Thank you so much for your great insights, Minister Tang. We strongly hope that we can collaborate in the future toward a better future through agile governance.

Thank you so much. Finally, I would like to ask each of the participants for final comments.

Our l final question is global cooperation, namely how Japan and Taiwan or maybe other countries can cooperate on these kinds of agile governance or social innovations.

In that context, do you think that population matters? For example, in Japan, we have maybe five or six times more people in our country compared with Taiwan. Does it matter to your mechanism or not?

The next question is the agile update of rules. We advocate a model in which rules and systems are updated in an agile manner in response to changes in society or maybe the small outrages from the people, but frequent changes to rules and systems have the disadvantage of causing ...

This is why we really need social innovation which allows people to raise small outrages to the public

Let us move on to the next question about evaluation. Evaluating governance systems – whether goals are being met by current regulations or corporate practices – often requires specialized expertise, and values such as privacy and security are difficult to quantify in the first place. It depends on the person ...

Exactly.

So, first make something, experiment with that, and then more people can evaluate.

Our next question is about transparency and accountability. They are very important for agile governance or collaborative governance, but information about complex systems and technologies is difficult for many people to understand, even when the facts are presented as they are. So, when governments and companies try to ensure transparency ...

Thank you, I totally agree that tech is not only about technology and social tech innovation is sometimes much more important.

Yes, and it sometimes impedes adoption of technology for governance. Technological solutions, such as the use of AI to detect abnormalities and drones to inspect infrastructure, for example, are enabling machines to replace governance by humans. On the other hand, governance based on these new technologies takes time to gain ...

I see. Yes, that is a good combination of democracy mechanisms, social norms, and market mechanisms. You talked about social norms, which leads us to the next question. Social norms are not always reasonable or sometimes very conservative.

Actually, our next question was “How will the roles of governments, corporations, and citizens change if the ‘public’ function is extended to include all these stakeholders?” Maybe you have already answered about how citizens can contribute to public policymaking, but do you have any other perspectives about how the business ...

The reverse procurement idea is a really great idea. Maybe when we talk about deliberative democracy, we imagine that you have to get all stakeholders together at one time and conclude discussion, and once concluded, you should never change the outcome. That is maybe the old type of deliberative democracy, ...

Thank you. Actually, that is exactly our next question – how to design the governance structure to achieve these goals. First, I would like to ask about the democratic system which is the foundation of the entire governance model. I heard in Taiwan that there is a system whereby the ...

Great insight, I totally agree.

I understand that your idea is to introduce the dimension of time frames to overcome the current conflict of interest. I think it is a great idea to harmonize people’s opinions.

Thank you. Let us move on to Question 2. Our next question is about the goals of governance. The first step in conducting the agile governance cycle is “goal setting” – to set out what value we want to achieve through governance. Nowadays, there are a variety of goals to ...

I totally agree that agile governance and collaborative governance have to work together simultaneously. The question is how to actually do that. I see a lot of good practices in Taiwan, and in the following questions, I would like to ask you how you have implemented the concept into practice.

First of all, I would like to ask your opinion on our agile governance model. What do you think about the model – do you agree or disagree, and why?

After reading Minister Tang’s books and articles, and watching presentations, we found that there are a lot of common approaches between us. For example, we both address the importance of a multi-stakeholder approach and agile update of governance, as well as emphasis on transparency and accountability. Further, I found that ...

On top of that, the agile governance model calls for the “governance of governance,” which is the design of an overall governance architecture that shows how multiple governance mechanisms by each stakeholder should be combined to achieve certain goals.

The second pillar is the multi-stakeholder approach. The new governance model needs to be one in which multi-stakeholders formulate rules and solve problems in a cooperative manner rather than one in which a single government sets uniform rules. This diagram indicates how the role of each stakeholder should change in ...

First, agile governance cycles are the double cycles as indicated in this slide. The inner smaller cycle is the so-called PCDA or plan-do-check-act cycle. This is often used for business management. However, it is not enough to run the PDCA only to achieve the governance goals because the environment, risks, ...

In traditional governance, the government plays a central role in establishing and enforcing rules, and businesses and citizens were subject to those rules or enforcement processes. This vertical model is based on the assumption that society is relatively simple and predictable, and that a single entity such as the government ...

Today, I would like to talk about governance in the digitalized society with Minister Tang. In Japan, we defined “Society 5.0” as a human-centered society where high integration of cyberspace and physical space can promote economic growth and solve social issues. In the process of pursuing Society 5.0, we found ...