Tambon municipality: the impact after changing status

Abstract

This study aims to examine the impact on the Tambon municipality after its status is changed from Tambon administrative organization (TAO) in four-dimensional issues: local politics, public participation, public services and a relationship with the community and local leaders. This study is qualitative research by observation and in-depth interviews with local politicians, local government officials, local leaders and the people who live in two sub-district
municipality in Khonkaen province.

The results showed that the Tambon municipality must faces the several challenges. In terms of the local politics dimension, it has the political violence which caused a political group of local politicians in the local and national politics that still used as a political vote. The dimension of the public participation is limited to the election. The overall of participation is no different mostly compared to being TAO and people still believe in community leaders. The dimension of public services which has the role of local government is few different from being TAO but the direct impacts are fiscal problems of local government which is not under estimated and the public services which mainly focus on general administrative plan. For a relationship
with the community and the local leader dimension, it has the challenge of collaboration between local government leaders and local community for development and the challenge is to act as the representative of Council members.

So when Tambon Administrative Organization is promoted as a
municipality, it should have considered as 1) People increasingly aware of being citizens and stimulate the local government with pay attention to the role of local politicians. 2) Council members must learn to work and act as a representative of the public following expectations of people 3) The municipality should gather sufficient financial resources and develop cooperation with other Parties for development because the primary difficulty faced by the municipality is the insufficient received fund.