While public administration practice and education in general has become considerably professionalized in the last decade, existing knowledge on public administration in Southeast Asia is fragmented at best, and often devoid of a useful reference. While journal articles and government reports provide decentralized information, Public Administration in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macao takes a comprehensive and comparative look at the major components of administration systems. The selection of countries and regions included reflects the diversity of Southeast Asia. Organized by Country The handbook fills a critical need by bringing together leading scholars who provide an insider perspective and viewpoint on essential and advanced issues. Divided into five sections, each dedicated to a particular country, the text outlines topics relevant to modern public administration, including: History and Political Context of Public Administration Decentralization and Local Governance Public Ethics and Corruption Performance Management Reforms Civil Service System Focusing on recent developments in public administration in these countries which are among the fastest growing economies in the world, the book explores their practices and innovative approaches in public administration. For many years people have been fascinated by the cultures, peoples, and governments of Southeast Asia, and now they have a book that discusses the apparatus of government in Southeast Asia – their agencies, contexts, processes, and values.

This volume investigates the missing link, the complicated realities of the relations between governance and development through case studies of ASEAN countries. Its main objective is to explore a theoretical framework to overcoming the limitations of mainstream approaches by employing case studies on decentralization, crisis management, corporate governance and foreign aid management of both public and private entities. From the beginning of the 1990s onwards, the international aid community has increasingly stressed that good governance, together with democracy and protection of basic human rights, is indispensable for sustainable economic development. The terms, however, are complex, broad, and arguable. They largely refer to discipline of government institutions and the capacity of the public sector. While a wide variety of empirical studies has been done on the relations between good governance and development, it is still unclear how the differences in governance influence development performance in a real world.

Local Autonomy as a Human Right contends that local communities struggle to preserve their territorial autonomy over time despite changes to the broader political and geographic contexts within which they are embedded. Forrest argues that this both reflects and is evidence of a worldwide embrace of local control as a key political and social value, indeed, of such importance that it should be embraced and codified as a human right. This study weaves together evidence grounded in a variety of disciplines - history, geography, comparative politics, sociology, public policy, anthropology, international jurisprudence, rural studies, urban studies -- to make clear that a presumed, inherent moral right to local self-determination has been manifested in many different historical and social contexts. This book constructs a compelling argument favoring a human right to local autonomy. It identifies practical factors that help to account for the relative success of communities that are able to assert local control over time. Here, particular attention is paid to whether localities are able to generate policy and organizational capacity. Forrest suggests that a focus on local policy and organizational capacity can help to explain why some communities attempting to assert greater local control are more successful than others. Local Autonomy as a Human Right contributes to scholarly debates regarding the varied impacts of globalization, with the place-based perspective and moral emphasis on territorial-centered rights put forth herein offering a necessary counter-narrative to the often-presumed predominance of global forces.