Here are five areas to watch in the new set-up to make the reformed pork less fatty
A fight as big as bringing down the pork barrel SYSTEM will take a long time. We want to bring back the integrity of our political system. End the culture of "suhulan." Restore the effective checks-and-balance relationship between the executive and legislature. This will take a long time.
So as not to get lost in the fight and be of disservice to our cause, we need to start somewhere where there is opening. We have to understand the institutional context of the country and the power dynamics to identify that opening.
'I enjoin others to try to fill-up the blank below and send the letter to good and honest Congresspersons you know too'
One of the reasons the Pork exists is because it filled-in the gap of our maldeveloped/ underdeveloped party system, which is supposed to be the mechanism that facilitates the relationship between the executive and the legislature. And party system, in simplest term, refers to how you organize political partisan affiliations.
There is a fundamental problem if we are organizing a rally against a system that is perpetuated because of the underdevelopment or maldevelopment of the system for partisan politics if we are organizing it in a way that discredits or neutralizes the latter. We are contributing to a mindset in our political culture that is keeping us from developing our party system, key in making pork irrelevant or at least not the sole determing factor in the relationship between the executive and the legislature.
The pork barrel is a scam fueling a patronage-based political culture and perverting the political system
While generally peaceful and credible, there are setbacks in the conduct of the 2013 elections that require attention.
The weakness of parties vis-à-vis personalities and families has a lot of ill-effects on democracy. One of the more serious problems it causes has something to do with making accountability in the exercise of power precarious and extremely difficult. Personalities and families operate in private spaces that are away from the public eye, hence are protected from public scrutiny or any accountability checks. Abuse of power and sheer bad, ill-informed decisions of politicians involving matters of national importance are at the heart of bad governance in the country, which makes accountability one of the biggest pre-requisites of governance and political reform.
Institutions matter and institutionalizing this reform process including the political dimension of it must be attended to so that it becomes a norm and its momentum cannot easily be subverted. Patronage politics supported and fed by political elites is an all-enduring institution in the country. For it to be subverted and replaced by modern and empowering institutions, the reform process and its constituency must also take the form of institutions--repeated pattern of behavior with predictable results that is accountable and efficient. Working towards party building and party system development that is democratizing must be taken up as a critcal challenge to the reform constituencies and champions.
This is a simple and easy-to-use guide on how to implement a community-based monitoring of local service delivery using the tools and methods developed in the pilot implementation of the G-Watch Localization Project.
This guidebook gives the citizens’ monitoring team, which we will call the Integrity Watch, a framework on how to assess the processes undertaken by the LGU and the WSP in water service provision. This guidebook is based on actual experiences of other citizens monitoring groups. It has been crafted using Human Rights-Based Approach to organization and development within the water sector, consistent with the MDGF 1919’s mainstreaming of HRBA.
In the Philippines, since the end of martial law, civil society has been hailed as “the savior of governance,” playing the roles underperformed by the government or filling the gaps in the services needed by the people. One of the most crucial elements of civil society engagement in the Philippines is its reform work that is varied and encompassing. These actors constitute a large portion of what is being referred to as reform movements in the Philippines, which consist also of the reformers in government, political parties, local government units and other arenas.
The Robredo case underscores one critical point for the Left: the new Left is out there. The current Left can either recognize this and do something about it, or once again be left out in the emerging politics of change.
Robredo said he expects bad people to be smart and to fight hard; so to defeat them, good people should not only be smarter, they should also fight harder.
Without a constituency rooted below in society and social movements, institutional reform will not stand a chance in Philippine politics.
Hence, if we want reforms in elections, we should build a constituency that will push for and claim those reforms. And this can only be done if electoral and party reform imperatives are mainstreamed and linked in other advocacies in governance and development work.
If we go down to the grassroots, talk to people, engage government and enable people and government to engage, trusting they would constructively engage, we'll see how everyday a certain Ate Inday or Pastor Nunez struggles to assert their rights, claim what's due them and in the process challenge the existing power relations. How by simply being informed, by caring, by simply asking a question, by reaching out to others and knowing what others are concerned about, by wondering and being bothered with questions on why some gets more than others who need it most, how by simply being a concerned and active citizen, they shake the foundations of injustice and abuse in the country and reclaim the public space for themselves and the many.
After round of monitoring of school building projects (SBPs) under the Bayanihang Eskwela, G-Watch has persistently encountered issues on allocation. This led G-Watch to inquire about the standard involving allocation.
The Government Watch (G-Watch) of Ateneo School of Government has implemented Bayanihang Eskwela since 2005. The program is a community-based monitoring of the government’s school-building projects that aims to ensure that the right quality of school building projects are implemented at the right time where it is needed most.
Textbook Count basically provided the blueprint of what we refer to now as Social Accountability, Constructive Engagement, Demand for Good Governance and similar terms that talk about engagement of citizens in governance to enhance transparency and accountability. Even before these terms were coined, there was already the practice and that was primarily Textbook Count.
ASoG’s brand of education is the marrying of theory and practice where academic knowledge is used in order to solve practical problems of our time. It tries to achieve that balance between the realm of ideas and the concrete realities that ideas must contend with to make a difference in real time, real space.
Our approach to change and development is what we call a mosaic approach where scattered efforts and actors working towards change and development are facilitated by the School to come together as pieces of the puzzle that if put together would form an alternative picture of the country.
This seminar serves as another classroom of ASoG. It will be a microcosm of what we endeavor to achieve all over the country.
Our premise why dynasties are problematic in democracy is it undermines accountability since decisions that affect the public are made in private sphere (the family). Hence, our working definition of political dynasty is it exists when members of a (nuclear) family occupies seats that have direct mandate to check and balance each other and have legal authority over other means of accountability. It is a state of political monopoly that cancels out checks and balance mechanisms.