Capacity assessment of integrated coastal management for Taiwanese local government

Abstract

Most of the members of the Competent Authority are from the professions such as fisheries or urban planning, which has limited capacity for integrated coastal management, and are urgent on getting into capacity development. Therefore, this paper assesses Taiwan's local government's integrated coastal management capabilities through the competency assessment framework provided by the United Nations Development Program as for bridging the gap between required capacity and existing capacity. The main findings of the study are: in terms of Institutional arrangements, the scores of "incorporating stakeholders", "budgeting, management and execution", and "making policies and strategies" are lower. For leadership level and knowledge level, each item has a higher score than 3.30, which shows that local government personnel mostly agree with the leaders of integrated coastal management and have certain knowledge; and in terms of accountability, only "whether your organization has the ability to establish a strong vision of a responsible mechanism" has a lower score of 3.03, which shows that local government personnel also agree on the level of accountability. This shows that the current management and maintaining the status quo of the Competent Authority lacks of overall planning for future coastal use. The leaders of the existing coastal management authorities should form a cross-disciplinary team to fully plan for the coast for the future. In terms of training, there should be a coastal management authority to conduct central training in the first place, and subsidies to the local government. Therefore, we are able to gradually implement integrated coastal management. SummaryIn order to promote integrated coastal management and promote the sustainable development of coastal areas, our country announced in February 2015 the implementation of the "Coastal Zone Management Act", the Ministry of Interior Affairs is responsible for the development of the overall coastal management plan, and the local government is responsible for the formulation of the secondary protection plan and the protection plan. However, only a small number of local governments in Taiwan currently have marine affairs specialized units, the rest of the county and city coastal management affairs are mostly promoted by the Urban Development Bureau or the Construction Department. Most of the members of the Competent Authority are from the professions such as fisheries or urban planning, which has limited capacity for integrated coastal management, and are urgent on getting into capacity development. Therefore, the following study assesses Taiwan's local government's integrated coastal management capabilities through the competency assessment framework provided by the United Nations Development Program as for bridging the gap between required capacity and existing capacity. The main findings of the study are: in terms of Institutional arrangements, the scores of "incorporating stakeholders", "budgeting, management and execution", and "making policies and strategies" are lower. For leadership level and knowledge level, each item has a higher score than 3.30, which shows that local government personnel mostly agree with the leaders of integrated coastal management and have certain knowledge; and in terms of accountability, only "whether your organization has the ability to establish a strong vision of a responsible mechanism" has a lower score of 3.03, which shows that local government personnel also agree on the level of accountability. This shows that the current management and maintaining the status quo of the Competent Authority lacks of overall planning for future coastal use. The leaders of the existing coastal management authorities should form a cross-disciplinary team to fully plan for the coast for the future. In terms of training, there should be a coastal management authority to conduct central training in the first place, and subsidies to the local government. Therefore, we are able to gradually implement integrated coastal management.