Professor Andrew Harding's new book explores how five Southeast Asian countries manage power-sharing between central and local governments through their constitutions. Our correspondent Lauren Tan speaks to him about this.
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00:01As Southeast Asia navigates its diversity, power sharing between central and local governments remains a crucial component in governance.
00:11That is the topic explored in a new book by Professor Andrew Harding, who looked at how five Southeast Asian countries manage power sharing through their constitutions.
00:23Our correspondent Lauren Tan speaks to him about this.
00:26Tonight we are at KLSCAH with Professor Andrew Harding for his book launch titled Territorial Governance in Southeast Asia.
00:36Professor Harding is an expert in Asian legal studies and comparative constitutional law.
00:42Professor Harding, we would like to understand how do you define territorial governance in the context of this book?
00:50Territorial governance is every form of governance below the level of the nation state itself.
00:59In other words, in Malaysia, for example, state government, local government, federalism, those are the issues that it deals with.
01:09So everything below the national government is territorial governance.
01:12Great. And then the next one is, what are the similarities or differences of the observations you made, either on common historical events or political patterns across these five countries?
01:30Right. There are some important differences between the countries, especially between Malaysia and the other countries.
01:39The most obvious one is that Malaysia doesn't have any local elections, whereas all the other countries do have local government elections.
01:48Also, Malaysia is a federal state, whereas the other four countries are all unitary states.
01:56But as we explained in the session, this doesn't have the effect that you would think,
02:01because Malaysia is nonetheless the most centralised of these five countries, even though it's a federal state.
02:09Thank you so much, Professor Harding, for your time and congratulations on your book launch.
02:14That's all the time that we have for tonight. Back to you at the studios.