Convention Theory sees government, market, community and general public work with each other by coordination. Over time, this coordination yields faith and trust, i.e. public good for all. This research employs Convention Theory as an aid to understanding the public disputes brought by two new urban renewal policies in Hong Kong before and after the 1997 handover. It compares two major cases representing the two new policies. Through an examination of the processes of these social disputes and each patty's justifications in the different, case studies, this thesis explores the differentiation between them in terms of people's and specific communities' expectation, faith and trust in public policies under the British administration and the new Hong Kong SAR administration. It brings in historical and political contexts to illustrate how and why people frame a new public policy with established social conventions so as to judge its impacts on self, community and public interests. A new public policy that becomes a cause for public dispute inevitably jeopardises this coordination. A change in suzerainty, then, sharply exposes work of this underlying coordination and its jeopardy. This explains the very different evaluations and actions by groups facing the same policy concurrently. Further, the thesis attempts to ascertain the reasons for such difference. Time plays a crucial role in this framework, one that supplements the critical ambit of Convention Theory. The time frame for the two case studies (1988-2008) allows for a comprehensive and continuous comparison of co-ordination, confidence and tmst between communities, society and government before and after Hong Kong's suzerainty changed from Britain to China in 1997. By contextualising two cases; the first evolving over the years 1988-2004 and the second, 2002-2008, this thesis assesses the impact of this change, both in terms of the evolution of governmental and administrative bodies and their affect on perceptions of justice, faith and trust, and on people's perceptions of how this change affected both their own self-interest as well as the interest of Hong Kong per se. Hence this study applies Convention Theory and extends it through its analysis of the role and impact of contextual socio-political change during this time. The in-depth comparative analysis reveals how the pursuit of collective private interests at the community level later evolves into a pursuit for democracy, which links the community to a wider public-whose support it both solicits and wins-as a counterweight to widespread morally and politically iniquitous, unjust and indefensible outcomes. Thus, the evidence furthers Convention Theory's dynamic view of a community's collective cognition and critical capacity that transmutes from the private and familiar to incorporate the public in the transformation from a private dispute made public. This thesis argues that the social values