วิทยานิพนธฉบับนี้ไดรับการสนับสนุนจากสถาบันพระปกเกลา
xlv
Asked what he thought about the association of good governance with Buddhism and Royalty, Thirayut ironically replied: ‘we have freedom of thought!’ Tanet Charoenmuang pointed out that the two concepts, good governance and
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self-sufficient economy, were introduced together in the country in mid-1998 thanks to Anand Panyarachun, Prawese Wasi and Thirayut Bunmii. However ‘good governance’ started to be criticized by several NGOs ‘for being too broad and as a result vague and tending to enable the government to acquire greater revenue and to repay the bills to the foreign lender’, it was thus rejected while the self-sufficient economy campaign retained its popularity (1999: 43). In my opinion this is true only to a certain extent, as noticed the jargon employed by radical thinkers and NGOs representatives often buy in that of ‘good governance’ and, nevertheless, while grass-roots associations might have taken a critical stance (underpinned by some good reasons) within government agencies the concept is still very popular and object of consistent discussion. xlvii
The use of borihanchatkan thidi, the government translation for ‘good
governance’, seems thus to have a value-free connotation compared with
thammarat that was here criticized as ‘international good governance’. xlviii
Similarly Thirayut’s book has been criticized as a ‘complete erasure of class
politics’ and through ‘its pursuit of national harmony and sacrifice for national capital’, of making the author truly an intellectual of Thailand Inc.’ (Connors 1999).
www.kpi.ac.th
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