ICT Policies Making Toward Smart Living in Taiwan

Taiwan’s government has had the goal of adopting smart living enabled by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and applications. Previous Taiwanese government’s ICT policies have primarily focused on the development of ICT industries with an emphasis on hardware production. To achieve smart living goals, there was a need to shift the direction of ICT policies to promote the development of an advanced ICT infrastructure and applications to realise these smart living goals. This research analyses policy documents to better understand how Taiwanese ICT policies have supported the development and application of smart living by drawing on concepts from Actor Network Theory to explain the interaction of human and non-human actors in the execution of Taiwan’s ICT policies. The results of this research show that the execution of Taiwan’s ICT policies has been divided into focusing on different developmental areas in terms of the ICT industry, broadband and wireless infrastructure, the smart living industry and public ICT service. The major finding of this research is that Taiwan’s government is the main actor in developing Taiwan’s ICT capability and combining existing technologies toward the development of smart living