Adjudication Where Negotiation Is Required: Community Initiation in Taiwan's Renewable Energy Siting

ABSTRACT Renewable energy projects continue to fail at the local level despite enjoying broad public support and successive rounds of participatory reform. This article asks what institutional pattern produces this persistent gap and what kind of response would address it. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 10 actors across resident, developer, consultant, local government, and civil society positions, alongside procedural analysis of two decades of wind energy disputes in Penghu, Taiwan, the study traces how the architecture of the country's Environmental Impact Assessment generates conflict at each node where it meets the communities it affects. The pattern is specific: community encounter precedes binding decision, while binding authority sits in a body structurally removed from those who bear the consequences. The architecture offers adjudication where the situation calls for multi‐party negotiation. This diagnosis points toward an institutional response that does not adjust the procedure but changes who initiates it. The article develops the Resident Tendering Mechanism (RTM): a procedure in which communities first specify the conditions under which a project would be acceptable, and developers respond through competitive bids that, once selected, become binding. The mechanism gives communities the position of initiator that consent‐based and negotiation‐based approaches presuppose but do not themselves provide.