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The Dual-Ladders system of Community Planners and Community Architects was established and propelled by the public works department of the Kaohsiung city government in 2002; it has been almost 2 years. Based on the basic principles of ¡§Bottom-up¡¨ and ¡§Community Independence¡¨ created by the whole community and driven by the current head of the public works department, Mr. Chin-Rong Lin, with the citizen participation in environment planning and reworks, it encourages the involvement of local community planners/community architects to proceed with the system of space problems diagnose and material space reworks plans. This study is to cite the Community Veranda plan pushed by the City of Kaohsiung as an example. In 2002, this plan produced five pieces of work representing the five administrative districts. Starting from September of 2003, these pieces completed one after another. These pieces were the signature pieces of the first anniversary of the Community Planners /Community Architects system in Kaohsiung. Based on this operation model and the working attitudes and the levels of satisfaction of the participating community planners and community architects toward this system, explore and discuss the major issues, such as the participation motives, role identifications, volunteer frequency, system establishment, interaction, difficult situations, and future developments. In addition, for the problems such as the special needs of local environments, the understandings of the system, the role definitions for the professionals, the differentiation of job responsibilities, the self-examination of professional ethics, the interactions among the professionals, and the interaction/integration of government agencies, use the research methods such as document reviews, case analysis and in-depth interviews, to further discover the problems within, to explore the directions for improvements and to guide the strategies for the future development of the system. This study shows that the levels of involvements of the community planners/community architects dropped after their initial participation. The reasons are mostly the practical concerns of personal interests. Besides, the construction industry shows signs of recovery, therefore the demands for these professionals increase. There is a lot of similarity between the expectations for the professionals from the system and the role identifications of the average professionals. There should be differentiation and cooperation for the two systems. Most professionals have the same way of volunteering, but it is not frequent enough. Overall, the professionals think that ¡§Bottom-up¡¨ and ¡§Community Independence¡¨ are beyond reach at this moment and there are many issues of the system need to be addressed. On top of that, lack of trainings, the mere formality of checkpoint mechanism, much needed improvement of the interactions between the professionals and the government agencies, and no leading agency for integration are also the causes for the poor operations and many obstacles of the system.

 Public participation, as a form of direct democracy, is becoming increasingly popular in the government policy-making process in China. This thesis argues that public participation in China acts neither as a supplement to a well-founded democratic system, nor as an alternative to an electoral democracy, nor even as an effective accountability politico-legal institution. Instead, contemporary public participation is an interim measure that caters to an urgent social need and provides temporary legitimacy to the state. As such, it is the first step towards further political liberalization, for which it lays a foundation. The public participation system in China has developed from its original form as a solely state-led, political campaign-oriented system in the closed era to the coexistence of three ideal-type public participation in the open era: state-led, issue-specific participation, spontaneous, issue-specific, group-based participation and spontaneous, issue-specific, individual-based participation. Public hearing, corporate lobbying and e-participation can be correspondingly treated as representative mechanisms of the three ideal-type public participation in China. In addition, the institutions of open government information and judicial redress are currently the most significant support structures for this system. Relying on the methodologies of case studies, statutory interpretation, quantitative calculation and socio-legal analysis, the thesis finds that citizens can articulate their demands on policies in public hearings, but government organs are inclined to prevent any substantial challenge to their proposed policies. Although business groups have not been conferred with any special systematic opportunity to participate in the formulation of policy, corporate lobbying contributes towards undermining the government’s monopoly in the policy-making. Citizens in e-participation take full advantage of the flexibility and anonymity of the Internet to enjoy a free, low-risk space of debating government policies and monitoring government officials. Although the implementation of the Regulations on Open Government Information has been basically satisfactory, the Regulations have failed to establish the necessary transparency for public participation. What citizens seek in public participation litigations is not only judicial redress of their grievances, but, even more significantly, de facto influence on a policy-making process taking place outside the courtrooms. The public participation system as a whole in China has a paradoxical character in contextual, structural, functional and developmental aspects. Its essential defect is to fall short of a device that makes government policymakers accountable for the output of public participation. The public participation system is used by the state as a viable trajectory for its own legitimization to secure the formal validation of government policies and to reduce the risks that it confronts in the ongoing democratization process. It is used by citizens as a locus of their self-expression values and as an incubator of their developing citizenship, also providing a prompt channel for citizens’ rightful contest. The prospects of this system and its impacts on future legitimization of the state are ultimately underpinned by citizens’ struggles for liberty and democracy, but they are directly shaped by the state’s adaptive strategy. / published_or_final_version / Law / Master / Doctor of Legal Studies

