List of Acronyms
Global Urban Observatory (GUO)
Urban Governance Index (UGI)
Millenium Development Goals (MDG)
Global Observatory of Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD)
The Philippines is beautiful and rich; it has the potential to really be a functioning government with an expanding economy. Filipinos are people with compassion, hope, and beauty, yet beauty does not waiver other governments from overlooking past inaccuracies and mistakes of past administrations. The local infrastructure is plagued by crime, corruption, and struggle, and no public support to break out a system lacking of adequate public education, an effective criminal justice system, or accountability of undemocratic government-fund allocations.
In result, the judges viewed her naïve response as a lack of humility and depth, perhaps. Maybe the Philippines is perfect. Or maybe it was pride to cover up the inevitable act of human error or initial response to deny any wrongdoing. Some of the best lessons can be learned from mistakes whether spanning on an individual case, or to organizational and governmental decisions. Or maybe it’s the fear of being viewed of having flaws. This is something that is embedded in our culture.
Urban Governance Index Indicators
5 Points of Reference for Urban Governance Index
Accountability- According to field test reports and the conceptual foundation of the UGI, Accountability implies that mechanisms are present and effective for transparency in the operational functions of the local government; responsiveness towards the higher level of the local government; local population and civic grievances; standards for professional and personal integrity and rule of law and public policies are applied in transparent and predictable manner.
- Formal Publication of contracts, tenders, budgets and accounts
- Independent audit
- Control by higher Levels of Government
- Codes of conduct
- Disclosure of Income and Assets
- Facilities to receive complaints
- Anti-corruption Commission
Participation- According to field test reports and the conceptual foundation of the UGI, Participation in governance implies mechanisms that promote strong local representative democracies, through inclusive, free and fair municipal elections. It also includes participatory decision-making processes, where the civic capital, especially of the poor is recognized and there exists consensus orientation and citizenship.
- Elected Council
- Local elected mayor
- Voter turnout
- People’s Forum
- Civil associations
Need to prove strong local representative democracy with the help of the local officials and community participation.
Equity- According to field test reports and the conceptual foundation of the UGI, Equity implies inclusiveness with unbiased access (be it for economically weaker sections, women, children or elderly, religious or ethnic minorities of the physically disabled) to basic necessities (nutrition, education, employment, and livelihood, health care, safe drinking water, sanitation and others) of urban life, with institutional priorities focusing on pro-poor policies and an established mechanism for responding to the basic services.
- Citizen’s charter
- Women’s Councilors
- Pro-Poor Pricing Policy
Effectiveness- According to field test reports and the conceptual foundation of the UGI, Effectiveness of governance measures the existing mechanisms and the socio-political environment for institutional efficiency (through subsidiary and effective predictability) in financial management and planning, delivery of services and response to civil society concerns.
- Local Govt. Revenue per capita
- Predictability of Transfers
- Published Performance Standard
- Consumer Satisfaction Survey
- Vision Statement
Security- According to field test reports and the conceptual foundation of the UGI, Security of governance implies that there are adequate mechanisms/process/systems for citizens’ security, health and environmental safety. It also signifies there are adequate conflct resolution mechanisms through the development and implementation of appropriate local policies on environment, health and security for the urban areas.
The Philippines has been investigated by the global campaign on urban governance which I want to test by site visits to improve the local conditions through capacity building and to improve the linkage of policy objectives based on the indicators and signify the principle of good governance.
Background
UN-HABITAT launched the Global Campaign on Urban Governance in 1999 to support the implementation of the Habitat Agenda and to eradicate poverty based influx by good governance and promote the Millennium Development Goals. The UGI was expected to catalyze local action to improve the quality of urban governance at the LOCAL LEVEL. NAGA Good Governance.
Relevance of GOLD as a potential data collection channel
Proposed components of GOLD
- Contribute to the development of indicators
o Application of the UGI framework in identifying local relevant indicators.
o With assistance from UCLG, promote the UGI and indentifying capacity building needs of cities that emerge a to and fro application of the index.
- Information gathering on decentralization and state of local governance
o With technical assistance from UN-HABITAT, train association of local authorities in data collection methods and analyses.
- Development of regional observatories
o With assistance from UCLG, mobilize regional associations of local authorities as the main collectors of data on local democracy and decentralization.
- Awareness raising
o Important for monitoring trend on governance and sharing experience from other cities.
Benchmarks are required on the basis of addressing the four principles (effectiveness, equity, participation and accountability) and the overall index could be established for various cities as measures of performance monitoring. Within the training, benchmarks would be used for action planning to achieve those targets.
Efforts of Quezon City to move towards good governance? People in slum communities can be relocated and can be improved through urban revitalization.
