<![CDATA[Thailand's digital government agenda, anchored by the Public Sector Digital Government Development Act, B.E. 2562 (2019), has established a robust national mandate, yet its translation into consistent sub-national outcomes remains uneven, particularly in rural provinces facing infrastructural and human-capital constraints. Existing scholarship has predominantly benchmarked digital readiness at the outcome level, leaving the structural and process-level determinants of implementation variation underexamined, while classical implementation theory—developed outside technology policy—has rarely been extended to the infrastructure- and expertise-dependent character of digital governance. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative single-case design centered on Kalasin Province, selected as a critical case for its sustained exposure to centrally driven digital initiatives in the continued absence of an independent provincial digital strategy. Employing thematic content analysis and structural actor-mapping across five triangulated sources spanning statutory, administrative, provincial, and operational tiers, the study traces implementation fidelity along the full policy chain. Findings reveal that strategic authority remains centrally concentrated despite formal multi-tier actor representation, while resource adequacy is markedly constrained—evidenced by a 27.15% year-on-year budget decline and the absence of dedicated provincial digital personnel. These constraints correspond with attenuated outcomes: only 766 villages connected under the Net Pracharat program and merely 12 of 38 provincial ICT centers upgraded to full Community Digital Center status, four permanently closed. These results substantiate the proposed Area-Based Digital Policy Implementation Framework, demonstrating that territorial outcomes are mediated by implementation capacity and coordination structure rather than policy input alone. The study contributes a theoretically grounded, empirically anchored account with direct implications for strengthening provincial digital capacity and horizontal coordination across comparable decentralized governance contexts.]]>
