The Ukrainian Lesson Taiwan Cannot Afford to Delay

Local governments know better than national ministries how many of their residents are not within walking distance of a shelter, which buildings are equipped with generators, and which of its firms can spare a truck to clear debris. When a territorial unit—a county, municipality, or township—holds the authority and resources to act on that knowledge, it stands a good chance of seeing its population through a major crisis. Though the war in Ukraine and the potential quarantine and blockade of Taiwan are near-canonical cases for a unified-command analytical framework, a move toward polycentricity—a system in which there are multiple decision centers all operating under an overarching set of rules—may be more productive. 

Polycentricity is not the absence of a center. Rather, it shifts decision-making on particulars down to those who are best informed. Ukraine’s 2014–2020 decentralization reform carried the country a long way toward such a system. In 2012, the Code of Civil Protection assigned local governments responsibility for protecting their populations against both natural and military emergencies. The broader 2014–2020 reform ensured that this otherwise nominal responsibility was matched by the means to carry it out. In December 2014, an amendment to the Budget Code credited local governments with 60% of the personal income tax collected within their jurisdictions. Six weeks later, the law on voluntary amalgamation merged the fragmented villages and towns into “hromadas” (communities), each with an elected council and its own executive bodies. Thus equipped and funded, a hromada could adopt its own evacuation and shelter plans and act promptly in crisis situations.

“Points of Invincibility”—the heated spaces with power generators, satellite internet, and stocked fuel and water that opened across Ukraine after Russia began striking the electricity grid—numbered in the thousands by the time Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers moved to standardize them. Resolution No. 1401, when it came in December 2022, set only a modest national floor for the equipment and supplies a Point should hold, and required each to be prepared to operate unassisted for at least three days. It left decisions about the number, locations, and work assignments to officials on the ground. In other words, without the capacity the 2014–2020 reform placed in local hands, roughly ten thousand Points would not have opened to serve communities’ needs as they arose. In the first months after the February 2022 invasion, these local governments were also the ones that organized evacuations, maintained utilities, distributed humanitarian aid, and took in millions of the displaced.

Should China escalate from threat to open use of force, Taiwan lacks the capacity for prompt, locally informed civil-defense decision-making. The two domains—civil defense and disaster prevention and protection—have followed separate institutional tracks since 1995. The Disaster Prevention and Protection Act, passed in 2000, established disaster councils at the central, county, city, township, and mountain indigenous district levels. At each local level, governments draft regional plans based on their specific disaster risks, their own councils approve (核定) those plans for implementation, and each level carries out the statutory response measures within its own competence. Taiwan’s Civil Defense Act, enacted in 2001 and amended in 2021, provides no corresponding decision-making mechanism. Although localities bear civil-defense responsibilities under the Local Government Act, the Civil Defense Act gives them no equivalent authority to determine, through locally approved plans, how those responsibilities should be implemented.

Specific Ukrainian wartime resilience measures, the Points included, have appeared among the lessons Taiwanese analysts judge fit for transfer, and to copy an action that has clearly worked is a reasonable instinct. However, Taipei might gain more from the foundation of polycentrism beneath those actions. The suggestion is not to copy one specific measure in place of another, and indeed the literature warns against adopting any program more or less intact. For example, much of Ukraine’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion presupposed an open land border with the EU, through which power generators, satellite terminals, and humanitarian aid kept arriving. On Taiwan’s decision tree, though, every scenario begins with the closing of the sea.

But polycentric governance, or a system as close to it as Taiwan could get in civil defense, runs less risk of failing to take than would any one-off measure designed for a specific context. A civil-defense policy usually succeeds if it meets three criteria: It solves a problem particular to a specific place and time, it fits local biophysical and material conditions, and it builds on existing rules and arrangements. A polycentric reform performs better than a one-off on each. Taiwan has 368 townships and districts, each with vulnerabilities that a single central prescription cannot fully accommodate. Providing localities with the capacity to make the decisions their circumstances require and to implement them would serve Taiwan, no matter what form Beijing’s coercion takes—and even if Beijing takes no action at all. 

Taiwan’s own disaster response system might supply the template for a functional equivalent in civil defense. But every year that Taipei defers the decentralization reform Ukraine took six years to carry out and instead directs its efforts toward more context-bound wartime measures is a year not spent building the local capacity it will need, whatever course events take.