402 Public Administration in Southeast Asia

20.3Past Reform Initiatives of the Philippine Public Administrative System

Performance management is not a recent initiative in the Philippines. It has in fact been a fi xture in the advocacies of good government and has been adopted with various labels and in dramatic fashion, from such banner slogans as President Disodado Macapagal’s moral regeneration program (1961–1965), the Integrated Reorganization Plan of President Ferdinand Marcos (1966–1986), energizing the bureaucracy under President Corazon C. Aquino (1986–1992), reengineering the bureaucracy for better governance under President Fidel V. Ramos (1992–1998), President Joseph Estrada’s effective governance program (1998–2001), and the streamlining the bureaucracy program of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who assumed the presidency in 2001 and whose term ends under the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines by 2010.

Since the independence period then, reform measures and programs toward streamlining the bureaucracy have been a continuing effort and various measures have been adopted and legislated to promote the performance of the bureaucracy in the Philippines.

The efforts are a heady mixture of various approaches with the most pervasive and most common being that of government-wide reorganization of departments and agencies. In an early study of patterns of reorganization in the Philippines since the independence period, Abueva (1969) maintains that almost every elected president of the Philippines have in one way or another adopted reorganization as a policy in response to the perceived ills of the bureaucracy.

Reorganization and restructuring of instrumentalities of government thus emerged to be the standing and standard policy from the administration of President Manuel Quezon during the Commonwealth Era (1935–1941) to the independence period under President Manuel Roxas to President Macapagal Arroyo.

Analyzing reorganization programs of the Philippine administrative system from President Manuel Quezon during the Commonwealth Era (1935–1941) to President Corazon A. Aquino (1986–1992), Cola (1993) affi rms this, saying that,

After political independence in 1945, (sic) the administrative system of the country had been reorganized five times. Thus, the government conducted an average of one reorganization every eight years (versus one every ten years under the Americans).

The spirit of the reorganization programs involved creation, mergers, abolition, restructuring, or expansion of government departments and agencies. Most of these programs rode on the banner themes of enhancing government operations, curbing wastages as well as graft and corruption, and ensuring fiscal economy, among others. But much of the emphasis of reform measures here involved structures and review of functions and mandates.

With the advent of new philosophies of public sector reform that came during the last two decades, however, new approaches were introduced toward enhancing the performance of the bureaucracy. The 1990s brought substantive changes in the contours and landscape of government and governance. For one, the rise of civil society organizations brought heightened activism. Information and communication technology also reconfigured the relationships between governments and their publics so as to make information on government activities more widely accessible.

The influential best-seller Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler (1992) acquired further prominence when its principles were adopted by the newly installed administration of President Bill Clinton, as the American “roadmap” toward reforming the US federal bureaucracy.

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