英文摘要 |
Since the late 1980s, there have been waves of debates about child protection systems among advanced industrial countries. In particular, child protection and family support regimes embraced by Anglo-Saxon countries and continental European ones, respectively, have been the focus of heated debate. Amidst the process, the two camps started to undertake policy exchange, which triggered their subsequent policy reforms. These international experiences have important implications for Taiwan's own policy development. Having acknowledged this, an institutional approach is adopted in this comparative-historical paper to address two related research questions. The first concerns investigating the politics of child protection reforms in the case countries of the two aforementioned regimes following policy exchange. The other pertains to inquiring how international lessons have shaped Taiwan's policy reforms as well as its related challenges in respect of policy implementation. With regards to the two major research findings, first, it is elicited that the convergence thesis of international child protection regimes put forward by some child welfare scholars is not sustainable. To the contrary, the analysis based on an institutional approach discovers a continuing diversity of policy regimes. As to the second finding, it is demonstrated that with heavily reliance on the importation of American reform experiences, Taiwan's child protection regime has been transformed into a managerialist one. Regardless whether this arrangement is appropriate or not, it cannot be ignored that the inadequacy of system inputs could have serious repercussions regarding the capacity and efficacy of the post-reform child protection system on the island. |