From Private to Community Engagement

--How Taichung City Guides District Offices to Engage in Community Development

Authors:

Shih-Yue Lu (Director, Taiwan Community Alliance; Project Director, Taichung City Community Development Consultation and Promotion Office)

Min-Ting Huang (Executive Director, Association of Community-activists in Taiwan; Project Manager, Taichung City Community Development Consultation and Promotion Office)

Evolution of government administrative mechanisms for community development

It has been over 22 years now since the comprehensive community development policy has been proposed and implemented. However, with the long absence of most townships or district offices from the government’s administrative mechanisms promoting community development, this policy emphasizing “bottom-up involvement” and “public participation” has become an ironical paradox. Apparently, the contents of Taiwan’s community development policy was neither perfect nor complete right at the beginning. After the policy was launched by the public sector, it has gradually been enriched by “rolling wave corrections” through the practice, reflection, debate and feedback of the voluntary sector—including scholars and experts, social groups/civil associations, base-level communities.

This article will omit this part and only give a rough description of the government administrative mechanisms promoting community development. At the end of 1994, the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA, now Ministry of Culture) proposed a comprehensive community development policy. At the beginning, the CCA only emphasized plans for increasing or improving local performing facilities and extending cultural and art activities to the rural areas with its own budget. It was not until the 921 earthquake in 1999 that devastated base-level communities in environmental, cultural, ecological, industrial, and social welfare terms that a comprehensive community reconstruction became extremely urgent and a point-based “community planning” gradually became a normal mechanism of government departments to promote community development across Taiwan from the Jiji earthquake reconstruction area. However, most of such projects were implemented through “representative operations”, that is, proposals made by colleges, universities or social groups/civil associations and guidance for citizen community participation. After the Association of Community-activists in Taiwan (ACT) linked civilian reconstruction teams, scholars and experts to give policy feedback, the 921 Earthquake Post-Disaster Recovery Commission, Executive Yuan, was convinced to establish four community development centers in the reconstruction areas by the CCA in April 2002. Later in July 2002, four community development centers for the non-disaster reconstruction area were established, respectively, in northern, central, southern and eastern Taiwan to provide training and guidance for communities to make proposals and implement community development plans. The first author was then the project director of two community development centers, each in the reconstruction and non-reconstruction areas.

In 2003, the Executive Yuan proposed the “New Hometown Community Building Project” to officially extend the community development business to nine government agencies. In 2005, the Executive Yuan launched the Six-Star Plan for Healthy Communities, which involved 13 government agencies and 60 sub-projects with a total budget exceeding NT$10 billion. Based on the operational success of the eight community development centers in each of the reconstruction and non-reconstruction areas, during 2004-2005, the CCA guided the cultural affairs bureaus of local (county and city) governments to establish their own community development centers, which have been operating until now. In the following years, Executive Yuan agencies followed this example to establish their own community development training teams to promote community development in the different regions and even local governments (the name varied based on individual plans/projects), thus setting up the model for introducing intermediary organizations to the community development policy and establishing long-term training and guidance mechanisms. Concluding this process, it took about ten years for the CCA to spread the comprehensive community development policy to majority central government agencies and from central government agencies to local governments.

Why were most townships and district offices absent from the mechanisms promoting community development over time?

However, what have the base-level government administrative agencies, townships and district offices, that are closed to communities done for community development? After the central government agencies approved the budgets and plans of community development for local government agencies, why did the latter bypass local townships and district offices and directly subsidized individual communities to implement related plans/projects? Socially, we all know that community development emphasizes “bottom-up” involvement. However, government agencies promote it in a “top-down” manner. In view of this, the CCA, which has been the initiator and promoter of community development, thus launched the “New Hometown Community Building Project Phase II” in 2009 to include community development contents in government administrative measures. Apart from integrating resources across agencies of local governments, the community development participation of townships and district offices was the focus. However, although the “New Hometown Community Building Project Phase III” has been started, most townships and district offices were still indifferent to community development and unwilling to propose any plans. In addition, most local governments (cultural affair bureau) simply assembled a few district offices to propose the pilot points with a perfunctory attitude.

The possible causes included: (1) insufficient workforce—a proposal suggests additional workload, making township or district staff reluctant to make any; (2) absence of corresponding windows in the present establishment: as there is no corresponding window in the townships or district offices, project documents from the cultural affairs bureaus of local governments are avoided by the social affairs section, civil affairs section or the library; (3) limitations in reality: the MOC and local governments (cultural affairs bureaus) plan budgets rather conservatively due to the limitations in reality, thus forming a vicious circle; (4) lack of a training and guidance mechanism: most local governments (cultural affairs bureaus) do not have a training and guidance mechanism for township or district offices but include related work to the community development center, apart from failing to differentiate the training and guidance strategy for townships or district offices, this has resulted in training ineffectiveness and difficulty to develop a professional team.

A predicament is the result of accumulation. Neither townships or district offices nor local governments (cultural affairs bureaus) should assume full responsibility for the above causes. In reality, there are many differences in training civil servants of townships and district offices and training and guiding community staff and volunteers. As the former is submissive to bureaucracy, parochialism and confrontation of sections within the administrative system, they must put themselves in others’ shoes to propose solutions with empathy. In the following sections, the authors will share their experience for public reference.