Dialogue and collaboration for sustainable development in Japan and Taiwan: Epistemic foundation of partnership toward Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

This study utilized an online social survey of the public in Japan and Taiwan to examine their willingness to learn about various energy and environmental policy issues, their willingness to participate in random-sampling-based citizen dialogues about such policies, their attitudes toward having these dialogues with others who hold different views, their attitudes toward collaboration-based moral foundations, and the boundaries of such collaborations. We measured the attitude toward dialogues with a scale that was previously developed for research on citizen dialogues in Japan. Furthermore, we measured the boundaries of the collaboration by referring to the trust questionnaire in the World Values Survey, and morality was measured using the Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q). Lastly, we statistically analyzed the relationships between these variables and found that Taiwanese respondents had a stronger willingness to learn about environmental issues and participate in citizen dialogue, a more positive attitude toward having dialogues, and a broader boundary of collaboration than among Japanese respondents, as measured by trust ratios. The perceptional attributes that led to significantly lower trust ratios were educational level, profession, and economic level for the Japanese respondents, but were religion, political orientation, and economic level for the Taiwanese respondents. Finally, the openness implied by the attitude toward having dialogues and the boundaries of the collaborations measured by trust was positively associated with the willingness to participate in citizen dialogues on energy and environmental policy in both Japan and Taiwan, with specific characteristics for each society, such as speaking in Japan and listening in Taiwan.