When Morality Meets Deliberation: Impact of 2014 Consensus Conference of Stray Dog Policy
Hui-Chun Hu, Chuang-Hsien Wu
Abstract
In current society of Taiwan, morality policies such as same-sex marriage, death penalty, and surrogacy form many challenges in governmental management due to contradictions of social and moral values. Recently, deliberative turn has made deliberative democracy trendy. However, on the one hand, not much impact of public deliberation on morality policy could be found in literature review. On the other hand, researches on consensus conference pay little attention to possible effects caused by morality policy.
In recent years, animal protection gradually becomes a focus of public policy. Nevertheless, the government frequently feels lost in decision making because this issue involves complicated value conflict. As a result, the Council of Agriculture (COA) tried to solve the problem with innovative decision-making model that help realize the 2014 Consensus Conference of Stray Dog Policy.
This research takes the conference as a case study to collect and analyze data with in-depth interview, field study, questionnaire, literature review, etc., in order to probe its impact on stakeholders namely citizens, the COA, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and the executive committee of consensus conference. The study found that except for a few items failing to meet expectation, consensus conference on morality policy not only enhances civilian capacity, compassion, and comprehensive thinking, but also reduces the intensity of debate. Meanwhile, it urges the dialogue between the government and citizens, allowing them to understand the difficulty of implementation. On top of that, when the government gets in the dilemma of governability, deliberative dialogue before performing can be the key to explore bottlenecks and public opinion, as well as making future policy and program design more meaningful and concrete toward the conclusion of consensus conference.
Keywords: deliberative democracy, consensus conference, morality policy, stray dog
* Hui-Chun Hu, MA, Department of Public Administration and Management, National University of Tainan, email: s09732029@gm2.nutn.edu.tw; Chuang-Hsien Wu, Associate professor, Department of Public Administration and Management, National University of Tainan, email: wuchuanghsien@gmail.com.