Natural resource management requires the simultaneous consideration of many different and often conflicting goals. For resource decisions to accurately reflect public values and desires, a systematic method is needed for assessing the importance which public groups attach to different management goals. Direct judgments of the importance of goals are often used as weights in additive utility models for evaluating alternative resource decisions. The overall value of each alternative is assessed by assigning it a value with respect to each relevant goal, multiplying each value by the corresponding goal's importance weight, and summing the weighted values. The validity of this procedure depends on the assumption that each goal's importance is judged independently of all other goals and is not affected by perceived conflicts between goals. Otherwise, the importance of some goals will be overestimated (double-counted). This study tested the validity of this assumption for direct judgments of the importance of forest management goals. Subjects read a description of a hypothetical national forest and rated the importance of six forest management goals on a ten-point scale. They also rated the amount of conflict between each possible pair of goals. The management scenarios were varied to represent two levels of conflict between a wilderness preservation goal and a timber production goal, and two levels of scarcity of existing wilderness areas in the region of the national forest. The conflict and scarcity manipulations were crossed, creating four conflict/scarcity conditions in a two-by-two ANOVA design. Analysis showed that both conflict and scarcity produced effects on ratings of the management goals' importance. The effects differed depending on the nature of the individual goal. In particular, goals which conflicted with wilderness preservation were rated lower in importance when the conflict was higher and when wilderness scarcity was high. This suggests that people discount the importance of goals which are perceived as conflicting with a highly valued goal, such as wilderness preservation. Importance ratings would therefore underestimate the importance of goals such as timber production if they were used as weights in an additive utility model. Further analysis revealed the presence of a single strong dimension underlying the ratings of conflict between goals. This dimension also seemed to be related to judgments of goal importance. It is possible that both conflict and importance judgments are made with respect to general cognitive attributes of the goals (for example preservation/utilization orientation). The results of this study show that direct judgments of goal importance may not satisfy the requirements of additive utility models, and that public perception of conflict between goals must be taken into account when interpreting judgments of the importance of management goals. A resource planner must be aware of what preconceptions the public holds about conflicts between goals and how these preconceptions affect the expressed importance of the goals.

Although the planning and implementation of recent transportation projects have attempted to involve the public at critical stages, the persistence of conflicts between an efficient metropolitan transportation system and the needs of residents of the quiet enjoyment of their communities suggests the need to study and evaluate the effectiveness of participatory planning. This thesis explores the role of citizen participation in urban transportation planning and proposes an evaluation framework which is tested through its application to two recent transportation projects. This framework includes nine requisites for effective citizen participation which were drawn from the literature and the review of other related transportation case studies. These requisites relate to: •Objectives Defined •Good Timing •Effective Communications •Accessibility to the Process •Government Responsiveness •Community Representation •Commitment •Credibility •Flexibility By drawing on the experiences and perceptions of key participants of each case, the thesis assessed the effectiveness of each program. An evaluation matrix which is also based on these requisites is also proposed as a planning tool. The framework is tested through its application to the Cassiar Street Connector case in Vancouver and the Kensington Avenue Overpass project in Burnaby. Selected participants covering the local community, and appointed and elected municipal and provincial officials who were involved in each case were interviewed. Through their perceptions and insights, the framework was used to assess the effectiveness of the citizen participation component of the case. Results suggest that the framework can be considered a positive step towards a more general framework and towards a general improvement in the field of evaluation. While not a conclusive or exhaustive list of requisites, the framework does offer the advantage of including those requisites which, according to both the literature and the interviewees, are fundamental to participatory planning. The proposed matrix should be considered as an effective planning tool which allows for evaluation and monitoring complete participation programs as well as focussing on a specific requisite. Furthermore, it can be used as both an interim and final report card on a citizen participation program. The matrix also lends itself to a spreadsheet application. The thesis suggests the importance of a well defined organizational structure for citizen participation such as an advisory body or supervisory committee. These structures appear to offer advantages in providing a forum for the major participants, including the affected communities, to participate effectively in the planning process. Furthermore, the thesis recommends that the Provincial Ministry of Transportation and Highways' transportation planning efforts would benefit from a strong public consultation function, to complement its engineering and technical mandates. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate