Routes
Iloilo River: autonomous multi-stakeholder management
Recently, I co-authored with my friend Victor Prodigo of the Department of Agriculture an abstract titled “Autonomous Stakeholder Management of the Iloilo River Development Master Plan: Towards A New Paradigm”.
The abstract will be presented in a scientific meeting on integrated water resources management this coming September at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Victor and I will be presenting six abstracts in the meeting.
In development work, the concept of stakeholder participation and management has been overused, but under-implemented. And there has been no major attempt at a workable approach to mainstream project concepts and proposals using Information, Education and communications (IEC) through the mass (especially the newspapers) media. That is what we (Victor and I) are trying to initiate now, as we develop the operational framework of our –as many say - extremely democratic paradigm.
A part of the said abstract says:
“The participatory approach to the formulation of the Iloilo River Development Master Plan is still qualitatively marginal as stakeholders should have primary technical and administrative entitlement to implementation, hence, non-government organizations, people’s organizations, and private sector ownership of project implementation should be emergent and central.
This paper aims to promote the adoption of approaches and institutionalize socio-economic mechanisms that will result to stakeholder virtual autonomy from planning towards the achievement of targets. Program direction will be set by cross-strata and cross-sectoral interests after the local government shall have established a decision-making decontrol from its standard function end.
Mediation, coordination and regulation shall become the evolving roles of the Iloilo City Local Government through the City Environment and Natural Resources Office. This is a policy diversion from the compliance-driven in place of progress interest-driven and public politics agenda-directed methodologies.”
I do not think that the language in the excerpt sounds highly technical, however, fur further mass understanding, we will come up with a Hiligaynon translation. I have learned after being a translator of English to Hiligaynon and of Hiligaynon to English from the literary to the socio-political and scientific levels that the language barrier remains a significant factor in the effectiveness of development communications.
Republic Act 7160 or the Local Government Code of 1991 has the purpose of giving autonomy to local government units to empower these, and to decentralize governance, which has been restrictive of or monopolized by the national government then. In the same decade of the 1990s came the paradigm shift to the multipartite or the multi-stakeholder participatory approach in non-government development organizations.
Our subject abstract on the Iloilo River stakeholder management tries to be more innovative with the objective of further decentralizing the decentralized local government unit and empowering the end-user stakeholders, who should have the direct hand in project development.
Workers in government and non-government organizations always cite the people, but, for a considerable time, cannot say that, at this time, the end-user stakeholder occupies the locus of project management. Many a development worker has agreed with me that the qualitative roles of the end-user stakeholder in development are still inadequate. They have to be the practical primary owners and managers of the projects.