Public servants' attitudes toward sustainable citizen participation: a case study from the water resources agency in Taiwan

The study aims to profoundly examine how the public administrators' attitudes towards citizen participation (CP) could affect their decision on the implementation of a meaningful CP that would reciprocally impact on the public trust level and water policy outcomes for sustainable development in Taiwan. The paper presented a case study exercising the long-term CP projects operated by a water resource agency in Kaohsiung City of Taiwan to evidence that the officials' positive attitudes toward CP could better the CP quality and outcomes that could improve public trust then accordingly achieve the policy goals of sustainability. The major practical contribution of the research is that it provided much empirical narrative data showing the causal relationship between public servants' attitude and a meaningful CP to advance policy outcomes through a qualitative research that has not been examined from the past studies.