Decentralization And Performance Evaluation

Compared to the past, the contemporary world is much developed. More and more Less Developed Countries (LDCs) are also trying to graduate from their current status as a developing country to a developed one. After declaring independence on December 2,1975, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has started to renovate the whole country’s system. Administered by one party called "Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP)", Lao PDR has a unique administrative system which adheres to the socialist principles of governance. Focusing on social-economic development and achieving effective and efficient administration, recently, the central government decided to apply the concept of decentralization to de-concentrate its power to the lower level by implementing Party-government policies on "Building Provinces to be Strategic Units, Building Districts to be Overall Strengthening Units, Building Villages to be Development Units." This was called the Three-Build Policy in short (9th Congress of LPRP,2011). The purpose of the Three-build policy was to encourage the stability of people’s democracy, increasing rights and participation, accountability to local levels, and poverty reduction, achieving MDGs in 2015, and develop the country from its status as LDCs by 2020. This study aims to figure out the performance evaluation and effectiveness of implementation of the three-build policy through three selected case studies. The research will be conducted using both primary data such as interviews, questionnaires and case studies, and secondary data such as government’s official documents, journal, and research papers. Finally, the findings show that the pilot implementation of three-build policy on village level has performed well. However, decentralization is not yet clearly understood and still faces previous problems such as those between central and local level.