Aims of SPRING Research Series:
How decentralization and Governance Shape Local Planning Practice
- Rhetoric, Reality and the Lessons from the Philippines
- Study aims to define in what direction the process of decentralization has moved and to what extent 10 years after the onset of reforms.
o Investigate the degree to which local planning processes carry forward planning styles reflecting new and innovative forms of decentralized governance.
o Looks at how effectively the process have provided learning or political, social and intellectual capital for the agents involved.
o Trace the changing role of spatial concepts in the process of local plan making is of particular interest.
Objectives:
- Broaden the understanding of the opportunities and limitations of decentralization reforms for sub-national (local) governance
- Uncover the changes in local planning practice as a social process and particular style of local governance and of the direction they are currently taking
- Examine trends in the specific role of spatial concepts and practices in local governance and of the direction they are currently taking
- Examine trends in the specific role of spatial concepts and practices in local governance
Aim are practical, his study was focused on the theoretical content of planning. It followed the views of (Forester, 1989) “theory is what planners need when they get stuck”, his study seeks to establish a dialogue between local planning practice under the conditions of decentralization and new governance concepts in the Philippines and contemporary planning theory.
Objectives are to:
- Review the suitability of communicative planning theory as a frameworks to guide decentralized planning practice in the reform context, with it’s opportunities and limitations
- Examine how this theory applies to the case of decentralized planning practice in the Philippines
Limitations of the Urban Governance Index
How can you say it was good? How can you explain local level to the people who control the government? We should define LOCAL LEVEL as the governance on a social, moral, or intellectual standard in a real or notional hierarchy of the state, preferably on-site.
1) The UGI is a work in progress and is presented on a conceptual basis
2) Larger sample of the city is necessary
3) Starting point for local adaption and development yet still leads to incomplete assessments
4) Applied research and tool development purposes as primary focus
5) City data does not differentiate between urban agglomeration, metropolitan and municipal areas. (2004)
Good governance is not based on performance of the state but of the mayor to defend the poor in court.
The relationship of decentralization, governance and local planning in the Philippines states that in the late 20th century, the country experienced a global movement for government reforms in the form of a development strategy and a public sector reform model. The development strategies at the macro-economic scale were unable to solve development problems.
Culture: context of governance and planning à Indicators
Civic culture, planning culture, organizational culture, governance culture, social capital and cultural traditions.
Advice from Tito Al
Project Inter Agency Committe
this was made for the victims of the fire last week
this was on september
11:52am
Undoubtedly the project is going to offer a much better and improved quality of life for them. Issues to cover with the squatters are 1) Distance between their homes and their work. How does this present a problem to them and their families. 2) Cost of living conditions that made it more expensive to live in the project. 3) Availability of water, electricity, sewage and trash collection facilities. 4) Proximity to Hospitals, schools, transportation facilities. etc.
Availability of sports and recreation facilities. Availability of work. This are only some of the content of your questionnaire.
Reflecting on the context of Philippine Urban Management, how globalization led to the decentralization of government powers to help the community, who have the power of making decisions; I wondered how the power of information and income may curb widespread poverty.
I shall first reflect on the meaning of urban management; It is the undertaking of sustained responsibility for achieving particular objectives, with the hopes of development for economic growth/base or social change/justice, with regards to the actions of a city for its residents. I wonder about the features of urban management such as its barriers to the work force which require much needed inertia, and how we can eliminate our confusion about un-sustained actions to strategies and proposals that do not fit. We have to adjust our priorities by cooperating with the community to avoid conflict between the different actors’ direction, efforts and objectives. We have to coordinate the different perspectives and points of views of our urban divisions towards better conditions for all.
As I reflect on the movement of information, its context and content dissected, criticized and disseminated by tests and experiments, I understood this movement as a share of experiences, skills and knowledge. The people, its citizens, our communities, should cooperate in sharing vital information which shape strategic policies through the help and motivation from our government. One objective of urban management is empowerment, or bringing about the capabilities of others, where leadership roles can emerge from the public sector as social workers and non-violent activists. People are not meant to be led by relations of patronage or clientelism, we have to participate in budgeting our allotted LGU funds to eliminate the exploitation of the poor. The government is our producer and provider, it knows the necessary priorities for our country and it will find strategies in building mechanisms for feasible proposals, holding them accountable for transparency. I ponder on the difference of governance an government, we are actors in the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed; governance is the action to manage and steer society, it is up to us if the quality of this relationship is good, this is good governance.
Globalization has helped our society yet its speed must be dictated by our culture and values as Filipinos. Culture in the extent of local “bayanihan” efforts and values as to finding proper strategies dictated on the basis of complete trust. It is a community responsibility, to be sensitive in catering to the needs and priorities of our citizens who have rights to the city. We can all have a better standard of living if we take the appropriate speed in our journey to develop the country.
