In September 1993, President Fidel V. Ramos started his ‘summit initiatives’ (what pundits somewhat derogatively called later as his “governance by summitry”) with the People’s Economic Summit – a grand meeting between the legislative and executive branches of government, with the participation of civil society components, to hammer out a common agenda. This resulted in the Social Pact for Empowered Economic Development – a wish-list of reforms and programs covering political, economic, social and other reforms. It was a cumbersome program of governance and human development, but it did provide a comprehensive framework and direction toward poverty alleviation.
Realizing the difficulty of keeping track of the process of multilateral consultations and coordination by and between the executive (national government agencies), Congress (House of Representatives and Senate), and civil society (private business sector, formal/organized labor, non-governmental organizations or NGOs, as well as the basic sectors – peasant farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, urban poor, informal labor, migrant workers, persons with disabilities, elderly or senior citizens, women and children, students and youth, and victims of disasters and calamities – Ramos gave separate priority to the basic sectors’ agenda. In June 1994 President Ramos convened the Social Reform Summit after a series of intensive talks between the basic sectors and their NGA counterparts to narrow down the former’s reform demands to a “doable” list, thus also institutionalizing the formal participation of civil society in governance on the basis of consensus building and the consultative collaboration process (or ‘critical cooperation’). From then on until the end of the Ramos administration, the Social Reform Agenda or SRA was the counterpoint to the economic management focus of FVR’s Philippines 2000 governance program.
The SRA initiative continued the Cory administration’s Preferential Options for the Poor (“Pro-Poor” initiative) into the 1990s – it may be recalled that Cory’s “centerpiece program” was the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program . The CARP and the other major reform issues and demands of the basic sectors were integrated into the SRA’s twin approaches of implementation: the Localization and Convergence strategies. The first priority provinces where the SRA was intensively localized and where the convergence strategy (i.e., different NGAs converge to collaborate with local government units or LGUs and the basic sectors concerned in specific poor communities in addressing identified problems and reform issues) was implemented were the 20 poorest provinces, which were previously identified and selected by the Presidential Commission for Countryside Development.
While Negros Oriental was not one of those early priority provinces (“the first cut,” as former SRA Lead Convenor and Agrarian Reform Secretary Ernesto D. Garilao called it), eventually the SRA was broadened to encompass all provinces – primarily through the various NGA-basic sector assemblies on major reform issues, including agrarian reform; fisheries reforms; indigenous communities concerns; and others, as well as the implementation of the Minimum Basic Needs approach cross-cutting all the social sectors. With a total of 557 barangays in Negros Oriental, it would be interesting to find out exactly how many have completed the MBNs in the province. At the end of the Ramos administration in 1998, the terminal report of the SRA’s implementation counted about 22,000 barangays of the country’s nearly 42,000 (at the time) with complete MBN surveys of households.
As director for policy reform, advocacy and sectoral affairs in the Secretariat of the Social Reform Council (the main precursor of the National Anti-Poverty Commission or NAPC), I oversaw the efforts to enact the 10 priority legislative measures of the basic sectors and the consensus-building process/’critical collaboration’ between basic sectors and NGAs that focused on a total of 134 reform commitments (five of which were later withdrawn). On the accomplishment scorecard, 103 commitments (or 80 percent) were substantively met, as validated by the basic sectors at the end of the Ramos administration. In terms of policy reforms, the 9th and 10th Congresses enacted a total of 79 economic reform laws; 65 political reform laws; and 85 social reform legislations – 60 of which were identified as SRA laws. But the major social reform measures – the 10 SRA priority legislative bills – also scored an 80 percent accomplishment rate: eight were enacted into law. The Estrada administration then took over in the latter half of 1998, and we (the first NAPC staffers comprising three merged agencies – the SRC Secretariat, the PCCD, and the Presidential Commission to Fight Poverty or PCFP) were history… and it seems that since then, the SRA had become frozen in time.
Carlos Bueno
caloy.bueno@gmail.com
