BoholAnalysis

Image courtesy of www.ifes.org For the longest time now, I am an election watcher. No, not that one who volunteers to ensure that there is free, clean, and honest elections in the country.  I am an election watcher – and I watch elections come and go from the sidelines. My friends say that I am a sour contradiction and a bad example for the young.  As one of the believers that change is necessary in this world so that people can have better lives, I should also be one of those who believe that elections are opportunities of turning the tables upside down.  As one of those who believe that governance is important in achieving political, economic, and social gains, I should at least be interested in ensuring that people elect the kind of leaders that we need.  And as one of those who think that almost all things are political, I should have been engaged in a political exercise characteristic of modern-day democracies.  But here I am, watching elections come and go, but not real

(image courtesy of gearpatrol.com) Last Friday, 22 March 2012, I met a Phd student from Belgium Sebastien and his wife Ally at Holy Name University where Sebastien was temporarily stationed while doing his fieldwork in the Philippines.  Sebastien studies climate change adaptation and participatory planning in the Philippines for his degree at the University of Namur (F.U.N.D. P) and he chose Bohol as the place to conduct his fieldwork though he plans to cover a few other sites in the Visayas.  I met Sebastien through email when he sent me a letter of inquiry after reading a paper I wrote and presented in the Development Studies Association conference in the United Kingdom sometime in 2008.  I explained to him the context of the research he told me his research interests. When they finally decided to come to the Philippines, they went to Bacolod first to explore possibilities of conducting the research there.  We met in Manila a few days after they arrived and still offered

(The essay below is published recently in A Revista Conexao Politica, published by the Universidade Federal do Piauí in Brazil. The essay was translated into Portuguese and is published in both English and Portoguese courtesy of my friend, Prof. Batista.  As the essay looks into politics and voter behaviour, I find it apt to put it here at Boholanalysis.) Introduction Some countries in the world may have buried machine politics and the predominant role of bosses in defining local governance as matters of nostalgia (Stone, 1996). But undoubtedly, this is not necessarily the case in developing countries which seem to be poor reflections of the colourful past of advanced democracies.   Machine politics and bosses still thrive in these environments where there is widespread insecurity and poverty and where on the hands of politician, rather than the state, rests the relative power and means to appease these conditions (Hedman and Sidel, 2000). What happens to machine pol

Travelling within Tagbilaran City is such a trouble and a great discomfort that I would rather stay at home than go somewhere else.   If I have a choice, I wouldn’t go to the city centre where the banks are located or report to my office at Step Up Consulting Services.   It would seem that as I drive, I can hear the shriek and the cry of the poor car coupled sometimes with my son’s loud “ouch” when I hit a pothole large enough to have his head banged against the windows. Every person who lives in Tagbilaran City will understand when I say that Tagbilaran nowadays seems like a city left to rot.   I highlight three reasons below why I say so. POINT 1 .   Tagbilaran roads are outrageously bad , the streets within the city center are dirty caused by mud on rainy days or by dust when the sun is out.   If you live somewhere in Janssen Heights and would like to go to the St. Joseph Cathedral, you can never have a smooth ride except when you travel through the Dampas-Mansasa Road down

Since economic reforms started to be implemented in developing countries in the 1980s, there has been a vigorous debate over the nature of the changes brought by market liberalisation and de-regulation, and over their results. As the debates over ‘getting the prices right’ and ‘appropriate incentives’ subsided by the early 1990s, the discussion moved towards, on one hand, the discussion of the role of globalisation in economic restructuring, and, on the other hand, of issues of institution building and good governance. Generally, the literature has focused on issues either at the international, regional, national or sectoral levels. While these debates have generated key insights, relatively little has been said on commodity-specific dynamics of change and on the possibilities (and the limitations) of economic upgrading for developing countries offered by specific markets. In local economies as Bohol, while there were a lot of discussions and interventions in the sphere of agr