Barangay Development Plan for what?

One of the failed promises of the Local Government Code of 1991 is the institutionalization of community processes for local planning. By institutionalization, I mean the general acceptance of sound planning as something that benefits a constituency, regardless of whether or not there is a law requiring them to go through those processes.

I have assisted several barangays in my home province of Eastern Samar in formulating their barangay development plans (BDPs), and my general impression is that our barangay officials do not own their issues nor the solutions that seek to address those issues. Some of them do not even have a hard copy of their BDPs.

The barangay officials see the BDPs as nothing more than a clearance slip, something by which they can get along, indicating their compliance with a plethora of directives from the DILG. They do not own the planning process nor the output of that process.

The governance environment does not support the LGC's basic purpose, which is to promote local autonomy.  First, there are funding gaps that must be addressed before barangays can actually start planning for self-reliance in financing their programs. From where will they draw the motivation to plan if the execution of their programs depends on external support? Excepting the highly urbanized barangays, the annual revenue of more than 42,000 barangays nationwide averages around three million pesos, ninety-nine percent of which comes from their share of national taxes. The revenue is barely enough for honorarium and salaries of barangay officials and employees.

Second, the documents required by the DILG can overwhelm any public office, much more so the barangay secretary. For the BDP alone, the filling out of standard data templates requires a staggering amount of information. An example is the so-called capacity development agenda. The first column of the blank table (there are 13 columns in all) asks the barangay respondent about its “current state of capacity.” Under this column are descriptors to be elaborated under six separate rows, namely: Structure, Competencies, Management System, Enabling Policies, Knowledge and Learning, and Leadership. The Philippine Senate can be asked to reflect on its capacity development agenda in terms of the above-mentioned dimensions, and it may be able to provide the data before the terms of its members’ end. But barangay secretaries?  

Third, there is too much hand-holding by higher levels of government, especially the DILG. It is unlikely that the barangays are unable to submit BDPs to the DILG because the barangay officials are negligent. It is more likely because they understand the limits of initiative. The internal drive needs to be cultivated, rather than relying on the carrot or stick, as it were, to influence behavior. The DILG risks equating compliance with capacity enhancement, or capacity building with compliance.

To achieve their targets, the DILG issues circulars and expects the barangays to comply, hoping the latter will learn something from the process. Here we see data gathering tools administered to barangays, complemented by 2 to 3 days of training, and expect the barangays to have achieved a desired level of planning skill.

I would prefer letting the barangays do the planning themselves, with a limited technical support from the DILG and related agencies, including the Department of Trade and Industry, and the municipal LGU, which has technical planning, social welfare, and agriculture services, staff. All planning templates should be in the dialect. The BDPs themselves should be written in the dialect. That the BDPs are presented in English adds to the worry that they are meant for the archives to gather dust.

The planning process can be contentious, as it must involve consensus-building among key sectors in the community. But the document itself must be simple in its construction. It cannot have more than two basic parts, namely the barangay profile and sectoral programs, projects, and activities (PPAs). The profile data informs the identification and prioritization of PPAs.

The barangay profile is best presented by data gathered by community members themselves. The Community-Based Monitoring System implemented by the Philippine Statistics Authority has become a misnomer because data collectors may or may not be based in the community being studied. When outsiders ask questions, the element of trust is low, and the risk of collecting low-quality data is high. Bad data yields bad PPAs. It also takes time for the CBMS data to become available to the barangays; by the time the PSA releases it, the data becomes irrelevant and stale.         

Because data is time-sensitive, especially at the barangay level, the BDP plan period may not exceed three years, instead of the current practice of five years. It must be a simple, less complicated document, but it will need to be updated every three years or less.

Promoting local autonomy requires not only authority but also resources. The LGC is an adequate source of authority, but it remains underleveraged. Through the development councils and the barangay assembly, it provides data sieving and data validation mechanisms, but they are largely unappreciated. Key BDC members like the congressional representative skip its meetings; the barangay assembly is a meeting of twenty or fewer community members.

Resources include funding and a continuous process of personnel upgrading.  

The DILG cannot measure its performance by how compliant the LGUs are in responding to its circulars. The measure must be the standard by which barangays agree to own their issues and the programs they themselves develop to address their issues. This can be indicated by how the BDP is supported by the annual budget: how the barangays evolve from being dependent to being self-reliant in funding their sectoral goals.

Honest-to-goodness planning and program implementation can enhance domestic resource mobilization (by expanding the base for local taxation), and generate both social capital and economic wealth creation. The country will never know how much countryside dynamism and industry it is missing from good-as-dead BDPs.