Turning Philippine Municipalities into Learning Communities:Building Citizen Competence Through Participatory Democracy

Chapter I: The Problem – A Case for Municipal Participatory Democracy This study is largely an attempt to develop a theoretical construct or model of participatory governance at the municipal level in the Philippines in the hope of contributing something to the ongoing effort of building a more democratic country. Democracy in the Philippines has not yet achieved consolidation, though compared to Indonesia, its nearest democratising neighbour in Southeast Asia, it is closer to achieving it (Blair, 2004: 78). Democratic consolidation, however, requires much more than the establishment of formal democratic institutions. It requires the equitable spread of democratic practice throughout society (Fox, 1990: 2). Democracy should develop beyond the formal and theoretical and actually become a public philosophy. As such, democracy becomes an end as well as a means of achieving decisions, combining the formal procedures and institutions with substance and results (Wintrop, 2000: 3). This study makes a case for establishing participatory governance within the Philippine municipal system. The process is expected to create a learning community, a concept derived from Senge’s (1990) learning organization, as part of it. Like a learning organization, a learning community allows people to continually expand their capacity to create which in turn, allows the community to survive and adapt (Senge, 1990: 1, 14). This would not mean the displacement of the legal and political structures of municipal government, nor does it imply the neutralisation of existing institutions of local representative government. Indeed, democratic participation and political representation need not exclude, nor become antagonistic to each other. Both can work together to produce better 2