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This paper reviews the study of Taiwan politics in the field of public administration, focusing on the concurrence of two reforms: democratization & new public management (NPM). The most vehement criticism against NPM has been voiced by the advocates of substantial democracy. They believe that, by encouraging individuals to pursue maximized self-interest, this efficiency-oriented movement only serves to attenuate the moral dimensions of democratic life, leaving underdeveloped such values as social justice, equality, social solidarity, & public-spirited participation. Such an observation leads to the following intellectual curiosity: what would happen if one country were to go through both democratization & NPM simultaneously, as is the case with many countries today? In an attempt to answer this question & to illustrate the dynamics between these two reforms, this paper examines Taiwan's history of administrative development. The findings challenge the common understanding that these two reforms are mutually incompatible. The main argument is that there is in fact a synergic interaction between the reforms during their initial phase. Because the NPM reforms actually advocate certain core values also shared by liberal democracies, & because NPM measures help fulfill certain political functions for regime transition, the two reforms actually reinforce each other early on in the process. Nevertheless, as democratization proceeds, such advanced goals as improving the quality of civil society & promoting grass-roots deliberation with regard to a collective future begin to be emphasized on the reform agenda. NPM at this later stage is found to impose challenges to further democratization. 99 References. Adapted from the source document.

What makes urban policies more responsive to environment problems? Local politics in Taiwan is considered to have combined features of both the pro-growth urban regimes of Western democracies and the clientele network of an authoritarian regime. Such features have made the sector resistant to democratic reforms: long after the introduction of competitive elections, urban policies were still overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of power elites and thus the interest of disadvantaged groups was seriously under-represented. Nevertheless, cases of anti-growth politics in different localities indicate the possibility of democracy trickling down to the local level, thereby moving local politics beyond a mere preoccupation in rent-seeking activities towards a civic activism based on a shared agenda of social and environmental issues. How such a transformation can occur can be illustrated by the Hsiangshan Tidal Flat Development Project in Hsinchu city. That incident demonstrated that such procedural requirements as environmental impact assessment in public policy-making provided civic groups with a very powerful tool to prevent an unpopular developmental project from destroying the local ecosystem. The Hsinchu case illustrates the dynamics among institutional reforms, informal political arrangements and strategic responses of civil groups that have resulted in a transformation of traditional urban politics in Taiwan.

Public governance often involves policy tools and stakeholders from multiple sectors. How different policy tools are used may affect the chances that the values and interests of diverse stakeholders can be aligned in mutually supportive ways. Drawing on insights from behavioral and cognitive economics, this article uses the case of land and ecological conservation in Twin Lake, Taiwan, to illustrate how various interactive dynamics—hierarchical exclusion and preemptive effects—may affect efforts in land and ecological conservation involving stakeholders from multiple sectors. Such illustrations may inform the choice and sequencing of policy tools for facilitating collaborative governance.