Environmental Movement in Democratizing Taiwan (1980–2004): A Political Opportunity Structure Perspective

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, for the past 20 years, Taiwan has been riding on the global wave of democratization. In place of single-party dominance by the Kuomintang (KMT) over 50 years, a genuine system of party politics and contested elections gradually took root, with the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) victory in the 2000 presidential election as the climax. Past scholarship on Taiwan’s transition tended to stress its controlled gradualism and the willingness to reform on the part of KMT leadership (Huntington 1991, 125–140). Newer studies have focused on the role of civil society, or ‘‘popular contentions’’ involved in the political transition (Diamond 1999, 235). While ‘‘bringing civil society back in’’ is important in order to understand Taiwan’s transition toward democracy, a crucial question of how social movements act upon as well as are influenced by the shifting political terrain between civil society and political elites. This chapter analyzes themore-than-two-decades development of environmentalism in Taiwan in order to understanding the social movement dynamics in the political transition toward democracy. Simply put, environmentalism is a collective pursuit of better living quality. This definition, however, overlooks the fact that environmentalism comes in ‘‘many varieties.’’ Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997, 16–21), argue that the Northern environmental movement has focused on preserving the wilderness, while their poorer movements in the South have evoked themes of justice and