Decentralization in a nutshell, is the decrease of powers of national government to the local and regional level; while Devolution is the decrease of powers of national government to semi-independent government agencies. As we empower local units which motivate the community to participate, I wonder about the decisions of our private sector where de-regularization without proper research on return become detrimental… or successful like the Community Mortgage Program (CMP) which is a socialized housing program that provides community ownership. I then wondered about the privatization of necessary services such as water, electricity and roads where the poor may have subsidies and pay less for the sake of the rich; this is where partnerships with diverse companies can screen and help those with low-middle incomes through legal-binding agreements and contracts.
I wondered how healthy the increased competition of goods be in this global market economy; as firms compete funds will be lost. Who wants a loser? Let’s join the winning team, we should judge and monitor the private sector, and maybe penalize them based on measurements of performance. A Public Private Partnership (PPP) is a government service or private business venture that is funded and operated through a partnership of government and one or more private sector companies. Through joint agreements or PPPs, we can Build, Operate and Transfer direct benefits to the impoverished society, where poverty has multi-dimensional aspects from single mothers in shanty towns to child laborer in our streets.
I reflected on government and public finance, in a nutshell, its the flow of sending and receiving money. You have income tax where you send money to the national government which then sends it to our provinces, districts and tribal communes. You will have business licenses, Value Added Tax and real property tax which the local government should manage properly to make profit with the help of loans from legal entities. The private sector may play important roles in this flow of money, as they get involved with loans and bonds; a bond is like borrowing with a rate, or in other words, a risk when there is a collapse to the capital market. We should spur the sales and production of the private sector, with the help of incentives from the government, to benefit the public sector. We should nurture our Community Based Organizations and offer donations, develop partnerships and get organized in our spending.
Reflecting upon the management of our urban economy, I think of the city as the source of our employment, where it is our job to drive the country towards a healthier and wealthier environment through potential industries of service and manufacturing geared in detailed tasks for future-productive and existing-productive activities. There are government sectors of service, such as banking and tourism, and sectors of manufacture, like small paper-cup businesses to high-technology parks; this is an example of economy of scale, once we as a nation learn how to apply technical knowledge with the help of high-technology in all sectors, we then will begin doing and developing into a research and resource based view. The urban planning of the country is fragmented due to market forces and splintering urbanism, it grows from its core city Manila and expands outwards as it should, since we are islands which should mature in compact ways to safeguard our depleting resources and dying rivers. We have to start growing with our government and seeing the results of its urban design. We have to aim towards sustainability of the society and do this efficiently by knowing “the what” and “the how” in the relationship between resources and outcomes. We as citizens are the engines of development in our country, our culture is coordinated with our city’s development, thus we have to be responsible and accountable for our actions which will affect our orientation of the future of the country.
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Stop, look and listen to the cries of the poor after the demolition of their homes. They cry like you and me, people with aching hearts, bearing a culture of Philippine poverty. Poverty is the consequence of income differential in society and is defined in its absolute terms as the state in which an individual lacks the resources necessary for subsistence. The demolition of illegal settlements without the reassurance of relocation, safety of tenure, social welfare and vital funds for building a house and starting a business to pay his debts; will ensue violence from the resisting poor. To understand their situation and how this came about, we must first reflect on the multi-dimensional aspects of our fragmented city, negotiated citizenships, lost cultures and a greater understanding of the impoverished filipino people.
We all agree that our country has and will face global ignominy due to the consequences of global restructuring and the failures of past administrations to counter corruption in its ranks. Our country is still under development yet the number of its cities grow, fragmented as they abound and fade. Due to the selective process of push and pull factors, gender equality and mass unemployment; rural to urban migration will always proliferate once mechanisms are in place. The structural adjustment program adopted by Asia shows how the state has withdrawn from catering to social issues. Accordingly, non-government organizations take into consideration this new form of clientelism due to high expectations and demands; yet they do not consider the hard times we the citizens need to function, live and work, in the context of such rapid globalization. The poor will survive as they seek alternatives to sustain themselves, even through an informal means of livelihood.
The mutations of citizenship in our country is caused by mis-guided planning, scam constructions and unprofessional development schemes causing karmic results that has already affected real lives. Our primitive and barbaric allure of being labeled as third world has unduly guided us to what we think civilization should be, our countrymen’s mutated eyes journeying through a euro-centric point of view; we are best described as countries of the south, influenced by indifferences based on societies and cultures embracing neo-colonialism. Neo-colonialism was born from the creation of economic blocks which serve as safe borderless economies, our membership an achievement during the Arroyo administration. The current global trend of oversees Filipino workers who live away from their families, subsisting for our country through hard earned remittances is an indication of the consequences of immigration; to the “quality” of their life.
We must look and understand that these poor citizens still have rights, yet as inhabitants in an impoverished society, they are trapped in the urban city without the comfort of belonging. By looking clearly and listening to how people relate and interact in our society can we then identify them into the different aspects of our daily urban lives. We should make sense of it all, only then can we will begin to accept their “sense of being” in relation to our hustling society; we should apprehend how they fit in society according to the different social, cultural and national points of views. An impoverish debased society will have many factors that will affect the identity of it’s destitute residents. It may be based on formal to informal relationships; such as dealings with their landlords as maids and drivers to rackets with contraband in the red light districts, national sports like basketball, billiards and bowling, to melodious original Filipino music and “motherly care-giving” bred by our faith; I pray “bayanihan” still exists in their society so the masses can relate and interact through non-violent activism. The impoverished can always informally identify themselves into the different aspects of our personal lives. Once we make sense of it all, we will begin to accept their sense of being in relation to society, and we will then understand how they fit in society according to our divergent social, cultural and national point of views.
Globalization is the catering of goods and services around the world, it is the sharing of ideas, culture and technology. I shall reflect on James Holston’s context of globalization, that our cities are spaces of citizenships where the insurgent poor can win their rights by exercising social power from the bottom up, these marginal citizens can be organized, mobilized and collected as social movements of protest against corruption, fraudulence and covetousness. Yet there are also significant consequences to the globalization of democracy for it allows the generation of new urban citizenships. As of today, democracy towards equality and freedom has become a global value since it is adopted by mostly all diverse societies and cultures. Political definitions alone are inadequate to evaluate democracy and that political democracies do not necessarily produce a democratic rule of law since it aims to integrate the social sphere but imposing a future embodied in city planning, development, law and government. Formal membership in the state is not sufficient to prevent exclusion of, in fact or law, from the rights of citizenship and effective participation in its organization. This will result in destabilization of dominant regimes as the insurgent remain entangled and entrenched in their plight. These dominant historical regimes of citizenship produce and limit possible counter formulations to the challenges of democracy. The localization of global forces of capital, labor and democracy in city regions may generate an urban citizenship at fundamental odds with principles of national membership. The urban poor experience and its engagement with global democracy may build the basis of a new kind of urban citizenship. Democracy is questionable, constructed and reconstituted. Right are negotiated and the values of belonging, identity, equality and differences are to be reconstituted until they are resolved, hopefully through participatory means.
To be a citizen, one must be part of a city as an active member, this means that you have to contribute and have a common interest as a right. These rights are beneficial, but if we consider globalization it could also be detrimental. There are times the rights of impoverished people are trampled upon, this is due to the speed and demand of globalization which breeds segregation amongst the people in their way of life or understanding of it. We believe in the provision of the necessary such as schools and hospitals, yet deprivation and exclusion of areas from these necessity services will suddenly and surely happen; and when it does, the association of ones devoid identity is created inside the city. These new identities embraced by the poor, may it be for belonging, membership or communal interests, may still be aimed towards the diminishing role of the government. Due to the globalization of capital where money has more power than state, rules are being forced to change. Capital has no territory, and money will always move, the state adopting a neo-liberalistic system will not regulate the economy for everyone. Due to the adjustment of laws for the upper class elite, the state will offer flexible citizenships in the creation of borderless job opportunities. Flexibility, mobility and entrepreneurship now become valuable mechanisms the impoverished can capitalize on.
We have to reflect on the growing urban under class, the guerrilla movements which may pose as a political threats in government destabilization. There are four types of poor people according to the theory of poverty. These are the passive poor who aren’t capable yet make ends meet; the powerless yet surviving poor who require empowerment at the cost of their selves or others; the political poor in their urban territorial movements participating in party politics and elections to have a share in urban services for collective consumption; and the resisting poor who are sensitive to injustice and pray for better days. Ours streets are arenas for politics, here the poor engage in passive networking in sites of contestation; factor in the rising rate of population growth, splintering urbanization and baseless economic spending and you have your recipe for poverty.
People are wrong to judge the poor as a whole, we require good governance, sufficient housing stock and critical mechanisms for job generation and poor self-help. People will always quietly encroach; it is a silent, projected and pervasive advancement to improve their lives, expanding their space to better their position. Due to government restructuring, agricultural failure, social hardships, civil war and displacement, also called zones of conflict, the rights to the city is not given to everybody but only for it’s citizens; it just depends on how the city is matures through history and governance.
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