Health and Militarization under the Public Health Experts’ Guideline: The Intertwinement of Ideas and Actor Coalitions for Policy Making-decision in Coping with the Outbreak of Coronavirus 2019 in Thailand
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Abstract
Since the outbreak of Coronavirus 2019, the Thai government has formulated the stringent policies to suppress the infection. The main policy content aims to control people, places, and products. The policies that strictly control socio-economic activities would have side effects and counter-coalitions. How and what sets of ideas and reasons do the Thai government select for creating the policy discourse to control the decision-making and persuade people to accept and obey the measures? Who plays a leading role to control and create the policy discourse? And how the sets of ideas and reasons generate an impact on the policy-making process? This research set out to address these 3 primary questions by conducting documentary analysis to seek data from the public agencies such as announcements, orders, and rules issued by the Prime Minister and governors and newspaper coverage during January 1 - June 10, 2020. Data analysis is run following the method of qualitative discourse analysis which bases on reading the policy texts through and analyzes the patterns of wording, language-used and thought in the texts. The findings indicated that the discourse established by the Thai government for controlling policy decision-making and persuading people composed of 3 sets of ideas and reasons: 1) politicization of health issue, 2) rhetorical theme of militarization and 3) moral politics. A number of actors emerge to the discourse, particularly the academic public health experts, persons holding political position and authority groups from security, economic, legal and public health agencies. Furthermore, the first two sets of ideas and reasons were also employed as the frame to design the policy instruments for solving the spread of Coronavirus 2019. The research was cognizant of how different ideas and reasons were selected and arranged to influence policy decision-making and implementation in Thailand as a developing country that would be able to control the low Coronavirus deaths.
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