Taiwan

There is no national law regulating Participatory Budgeting experiences. Taipei is the only municipality that attempts to institutionalize P.B. on a city-wide basi.

Some impressive cases were for example, in New Taipei City, the Ludi Community College quite successfully organized the immigrant residents in a thematic PB on energy-saving. Similarly, in Taoyuan city, the Serve the People Association organize and empower migrant workers in another thematic PB. But these successful cases were more a consequence of the self-exploitation of these NGO workers and projects assistants than a proof of the superiority of the outsourcing system. Therefore, the point is not that the contractors can never realize the core values of participatory and deliberative democracy, but that the outsourcing system puts structural constraints on how far they go.

The only city in Taiwan that has not adopted the outsourced model is Taipei, where more than 1,000 civil servants have been trained for and/or taken part (however reluctantly) in PB since 2015, and the internal division of labor of the city administration was slightly modified to meet the needs for implementing PB. However, the mobilization of citizens in Taipei relied too much in the district offices and village and neighborhood systems, since it is the Department of Civil Affairs (the competent authority in charge of these offices and villages) that is responsible for organizing PB. The Taipei City has been experimenting with other methods of collaborating with civil society organizations. The main problem is that it could not have allocated sufficient resources to these efforts as a result of some city councilors’ objection (another indicator of how the political society is skeptical of PB).

Most of Participatory Budgeting in Taiwan adopt an “outsourced” approach by contracting out nearly all aspects of PB to the private or voluntary sector. The government plays a minimal role, restricting itself to deciding on the amount of resources allocated to PB and to implementing certain winning projects.

Like most experiences in Europe, Participatory Budgeting in Taiwan has been characterized by a stronger top-down than bottom-up mobilization.

NGOs and social movement activists are mainly concerned about specific values and policies (e.g., environmental protection, workers’ rights, long-term care, same-sex marriage, etc.). But there is virtually no space for debates over medium-and long-term policies during the PB process in Taiwan. Even in thematic PBs that took place in several cities, the discussion is generally geared toward short-term projects instead of policies. For example, in the PB on disability employment promotion in Sanxia (2015-16) that was quite successful in terms of voter turnout, participants could only propose and discuss one-year funding projects (Yeah and Lin, 2017).

​ ​

Participatory Budgeting experiences without sufficient support from the government is far from a “state-society synergy,” but a shirking of responsibilities in the guise of public-private partnership.

In short, the outsourcing system is a mechanism that tends to create incentives for the commissioner to avoid administrative and political responsibilities, and put structural constraints on the performance of the contractor. The outsourcing system brings different actors together in an institutional context that regulates the actor’s choices and their interactions, and thus tends to inculcate certain patterns of behavior that have causal power to bring about change or resist it.

If the government plays a more direct role in PB instead of contracting it out, it will more or less be forced to learn how to do it well by, for example, systematically training the city staff about participatory and deliberative democracy, reorganizing its internal division or labor, and taking seriously the necessity of cross-agency collaboration, and so on.

The main pitfall of PB in Taiwan is the absence of active engagement among more progressive sections of civil society, the shifting of responsibilities from the state to the contractors, and the possible domination of PB by the political society.

The outsourced model of PB in Taiwan has an adverse effect on the further institutionalization of PB. PB as an isolated policy device is easy to replicate, but PB will not live up to its radical promise unless it is embedded in a larger framework of empowered participatory governance or in a multi-level “deliberative system” (Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012 in Poe Yu-ze, 2018).