Last month, residents in Taipei County's Pinglin township held a referendum to back demands for an exit on the Taipei-Ilan freeway at Pinglin. Earlier this month, residents in Chichi township in Nantou County held a referendum which rejected an incinerator project. Meanwhile, Environ-mental Protection Administration (EPA) chief Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) tendered his resignation after Premier Yu Shyi-kun said that"professionalism should not outweigh democracy."
"Referendum" is not just a political slogan anymore; the term is now part of our daily lives. It has become a new democratic channel, affecting power and culture at the grassroots level.
In considering these cases, it is argued that the problem of how to handle local referendums is separate from the issue of public infrastructure -- especially the problem of how to distribute the cost of negative "externalities." Pinglin's economic development has been obstructed due to water- supply planning for the greater Taipei area. This externality was brought about by the use of public property.
Oddly, those who have to bear the external costs are the Pinglin residents, not the residents of Taipei. The problem thus lies in the power gap between urban and rural districts.
Chichi's referendum also involved public infrastructure that caused a problem in the cost distribution of a negative externality. The problem is, who has the power to distribute cost responsibility? The answer involves central government agencies and environmental experts, not Chichi residents. This is an example of a power relationship between the center and the periphery.
This also indirectly explains why interest in holding local advisory referendums has spread across rural communities, but not into the major cities. Are residents in urban areas more rational? Do they believe in representative politics more? Is this because the problem of sharing the cost of externalities has already been eliminated? Or is it because the problem of having an incinerator stuck in one's backyard will never occur in the neighborhoods of our environmental experts and government leaders?
The holding of referendums is a kind of social movement, which aims at adjusting a power relationship by making one's voice heard through direct and democratic means.
But what about the role of our experts and professional environmental evaluators? Isn't there an objective and scientific basis for deciding on this?
Choosing particular goals is not the domain of such experts. Since there is little room for neutrality where values are involved, we must return to the democratic process. Under such circumstances, both experts and local residents are part of the same democratic polity.
Perhaps tension between professionalism and populism can be eased if we define experts as providers of information within a division of labor, and then examine issues of evaluation as a function of this information.
If we only uphold professionalism, we will be allowing the experts to dominate judgements involving values. This will lead to the degeneration of the nation's "democratic citizenry." On the other hand, it would be a distortion of the democratic system if direct democracy merely meant choices were being based on incomplete information.
Local referendums are challenging biases and structures. This phenomenon is having an impact on both the ruling and opposition parties, demonstrating that the public are indeed dissatisfied with the representative structures, and are ready to speak out with confidence. Are the politicians and residents of urban Taipei ready for this?
Hsu Yung-ming is an assistant research fellow at the Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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