Rural Regeneration Five-Year Checkup, Part Four: Returning to the Bottom-Up Spirit
Rural Regeneration enters its second phase this year. The Soil and Water Conservation Bureau plans to allocate a budget of 830 million for the "regional competitive grant program," allowing county and city governments to apply. This changes the previous practice in which only communities could submit proposals. The goal is to integrate through local governments, connecting points into lines and promoting regional development. However, without relevant supporting measures, the bottom-up spirit of community self-governance in rural regeneration may be lost.
Huang Wen-jing, project manager of Peigen Planning and Design Co., Ltd., who has long been in contact with communities, believes that rural regeneration indeed needs community integration. At present, it is done by single-point communities, which is very difficult. Communities all say they lack manpower, and even the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau cannot handle it. One Tainan branch office has to manage hundreds of communities in Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pingtung and Penghu. Local governments should take district offices as units, coordinate with local development plans, and integrate communities. In the future, whether for developing tourism or holding activities, resources can then be linked together.
Many veterans of community building proposed the concept of community integration long ago, but some scholars said privately that the devolution of money and power must be matched by a corresponding assessment mechanism to ensure that funding conforms to plans. Otherwise, under Taiwan's political operations, it could very likely become a tool for local patronage.
Included in tourism plans, yet communities do not know
However, mural painting, cross-community and cross-regional integration may not be the real problem. The key is how communities can independently decide their future. Taking the county and city competitive grant program as an example, Pingtung County proposed the "Route 185 Landscape Axis Creation Plan." Provincial Highway 185 is commonly known as the "Road Along the Mountains," passing through Gaoshu, Sandimen, Wanluan, Fangliao and so on. The Pingtung County Government plans to combine rural regeneration communities along the route to promote tourism, but residents of some communities revealed that they had no idea they had been included in the plan.
How to build bottom-up community awareness is an eternal question in community building. Sun Jia-rong, former director-general of the Shanglin Community Development Association in Chiayi County, believes that in addition to subsidizing young people to return to their hometowns, attention should also be paid to cultivating talent from the middle generation. "Young people can write proposals and do online marketing, but people in their prime are the ones who best understand the community and can mobilize it."
Deliberative democracy, workshops
Tseng Hsu-cheng, former chairman of the Community Empowerment Society of the Republic of China and newly appointed deputy minister of the National Development Council, believes that the pace of promoting rural regeneration should not be too fast. Like the European Union, residents should arrange their own courses, for example learning how to build an online platform. Germany, by contrast, first teaches everyone how to hold meetings. To promote bottom-up community development, deliberation rather than review should be used so that community awareness can grow.
Japan also has a "local revitalization" program similar to Taiwan's rural regeneration. Yamaura Haruo, who has devoted more than 20 years to this field, specifically mentions the importance of "deliberative democracy" in his book Introduction to Regional Revitalization. He guides local residents and government officials to discuss together, with residents writing their goals for their hometown on sticky notes, then categorizing and evaluating their importance, and discussing the order of priorities for community affairs large and small.
Yamaura Haruo believes that local revitalization does not need very concrete numerical targets. The key is to jointly discuss a vision, perhaps for ten or twenty years later, to become a place where children and different generations can live. With this vision, residents analyze every year how much they have advanced toward this goal over the past year and how to improve, and so on. If performance is put first and goals such as "become a very large city in ten years" or "population to grow by 20% in five years" are proposed, it will fall into a government-led direction, demanding results and upward reports, and become something done just to spend the budget. (Series complete)
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