The Naga experiment
When Leni Robredo returned to Naga City in 2025—not as a former vice president seeking another national post, but as mayor—some saw it as a retreat from the national stage. After the extraordinary national visibility of the 2022 presidential election, why go back to city hall?
Perhaps we are looking at it backward. Political capital is not simply a stock that one accumulates by holding increasingly high office. It can be diversified, sequenced, converted, and regenerated. And Robredo’s trajectory offers an intriguing case of this process: widowhood and the Jesse Robredo legacy; congressional representation; the vice presidency; a national movement through Angat Buhay; a presidential campaign; and now direct executive governance in Naga. The interesting question is whether Naga represents diminution—or another form of accumulation.
Consider Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto. His emergence as a potential national leader has been built substantially around what might be called performance capital: the accumulated perception that he can govern. He has been Pasig City mayor since 2019 and is now in his third and final term. His administration has emphasized institutionalizing reforms rather than making government dependent on a single personality. His trajectory is relatively easy to understand: local performance generates national curiosity.
Robredo’s trajectory is different. She already possesses national political capital. What she lacks is not national experience but a fresh demonstration of executive performance under her own direct authority.
That is where Naga becomes interesting. Her administration has deliberately framed the city through the “2028 Finish Lines,” an eight-part development framework covering economic inclusion, environmental sustainability, mobility and order, health and education, heritage, digital governance, good governance innovation, and local government efficiency. The framework aligns plans, budgets, and performance targets and calls for scorecards and a public Governance Impact Dashboard.
That is potentially much more than a mayor’s program. It can become a demonstration laboratory. The basic proposition is simple: the city is the nation writ small. Philippine problems—flooding, poverty, housing, mobility, bureaucratic inefficiency, digital exclusion, environmental degradation, citizen disengagement—appear in Naga at the human scale. If an intervention works there, can it be measured? If it works, can it be replicated? If it fails, can the failure be understood?
This is where I see the possibility of what might be called demonstration capital. Performance becomes political capital only when citizens can see what was attempted, what changed, what it cost, what did not work, and whether the experience can travel beyond the jurisdiction.
Naga’s early steps point in that direction. Robredo ordered a baseline performance review of city departments, explicitly seeking measurable outcomes and an institutional culture of evaluation and continuous improvement. The city has subsequently reported initiatives involving flood management, business processing, social targeting, waste diversion, infrastructure, and participatory planning.
But the deeper opportunity is not simply to publicize accomplishments. It is to document learning. Imagine Naga becoming a living laboratory in which each major intervention follows a simple chain: problem → baseline → intervention → implementation → evidence → citizen experience → lesson → replicability. That would transform a mayoral accomplishment report into a national governance resource.
It also introduces an intriguing element of appreciative inquiry. Instead of beginning with “What is wrong with government?” begin with “What is already working, why is it working, and how can it be made to work better and elsewhere?” Naga’s existing traditions of participatory governance and its new Finish Lines framework provide fertile ground for such an approach. This may be the most consequential difference between simply being a successful mayor and becoming a credible national executive in the public imagination.
Sotto’s Pasig experience is accumulating from the local upward. Robredo’s Naga experience could potentially accumulate from the national downward and then move upward again: national experience → local experimentation → demonstrated results → transferable lessons → national relevance. That is not necessarily a step backward. It may be a different sequence of political capital generation.
And perhaps this is the provocation we should take seriously as we approach 2028: instead of asking whether Robredo’s return to Naga diminishes her national stature, ask whether Naga can become her executive laboratory. If the answer eventually becomes visible in the data, in the lived experience of Nagueños, and in the ability of other Philippine cities to learn from Naga, then the political significance of the experiment will not depend on slogans, endorsements, or nostalgia. It will rest on something harder to manufacture: demonstrated capacity to govern.
doyromero@gmail.com
