volume-12-number-1

Pages: 1-18

This study aims to assess the active ageing of elderly people aged 60 to 95 years old in Thailand and to investigate its determinants based on the data obtained from the National Statistical Office’s elderly survey in 2007. The findings revealed that elderly people in Thailand had moderate active ageing. In terms of each dimension, this found that elderly people had high active ageing under health dimension, moderate active ageing under security dimension, and low active ageing under participation dimension. Additionally, the regression analysis indicated that age and living in urban areas had the negative impacts on the active ageing of elderly people, whereas physical exercise, alcohol consumption, receipt of useful information, awareness of social benefits for elderly people, education, and saving duration had the positive influences on it. The active ageing of elderly people in Thailand was also determined by their most important sources of income. Moreover, the findings revealed that family warmth was positively related to the active ageing of elderly people in Thailand. That is, living with spouse and children under 18 years old and receiving basic needs, visits, and telephone contacts from children helped promote the active ageing of Thai elderly people. However, living with grandchildren and receiving money from children less than 10,000 baht per year were found having the negative relationship with the active ageing of elderly people.

Keywords: Elderly People, Active Ageing, Health, Participation, Security

Pages: 19-30

While Southeast Asia is generally stable, political leadership in two regional states is going through a period of uncertainty. The leaderships in Malaysia and Indonesia are undergoing some stress as they face the challenges of transition. Najib Razak, who was appointed Prime Minister of Malaysia in 2009, is due to call a general election to win his first mandate from the people. Najib’s return to office is likely, though this is not a certainty, as Malaysian politics have become more unpredictable. Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is to step down in 2014 at the end of his second and mandatory final term in office. As the longest-serving post-Suharto president, his legacy as a leader will be under scrutiny. Leadership and political succession in Malaysia and Indonesia are critical for Southeast Asia as both countries occupy strategic positions to the region—Malaysia and Indonesia straddle the world’s busiest waterway in the Straits of Malacca, while Indonesia is also the world’s largest Muslim democracy and ASEAN’s biggest member. The political stability of both has a bearing on the rest of Southeast Asia, which lies at the crossroads of major economic regions, such as Northeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. This article looks at the dynamics of leadership contestations and succession in Malaysia and Indonesia with a view to assessing their impact on domestic political stability.

Keywords: Malaysia, Indonesia, leadership succession, political transitions, elections

Pages: 31-44

Philippine democratization and its decentralization initiatives are studied to understand how it has empowered the local government, and if decentralization played a role in the demise of Philippine higher education, one of the most admired Southeast Asian higher education systems in the 1960s and 1970s. A documentary review of key decentralization policy documents, namely, the 1973 and 1987 Philippine Constitution and the 1991 Local Government Code, together with a review of key Philippine higher education reforms, is conducted. The study explains that there is a transfer of fiscal, administrative, and political power to local governments. Philippine decentralization initiatives, however, have design flaws that facilitate recentralization, uneven power distribution, and together with non-compliance of policies, political dynamics resulted in the demise of the state’s higher education sector. This influence is seen directly in increased diploma mills brought about by the proliferation of private for-profit higher education institutions and the establishment of local universities and colleges by the local government units. Indirectly, its influence is seen in the tri-focalization of education, privatization, rationalization, and the granting of deregulation and autonomy to accredited higher education institutions.

Keywords: decentralization, Philippines, higher education, higher education reforms

Pages: 45-64

The paper re-examines the Moro secessionist movement in the Philippines from the perspective of ethno-politics. Using a hybrid framework, which combines Paul Brass’ and Abner Cohen’s instrumentalist approach to ethnicity on the one hand and Michael Hechter’s and Michael Banton’s rational choice theory on the other hand, the paper argues that the complexity of the current separatist war is not simply due to the weakness of the state but also due to the weakness of the Bangsamoro identity and notion of nationhood. This frailty allows the state to co-opt leaders of the movement and sabotage their legitimate quest to self-governance and political autonomy. The reinvention of the Moro struggle towards self-determination reflects another attempt to sustain the relevance of the Muslims’ effort to create its own nation-state. However, the prospect of which is not promising. Addressing the conflict in Mindanao requires not only the strengthening of the state but also the strengthening of the Moro national identity. Mutually re-enforcing these strengths can accelerate the process of Philippine nation-state building and establish co-governance mechanisms that would guarantee the unification of the country in spite of its diversity.

Keyword: Ethnopolitics, Bangsamoro, peace agreement, self-determination, and Mindanao

Pages: 65-82

The paper argues that the development of biotechnology policies in the Philippines vis-à-vis rice is enabled by structures and processes that are friendly to the furtherance of social inclusion and equity goals. This occurs in the context of attaining rice self-sufficiency amidst a globalized system, and is clearly expressed in the relative density of concepts and provisions related to participation, inclusivity and transparency in all the relevant policy instruments. However, spaces that are opened are vulnerable to a political system that has deep-seated structural flaws and a science community whose financial support from the state is limited and at the same time whose financial autonomy from vested interests is suspect. Thus, in addition to investing in research to build scientific knowledge and capacity, there should also be an investment in research on the political dynamics of the institutional domains for multi-stakeholder encounters and contestations. Further research should be done on the nature of the interplay between science, industry and policy, to determine appropriate institutional arrangements in which science-industry linkages remain robust without compromising the regulatory process, and without compromising science. In addition, it is also vital that research is conducted about the knowledge and information flows and communication pathways and their implications on policy outcomes and stakeholder positions. A deliberate effort should be done to study the processes of mythmaking on both sides of the biotechnology debate, and to clearly identify the nexus by which distortions occur, the form by which they happen, their manifestations, and the drivers that engender their emergence.

Keywords: Science, technology and society; social impacts of genetically-modified crops; politics of science and technology

Pages: 83-90

Access to information and communication technologies (ICT) is seen as a key tool to provide economic growth both in developed and developing countries. Despite public and private ICT initiatives to take part in the provision of ICT access and usage at a grassroots level, there is still a large digital divide (Norris 2003, Mazzarella 2010). Marginalized sectors in Asia, such as, the rural folk, women, and low-income youth remain unreached by the benefits which ICT is supposed to offer. In this paper three approaches in Bangladesh to decrease the digital divide are analysed: Grameenphone’s establishment of Community Information Centers (CICs), Grameenphone’s Village Phone program and Cellbazaar1 . In what ways can the private sector through its business initiatives touch upon the issues of digital divide and social inclusion? By providing the needed infrastructure to spur usage and awareness of ICT in low-income communities, the private sector’s role as ICT provider and enabler is emphasized.

Keywords: digital divide, social inclusion, private sector initiatives, community information centers, Grameenphone, Telenor, Cellbazaar