Taiwan is a small island with more than 24 native language groups. Through imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, their pre-colonial knowledge and social structures have been destroyed and marginalised, while territories and resources have been consumed and disposed of by the growing needs of contemporary society without their engagement in the decision-making process. After these invasions and dispossession processes, the indigenous people continue to claim their right to access their homeland and natural resources. They fight for environmental, social, and economic justice. Since being liberalised in 1988, Taiwan has begun to develop a deliberative and plural society. However, this western knowledge- and Chinese value- based planning and management discourse pays attention on binary boundary, such as Chinese/indigenous, urban/nonurban, culture/environment rather than its hybridity and difference. Indigenous land and resource arrangement knowledge that has been exercised according to their worldview for generations has been largely ignored throughout modern planning practices.
The Taiwanese government was working on democratisation with a plural society, through the Indigenous People’s New Partnership, signed in 1999 (nation to nation), presidential apology in 2016, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Taiwan in 2016. This process works to repair the relationship between the government and the indigenous peoples in the name of justice. The Spatial Planning Act of Taiwan opens a little room for discussion in planning and management with a culturally appropriate solution and ways by which to empower indigenous people to plan themselves in their territories. This discussion uses two cases study areas (Thao and Katratripulr) to reveal the reality of their: historical dispossession, forms of indigenous resistances and governances, state-controlled and community-based planning processes, conflicts with contemporary cultural practices and individual narratives. However, the Spatial Planning Act might eventually lead to another extinction with engagements of just voices and stakeholders. This thesis starts from a different ontology to think and examine structural, historical and hegemonic realities. The examination reflects the scientific language of objectivity and neutrality, and the complicity of planning theory, market-led development, property right, legalisation, and institutional system of decision-making to propose explanations and unsettle plural, agonistic, and radical spaces.