A Year of Advocating for Decentralized Governance:

Gains and Challenges

In January 2014, CODE-NGO convened its partners for its Decentralized Governance project, namely MINCODE, Balay Mindanaw, CBD and CENVISNET, to reflect on their work for the past year and strategize for the coming year. The project works on empowering citizens to participate in governance processes in Regions 5, 7, 10 and 11 and contribute to making strong regional governance structures, towards a vision of regional federal type of governments.  

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On January 20 and 21, 2014, the Decentralized Governance (DG) National and Regional Project Teams held their Consensus Planning Workshop at the Partnership Center, PhilDHRRA Office, Quezon City, one year after the project commenced.  The workshop devoted time for the project’s partners, the Mindanao Coalition of Development NGO Networks (MINCODE) for Region 11, Balay Mindanaw Foundation Inc. (BMFI) for Region 10, Coalition for Bicol Development (CBD) for Region 5 and Central Visayas Network of NGOs (CenVISNET) for Region 7, to report on and evaluate the implementation of their project activities thus far. 

Among the key activities organized by the partners for the past year are:

• conduct of training programs on the public planning and budgeting processes for member and partner civil society organizations (CSOs) in four (4) regions covered by the project, i.e. Regions 5, 7, 10 and 11;
• building of partnerships and engagements with concerned National Government Agencies (NGAs) and Local Government Units (LGUs); now, the regional partners have at least two (2) CSO members represented in each of the 4 Regional Development Councils (RDC) and at least 5 in the Provincial Development Council (PDC) who will be able to advocate for their agenda in their respective governance bodies.
• conduct of regional baseline researches and analyses on the local governance and political situation, which informed the regional partners’ poverty reduction and development agenda; and
• development of the regions’ Poverty Reduction Development Agenda, which are either finalized or in the process of ratification by their members.       

The planning workshop also provided time for project partners to assess and discuss their assets and challenges from the internal and external environments which influence their work. Internally, they discussed common assets such as their networks’ well established credibility and experience in engaging with the government, their presence and active involvement in the Bottom-Up Budgeting (BUB) process and the affairs of the local special bodies (LSBs), and having a committed workforce or network secretariat to handle the day-to-day activities. On the other hand, they reported on challenges common to them such as difficulty in mainstreaming the formulated agendas to the CSOs’ activities, budgetary constraints, and heavy staff workload. They also reflected on strategies to sustain the advocacy work even after the project’s timeframe.

In terms of the external environment, the partners cited the following assets which facilitated their work: already existing government policies for CSO engagement, willingness of some government bodies to partner with CSOs, presence of allies within the NGAs and LGUs, and the existence of other regional networks who also wish to push for their poverty reduction and development agenda. On the other hand, the common challenges that they have reported come from perceptions about bogus and “Napoles”-allied NGOs and being mistakenly identified with them, natural and man-made disasters, LGUs who defy the existing policies for engagement, and the changes in leadership that was brought about by the 2013 elections.

Having considered these factors, the partners drafted their implementation plans for the succeeding year. Among the important activities in the pipeline include the convening of the project’s National Assembly, the adoption of the formulated RPRDAs into the plans of the partner CSOs and government bodies, and identifying priority poverty-reduction projects to implement.

At the end of the day, the project team was reminded of the ultimate goal of these efforts: to contribute to strengthening regional governance structures and empowering citizens to participate in governance processes in Regions 5, 7, 10 and 11 towards Regional Federal-type of governments. – Dan Christian Ramos, Project Monitoring Officer, Decentralized Governance (DG) Project (The DG Project is being supported by Misereor of Germany.)