Welcome Remarks By Deputy Director General Department of Local Administration Ministry of Interior, Thailand Tuesday 30 th October 2012

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, It is my great pleasure to be here today and to welcome all delegates of the Asia-Pacific Local Practitioners and Climate Change Finance Workshop: Implications of Local Governance and Decentralisation for the effective delivery of finance for climate change at the local level” to Thailand. I would like to congratulate the organisers, UNDP, UNCDF and UNEP, for bringing over 90 participants from 12 countries in Asia-Pacific to this important event.

This includes government officials in both Central level and Local level, representatives from Civil Service Organisations, Regional and International organisations as well as development partners. It is a great opportunity for all stakeholders to meet and to exchange their experience on Local Governance, Decentralisation and Climate Change Finance and to discuss ways to take the issues forward together.

Department of Local Administration, Ministry of Interior has played a crucial role in supporting Decentralisation and its implementation on the ground across the country. From its starting day over 10 years ago, Thailand’s local governance reforms are still work in progress. We have seen great progress at local level administration in better public participation, better budget utilisation and transparency and so forth. There are a number of challenges we have faced and there also are many opportunities to enhance our local governance’s capacity toward sustainable development and self-dependency.

The current 5-year National Economic and Social Development Plan has put climate change as one of the 6 pillars of its mandate. Thailand sets our vision to move ourselves towards a low-carbon and climate resilient development pathway. The policy framework and institutional set-up to enhance Thailand’s readiness to respond to climate change is building up. But it is crucial to also look into the fiscal and financial measures to turn this vision into reality and actions on the ground.

Earlier this year, Thailand completed a Climate Public Expenditures and Institutional reviews (CPEIR). One of the key recommendations is to ask the government in all relevant agencies to coordinate among themselves better on ways in which to deliver climate finance. We would like to emphasize that the coalition should not lie only at the central government level but it’s very important, at local level, to encourage the local government agencies to coordinate among themselves better and to integrate their works to ensure that the local level administration goes in the same direction.

Moreover, the study about public expenditure and institutional management concerned climate change revealed that the local government organisations in Thailand realized about climate change situation but their investment and activities are still explicit. Therefore, to enhance the local executives to have knowledge and necessary skills including technical support from ministries will make local government organisations which are legally independent be able to initiate and develop suitable projects to locality with subsidy or grant from non-government organisations, foundations or private development organisations.

Climate Change and local government is not a new topic because it affects people’s everyday lives. We are looking forward to share our experiences and hear from others through discussions and lessons learnt from this regional workshop to bring home solid recommendations to help strengthen our local governance. I wish you all the pleasant stay in Thailand and I do wish you a dynamic, productive and successful dialogue. Thank you very much.