Lighting up communities: the worship streetlamp project in Luodong Township

ABSTRACT

To improve the performance of local streetlamp maintenance and management under the effects of the regional economic recession following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Luodong (Yilan County, Taiwan) Township Office implemented a streetlamp sponsorship project in 2010 which combining streetlamp sponsorship and the installation of worship lamps at local religious organizations. With successful promotion and marketing strategies, many local residents and merchandisers participated in the project. This study analysed the project to investigate how a Taiwanese local government office employs innovative public policies to strengthen its governance. In-depth interviews with critical policy stakeholders and geographic information system-based spatial analysis was employed as the main methods. Several suggestions are offered in the conclusion of this study.

KEYWORDS:

• Streetlamp sponsorship
• worship streetlamp project
• policy innovation
• Luodong Township
• Taiwan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yi-En Tso is an assistant professor in Department of Political Science, Soochow University. His research interests include: public policy, emergency management, local government, and governance in China and Taiwan.

Pei-Lun Li receives her Master of Art in Architecture and Cultural Heritage in Taipei National University of the Arts.

Notes

1 Tai Sui is an important feature of Chinese astrology and Taoism, and is believed to have negative effects on people.

2 We employed the nearest neighbour analysis in QGIS to calculate the number of, location of, and distance between different sponsored streetlamps to obtain the nearest neighbour index. An index approaching a value of 1 indicates greater dispersion of the sponsored streetlamps. The formula for the nearest neighbour index is as follows: average nearest neighbour = (distance/number of points); expected average nearest neighbour = 0.5 × [square root (area/number of points)].