BoholAnalysis

Two friends of mine sipped coffee at Bo’s after what to them was a disappointing forum on the RH bill sponsored by the local Catholic Church. They were amazed by the lack of information, the drought of reason, and the argumentum ad misericordiam employed by those who said that the RH bill should be junked. The lady, mother of two, asked, “Why should an intellectual forum on a bill be reduced to an attack to our conscience? Why does the church have to repeat all over and over again that to kill is bad?” His companion replied, “I do not really see the point. I have not seen a provision there that says that the bill can be made responsible for deaths of unborn children. I do not really know what they are objecting about.” “Impress me, convince me.” These were the words that echoed in my mind when I heard the conversation. I heard it first in a reality show looking for fresh new talents, shouted by one of the three judges at a contestant doing an interpretation of Stevie Wonder’s ‘

I came across a very powerful article by Jeffrey Sachs in The Broker Magazine issue for February 2010. Though I am not his huge fan even when he wrote “The End of Poverty” five years back, I got excited by how bluntly he made a critic on government and the development enterprise regarding the climate change issue after Copenhagen. He wrote, in his final remarks on his essay “Rethinking Macroeconomics” regarding that knowledge deficit in the policy-making halls of governments. I love the lines. This is the reason why I am reproducing it here. “Finally, another fundamental problem of governance is the lack of interface between politicians and ‘knowledge communities’, that is, the communities of expertise in critical areas such as energy, food production, disease control, poverty alleviation, and so on. We have not solved the problem of the proper integration of scientific and technological knowledge in public policy making. The US Congress is nearly scientifically illiterate. This is v

The Bohol Chronicle reported today (27 December 2009) that the Sangguniang Panlalawigan has given a go-signal for the governor of the province of Bohol to sign a joint venture and development agreement (JVDA) with Oasis Leisure Islands Development Inc. (OLIDI) to reclaim at least 450 hectares by building 5 islets at Panglao Bay. The provincial lawmakers believed that the proposal was advantageous to the government, as it will not spend any single peso for the project, from its inception to implementation. Interestingly, the Bohol Chronicle reported that Vice Governor Herrera stressed that "Several discussions have been made and the SP met with the proponents many times. Concerns of each board member have been satisfactorily answered." I was appalled. It seems that the Sangguniang Panlalawigan members have not read the proposal in its entirety. I wonder if they could answer questions if reporters will ask them for the details of the proposal. I wonder

(This is an excerpt of the paper "Its Just a Buzzword from Above...." which Michael Canares presented in the most recent conference of the Development Studies Association of the United Kingdom, held at the University of Ulster, Coleraine Campus, Northern Ireland on September 2-5, 2009) The review of local development plans of 60% of the municipalities in Bohol, Philippines revealed that climate change concerns are not incorporated into the plans. What the plans contain are environmental projects and policies that are not necessarily related to climate change issues, or drafted not with climate change mitigation and adaptation in mind. There has never been a climate change vulnerability assessment conducted, nor discussions related to mitigation and adaptation policies. Thus, it would seem that climate change as a global problem is never a local concern, precisely because of the reason that there are significant knowledge gaps that constrained problem recognition and solution.

I can still remember the 1993 American film Demolition Man where Sylvester Stallone faced off Wesley Snipes in a science-fiction-war-thriller movie set in 2032. The forces between good and evil, between light and darkness, is captured vividly in the film while it puts forward the idea that one can coexist with the other even in the mind of a single person. In movies of this plot, the protagonist is always the one at the fold of the law, the one that is just, the one who asserts its rightful power against the other. But as I write this piece, I no longer refer to that police officer played by Stallone in the movie. I refer to one person who has, after all these years, shown what political will is all about. I must admit I am never a fan of this man. I was very critical of his administration when he ‘ruled’ the island of Panglao when I was still studying university. But he is the modern-day Demolition Man. His name is Benedicto ‘Dodong’ Alcala, three-term mayor in the municipality of Pan

(as you read this piece, bear in mind how the arguments can be located in the political landscape of Bohol) Introduction Manny Pacquiao’s victory over Hatton in their recent fight gained several descriptions attached to our political development as a nation. National dailies said that his victory once again “unified the nation” or that it showed that “the Philippines still has hope”. Even the Bohol Chronicle said that “we have not had this high feeling since EDSA 1986”, and that “Boholanos back pacman’s politics”. The Philippine fanaticism in boxing as a sport dates even beyond the time that Gabriel “Flash” Ilorde was proclaimed by the WBC as the “greatest world junior lightweight champion in WBC history” in 1972. Records show that the Philippines had its first international champion in 1925, at a time at which the country was experiencing its painful journey towards autonomy from the United States regime. Coincidentally, it was also the time when local politicians seemed like boxing c

The role of non-governmental organizations in development has been subjected to numerous praise and criticisms in literature. Fisher (1997) reviews these schools of thought and identified two separate sets of views. One view regards NGOs as “apolitical tools that can be wielded to further a variety of modified development goals” while the second imposes large expectations of NGOs as “vehicles for challenges to and transformations of relationships of power”. Other theorists hints on another significant criticism of NGOs: their potential to eclipse the role of the state (Collier 2000, Putzel 2004, Kamat 2004) and succeed as agents of development at the cost of the state legitimacy (White 1999). NGOs Replacing the Government? NGOs in Bohol, despite its good intentions to supplement the efforts of the provincial government, have the potential to replace the state’s role as provider of basic services, thereby decreasing the LGUs accountability to the general public in terms of basic service