Citizen Participation during Second Overall Review of the Qingquan

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5.2.2 Citizen Participation during Second Overall Review of the Qingquan Scenic Area Project

In this section, the author tries to understand the citizen participation situations in the Second Overall Review of the Qingquan Scenic Area Project and then analyzes the difficult positions faced by the citizens in terms of participation in the project.

1. The channels to transmit messages are insufficient for the residents.

For the citizen participation system, Lin and Wang (Lin &Wang, 1999) proposed three key elements—independent residents, the public in the know, and fair participation.

Among them, the “public in the know” means that administrative organizations should value people’s right of awareness. If the public is provided with information and knowledge about public affairs, they can contribute ideas to the public decision-making.

The author, after interviewing residents who did not participate in the public meeting on March 9, 2006, realized that most of them did not know about the public meeting. Although the Wufong Township mayor claimed that he had informed the heads of every community in Wufong, the residents indicated that they had not received the message.

According the Urban Planning Act Article 19, after the main project has been drawn up, it is to be exhibited for thirty days, after which a public meeting is to be held; in addition, the information about the exhibition of the urban planning is to be published in the newspaper. In this case, however, Taoshan Village is a village of aborigines; in an aboriginal village, very few families subscribe to newspapers.

Therefore, announcement of the exhibition in the newspaper cannot achieve the goal of notifying local residents.

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I didn’t know anything about the meeting. I had no way of knowing about it. If the messages were published in the newspaper, we wouldn’t know about it, either, because we don’t subscribe to newspapers, let alone the Royal Times. (Interviewee L2)

I didn’t know what time the public meeting was. Wufong Township Office didn’t inform me of the time; that’s why I didn’t attend the meeting. (Interviewee R2)

Residents did not obtain the information about the public meeting and project content. As a result, very few residents attended the public meeting on March 9, 2006.

Those residents who did attend the meeting did not fully understand the project before the meeting, so during the public meeting, they could discuss only matters related to their own profit. (See Appendix 3)

Clearly, the process of planning did not achieve the goal of promoting policy discussion. In Chapter 2, it is explained that the public participation continuum concept requires that public participation processes include information exchange, public consultation, engagement, shared decisions, and shared jurisdiction. These processes form a continuum. Along this continuum, information exchange is essential to the processes. If people cannot receive sufficient information, then they cannot accomplish the goal of substantial citizen participation.

2. Executive officials held a negative attitude toward citizen participation.

Whether the residents can receive the information or not is related to the attitudes of

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policies and projects, play an important role in citizen participation. However, in general public meetings on urban planning, the executive officials usually have a mindset of “the less trouble the better”. They consider the development of citizen participation to be an obstruction to administration. Therefore, they strictly follow regulations and hold the meeting, but they do not take people’s opinions seriously.

The public meeting is, in effect, a mere formality. In the case study, some interviewees indicated that the Wufong Township Office did not like residents who had many opinions, so these residents were not invited to the meeting.

Maybe sometimes the Wufong Township Office called only the village head and told him there was a meeting, without notifying other villagers. In addition, the Wufong Township Office didn’t invite residents who had many opinions, like the Manager of the Minduyou Carving Classroom. They didn’t want her to attend the meeting because they hoped the meeting would go smoothly.

(Interviewee L3)

In addition, administrative departments often use administrative procedures for the sake of administrative convenience. They can exclude residents from participating through technicalities. For example, the public meeting was held during the office hours of administrative departments, effectively excluding residents who had to go to work.

I don’t think the villagers were very clear about the meeting.

Moreover, the meeting was held during our work time, so we couldn’t attend. (Interviewee R1)

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3. The effect of the citizen participation system of urban planning on policy- making is limited.

From the present Urban Planning Act, the administrative procedures of urban planning comprise the three stages of planning, deliberating, and implementing.

Residents can participate in the project only when the draft plan has been drawn up.

During the process of drafting the project, the Hsinchu County Government delegated an engineering consulting company to investigate residents’ ideas. This kind of investigation does not equal essential citizen participation. The administrative procedure of urban planning shows that people cannot participate in the beginning of the project, and the purpose of the public meeting is just to inform people about the project.

It is more difficult for people to make recommendations after the planning has been completed. Regarding modification and review of the project, according to the Urban Planning Act, Article 26, administrative organizations should review the urban planning project every three to five years after implementation of the project. In addition, according to the Regulations for the periodic overall review of Urban Planning, Article 15, if people want to file proposals for modification of the urban planning project after project implementation, the proposals should be collected as the references of the overall interview of the urban planning; the proposals cannot be considered individually. Therefore, if people want to make recommendations on the project after implementation, they can only submit proposals for consideration in the periodic overall review of urban planning.

In the interviews, the local villagers expressed expectations of the time of citizen participation that differed greatly from the regulations on urban planning.

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We thought that if we found the policy was not perfect during the implementation, it should be modified no matter when.

(Interviewee R1)

4. Public participation techniques are formalities for aborigines.

In the citizen participation process, the ways that administrative departments communicate with the public are called public participation techniques (Hsieh, 1984).

Many possibilities for public participation techniques are proposed in the citizen participation theories, some examples being publications, open houses, workshops, focus groups, and public hearings. The public participation technique of the present Urban Planning Act in Taiwan is the public meeting. Currently, the general public meeting form is the presentation of the project by officials first, after which the floor is opened to the public for them to express their opinions.

Since most of the residents of Taoshan Village Wufong Township are aborigines, with historical and cultural differences from the Han people, the aborigines’ lifestyle and languages differ greatly from those of the Han people. Therefore, the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China states that the State must affirm cultural pluralism and actively preserve and foster the development of aboriginal languages and cultures. The State shall, in accordance with the will of the ethnic groups, safeguard the status and political participation of the aborigines. The State shall also guarantee and provide assistance and encouragement for aboriginal education, culture, transportation, water conservation, health and medical care, economic activity, land, and social welfare, measures for which shall be established by law (Office of the president R. O. C., 2010). In this respect, the State should also guarantee the citizen participation rights of aborigines.

The present style of public meeting is usually led by government officials, and

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the meeting process is very serious. Furthermore, the authoritative and specialized language in the meeting, laden with political jargon, is not understood by local aborigines. The villagers indicated that some elders of the tribe cannot speak Mandarin, so they could not understand the topics discussed in the meeting.

We aborigines don’t have professional knowledge about the project and we are not good at expressing our ideas. If they could use our language in the meeting and make the meeting relaxing, the villagers would be more willing to participate. (Interviewee L1)

King, Feltey, and Susel (1998) state that real citizen participation should consider how to provide accessible and comfortable citizen participation conditions. This means that factors that affect participation, such as transportation cost, time limitations, and culture differences, should be considered. These factors are related to the justice of citizen participation.