Strategies in Public Administration

SELECTED
STRATEGIES
IN
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION

by

Ferdinand Parado, CE
Rodel P. Hacla, ECE

FACTORSTHAT PROMOTE OR DETER POPULAR PARTICIPATION IN
DEVELOPMENT: THE PHILIPPINE EXPERIENCE

Objectives:
This study is an attempt to describe and
analyze the Philippine experience in
promoting participation in development,
paying particular attention to factors
that promote or deter popular
participation. More specifically, it
seeks to answer the following questions:
1. What has been the country‟s
experience in promoting popular
participation in the government‟s
development programs?
2. Given the country‟s experience, what
factors may be identified as
facilitating or obstructing popular
participation in development?


3. Given this assessment, what
recommendations may be forwarded to
stress those that facilitate and
minimize those that impede popular
participation?

POLICIES AND MECHANISMS:
This section describes the „barangay”
as the lowest level of the local
government, the establishment of the
National Economic and Development
Authority (NEDA) and the Regional
Development Councils (RDCs) intended to
decentralize and bring government
closer to the people, the country‟s
rural development program. These are
illustrations of policies and
mechanisms for popular participation.


Initially conceived as a mechanism for
citizen participation, the barangays
were observed to have been transformed
into “administrative channels of
government as part of the delivery of
services to the people”.

Despite doubts as to its effectiveness
as a mechanism for the political
participation, the barangay is viewed as
a possible Filipino alternative to the
Western model because it is founded on
Filipino collectivism. Taking its roots
from the family‟s collectivist nature,
the barangay is viewed as
correspondingly collective.


The Philippine Rural Development Program

- is built on the principle that
development is a government-people
enterprise. Its activities aim at
revitalizing community and local
institutions through the development of
awareness among all segments of the
community and the promotion of self-
reliance and active participation of the
people.


The major objectives of the rural
development program were:

1. to promote and encourage citizen
interest, understanding and active
participation and increased capacity
for initiation and resourcefulness for
a meaningful and active role in local
and national affairs;
2. to stimulate the understanding of
community projects/activities to
promote socioeconomic advancement;
3. to encourage the organization,
revitalization and/or strengthening of
institutions necessary to achieve the
desired changes;


4. To develop local leadership for them
to acquire the confidence and ability
to lead decisively in the improvement
of their communities;
5. To promote integrated comprehensive
planning in local levels to achieve
maximum mobilization of efforts and
resources for development;
6. To encourage and maximize
coordination of technical agencies,
local government, private and civic
organizations engaged in rural
development.


The government policy underlying its rural
development program was essentially people-based
with the government taking a secondary role. The
major responsibilities of the two sectors in
their joint understanding can be described as
follows:
Rural People
1. Determine their own needs or crystallize
their most pressing problems and set
priorities for their treatment;
2. Plan a course of action to satisfy their
needs and solve their problems;
3. Marshal available local resources (money,
materials, equipment, and labor) which may
be utilized in program implementation;
4. DO the work themselves.


The Government
1. Provide the initial stimulus for
self-help development and set up a
system for continuing training and
education of the people;
2. Provide the technical know-how for
development planning and assist the
people in the preparation of
development plans;
3. Given material assistance on a need
basis, i.e., those materials that
cannot be obtained in the locality;
4. Help the people in the program
implementation and assist in
evaluating the progress of
development work.


Looking at popular participation as a four
stage process which builds up from one
stage to the other, four component phases
maybe identified:

(1) the individual level,
(2) the community,
(3) the government/other sectors,
(4) the greater society.

The categorization proceeds from a simple
to a more complex unit of analysis with
each level interacting with each other.
The characteristics of these four sectors
are the important factors that promote
popular participation.


INDIVIDUAL LEVEL

Promoting Conditions Impeding Conditions
1. Realizes that what he thinks and 1. Feels that what he thinks is not
feels is important and that he can important; can hardly articulate his
think and talk intelligently. thoughts.
2. Is confident that he has the 2. Feels incapable of acting on his own
capability to mold himself and his or transforming the environment.
environment. 3. Is not aware of the socio-political-
3. Is conscious and aware of the economic conditions that influence
societal factors that impinge on him his life.
as an individual. 4. Has no notion of nor experience in
4. Has actual experience in any collective involvement which
participating in group problem entails discussion and analysis of
analysis or problem solving issues with other individuals.
situations.


