4.3.4. Governance Network after 2016

Since 2016, due to the central government's Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Policy, the Forestry Bureau has clearly revised its policy and has become more open to indigenous issues regarding natural resource use and co-management. In the DFA case, the HBFB accelerated its effort toward establishing a more inclusive governance mechanism and seeking to include primary stakeholders. This effort, based on the perspective of resilience-oriented governance, is also supported and pursued by the NDHU Team. An obvious major challenge was that the indigenous communities refused to engage in dialogue and cooperation with the existing state management regime. This led to the absence of indigenous representation in the governance network. The attitude of the indigenous communities is understandable, considering their extremely negative experiences of oppression by the state. The boycott can also continue to highlight the indigenous land and natural resource rights issues that Taiwan society generally ignores. However, this strategy is also a two-sided sword for the indigenous communities themselves. Continuing to be absent from the governance process actually means the absence of opportunities for the indigenous people's perspective to be considered, leading to the continued dominance of land use governance by mainstream social groups. Indigenous communities also lost an opportunity to foster their own governance capacity. The trend of large numbers of young indigenous people moving to urban areas has exacerbated these concerns. From a longer-term perspective, indigenous people must prepare their capacity in advance of the possible enactment of the Indigenous Autonomy Act.

To address this dilemma, the NDHU Team, as a change facilitator, took initiatives to discuss it with the tribal network. Based on long-term internal dialogues of tribal leaders and the bridging role of academia, the NDHU Team was able to host a series of discussions. The tribal network, after thorough consideration, agreed to join the meetings of the DFA governance platform, under the premise that the indigenous party insisted on its land ownership claim. The internal consensus of the tribal chiefs is that they can talk with other parties on improving DFA governance, while the land rights issue can, and should, be addressed in a stepwise manner. After 2017, stakeholders representing the public sector, indigenous communities, Han community organizations, citizen scientists, and academia regularly held governance platform meetings to discuss governance issues from both scientific and local knowledge perspectives. This platform integrates various stakeholders at different governance levels and facilitates cross-scale and cross-level interactions.

Compared with the network structure prior to 2016, interactions among the multiple groups of stakeholders are now closer and more frequent, including interactions between indigenous communities and other stakeholders. Two new types of stakeholders also emerged. One is a network for a national protected areas plan, and the other is the ecotourism platform. Both these subnetworks are results of the Forestry Bureau's efforts, and the common purpose is to incorporate the DFA into the national network of protected areas while promoting ecotourism. Figure 5 presents the interaction of actors and governance network after 2016.

**Figure 5.** Governance network after 2016.
