ABSTRACT
Urban governance is recognized as a vital component of the human response to climate change. However, a diverse urban ecosystem and the associated climate hazards impose great challenges on an urban climate response and assessment. Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan, experiences these challenges and is the focus of the present chapter. We apply social network analysis (SNA) and text mining techniques to comprehend the complexity of the social ecosystem and assess its stakeholder interactions with the goal of offering suggestions for Tainan’s climate governance as part of the Taiwan Climate Change Adaptation Technology (TaiCCAT) program. Stakeholders were identified and categorized into seven actors: central government, municipal government, district office, private sector, NGOs, academic experts, and individual citizens. Analysis in this chapter reveals three findings: first, that a municipality-led style of governance is prominent in Tainan; second, that the central and municipal governments, district offices, and expert sectors acted cohesively in resource exchange and cooperation networks; and third, that the actions of municipality and district level offices are strongly impacted by network inertia resulting in ineffectual responses to natural hazards over the long term. We conclude that NGOs can and should play a much more supportive role in the planning and execution of water disaster prevention and recovery in Tainan.
