新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

This study adopts a decolonial perspective to explore how public participation can generate transformative potential within democratic governance. Drawing on the decolonial deliberative democracy framework proposed by Mendonça et al., it examines the constraints and possibilities of deliberative democracy in the context of colonial histories and unequal power relations. This framework emphasizes the need for deliberation to respond to localized hierarchies of knowledge and communicative forms and to value the lived experiences and expressions of diverse actors. Employing qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the study focuses on the experiences and strategies of Indigenous groups participating in eliberations on Indigenous hunting issues during the Fifth Solidarity Conference held in Taiwan in 2022. Although the conference’s deliberative process was carefully designed and facilitated by intermediary teams, Indigenous activists were able to strategically intervene in the process. This paper analyzes how these activists effectively used cultural assertions and historical witnessing to claim epistemic visibility and agenda space, thereby reconstructing their participatory positions under constrained conditions. The findings suggest that applying a decolonial deliberative lens enables marginalized participants to bring their knowledge positions and political claims to the center of discussions, which allows for more responsive spaces of participation. This study argues that only through decolonial deliberative practices can genuinely pluralistic and transformative democratic spaces be realized. It contributes to the deepening of decolonial democratic theory and offers theoretical and practical insights for ethnic politics and public policy.