Application of Social Choice Mechanisms to Environmental Governance: An Experimental Approach

• Main Authors: Chang Hui-Ying, 張慧英
• Other Authors: Lai Shih-Kung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13276294718976665424

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 不動產與城鄉環境學系 === 94 === In Taiwan, the executive administrations for the governance of environmental and common property resources are responsible for making policies and supervising management activities. The implementation of the environmental policies influences the related rights and interests of the general public, but the administrative units often pay much attention to the technological aspects, ignoring public opinions and not being able to adopt the suggestions from the general public to examine and revise the policy contents. Under democratic politics, the formulation and implementation of policies should reflect public opinions in order to fulfill the democratic principle. Social choice mechanisms collectively make relevant decisions about provision of public goods, not only dealing with environmental issues, but also embedding public opinions in the resulting decisions preferred by the general public. The representative government with log-rolling institutions proposed by Haefele (1973 ) is a social choice mechanism to solve the environmental governance issues, and shows that a two-party system could, under the majority rule, result in decisions on environmental issues that would be identical to the decisions made if all individuals vote directly, taking advantage of vote-trading. The present research refers to the social choice mechanism that Haefele puts forward, and applies it to Taiwan’s environmental governance issues, investigating whether it is operationally feasible and whether the resulting decisions are consistent with Haefele’s theory through designing and conducting an experiment.