254
Strengthening Local Service Delivery in the Philippines
LGUs are equally politicized in their management of public resources. But it is also generally understood that road spending is among the areas most vulnerable to political use. The exact distribution of the risks across LGUs is practically impossible to measure ex ante without the kind of detailed data we gathered in this survey for each LGU in the entire country. One available means to begin to screen LGUs according to the quality of governance is to rely on proxy measures of good governance such as the Seal of Good Housekeeping of the Department of Interior and Local Governments.28 Another option may be to encourage LGUs to conduct participatory budgeting for capital expenditures following a robust, yet simple participatory process for identifying relative needs. For example, it may be possible to extend the participatory method used in the national Community Driven Development Program to encompass all (or at least a large portion of) infrastructure spending by LGUs. Actual execution should also be closely scrutinized through third-party monitoring as well as mandatory d isclosure of details of the bids and awards. A key recommendation is to make adherence to transparency and participation measures strictly voluntary. A program of support could then use the LGUs’ voluntary compliance with a stringent set of transparency and participatory requirements not as an additional risk mitigation measure but as a screening device to identify those LGUs that are less prone to political risks of the kinds identified in our study. A complementary approach would be to take (at least some) decision- making authority away from LGUs by imposing decision criteria that are transparent and rule based. For example, it may be desirable for the national government to step in and develop technically sound plans for a portion of local road networks. For certain selected purposes, the national government could specify that at least the national government subsidies and congressional funding for local roads follow those network plans. Examples of this approach that the government has considered are local roads for promoting tourism in certain designated areas. Knowing in advance where roads are supposed to be built or repaired and with what design specifications (length, width, and so on) is essential for any third party that monitors road works. Whether the national government can actually impose and enforce such rules depends on the politics of center-local relations. But it may be feasible if applicability of such rules is limited to a subset of local roads—those that are of strategic interest to the national government’s specific policy objectives such as tourism development— while still leaving a bulk of public spending on local roads to the prevailing clientelist criteria.
Health In health, the overwhelming need is not to restrain politicians from misallocating public spending, although the efficacy of allocating available funding is, no doubt, an important consideration in any public spending. Instead, the primary challenge is to entice the mayors to spend more on high-return public health interventions such as child immunization and prenatal care services Problem-Driven Political Economy Analysis • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0121-1