The Rise of the Environmental Litigation in Taiwan

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. The Politics of Policy

Abstract

This study attempted to understand why Taiwanese environmental movements changed their movement strategy from protests on the street to litigations in the courts. This is a new trend in Taiwanese environmental movements. In the past, the governments often used the judiciary to oppress social movements. Now, the environmental movement activists used the judiciary to purse their movement goals. In many cases, the judiciary supported the Taiwanese environmental movement activists’ claims. We called this kind of strategy as legal mobilization. In this study, we explored why the change of environmental movement strategy happened and what kind of roles judges, prosecutors, and cause lawyers played in the processes of the change of the movement strategy. We argued that three conditions contribute to the rising of the legal mobilization of the Taiwanese environmental movements: the decline of the street mobilization, the emergence of the cause lawyer community, and the success of the judicial independence reform movements. In the end, we discussed the advantages and limitations of legal mobilization of the Taiwanese environmental movements.

Author

• Chin-shou Wang, National Cheng Kung University