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.
Of all the books that I have managed to read, none is as deeply personal or as emotionally poignant as Subversive Lives 1. Written as a collective memoir of the Quimpo family, the book narrates their shared ordeal under the Marcos dictatorship, and the hardship that each of the siblings had to endure in the course of their resistance to Martial Law.
Such autobiographical style allows the reader to form a mental picture of the series of emotional storms that had repeatedly overtaken this family of “subversives”—from Norman’s Christian dilemma as he agonized over the question of joining the communist-led resistance; to Ryan’s narrow escape from death as the soldier who was about to shoot him was suddenly distracted by an exploding pillbox; to Lilian’s sense of dread and shame as she was repeatedly humiliated by her military interrogators.
Society should have a soul—authority. This authority should have a sense of reason that guides and directs—the legislative power. A will that acts and implements—the executive power. A conscience that judges and punishes the bad—the judicial power. Those powers should be independent in the sense that none of them should infringe on the authority of the other. However, the latter two should submit to the former, as will and conscience submit to reason. The executive and judicial cannot separate themselves from the laws passed by the legislative, but the latter does not have any other judge except public opinion, or the people themselves.
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.
In 2001 there were a plethora of reports, disclosing that billions of pesos were lost in textbook scams, corruption in procurement, ghost projects in textbook delivery and school-building construction. In that year, G-Watch reviewed public sector performance in two key areas: textbook delivery and school-building construction.
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.
This study looked at whether the following government services have been allocated where they are really needed most or where there is shortage. It sought to find out explanations for misallocation that can inform possible policy/implementation reform proposals.
This provides an application of the G-Watch monitoring in human rights compliance, particularly on the right to food of the bakwit, or Internally Displaced People.
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.
The Department of Education (DepEd) has strengthened its partnership with the private sector to achieve its goal of solving the textbook shortage problem this year.
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.
A follow up to the COMELEC Budget Watch in 2009, this study aimed to baseline and benchmark electoral administration spending of COMELEC, in the hope of helping inform COMELEC of relevant performance standards and indicators they should achieve in effectively linking their budget preparation and performance target setting.
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.
This policy study is a follow-up to two cause-and-effect studies of PODER on election-related violence, one in Abra and the other in Nueva Ecija. The project involves scanning of ERV in selected hotspots, documentation of successful civil society initiatives to prevent ERV and policy assessment study of government response to election-related violence, particularly its major perpetrators: loose firearms, partisan armed groups and political dynasties.
Twenty-five years after its ratification, the 1987 Constitution has survived serious attempts to change it during the presidencies of Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. What were the reasons for the attempts and why did they fail? For persons and organizations with valid reasons to explore Charter Change, what are the available options? What is a systematic way to explore and pursue it? These are some of the questions this book examines and answers.
A chapter by La Viña and Aceron in the book, Agenda for Hope: Democratizing Governance. This chapter proposes a movement for nation-building among reformist leaders from the different local government units (LGUs), the bureaucracy, the citizens’ groups, and even among the circles of some modernizing elites, that would develop a system of synergy and interdependence to be able to connect their efforts, share a common vision for the country, and eventually execute a coordinated strategy of capturing power at the national level.
This policy study aims to identify key issues in the implementation of the government’s school building program, focusing on the DepEd-led School Building Program for schools experiencing acute classroom shortage and the DPWH enforced Regular School Building Program which is in the ambit of Republic Act No. 7880 or more commonly known as the Roxas Law.