The Executive Yuan is adjusting its national regional plan and the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is working on amendments to the Enforcement Rules for the Regional Plan Act (區域計畫法施行細則).
The authorities have made several attempts to consult with civic groups to reduce conflicts, but these matters have run up against the same problem: While the central government wants to devolve some of its powers and responsibilities to local governments, the local authorities do not enjoy people’s trust.
The Ministry of the Interior wants counties and municipalities to operate their own regional planning committees, and the EPA wants them to do a proper job of conducting environmental impact assessments. Environmental groups are worried that development projects will not be examined properly and that they will get pushed through due to vested interests.
Two examples, one positive and one negative, can show why such worries exist.
The controversy over environmental impact assessments for the Miramar Resort on the Taitung County coast has dragged on for 10 years with no resolution because the Taitung County Government’s assessments have not been done in accordance with the law. To begin with, the county government helped the resort’s developers evade an assessment. However, eventually, an assessment became unavoidable. Since then, there have been seven assessments, but none has been conducted legitimately.
The other example is that of the expansion of the Hsinchu Science Park using land in Miaoli County’s Houlong Township (後龍), which was rejected by the ministry’s Construction and Planning Agency in the face of protests by Wanbao Borough (灣寶) farmers. This is a rare example of a successful campaign against land expropriation.
Another reason for this success was that the department in charge of examining the expansion plan was the ministry’s Regional Planning Commission. If the Miaoli County Government comes to have a regional planning commission of its own, it is doubtful whether fertile farmland like that of Wanbao will continue to be preserved.
Part of the reason why the ministry and the EPA want to hand over some of their powers and responsibilities is that they often face protests and even administrative lawsuits, yet instead of tackling the underlying problems, they prefer to skirt around them. Civic groups are obviously not willing to let them get away with that.
At the same time, civic groups must admit that we cannot go on forever expecting the central government to be the arbiter of justice, sending its agents to receive local residents’ petitions and handle disputes.
There are two key reasons why people do not trust local governments. The first is a lack of information transparency and public participation in all kinds of procedures, and the second is the lack of effective checks and balances in interactions between executive and legislative departments, which results in a monolithic approach to policy decisions. The former reason represents a lack of participatory democracy, while the latter results from neglect of duty in a representative democracy.
Both these problems require the public to keep challenging the government to reform the system, to educate executive departments so that they will come to carry out procedures more smoothly.
Nationwide local elections will be held on Nov. 29. Are the above-mentioned expectations being raised as an electoral issue? Does sufficient pressure exist to make these changes happen? If these concerns are still not raised, the ministry and the EPA will have to go on acting as the last lines of defense.
Wang Chung-ming is a spokesperson for the Green Party Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS