The Public and Private Partnership of Shuangxi District's Low-Carbon Tourism Policy

Shuangxi District, a rural area of New Taipei City, has adopted a new business philosophy of “Public-Private Partnerships” in management theory to promote its policy of low-carbon tourism, so that the implementation of its policy could effectively achieve the goal of a win-win situation in both environmental protection and local economic development. The main process of any public policy-making consists of four stages: the initialization, the planning, the implementation and the evaluation. But in the past, the major parts of public policy-making process in initiation and planning were exclusively done by public sectors, while the power of private sectors were introduced later in the implementation stage, thus the studies of the Public-Private Partnership mainly focusing on the effectiveness of policy implementation only. But in recent years with the government budget and resources decreasing, the strength of private sectors is introduced earlier at the initialization stage of the policy making process to assist the government to develop a proper public policy. However, few studies explore the roles played by the public sectors and the private sectors in the development of public policy-making and their interactive relationship. This paper studies the interaction between the public and private sectors at the implementation of the low-carbon travel policy by examining the data of low-carbon tourism policy Shuangxi District has collected from 2009 to 2013, as well as by the in-depth interviews and the results of discussion with focus groups. This paper finds the different roles played by the public sectors, private sectors and the third party in various stages in developing the policy, and their different focus points in each stage of the Public-Private Partnership. Therefore, the public sector, private sector and the third party could take advantage of the results of this paper in promotion of relevant low-carbon tourism policy so as to quickly understand the roles they play in all stages, so that the relevant interested parties of the current policy understand the views, consideration of the current situation and the possibility of future development, as well as that the researchers of the Public-Private Partnership have a better understanding of the relationship between the public and private sectors and mutual cooperation in various stages of the public policy development. The paper also finds that, despite differences occurred at the stages of initiation, planning and implementation of the low-carbon tourism policy of Shuangxi District, all the interested parties follow the principles of ""peer relations"", ""mutual participation"", ""common interests"" ""mutual trust"", ""transparency and openness"" and ""resource sharing"" as the code of conduct, so that the policy and the actual implementation of the business model move towards the expected direction, and bring positive effects to Shuangxi District in production, living, ecology and social development.