policy design is more than just the ideal type approach, this chapter uses a real-world practice to illustrate a deliberative alternative from Khon Kaen, Thailand. It is presented as a practice of democratization from below in an authoritarian political setting.