The enumeration factors at the
individual level suggests that the
popular participation may no longer be a
concept in search of methodology.
Rather, it implies that community or
organization may be the methodology for
popular participation. However, the
community organization is observed that
it appears the most important approach
to popular participation. Community
organization has its own set of
procedures and organizing principles
along conflict-confrontation lines but
in actual practice, many modifications
are accommodated mostly in the degree to
which the conflict confrontation is
pursued.


GOVERNMENT LEVEL
Bureaucratic processes in large organizations
have instilled in most government employees a
respect for technocratic knowledge and expertise
for their clients‟ capabilities in
conceptualizing, designing and implementing
programs.

SOCIETAL LEVEL
Beyond the characteristics of the community and
government are broader societal factors operating in
a developing country which implies rather than
promote popular participation. These are:
1. Colonial Experience – suppresses the people‟s
desire or capacity to participate in social,
political or economic decisions affecting them.


2. Poverty – concerned more with survival, poor
people who have to eke out a living do not
understand why they must participate before
they get the long needed and much delayed
services which may spell life or death for
them.
3. Ineffectiveness of participation as a means of
getting service. The people‟s experience that
participation does not materially affect the
delivery of services to any group of society
serves to negate any effort directed at
strengthening popular participation.

POLICIES, STRATEGIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE IMPLEMENTATION FOR
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PHILIPPINES

As early as 1988, the Philippine government
had promulgated a Philippine Strategy for
Sustainable Development (PSSD) through the
Department of Environment and Natural
Resources (DENR), to address the adverse
impact on growth and development caused by
the pollution of environment and the misuse
and depletion of the natural resources. The
DENR adopted ten strategies which could have
been the basic guidelines for the
environmental and natural resources
preservation in the Philippines. These are
the following:


1. The environmental factors must be integrated in the
formulation and decision making process of concerned
government agencies and units in such that there
should be provisions for the Natural Resources
Accounting, Environmental Impact Assessment and Land
Use Planning.
2. There should be proper costing of the natural
resources and the price should be built into the cost
of damages done to the environment. The users of the
environment have to pay the cost of whatever damages
there will be.
3. The property rights reform should be in place so that
there should be regulations to the people‟s access to
the natural resources.
4. There should be an established integrated protected
areas that should conserve the wild life and unique
ecosystem that should conserve the wild life and
unique ecosystems in order to preserve the genetic
resources for scientific, educational, cultural and
historical values.


5. There should be rehabilitation of the degraded
ecosystems which meant, the reforestation of the
denuded watersheds, replantation of mangroves,
clean-up and control of pollution, and revival
of the biologically dead rivers, and also the
transplantation of sea grasses.
6. Industries must invest to strengthen their
facilities for the management of their residual
wastes and the pollution that they have caused
by putting up more technological innovations as
soon as they could. The pollution control law
must therefore, be strengthened. Industries and
firms must install pollution control facilities
which could be done by collective action by
users group of firms in creating their
facilities for waste waters.


7. The development plan must integrate the
population and the social impact programs
with the intention that the population factor
should be highlighted as the real asset in
building a strong industrial base in the
production of livelihood projects and the
preservation of the ecosystem and natural
resources. The population management program
should emphasize the benefits of spacing
births and the population distribution must
be directed to less densely populated and
less environmentally sensitive areas.
8. Economic growth must be induced in the rural
areas where majority of people live.
Employment must be developed in the rural
areas to increase the people‟s income.


9. Schools curricula for elementary and secondary
levels must integrate environmental education
and social values supportive of the
environmental protection and commitment if the
government.
10. Citizens‟ participation and constituency
building must be encouraged so that non-
government organizations could assist in the
environmental protection and managements efforts
of the DENR.
Other government units were expected to assist the
DENR in implementing its ten strategies, namely,
the agencies concerned with population,
environment, natural resources, agriculture,
industry, infrastructures, energy and agrarian
reforms. All government agencies were also
expected to integrate sustainable development
and environmental objectives in their policies
to provide the support services to the DENR
strategies.


The Philippine strategy for the
protection of the environment and the
natural resources for sustainable
development have many points. The
problem, however, is how sustainable
indeed could the effort be in
pursuing all the policies and
strategies. Can the country maintain
a carrying capacity of its natural
resources for the maintenance of its
population up to the end of the
century.

Strategies in Public Administration

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