Bridging the Socio-economic Inequality Gap in Adapting Climate Change: The Socio-Political Role of Civil Society in Taiwan

• In Event: Climate Activism and Socio-political Challenges in Democracies

Abstract

Climate change does not only encompass ecological collapse, but also directly or indirectly contributes to the enlarging socio-economic inequality which might at worst provoke armed conflict or political instability within a state or between nation-states. Under the threat of unpredictable climatic conditions, most of the conflicts are over natural resources such as water, land, fish stocks, forests, etc. To cope with the issue of securing the climate, scholars call for rethinking traditional geopolitical assumptions, promoting inclusive approaches to climate adaptation planning and advocating cooperative governance as a potential solution for horizontal networks to manage climate crisis. However, in the extant literature, we lack empirical cases to analyze the specific role that each state or non-state actor can play to mitigate socio-economic inequality across different socio-ecological contexts. Our study aims to partially fill in this literature gap by scrutinizing in specific the socio-political role of local civil society organizations in Taiwan in bridging the socio-economic inequality gap surrounding specially water resource transfer matter.
Although within the modern history of Taiwan, there was no historical precedent of armed conflict or civil unrest over water rights, Taiwan has recently undergone the worst drought in a hundred years between 2021 and 2023. If this dramatic drought is a new normal in the future life of Taiwanese people, water as an increasingly scarce resource will be at the heart of resource competition between the haves and have-nots, resulting in inevitable social protest and even conflict. Research questions including how civil society can help to mitigate the level of resource-dependent conflict and who has been excluded or should be included in the process of climate adaptation strategy in democracies will be reflected in the midst of analyzing our Taiwan empirical cases.

Reference
Welzer, H. (2015). Climate Wars: what people will be killed for in the 21st century. John Wiley & Sons.
Dalby, S. (2014). Rethinking geopolitics: Climate security in the Anthropocene. Global Policy, 5(1), 1-9.
Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., & Carmin, J. (2016). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy, 16(3), 372-392.
Piazza, A. (2021). Collective responsibility in the cooperative governance of climate change. Sustainability, 13(8), 4363.

Author

• Herlin Chien, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology