Reviving pointers for good governance and realistic development goals

Considering the current crisis in the Middle East that has rattled our economy and endangered the lives of overseas Filipino workers, it is never too late to start talking about how President Marcos and succeeding presidents can improve their governance to accelerate our economy.

Leloy Claudio, assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley, has criticized the administration for what he calls “performative governance” that relies on slogans and superficial branding rather than providing a clear substantive economic development roadmap for the Philippines.

Other critics called Mr. Marcos’ development goals ”idealistic rhetoric” for making unrealistic promises: making rice available to the public at P20 to P30 per kilogram; building 1 million housing units annually when his father could only build 230,000 units in 10 years; and accomplishing 183 transportation, water, and digital connectivity projects.

These aspirations of the administration represent positive basic needs goals that should be pursued to address poverty, inequality, and unemployment. The problem is that the President resorted to idealistic rhetoric, citing unrealistic quantitative targets that were not based on feasibility studies. He was also not careful in selecting Cabinet secretaries with intelligence, capability, and a good moral background. His father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., formed a group of technocrats and intellectuals to achieve economic goals.

Marcos Jr. has stated that the pursuit of the above goals has been influenced by his mother’s promotion, as former secretary of the Ministry of Human Settlements, of the 11 basic needs required to accelerate the country’s socioeconomic development. These basic needs are food, shelter, mobility, water, power, ecological balance, clothing, health, education, livelihood, and sports and recreation—concepts that originated from the international urban planning ideas promoted in the 1972 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements.

The government addressed this issue through the Philippine Development Plan for 2023–2028, which in turn requires the formulation of the Regional Spatial Development Frameworks, Provincial Development and Physical Framework Plans, and Comprehensive Land Use Plans (CLUPs) of local government units. In the CLUPs, the rational delineation of proposed land uses—with their specific protection, production, settlement, and infrastructure areas—is particularly observed.

The promotion of the basic needs concept, which constituted the centerpiece of his mother’s public service stint, should be seriously—but realistically—supported by Marcos Jr. Like his father’s strategy, he could create a cabinet cluster of related departments whose functions involve the interlinked development of the features and resources of each of the four land-use categories. In this way, through checks and balances, even the current rampant corruption in project implementation can be significantly minimized.

Meliton B. Juanico,
melitonbjuanico@gmail.com