Going Vertical: Citizen-Led Reform Campaigns in the Philippines

"These theoretical propositions on what kind of strategy works best for strengthening accountability and instituting reforms are built on a review of evidence. As such, they are ripe for testing, deepening and enriching through application to particular country contexts, and through sharing and 'truth-testing' with social and political actors engaged in exercising voice and claiming accountability."

The Philippines has a long history of state-society engagement to introduce reforms in government and politics. Transparency, participation, and accountability (TPA) to make governments responsive and effective is a reform solution that has been popular in recent decades. Several theoretical propositions on which strategic approaches work best for social accountability (SAcc) initiatives - to make governance more responsive, to introduce policy reforms, and to make government more accountable - have been put forward, including the idea of vertically integrated civil society monitoring and advocacy. This multi-authored research report uses vertical integration as a framework for examining 7 civil society SAcc initiatives in the Philippines, looking at what made them successful and how the gains they realised can be deepened and sustained. This work was supported by a grant from Making All Voices Count, and was conducted in 2015 and 2016 by a team of researchers from the Philippines through the Government Watch (G-Watch) Programme in the Ateneo School of Government, in partnership with the Accountability Research Centre at the American University, Washington DC, United States, and the Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom.

In section 1, Joy Aceron and Francis Isaac set the scene for the research, explaining the background to the study, case study selection, and the use of vertical integration as a conceptual framework. They explain the 6-year presidency of Benigno Aquino saw numerous reform initiatives being undertaken across localities and sectors to open government and enhance citizen participation. The country's position on international governance and anti-corruption rankings improved; the government claimed that this contributed to the steady increase of the country's growth rate. Although the new administration that began with the election of Rodrigo Duterte in May 2016 has launched initiatives towards open government, such as the passage of an executive order on freedom of information, it has also abolished an internationally recognised reform programme on participatory budgeting.

This history sparks some questions. As noted here, most of the TPA reforms undertaken during the Aquino period were government-led. Aceron and Isaac wonder: "How did this affect continuity? And did the government's leadership of TPA reforms affect the capacity and independence of civil society? To some extent, over-reliance on reform champions and overly-centralising reform efforts of the state may have limited independent and autonomous citizen power." They also ask: "Did they engage broad and diverse set of actors who independently and competently undertook both advocacy and monitoring? And did they lead to the 'thickening' or broadening of civil society, or did they result in limiting the repertoire of what civil society can do?" They note that, in the TPA field, "there has been a tendency to focus on providing mechanisms that make information accessible, with less consideration of the complexity and dynamics of how information and participatory mechanisms are used to hold power to account. The role of citizens - the actions they take, and the analysis that informs their actions - is sometimes side-lined. The Going Vertical study frames citizen action as central to meaningful engagement - a form of self-aware citizen action that involves thinking whilst acting, and vice versa. This kind of citizen action, needed now more than ever, is grounded in an analysis of power."

A vertical integration is proposed as a framework of analysis to explore these and other questions. As the editors note, studies of citizen-led reform initiatives in the Philippines have attributed the success of these efforts to at least 4 general factors: (i) "champions" on top, or the presence of important reform-minded leaders in government; (ii) mobilisation below, or the capacity of social movements and civil society organisations (CSOs) to organise people, gather support for their cause, and shift public opinion in their favour; (iii) partnership/engagement between state and societal factors, or the constructive interaction of pro-reform forces to advance the desired policy measures; and (iv) leadership, which pertains to the personal skill and attributes of individual state reformers. "With sufficient demand from below and with adequate opening from above, state and societal actors are able to interact with one another, which then pushes the reform agenda forward. Such an approach is often described as the 'bibingka strategy'....Without a doubt, the bibingka strategy has been the most significant development in the reform discourse in the Philippines. Nonetheless,...the framework also has its limitations, because it does not fully capture the reform dynamic at every level of engagement." The vertical integration concept is thus advanced as one that can potentially provide an adequate description of the reform dynamics at every level of engagement.

In section 2, Jonathan Fox discusses vertical integration and explains why he considers it to be effective. In short, instead of attributing reform victories to either "champions" on top or to social mobilisation from below, vertical integration encourages a focus on the scale of an initiative and how societal groups engage various state actors at different periods in time. Scale refers to the interaction of the different levels of decision-making - from the local to provincial, national, and international arena - for both the public sector and for civil society (Fox and Aceron 2016: 3).

In section 3, Joy Aceron discusses the evolution of civil society and social accountability initiatives in the Philippines.

In section 4, Benedict Nisperos, Marlon Cornelio, Danilo Carranza, Frederick Vincent Marcelo, Rhia Muhi, and Romeo Saliga present overviews of the 7 case studies, which correspond to some of the major civil-society-led campaigns of the post-Marcos period. They focus on reform initiatives in education, agriculture, housing, mining, indigenous rights, reproductive health, and disaster resilience, as follows (in brief):

1. "Addressing corruption and improving the government efficiency and responsiveness, especially in service delivery" - examines Textbook Count, a joint monitoring project of the Department of Education and G-Watch, which was designed to monitor whether the right quantity and quality of textbooks were being delivered to students at the right time following the right procedures.
2. "The centuries-old struggle for land by poor peasants and farmers, considered as the very first social movement in the Philippines" - focuses on the organising efforts of 2 national agrarian reform networks, the Rural Poor Institute for Land and Human Rights Services (known as RIGHTS Network) and the Movement for Agrarian Reform and Social Justice (Katarungan) and their campaign with local farmers' organisations on the Bondoc Peninsula.
3. "The need for decent and affordable housing for the poor, which emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanisation and the migration of rural people to cities" - looks at the work of Damayan ng Maralitang Pilipinong Api (DAMPA, Solidarity of Oppressed Poor Filipinos), a network of more than 90,000 economically poor urban households.
4. "The growth of large-scale mining, which represents the increasing penetration and expansion of corporate interests in the Philippines" - focuses on the activities of the Anislagan Bantay Kalikasan Task Force (ABAKATAF), a community-based organisation (CBO) in a town in Surigao del Norte, formed in 2000 to fight a large mining company that was starting its operations in their locality.
5. "Threats to the rights of indigenous peoples, which come from many directions, including from large-scale mining" - examines the work of the Téduray Lambangian Women's Organisation Inc. (TLWOI), a federation of CBOs fighting for the rights of indigenous women in Mindanao.
6. "The women's rights agenda, which has been pursued through issues such as reproductive health" - examines the work of the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN) to push for the passage of the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, despite stiff opposition from the highly influential Catholic Church.
7. "The increasing demand for disaster preparedness as a result of growing concerns over environmental degradation and climate change" - focuses on the work of the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) Network Philippines, a large civil society coalition that aims to transform the country's paradigm on disaster management from that of emergency relief and response to one that focuses on risk reduction and community participation.

These campaigns illustrate the vertical integration approach. For example, the campaign for the passage of the RH law involved national and local organisations that include health service providers, women's organisations, sectoral groups, political parties, and academic institutions. (For instance, the case study focuses on the story of Likhaan Centre for Women's Health, which focused worked during the RH campaign to consolidate community support through intensive information, education, and communication (IEC) campaigns and community meetings, and conducted capacity-building training for community women to engage in RH policy debates). Together, these organisations later formed the RHAN, which launched a massive media campaign at the national level, while organising public information activities at the community level. While it actively lobbied the national legislature to pass the measure, it also made similar efforts with local governments, resulting in the enactment of local RH ordinances in Quezon City and in the province of Aurora.

Aceron and Isaac note that, "[w]hile there were many engagements with state actors, citizen power was at the centre of these efforts, providing the necessary scale to connect actions, actors and voices across levels of decision-making, and thus to make a difference that mattered to citizens themselves." They continue: the case study campaigns "generated response and accountability from government. Acting at different scales through coalitions spelled the difference, turning the whole into greater than the sum of its parts, effectively withstanding pressures from anti-accountability forces whilst simultaneously maximising opportunities at different levels. They show that citizen action to strengthen accountability in governance must mirror the forces of anti-accountability and impunity, which are also integrated between levels."

In section 5, Isaac and Aceron draw together the report by synthesising lessons about vertically integrated social accountability reform campaigns. While vertical integration allows us to understand how reforms are won, they say, it also serves as a critique of mainstream practices in the accountability field. In this section, they discuss a number of these practices, such as the search for "best practices", the idea that "transparency + participation = accountability", and single, short-term tactics. They then explore common features of the case studies, such as (i) engagement at multiple levels of governance; (ii) the use of multiple approaches and strategies (such as policy advocacy, policy monitoring, grass-roots organising, coalition-building, and public education); and (iii) engagement with multiple actors from both the state and civil society. They point to the need for approaches to be grounded in the actual power dynamics that are present in any accountability relationship. They say that "[o]ne finding of the research that is especially relevant for citizen action in the Philippines as it moves forward is the need for synergy of actions and tactics that have formerly been dichotomised and divided:...While some of the reform initiatives of recent years were strong in advocacy, others were strong in monitoring – but there has been little synergy between the two. At the same time, there has been a strong emphasis on engaging the centre of government, perhaps to the detriment of developing broad and deep grassroots leadership that can check power at different centres. Different tactics and strategies for citizen action are part of a continuum. Working towards synergy can rebuild democratic citizen action in the country that makes a difference."