In this article we examine radical proposals for political, administrative, and fiscal decentralisation in Thailand which were developed for Chiang Mai, as a potential model for Thailand as a whole. These proposals lay emphasis on local self[1]government and citizen participation. We argue that they offer a way forward for a Thai decentralisation process that has yet to proceed to the extent envisaged when it was commenced, as part of democratisation, in the 1990s—embraced most notably in the 1997 Constitution. Moreover, this process, we argue, offers a way out of the extreme confrontation between the yellow (royalist-conservative) and red (pro[1]democracy) factions that has troubled Thailand since 2005. As Thailand is now under a civilian rule after five years of military government, local and provincial government came once more to the fore, and we argue that the Chiang Mai Metropolitan Administration Bill of 2013, still before Parliament, offers more local democracy, as well as imaginative ways of recruiting the enthusiasm of local stakeholders, via a system designed to link provincial and local authorities and the citizenry in a virtuous circle of democracy and development.