BoholAnalysis

(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

 Undated aerial photo of Alona Beach, from www.alonabeach.co . I was reminded of tourism planning, as an aspect of the climate change debate, when I attended a conference on Climate Change and Development Policy in Helsinki last 28-29 September 2012 at the invitation of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.   One of the sessions highlighted the need to decongest spaces and make towns and cities compact for purposes of energy efficiency, carbon footprint reduction, and climate change mitigation, recognizing that cities than the rural places, are the largest emitters of carbon dioxide.   While the argument was done in the context of cities, I believe it is also applicable to the pseudo-cities, or those I call spaces where the characteristic of cities (population density and intense requirements of sanitation, utilities, housing, and transportation) are prevalent and where there is a need to ensure that proper planning and development

Very recently, business tax collection system in the municipality of Panglao has drastically changed that resort owners, maybe accustomed to a subjective tax assessment processes, reacted strongly.   The basis of the reaction is simple – tax assessments have significantly increased the amount of tax that they will have to pay, when compared to previous years - and like every taxpayer who is assessed a higher amount of tax, businessmen complained, alleging that the tax base is highly irregular and the system anomalous. The municipal government of Panglao implemented this year the Enhanced Tax Revenue Assessment and Collection System (E-TRACS), a system that automates the assessment and collection of taxes and puts subjective assessments aside and makes tax payment negotiations a thing of the past.   A primary highlight of the system is the elimination of subjective tax assessments because certain parameters are used, and in this case, the most objectionable to businessmen, the u

I arrived in Tagbilaran after three weeks of academic theorizing on development and inequality at Brown University.  Several news, unpleasant ones, greeted me, over a breakfast of corned beef and rice.  There was new case of burglary with arson at Paz Pharmacy, located along Gallares Streets. The Bohol Chronicle reported, on its Wednesday edition (June 22), that the pattern was similar to what happened to B and J Computer in May this year. As I am writing this, I am facilitating a workshop in Naic, Cavite.  My wife called me, a few minutes ago that two of our neighbours experienced attempted cases of burglary, resulting to a loss of P1,000 to one of them. I shudder at the thought that Tagbilaran is no longer safe, as I still want to cling to the memory of a not so distant past when roaming the streets was not a problem at all, and robbery and burglary of this scale were never heard of. In 2011 alone, several alarming cases happened. In January, the church of Loboc was burglarized we