Water Governance, Land-Use Control, and Local Development in a Reservoir Catchment: The Pinglin Tea Industry, Taiwan

Local development in reservoir catchments is often sensitive and contested, as drinking-water protection frequently imposes strict constraints on land use and local livelihoods. This study examines the tea industry in Pinglin, a rural area in northern Taiwan located within the Feitsui Reservoir catchment, to analyze how local economic development has interacted with environmental policy—particularly water resource conservation—and how these interactions have shaped tea landscapes over time. Using a socio-ecological systems (SES) framework, the study employs qualitative methods including literature review, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS). These approaches document landscape and industry change and frame the tea industry as an outcome of interactions between land governance and water governance.

Tea cultivation in Pinglin was introduced during the Qing dynasty, consolidated under Japanese colonial rule, and expanded after World War II, eventually becoming one of Taiwan’s best-known tea-producing regions. Transportation infrastructure emerged as a key driver of this process. Successive mobility corridors—from the Danlan Ancient Trail, to the Beiyi Road, and later an extensive network of industrial roads built between the 1970s and 2000s—connected producers to markets, supported settlement formation, and aligned Pinglin’s tea economy with Taiwan’s broader economic growth. During the 1980s and 1990s, these dynamics transformed a diverse agricultural mosaic of rice paddies, orchards, and tea gardens into landscapes dominated by tea plantations.

This development trajectory shifted with the completion of the Feitsui Reservoir in the 1980s, which supplies drinking water to the Greater Taipei metropolitan area. The designation of a water source protection zone introduced increasingly strict land-use regulation, constraining the expansion and transformation of tea production and raising concerns related to residential land rights and housing justice. A second turning point followed the opening of National Freeway No. 5 in 2000, which reduced Pinglin’s role as a transportation node. Declining visitor numbers, population out-migration, and long-standing demographic aging combined to intensify economic challenges and weaken the social foundations of the tea industry.

Local actors responded through multiple adaptation strategies, including mechanization, organic farming, cooperative production arrangements, and tourism-oriented initiatives. However, many of these efforts were limited by stringent land-use controls that restricted diversification and spatial reconfiguration. At the governance level, limited channels for local political participation further constrained adaptive capacity. Following administrative restructuring in 2010, local representation in this small-population area remained weak, contributing to a governance configuration increasingly oriented toward external and centralized water-resource priorities, with bottleneck effects on local development.

Overall, the Pinglin tea industry emerges not simply as an outcome of environmental conditions, but as a dynamic product of transportation infrastructure, central policy intervention, land-use regulation, and local power relations—most critically, strict land-use control under reservoir water governance. Future work should both examine land-use–water quality relationships and explore environmentally friendly practices and locally applicable water-governance approaches. Strengthening meaningful local participation, through participatory platforms and more representative governance arrangements, may help advance reservoir catchment management that better balances conservation goals with equity and local development needs.