The National Campaign for Land Reform in the Philippines

Saturnino M. Borras Jr.Halifax, Canada

Jennifer C. FrancoAmsterdam, The Netherlands

Web VersionSeptember, 2007

http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/Part/proj/pnp.html

This paper was prepared for the project on Citizen Engagement and National Policy Change, coordinated by John Gaventa at the Institute of Development Studies and Gary Hawes, of the Ford Foundation.  We are grateful to the Ford Foundation for its support. We anticipate that shorter versions of the papers will be forthcoming as a printed volume.

Other papers in the series include:

Cultural Adaptations: The Moroccan Women’s Campaign to Change the Moudawana

Is Knowledge Power? The Right to Information Campaign in India

Mexico Case Study: Civil Society and the Struggle to Reduce Maternal Mortality

Protecting the Child: Civil Society and the State in Chile

Reforming the Penal Code in Turkey: The Campaign for the Reform of the Turkish Penal Code from a Gender Perspective

The Extraordinary ‘Ordinary: The Campaign for Comprehensive AIDS Treatment in South Africa’

Urban Reform, Participation and the Right to the City in Brazil

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The National Campaign for Land Reform in the Philippines

Introduction

The social, political and cultural aspects of successful land redistribution are difficult to measure and assess. Some studies posit a straightforward breaking of the nexus between peasants and landlord and transformation of the former into relatively ‘free-er’ agents, with a greater degree of autonomy in social and political decision-making and action vis-à-vis both state and non-state actors. Others show that while clientelistic tenant-landlord ties may be cut through land reform, other unequal relationships can emerge to take their place, such as between government officials and merchants on the one side and newly created small family farmers on the other. Or, in the case of commercial plantations, farmworkers’ key relationship may shift from being with a domestic landlord to a transnational company, where the underlying issue of control of the land resource and its products is not resolved in their favour. In the contemporary Philippines, the overall picture may be mixed, but one thing is clear: fuelled by the break-up of landlord-peasant ties through partial land reform implementation, the social-political power of the landed elite has experienced an unprecedented degree of erosion, albeit in localised patches scattered across the country. How has this been possible?

In a liberal democracy, no matter how flawed, policy making and the implementation of pro-poor programs are structured, but open-ended and even conflictual processes involving strategic interactions between actors within the state and in society. These dynamics, the nature and degree of conflict involved, and the outcomes they produce, are influenced by a number of factors, including the political-economic character of the state, social class formation in society, as well as the nature of the public policy being debated or pursued and interested parties’ perceptions of these (Grindle and Thomas, 1990; see also Fox, 2005). Some pro-poor policies require the redistribution of wealth and power in society, while others do not. Public policies can thus be categorized into two broad types, namely, ‘distributive’ and ‘redistributive’. According to Fox (1993: 10):

Distributive reforms are qualitative changes in the way states allocate public resources to large social groups…Redistributive reforms are a special case of distributive policies: they change the relative shares between groups. This distinction is important for two principal reasons. First, many apparently redistributive reforms are not, and to call them so implicitly begins with what should be the ultimate outcome of analysis: determining what a social reform actually does, and why. Second, redistribution implies zero-sum action, whereas social programs often are carried out precisely because they avoid clearly taking from one group to give to another. In a context of economic growth, moreover, antipoverty spending may well rise in absolute terms without changing its relative share of the government budget. The label ‘redistribution’ builds in an assumption about where the resources come from, whereas the notion of distribution limits the focus to who gets what (italics original and added).

To fully understand the dynamics of state-society interaction, it is important to recognise public policies as both context and object of focused political contestation or collective campaigning. The term ‘collective campaign’ comes from Marwell and

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Oliver (1984: 12), who use it to refer to ‘an aggregate of collective events or activities that appear to be oriented toward some relatively specific goal or good, and that occur within some proximity in space and time’. As object, public policies are important focal points in such campaigns, and in the struggles between and among different state and societal actors over ‘who gets what’ and the terms of inclusion and exclusion (see, e.g. Thelen and Steinmo, 1992). As context, meanwhile, discrete public policies can alter existing opportunity structures or create new openings for different actors and thus influence their choice of political strategies, thereby shaping key actor’s actions and interactions.

The national citizen’s campaign that we examine in this paper is one that calls for a radical redistribution of wealth and power in society, namely, land reform, and so can be described as a collective campaign for a ‘redistributive policy’ in the sense explained by Fox (see also Borras, 2005: 92-94). In a society such as the Philippines today, where land still connotes wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few, land reform holds a great deal of political significance and generates a great deal of political conflict, though much of it still tends to be ‘invisible’ in the national media. Land reform remains one, if not the only, public policy that continues to mobilise a relatively deep and wide range of pro- and anti-reform actors in the state and within society, and to encourage the rise of strategic alliances, both for and against land reform, on a relatively sustained basis over time.

As is well known, land reform in the Philippines has had a long and dubious history marked by cycles of intense popular assertion that put the idea of land reform ever more firmly on the national political agenda during the 20th century, in between long periods of government inertia. Government accountability to rural poor citizens demanding land reform has never been automatic; nor have government promises of reform made under intense social pressure been enough to deliver real results. Instead, there has been a steady succession of promises broken and opportunities lost. Broadly, a pattern of periodic cycles of intense social mobilisation from below in favour of land reform on the one hand, being met by a relatively lukewarm state response at best on the other, perhaps best describes the roughly 100-year history of land reform in the Philippines.

Yet this basic pattern has been broken, even if, arguably, only once.1 Despite a host of pessimistic predictions about the inherent flaws of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) launched in 1988, an unexpectedly positive trend in land reform implementation took hold after a lag period. From 1992 to 1998, land redistribution took off and the momentum continued into the next presidential term, though at a diminishing pace. After 2001, however, with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s

1 The break in the pattern came in 1992 with the election to the Philippine presidency of a former Marcos dictatorship era Philippine Constabulary general and defense minister, who, ironically, had promised to rollback the hard-won legal limit on landlords’ rights to retain land (‘retention limit’) from five hectares to fifty hectares if elected that would have resulted in the exclusion of most farms from reform. But the election of Fidel Ramos quite unexpectedly led to an unprecedented shift away from ‘business as usual’ at the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), until then a much maligned arm of the executive branch, which in turn helped to unleash an equally unprecedented surge of creative civil society engagement with the government program in favour of reform. What followed was six years of relative gains and unprecedented activity in land redistribution to landless and near-landless peasants under the government program known as the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), a program that had been languishing in ignominy and disrepute since its launch back in 1988.

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assumption of the presidency, government inertia in land reform reasserted itself. The ‘Prague Spring’ of Philippine land reform was pretty much over.2 Since then, implementation of the program has lumbered on half-heartedly, as serious assaults on its scope and legitimacy launched through the courts come to fruition. By 2005, according to the government, nearly six million hectares of private and public lands accounting for about half of the country’s farmland had been redistributed to three million rural poor households, representing two-fifths of the agricultural population. In addition, 1.5 million hectares of land had been subjected to leasehold, benefiting about one million tenant-peasant households (see also Tables A and B, Annex).3

Table 1: Percentage Share in Time Period and in the Total Land Redistribution Accomplishment

by the Department of Agrarian Reform, as of 1972-2005

Marcos Aquino Ramos Estrada Macapagal- Total1972-86 1986-1992 1992-1998 July 1988 - Arroyo

Dec 2000 Jan 2001 -present, 2005

14 years 6 years 6 years 2.5 years 5 years 33.5 years

% 41.79% 17.91% 17.91% 7.46% 14.92% 99.99%sharein timeperiod

% 1.86% 22.51% 52.34% 9.24% 13.86% 99.81%sharein landreformoutput

Source: Borras (2006a); Franco and Borras (2005).

Looking back at the 1992-2001 reform cycle, and in light of the post-2001 slow-down, the aggregate gains in land redistribution made especially during the 1992-1998 period indeed appear to be quite remarkable (see Table 1). Although the government’s land reform accomplishment data has limited reliability, data from rights-advocacy and peasant organisations actively involved in the national land reform campaign confirm the expansion of land redistribution during the 1992-1998 period, and a serious drop-off after 2001. And if one takes a close look at any one of the hundreds of individual land conflict cases from this period that was hard-fought between an entrenched rural elite and tenant or farmworkers’ claimants, and then

2 Macapagal-Arroyo is the daughter of the president who had introduced the agrarian reform code in the late 1960s that made the extremely oppressive but prevalent institution of share tenancy illegal. Whether the relative accomplishment in land redistribution can be sustained in the future and whether the momentum reached in the mid-1990s can be recaptured are pressing issues, but ones that lie beyond the scope of this paper. If the pattern of history continues to hold true, it is very likely that the 1990s cycle of land reform mobilisation, like its predecessors, will have pushed the bar higher, rather than lower, in terms of what and how the landless and near-landless rural poor will demand from, and how they will engage and interact with, government in the future.3 The official data on land redistribution and leasehold accomplishment is hotly debated. Our own calculation is that despite some real problems in the official story about accomplishment, the significant level of accomplishment is not at all fictitious. For a systematic discussion about this issue, refer to Borras (2006a, 2006b, 2005, 2003).

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won by the latter, the achievement becomes all the more remarkable (see Table C, Annex; Franco, 2005; Franco, forthcoming).4 It is precisely through such difficult political-legal struggles, waged both inside and outside state structures, to control the meaning and purpose of the development process, that ‘new’ collective identities and ‘new’ attitudes towards authorities – potentially important indicators of democratisation -- are constructed at the grassroots.

But this then begs a question. If the Philippines has such a long and tarnished record in land reform, then what explains the broadly unexpected outcome of partial but significant success in land reform during this particular time? This paper aims to examine the reasons behind and possible wider implications of the fact that slightly over half of Philippines’ land reform accomplishment over the past thirty three years was achieved, remarkably, during this one six-year period (1992-1998). Why did the central state carry out a redistributive land reform at the time when, globally, this type of public policy had been dropped from the official agendas of most nation-states and international development institutions? What were the dynamics of interaction amongst the key actors within the state, within civil society, and in state-civil society interaction in each period of time shown in Table 1? What are the implications of insights from this case for our broader understanding of how citizens’ participation in national policies can make a significant impact?

Building on our earlier separate and joint works around this topic, our basic hypothesis is that this unexpected outcome is the result mainly of the peculiar nature of state-society interactions around national policy making and implementation during this time. That such interactions matter for implementation outcomes may be obvious. But we mean this more deeply, as it were. As some observers have put it more recently (e.g. Houtzager and Franco 2003; Franco 2005), ‘[s]tate laws emerge, but they are not self-interpreting or self-implementing’. It is our contention here that the authoritative interpretation and implementation of agrarian laws is a very complex and perhaps unexpectedly open-ended process, which results from the actions and interactions of state and societal actors at different levels of the polity. In the Philippines in the late 1980s, the flawed land reform program’s potentials remained beyond the limits of many people’s political imaginations, at least initially, and much had first to be re-thought and then proved, before positive momentum could begin to take flight. But this momentum did not take flight fuelled by sheer will power alone; rather, movement forward in land redistribution was the result of the ongoing strategic interactions of key actors and their chosen political strategies within changing yet specific, historical-institutional contexts.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 1 provides some relevant historical background on the issue, focusing on the country’s agrarian structure and the institutional context of the struggle for land reform in the Philippines, as well as an historical analysis of social mobilizations for land ‘from below’; Section 2 examines efforts to construct constructive mechanisms for interaction between state and rural social movements in implementing land reform during the 1992-1998 period; and Section 3 carries the discussion into the post-1998 period in order to better frame the analysis historically. The paper concludes by offering some observations on the implications of the insights from this case study to the studies of

4 For discussions of individual cases where land reform gains were made, see for example Borras (1999), Franco (2005) and Borras and Franco (2005).

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citizens’ engagement with the state on public policies that matter to poor people more generally.

Section 1. Background

Citizens’ engagement with the central state on land reform in the Philippines has a long and complex history marked by cycles of contending internal trends of resistance and acquiescence, independence and co-optation, success and failure. Citizen engagement has always been marked by socioeconomic and geographic diversity, as well as by pluralism in terms of political strategies pursued, with periods of fragmentation as well as coalescence. Such diversity and pluralism have shaped perceptions of what is desirable and possible and when. Agrarian unrest in particular is long-standing, going back to the Spanish colonial period (1565-1898), and can be better understood in the context of how the state partly instigated the, and how it reacted to, peasant unrest. It was during this era that the concept of ‘individual freehold private property in land’ was introduced, and this concept laid the socio-economic foundations for the development of land monopoly, one that has persisted despite a long and variable line of agrarian reform initiatives (McCoy and de Jesus, 1982).

Building on the insights of Ileto (1979), who examined the role of popular versions of the pasyón, or ‘story of Christ,’ in framing peasant rebellion in the 19 th and early 20th

centuries, James Putzel (1992: 49-50) suggests that pre-1896 rebellions helped forge ‘ideas of peasant justice’ including dividing land among peasants. But it was not until the 20th century that notions of peasant justice became firmly anchored on increasingly organized demands for land by the peasantry. Successive peasant uprisings not only spread the call for agrarian justice nationwide, but also kept pushing land reform to the national government agenda. Equally important, successive mobilization cycles gave rise to political strategies aimed at pushing the state to respond to peasant demands in democratic ways. Over time this has led to getting land reform on the central state agenda, expanding its scope and deepening its legal basis, and pushing government to keep its promises. The significance of the current land reform program simply cannot be understood without reference to this history of agrarian unrest, and rural poor Filipinos’ increasingly focused and politically sophisticated struggle for agrarian justice. If agrarian justice has been primarily about land, it has necessarily also been about expanding the existing limits to political democracy and democratic state building.

The evolution and persistence of land monopoly despite a long succession of state initiatives is well documented.5 By 1988, the government’s own data showed that ‘not more than 5 per cent of all families owned 83 per cent of farm land’ (Putzel, 1992: 27). Though their focus has been highly localized, numerous social historians have also shown how past cycles of peasant mobilization related to elite efforts to control or restrict access to land. Historically, social pressure from below increasingly pushed the Philippine state to respond, which it did, but with programs that emphasized resettlement and repression, rather than redistribution (see, e.g. Abinales, 2000).

5 Putzel’s book (1992) is the most comprehensive discussion of the historical evolution of the land problem.

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This pattern of state stress on ‘moving people to new lands, rather than giving them ownership of land they previously rented or sharecropped’ in response to social pressure is one the Philippines shares with most past Latin American land reforms (Fox, 1993: 114). This was the dominant character of programs during the first three quarters of the past century. By the 1960s, however, specifically under the Macapagal presidency, state response to renewed agrarian unrest began to move toward actual reform, albeit only very tentatively. Whatever its motivations, though, the 1963 Macapagal land reform nonetheless irreversibly introduced progressive measures into the realm (and possibility) of authoritative public policy.

The 1963 Code was followed a decade later by Marcos’s agrarian reform program. The Marcos land reform widened the parameters of official agrarian reform by opening up the land redistribution process for the first time although confined to rice and corn farms. The Marcos program, generally regarded as a failure, has been discussed extensively by scholars from varying disciplines and perspectives (see Kerkvliet, 1979, for one of the earliest assessments; see also Boyce, 1993; Wurfel, 1983; Riedinger, 1995).

The failure to deliver agrarian justice fanned the flames of agrarian unrest and heightened peasant demands for agrarian justice. By the early 1980s, peasant protest had spread across the country, largely in the form of a Maoist-inspired revolutionary movement. It is partly because this movement played a key role in linking and mobilizing the anti-dictatorship movement nationwide that agrarian reform made it onto the national agenda by the time of Marcos’ fall and the celebrated installation of a new government in 1986 (Franco, 1994; Hawes, 1990, 1989). But in the absence of land reform and amidst the left’s half-hearted electoral participation, landed elites and their allies experienced a political resurgence not long after the elections to the first post-Marcos national legislature in 1987, leading to the promulgation of a compromise land reform law.6

Looking back then, the parameters of state-sponsored agrarian reform have come a long way since the 1930s. Persistent rural protest from below contributed to ‘ratcheting up’ not just the content of societal demands for agrarian justice over time (Putzel, 1992). It also helped alter the nature of central state response in terms of official declarations of principles, as well as actual legal measures and program mechanisms – see Table 2. This may be because with every new state response to demands for agrarian justice, there was failure and unkept promises. In this way, failure and unkept promises has indeed, as Herring (2003) puts it, ‘kept movements alive’, while teaching social movement actors how to sharpen their advocacy and increase their political impact.

Finally, the persistent challenge from below launched by peasant movements over time also impacted upon the terms within which the central state related with social movement groups. History has shown that the state preferred to work with co-opted peasant groups, and repeatedly repressed the ranks of autonomous, usually more militant, groups. This kind of practice had its peak during the Marcos dictatorship. The liberal democratic gains during the post-authoritarian period, however partial and uneven these were, have in turn facilitated the entry of more reform-oriented

6 See Lara (1986), Lara and Morales (1990), Riedinger (1995), Hayami, Quisumbing and Adriano (1990), Putzel (1992).

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officials into the state bureaucracy, especially within the executive branch. The post-authoritarian setting also provided liberal democratic rights for autonomous organizing and political mobilizations, although, again, partial and uneven over time and across subnational territories, that in turn favoured the political environment and strengthened the political capital of rural citizens for claim-making vis-à-vis the state (see Table 2; Franco, 2001a).

In short, it is the dynamics among societal actors (peasants and landed elite), within the state (central and local, anti- and pro-reform actors), and between state and civil society groups that are largely responsible for the emergence and implementation, or not, of pro-poor reformist policies, such as land reform. Rural citizens’ engagement with the state results in positive and significant impact on the lives of poor people when such campaigns are carried out by highly autonomous and capable organizations of the poor whose actions are complemented by the reformist initiatives of reform-oriented officials within the state. When such a symbiotic interaction between these two sets of progressive reformist actors is achieved, the chances for significant pro-poor policy outcomes are high – as shown in the land reform experience in the Philippines.

Table 2: Presidential/National Administrations and their Policies, Land and Tenancy Reforms and

Approaches to Interactions with Civil Society Groups

Relevant National/ Policy Emphasis, Legal Approaches to Interaction Extent of Presidential Coverage & Geographic Focus with Peasant Movements RedistributiveAdministrations of Land and Tenancy Reform & Other ‘Civil Society’ Policy& Time Periods Groups Outcomes

Manuel Quezon Some adjustments in the terms Reactive to collective Marginal1930s of sharecropping relationships; actions from below, but no

opening new land frontier significant, pro-activeresettlement; targeted on and reformist interactionone region, i.e. Central Luzon with peasant movements &but also affecting other regions rural workers groups.where land frontiers were openedup. Limited to rice & corn farms.

Ramon Magsaysay Further adjustments in the terms Reactive to collective Marginal1950s of sharecropping relationships; actions from below, and again,

opening new land frontier no significant, proactive andresettlement; targeted on reformist interaction withone region, i.e. Central Luzon peasant and rural workersbut also affecting other regions groups that are autonomouswhere land frontiers were opened from the state. But thisup. Limited to rice & corn farms. administration started to sponsor

state-coopted peasant groups aspart of its ‘management’ strategyto fight the communist insurgency.

Diosdado Macapagal Progressive law passed: Demands from below for radical MarginalFirst half of the 1960s sharecropping banned, leasehold agrarian reform. State reactive to

promoted; land redistribution collective actions. Bill of rights ofof some rice & corn lands were peasants introduced, but not to be redistributed (first time significantly implemented. Nosuch as passed as a law); bill of significant initiative to link uprights of peasants & workers to with peasant movements to push organize & to a minimum wage. land & tenancy reform Focused in Central Luzon. implementation.

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Resettlement program continued.

Ferdinand Marcos Narrow although progressive Demands from below for radical Marginal1965-1986 land reform law was passed in agrarian reform escalated. MartialMartial Law: 1972 as part of the Martial Law regime reactive. Marcos createdSince 1972 Law consolidation strategy. rural people’s organizations in order

Land redistribution limited to to control popular dissent from theRice & corn farms. Resettle- countryside; in some cases, Marcosment program in new lands co-opted existing peasant groups.continued. Reform expanded Repressed autonomous groups.beyond Central Luzon region.

Corazón Aquino Break-through land reform Demands from below for radical Low level1986-1992 law (CARP) – progressive & agrarian reform escalated. outcome;

comprehensive: covers all Administration simply reacting to focusing ontypes and sizes of farms. pressures from below. Government non-But actual practice focused worked only with state-coopted politicallyon conservative provisions peasant groups; repressed contentiousof CARP. autonomous peasant groups. component of

the program.

Fidel Ramos Working within the Demands from below for radical Partial1992-1998 context of CARP. agrarian reform continued but but

with revised reinterpretation of significantmeaning – to include ‘CARPimplementation’. Government started interacting with autonomousprogressive left reformist groups.

Joseph Estrada Working within the Continued demand for land from Partial1988- Dec 2000 context of CARP. below, and within the parameters but

Some conservative & of CARP. National government stillanti-reform interpretation continued to interact with significantof CARP that had strategic autonomous progressive left setback or political damage. reformist groups, though a section

of the latter decided not to engagethe government.

Macapagal-Arroyo Working within the Continued demand for land from Low levelJan 2001 – context of CARP – but, from, and within the parameters of outcome.

like the Aquino administration, of CARP. National government focused on the conservative stopped interacting with provisions of CARP. autonomous peasant movements;

repressed autonomous peasantgroups.

Changes in the ‘political opportunity structure’ such as progressive changes in the legal land rights framework are likely to lead to changes in the nature, form and scale of peasants’ campaigns for land reform.7 This is what partly explains the dynamics of state-society interaction around land reform. Between 1972 and 1986, the most consistent mobilizations by peasants for land occurred in tenanted rice and corn lands, following the Marcos land reform. Despite the impoverishment in coconut lands, sugarcane haciendas, and export-oriented fruit plantations, there had been no concrete, systematic and sustained mobilizations for land reform in these sectors.

7 Tarrow (1994: 54) has defined political opportunities as ‘the consistent (but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national) signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form a social movement’ (see also Brocket, 1991: 254). He has also identified four important political opportunities: access to power, shifting alignments, availability of influential elites and cleavages within and among elites (Tarrow, 1998). It is important to note that the agrarian structure of the Philippines is highly varied from one farm sector to another and across different geographic locations, creating the conditions for a wide diversity and variability in the nature, pace, and orientation of rural organization and mobilization historically (see Franco and Borras, 2005).

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When peasants and workers did mobilize in farms not officially covered by the Marcos land reform, they did so for demands other than land, such as labour-oriented claims. For these demands, they usually confronted the plantation owners. In coconut and subsistence farms, the main forms of action by peasants to advance their interests were mainly through the most widespread ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’, as demonstrated in the excellent works of Kerkvliet (1977, 1990). Seldom did peasant groups in these farms outside the Marcos land reform coverage demand and pursue calls for land redistribution, except perhaps for the occasional calls made by peasant groups associated with the revolutionary left made in the context of ‘agitation-propaganda’ work rather than struggles for reformist concessions (see, e.g. Hawes, 1990; Rutten, 2000). The more systematic, concrete and sustained mobilizations by peasants and farm workers for land outside the rice and corn sectors, or even the more ‘unorganized, spontaneous peasant land occupations in these landholding types’ arose only after CARP was passed into law in 1988 (Kerkvliet, 1993; Canlas, 1992, 1994).8

Apart from changes in the legal framework of land rights, another crucial factor determining peasant mobilization has been the availability of state and societal allies. In other countries historically, societal allies of peasant and farm worker struggles for land have included political parties or movements, individuals or groups from the progressive middle class, and the progressive sections of institutional churches. In the Philippines especially since the 1980s, NGOs have become one of the most widespread and visible allies of the peasants and farm workers for their mobilizations for land. For the latter, the importance of these allies lies in the fact that landlords oppose land reform from the local ‘up’ to the national. Local groups of peasants and farm workers alone can match multi-level resistance to reform only to a limited extent. With allies, however, they have been able to extend the reach of their political actions ‘up’ to the national and international levels, while opening up access to other campaign and mobilization resources, including legal aid, media, and so on.

During the 1970s-1980s, Philippine rural politics was marked by the growth of a peasant-based insurgency led by the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The authoritarian character of the Marcos regime permitted only clandestine forms of struggle. The CPP quickly became the spearhead in the opposition movement against Marcos (see Putzel, 1995; Hawes, 1990). However, by the 1986–88 period, when the national land reform policy debate unfolded, other progressive peasant organizations had emerged, such as the highly differentiated group of ‘conservative reformists’, mostly associated with Catholic institutions such as universities. This latter group pushed for the formation of a national coalition of peasants, the Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform (CPAR), which was formed in 1987. When the CARP became law in June 1988, it was roundly rejected by all peasant organizations across the political spectrum, because it fell far short of the progressive land reform concept these organizations had wanted and lobbied for (Putzel, 1998). With Ramos’s election in mid-1992, the CPAR was finally forced to admit that the coalition had lost whatever remained of its former unity of purpose. Ignoring a previous agreement that the coalition would throw its weight behind an

8 There were a few land redistribution initiatives that took place during this period, but these were due to the early expiration of existing land-related contracts. The outcomes of these earlier land redistribution efforts have been varied, as in the case of Hijo plantation and DAPCO (Franco, 1999a; Borras and Franco, 2005).

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openly pro-agrarian reform presidential candidate, half of the coalition’s member organizations had supported Ramos’s presidential bid anyway despite his campaign promise (to landlords) for a conservative revision of CARP (see Franco, 1999b; Putzel, 1998). The demise of the CPAR and the split in the revolutionary Communist left in turn created an opportunity for realignments within the broad left and centre-left peasant movement and NGO community that would prove to be highly favourable to the new cause of land reform. The emergence of new formations of autonomous rural social movements, combined with the widespread erosion of the influence of the revolutionary Communist left, ushered in a new era characterized by a combination of militancy and pragmatism among rural people’s movements in the country. This development thus had an especially positive impact on efforts to initiate full and meaningful implementation of CARP’s progressive provisions from below.

Stepping back, we see that the different organizations and networks that came to occupy civil society space on the agrarian reform front during this time, also embraced different kinds of political strategies on how to carry out effective campaigns for land reform.9 These four categories are ideal-types; the reality is not as fixed and static as the four groups explained below. The first group includes those identified with the revolutionary Communist left. This group adopted an ‘expose and oppose strategy’ vis-à-vis CARP from the outset, based on the notion propagated by the underground revolutionary movement that ‘genuine land reform will be implemented after the seizure of state power by the worker-peasant alliance’. Thus, it does not support CARP, and instead works to undermine it. Its strategy is to focus on media work, capitalizing on carefully selected negative land reform cases that have big political propaganda value to convince the public that CARP is ‘pro-landlord’ and ‘anti-peasant’.

The second group are the state-coopted organizations. These are ‘traditional’ conservative peasant organizations and they use a ‘patron-client strategy’ that relies on a few charismatic, well-connected leaders to follow up cases in various DAR and government offices. Here, militant forms of actions are, as a general rule, not used, and confrontation with state officials is avoided. This strategy is essentially the manifestation of a double-sided patron-client relationship: between the leader and the ordinary poor people, between government officials and the leader.

The third type are the ‘conservative reformists’, which are mostly (but not solely) those close to Catholic/Christian institutions. This group uses a strategy that builds on some features of the two strategies explained above. Such an approach makes strong use of what critics pejoratively call ‘paper-chasing strategy’, which amounts to merely following-up on the whereabouts of a case and its documents within the state bureaucracy. The focus is on the technical legalities and often the key actors are the individual leaders or staffers, rather than organized claimants themselves. As such, this group can also be aptly labelled as the ‘NGO-led campaigns of the rural poor.’

9 The Philippines is often criticized by observers for the fragmentation that seems to characterize its civil society spaces; too often, however, such criticism seems to stem from an assumption that such fragmentation has no reasonable basis and that it is simply petty differences (often between key ‘personalities’) and competition for foreign donor funds that prevent or limit broader and more durable unity on the agrarian front. In fact, while petty differences and competition for scarce funds are at work in some instances, there are clearly also fundamental differences over land reform political strategy, which matter a great deal in shaping not just the land policy process, but also its outcomes as well – including its actual impact on rural poor households and communities.

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This approach generally assumes that a ‘conflict-free partnership’ with government is the most effective. By reducing land reform to an issue of ‘development project’, this strategy more or less ‘depoliticizes’ the land reform process.10 Organizing work in this kind of strategy tends to focus on less politically controversial and contentious landholdings.11 Some groups within this camp engage intermittently in some militant forms of actions to boost the main framework of their strategy, i.e. paper-chasing and conflict-free partnership.

Finally, the fourth group are what can be called the ‘progressive left reformists’, most of which (but not all) are formerly associated with the revolutionary Communist left. This group, to varying extents, developed and promoted what is now well-known as the ‘bibingka strategy’ in land reform, which involved combining autonomous and militant social mobilization ‘from below’ with initiatives by state reformists ‘from above’ (Borras 1999, 2001). Its forms of collective actions have ranged from forcible land occupation to dialogues, from street marches to legal offensives, from petition-letters to occupation and padlocking of DAR offices and gates to dramatize their protest. But by persistently navigating in between ‘outright opposition’ and ‘uncritical collaboration’ with the state on the issue of land reform (Franco, 1999b), the main adherents of this strategy, PARRDS and its affiliate organizations, especially the PEACE Foundation network,12 attempted to maximize the reformist potential of CARP, while remaining strategically concerned about redistributive land reform beyond the institutional limits of CARP. The strategy proved to be path-breaking.13

We now turn to take a closer look at this strategy and how it worked.

Section 2. The Bibingka Strategy: Mobilizations ‘from below’ Meet Reformist Initiatives ‘from above’

There are at least four important political openings for poor peasants campaigning for land reform: access to power, shifting alignments, availability of influential elites and cleavages within and among elites. The availability of all or some of these opportunities can create possibilities that even weak and disorganized actors can take advantage of; conversely, the strong may also grow weak. Regime transitions, even periodic administration turnover through competitive elections, offer changes in the structure of political opportunities and openings that can be potentially favourable to the landless poor, especially when the ruling classes are fragmented into competing factions (see Tarrow 1994, 1998). Pro-land reform forces can overcome anti-reform obstacles when their ranks remain solid and persistent, while landlords may either fail to muster sufficient state allies, may be abandoned by state allies, or

10 The term is borrowed from John Harriss’ critically acclaimed book on social capital where he coined the phrase, ‘depoliticizing development’ (Harriss, 2002).11 One specific initiative in the 1990s that approximated this strategic perspective was the TriPARRD (Tripartite Partnership for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development), a well-funded program that focused on ‘softer’ landholdings and on making these farms productive through development projects. It started early in the Garilao administration and was conceptualized and implemented through a joint effort by the DAR and the conservative Catholic/Christian reformists (see Liamzon, 1996). After a lacklustre performance, the TriPARRD experiment came to an end toward the end of the Garilao period, after having been carried out in a few pilot municipalities.12 Philippine Ecumenical Action for Community Empowerment, an NGO founded in 1977, and is today’s largest network of local NGOs and peasant movement organizations struggling for agrarian reform. It is the pioneer in the bibingka strategy employed by civil society organizations to push for pro-poor reforms in public policies.13 Between 1992 and 1998, the PEACE Foundation network alone, using the bibingka strategy, was involved in the redistribution of 196,873 hectares of agricultural land to around 60,000 households (or 360,000 rural poor individuals) under CARP (Franco, 2001b).

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may face a split from other elites. Furthermore, their co-opted peasant groups may fail to deliver, or may simply be overpowered by the composite force of pro-reform actors. From this perspective, one can begin to get a better sense of the rich variation and enormous unevenness in land redistribution outcomes at the sub-national level over time.

Pre-1992 Land Reform Inertia

As is well known, for all the promise of 1986 ‘people power’, the political opportunities for agrarian reform during the first post-Marcos government (1986-92) under Corazon Cojuangco Aquino were quite limited, resulting in anaemic outcomes in land redistribution. Most observers traced the problem to the first post-Marcos government’s ‘lack of political will’ to implement the CARP law, combined with a kind of bureaucratic inertia. The DAR bureaucracy was dominated by conservative forces that were not keen on according recognition (much less reaching out) to autonomous rural social movement groups in order to jointly implement the law. They opted instead to work with farmers’ associations that they could control in exchange for limited concessions. Meanwhile, there was a group of reformists within the DAR bureaucracy led by former activists, especially Gerry Bulatao, who used to be an important leader of the revolutionary Maoist movement. But at that time, the independent reformist initiatives of individuals such as Bulatao had very limited impact because they tended to be isolated and overpowered by the conservative DAR leadership in particular and the national government in general (see Putzel, 1992, for detailed analysis).

But while it may be true that the conservative anti-reform forces inside the DAR were quite strong at that time, this constitutes only part of the story. For their part, large sections of the rural social movement had chosen to forego serious participation in implementation of the land reform law and to boycott the CARP program instead. This had the effect of strengthening the hand of the anti-reform forces even further, and isolating the few reformists within the state even further. In early 1990, what remained of this state reformist bloc within the DAR finally bolted when President Aquino’s fourth appointee to head the DAR in as many years, Florencio Abad, a politician with pro-land reform sentiments, was stonewalled during the confirmation process by anti-reform legislators and eventually junked by the president herself. The whole affair seemed to provide the final proof that the political system was inherently flawed and so nothing could be expected from this or any agrarian reform program under the prevailing political dispensation.

As a result, two diametrically opposed poles, i.e. the ‘expose and oppose’ and ‘state-coopted’ extremes emerged on the rural social movement field, neither of which entailed a strategy of systematic autonomous interaction with a differentiated state around the government land reform program, and neither of which represented a significant political challenge to the hegemonic hold that anti-reform elites had managed to keep on the government program. A third pole later emerged, i.e. the ‘conservative reformist’ group, but it did not make any significant contribution to moving land either. It is worth emphasizing here that the actual strength of the land elite’s strident opposition to the reform thus went largely untested because of the relative absence of reformist pressures from pro-reform advocates either within the state or in society. And it was precisely this situation that some argued then as

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posing the most important obstacle to land reform implementation at that time. According to Gerry Bulatao, ‘There were two problems then: the continuing pressure on government by big land owners, including by the family of Cory Aquino, and on the side of civil society and political movements, there was a reluctance to shed the old paradigm’.14

Post-1992 Land Reform Dynamism

This state of affairs was significantly altered by the 1992 elections. The reforms initiated by a reform-minded team at the DAR under the leadership of Ernesto Garilao (1992-1998) contributed immensely to a favourable change in the political environment for autonomous local land reform movements to emerge and for meaningful engagements with the state to grow (see, e.g. Garilao, 1999). Shifting political alignments within the state brought about by the 1992 national electoral process also directly and indirectly favoured the cause of agrarian reform as well. The elections had greatly divided the elite, while the candidacy of Fidel Ramos failed to rally a majority of voters, and the new president thus entered office with a very weak electoral mandate. As a result, he sought to broaden his political base, and it was in this context that some reform-minded civil society activists were recruited into important positions in the state bureaucracy, including the DAR.

Meanwhile, it is also relevant to note that Fidel Ramos and his wife did not come from any big landowning families in the country. This could also partly explain what Gerry Bulatao, who was a top DAR official during the Aquino administration and part of the Ramos period, said in comparing the attitude towards land reform between the Aquino and Ramos administrations: ‘there were more pressure from the family of Cory Aquino than from the family of Fidel Ramos’ for us to make anti-land reform decisions or favour presidential friends in our decisions. ‘And,’ Bulatao continued, ‘if there was pressure [from President Ramos], it was done in a subtle way. It was so subtle that you cannot even…you’re not even sure, that it was there…I think there is not much debate to say that Ramos was never an anti-land reform president, as compared to Aquino.’15

But the DAR was (and still is) a huge and diverse state bureaucracy composed of an army of 15,000 personnel scattered nationwide, who had been recruited into the department at different times, including many dating back to the Marcos era. The top DAR leadership (secretary, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries) is composed of ‘political appointees’ whose terms of office are co-terminous with the appointing power (i.e. the president of the republic). Below is a layer of middle-level officials (bureau chiefs, regional directors, provincial directors, and national-regional-provincial adjudicators) who are also presidential appointees, but whose terms of office are not co-terminous with the appointing power; they can secure permanent positions according to the rules of the Civil Service Commission. Below the director and provincial officials are the numerous rank-and-file employees. Like other government employees, the DAR employees and officials are not well-paid. The various employees and officials enter the DAR bureaucracy through a variety of appointment and recruitment channels, and like other government agencies, ‘political patrons’ play a role in many such appointments and recruitment.

14 Interview, Gerry Bulatao, 21 January 2002, Quezon City.15 Interview, Gerry Bulatao, 21 January 2002, Quezon City.

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Over time and to varying degrees, the DAR bureaucracy has been subject to the power influences of both anti- and pro-reform state and societal actors. However, the political and geographic location of lower-level employees and officials in particular, tends to leave them especially vulnerable to anti-reform influences and manipulation. In the absence of significant land reform, most DAR employees at these lower levels live and work in local communities that remain the building blocks of landlord power. In their work, they face the daily threat of coercion, reprisal and harassment by landlords in active resistance to the government reform program. This situation is aggravated by the fact that if a landlord accuses them of any administrative or criminal wrongdoing (e.g.‘abuse of authority’ or ‘trespassing on private property’) when carrying out their official duties, they are left alone to defend themselves. Legally, the DAR cannot provide them with either lawyers or money to hire lawyers, and employees retiring from service are unable to receive retirement benefits as long as such cases are pending against them. Anti-reform forces frequently exploit these ‘technical’ facts in their efforts to pressure lower level officials not to proceed with expropriation. As a result, many local DAR officials who are supposed to be frontline CARP implementers, become immobilized. By contrast, regional and national level DAR officials do not suffer the same degree of daily pressure and harassment by landlords.

This brief background on the institutional set-up of the DAR bureaucracy gives insight into the internal dynamics within the bureaucracy and how it engages other state and societal actors. Against this background, we can get a better understanding of the various types of DAR employees and officials: from active pro-land reformists, to ‘fence-sitters’, to rent-seekers, and then outright anti-land reformists. These various categories are found not only in the national-level bureaucracy, but also within the intermediate (regional/provincial) and local (municipal) levels. The Philippine experience suggests that such categories can be altered, however, in every location and level of the bureaucracy over time, through the dynamic, recursive interactions between state and societal actors, both pro-reform and anti-reform.

It is also important to note that the local-level bureaucracies, just like the local peasant groups, need allies at the top of the DAR bureaucracy. If they do not perceive support from allies at the top, they will tend to remain fence-sitters or might even be recruited to the side of anti-reformism. Thus, the nature of the leadership at the top in the national DAR office is of critical importance in determining the orientation of those at lower levels: the top leadership’s orientation tends to be mirrored at the lower levels of the bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the DAR is embedded within the broader state apparatus and bureaucracy that directly and indirectly facilitates or blocks the former’s efforts to implement land reform. For example, the DAR must contend with Congress in terms of yearly decisions on its budget allocations to the various CARP components. Yet historically, Congress has been the bastion of landowning classes and their allies, with the most serious anti-reform attacks against CARP tending to come from this institution. The DAR must also contend with a judiciary that, like Congress, is known to be heavily influenced by the elite, including the landed elite. It is therefore not

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uncommon to see landlords use the judiciary (from the local courts up to the Supreme Court) to block the implementation of land reform (Franco, forthcoming).

Finally, the DAR deals directly with a complex web of state agencies, large and small, in the everyday implementation of land reform. More than twenty agencies are directly involved in the various aspects of CARP implementation. Many have demonstrated little sympathy for the cause of land reform and the interests of the landless and land-poor peasants and small farmers. And yet despite the entrenched anti-land reform leaderships of these agencies, smaller pro-land reform enclaves have been known to emerge within some of these agencies since the early 1990s. For example, within the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) some progressive tendencies could be seen at the top and middle levels of leadership in the 1990s.

The 1992 electoral victory of Fidel Ramos initially elicited grim predictions about the fate of the already much weakened CARP. Indeed one of the plans in Ramos’s campaign platform had been to increase the retention limit under CARP from five to 50 hectares (that would exclude from reform majority of farm lands) in an apparent attempt to court the support of the landowning class. Soon after being sworn to office, the new president in fact started to recruit military officers into his administration. But it did not take long for the grim predictions to be proven partly incorrect, at least on the agrarian reform front, starting with the appointment of Ernesto Garilao as the new DAR secretary. Garilao had previously been the head of the politically conservative Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), one of the country’s largest mainstream NGOs, which was funded by the country’s top corporations and foreign donors.

Garilao himself believed that he had been selected by Ramos to become the DAR secretary among other possible appointees because he was ‘not politically controversial – considering that at that time agrarian reform was very controversial’.16

He had not really been directly involved with land reform before 1992 despite his NGO background, and he had been loosely identified with the political community of the conservative reformists. But in his first few days in office, he made the crucial move to convince Ramos to drop his campaign promise of a 50-hectare retention limit and to revise the existing five-hectare retention limit, which he succeeded in doing without much opposition. Ramos, according to Garilao, explained that the talk about a possible shift to a 50-hectare retention limit had been mere ‘election propaganda’. Garilao said that when he asked Ramos whether the latter had landholdings in any farm size categories that the DAR should be extra sensitive about, the president replied no and subsequently gave him the go-aheadl to proceed and cover all farm landholdings based on what the law stated.17

To do this, Garilao brought several respected NGO activists into the DAR and gave them key positions – e.g. Hector Soliman (Undersecretary for Legal Affairs), Clifford Burkeley (head Executive Assistant and later Assistant Secretary for Legal Affairs), Joe Grageda (Bureau Director and later a provincial and regional top official) and Jose Olano (Undersecretary for Operations), to name a few; and Gerry Bulatao

16 Interview with Ernesto Garilao, 11 January 2002, Makati City.17 Interview with Ernesto Garilao, 11 January 2002, Makati City.

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(Undersecretary for Operations) later in Garilao’s term of office.18 After making sure that President Ramos and his family did not have any landed interest, Garilao proceed to frame his plan: ‘The vision was there, and it was very simple – more lands to be distributed at a shorter time, faster rate of resolving agrarian disputes. So I approached some friends from the NGO community, and I told them that since it’s them who know how to make these things work they should join me in running the department. And most of them did.’19 He also consolidated the ranks of the liberal reformers within the bureaucracy and gave more important positions to some of them. He then proceeded to launch a ‘clean-up’ operation within the bureaucracy. His other major step was to seek informal consultations with members of the broad community of autonomous NGOs and peasant organizations, to the surprise of many of them. Garilao explained that, ‘When President Ramos appointed me secretary…I brought in a number of NGO development practitioners to become agrarian reform state implementers. We adhered to the principle that for the redistributive program to succeed, it must have the support of the public in general, and of major constituency in particular, the landless farmers. Since that was not present in 1992, we had to develop strong constituency support.’20 He later instituted both formal and informal consultative groups involving various peasant groups and NGOs. Taken together, these moves suggested that he would be more concerned with ensuring political legitimacy, rather than private capital accumulation, of the Philippine state.

Garilao’s sense of belongingness to the conservative reformists from the Ateneo de Manila University, many of whom were staunch land reform advocates, would partly explain his consistent pro-reform stance. His continued reformist stance after 1992 can also be explained by the influence of the radical reformers who were able to position themselves within the DAR bureaucracy. Moreover, Garilao’s political calculation that it was highly likely that the sympathy and support of broad peasant movements and their allies to his reformist actions would, in turn, strengthen his leverage within the broader state bureaucracy also partly proved correct. Garilao said: ‘At times I would tell the President or other Cabinet members or Congressmen that if we don’t do this or that then the militant farmers’ groups are going to rally against us…I used this kind of bargaining strategy within the government many times, and it proved effective.’

But it is important to point out that the reform-oriented officials could not have consolidated their ranks and their position within the government in general and the public constituency had it not been for the critical engagement by an important section of the rural social movements formerly associated with the revolutionary Communist left that opted to drop the ‘expose and oppose’ framework and adopted the ‘critical engagement’ strategy towards the state land reform law. The ground for 18 Soliman, Burkeley and Bulatao were all associated with the NGO KAISAHAN at the time of their recruitment to the bureaucracy. They all played critical role in the formation of KAISAHAN in 1990, and turned it into an important NGO that specializes on agrarian reform policy analysis and legal assistance (together with ex-DAR Secretary Florencio Abad. KAISAHAN would play an important role in assisting the Garilao administration in terms of policy direction and bias in legal interpretation of the CARP law. Butch Olano was the former director of another NGO closely associated with the Jesuits, the PhilDHRRA. Meanwhile Joe Grageda and Gerry Bulatao both had past associations with the revolutionary Communist left, although both had earlier left the mainstream movement in the 1980s and joined NGOs that are associated with other ‘popular-democrats’ (those who officially left the mainstream revolutionary movement and started to experiment on new approaches to organizing and mobilization work among the poor).19 Interviews with Ernesto Garilao, 11 January 2002 and 14 July 2005, both in Makati City.20 Ernesto Garilao (1999: xix).

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interface between these two sets of pro-reform actors seemed to have been appropriately prepared, as Garilao said, ‘We also adhered to the principle that we would work with anyone who wanted to work with us…It was necessary to view them as autonomous partners and that we intersect in areas where there are common agreements, and seek resolutions in areas of differences…Our thinking was that if we were to have a strong civil society support, we had to get the agrarian reform actors of civil society to penetrate the agrarian reform state apparatus’21. In short, the relationship that was envisioned and that emerged was kind of symbiotic, or mutually reinforcing – despite the permanent presence of conflict between the state and societal actors.

The positioning of the DAR between 1992 and 1998 thus differed from the previous four years of CARP implementation in several ways. Garilao appears to have had a dynamic two-way relationship with the executive branch of government, especially with the Office of the President. He was able to stabilize the agrarian reform front, and in doing so, earned the government’s confidence, or tolerance, as partly demonstrated by his appointment as head of the anti-poverty programme. This appointment put the role of the DAR, and Garilao, in a broader anti-poverty framework, further strengthening the pro-(land) reform policy current within the government. Garilao demonstrated ability and willingness at times to challenge anti-(land) reform policy currents in other agencies and groups of state actors. Initially paired with a Department of Agriculture secretary who was outrightly anti-land reform, Garilao showed most of the time that he could withstand conflicting inter-agency priorities and push their outcomes in his favour.

At times, however, when the private capital accumulation imperatives for the government were too great, he set the ‘political legitimacy’ task aside. One should remember that the Garilao DAR did lose a considerable number of ‘battles’, like the Mapalad and Hacienda Looc cases – most of which had something to do with land use conversions from farmlands to non-agricultural uses involving elites who were well-connected at the national level in the context of the real-estate boom of that period.

Yet through Garilao’s efforts, liberal reform advocates became deeply and widely entrenched within the DAR nationwide. One way Garilao used to convert officials and employees to a reformist orientation was to deliberately expose them to militant, autonomous peasant groups and NGOs. The reformist tendency at the national DAR impacted the local bureaucracies. For one, the appointment of progressive, radical reformers in regional and provincial DAR positions brought the reformist leadership closer to the rank and file field officials and employees. The signal from the national leadership of its serious reformism was picked up by field personnel, leading numerous fence-sitters to jump onto the nationwide bandwagon of reformism. This signal also directly helped neutralize, if not isolate, outrightly anti-reform DAR officials and employees. Overall, the reformist signals at the top contributed to the consolidation and expansion of pro-reform field personnel. Autonomous peasant groups and NGOs started to interact with these local DAR reformers, leading to numerous gains in land reform. Through such reformist initiatives, the Garilao DAR almost completed the implementation of redistribution of ‘softer’ landholdings.

21 Ernesto Garilao (1999: xix-xx).

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Alongside these gains, however, when he left the bureaucracy in mid-1998 what generally remained to be redistributed under the DAR were the more highly politically contentious private landholdings. The two post-Marcos administrations of Aquino and Ramos also left pending the full and decisive expropriation and redistribution of the vast landholdings of Marcos’ cronies, particularly the lands of Danding Cojuangco, the Benedictos and the Floirendos, despite the CARP mandate to quickly expropriate and redistribute these landholdings to peasants.

Framework for constructive initiatives from below

During the Garilao period, various forms of pressure politics, such as picket, dialogues, street marches, camp-outs, and land occupation, were increasingly employed by peasant organizations and their allies who rejected both the ‘expose and oppose’ on the one hand and the ‘conservative, non-contentious’ strategies on the other (see Franco and Borras, 2005). Most of these actions tended, and continue to be, landholding-specific, with very clear immediate demands. Complementary to these local, peasant-led actions, have been another type of social movement-initiated campaigns intended to bring the poor people’s movements in direct contact with state actors. This latter type of initiative has aimed to improve and systematize implementation mechanisms to speed up and broaden the scope of land redistribution, to push for policy reforms and, to some extent, to actually map possible additional target landholdings. This type of action has thus been directed more at the national level and is more programmatic in character, although its form is often considered ‘less dramatic’ by the national media. Others have concluded that such state-society interface more or less automatically means co-optation and uncritical collaboration. But for those who participate in it, this latter type of action aims at improving the very context – the ‘enabling environment’ – for the actual local struggles for land by the landless and near-landless poor, and as such constitutes a key battlefield. And the outcomes of such efforts certainly suggest that they have been something more than ‘co-optation’.

For instance, in 1994, the PEACE Foundation and its network of local, autonomous peasant organizations and NGOs initiated a dialogue with the DAR regarding specific landholdings scheduled for expropriation in the 24 provinces, where its network had direct operations had been identified as major areas of highly contested large landholdings. The group aspired to defend redistributed farms threatened by land use conversions and other anti-agrarian reform moves aimed at reversing reform gains and vowed to promote productivity and income improvement in agrarian reform communities and to push for a positive policy environment for a more just and meaningful agrarian reform and rural development. The workshop, which drew in the DAR, is a good example of a state-society interface driven from below. Instead of dealing separately and on an individual basis to resolve each case, PEACE proposed that a more systematic joint PEACE-DAR team be formed to resolve the cases and work out operational mechanisms for implementation. The workshop formed a working committee called ‘Task Force 24’, whose main objective was to fast-track land acquisition and distribution in the said provinces (out of a total of 80 provinces in the country). Thereafter, Task Force 24 focused on the 24 provinces where the positive interaction between state reformists within the DAR and peasants organizations and NGOs were most needed, given the potentially and actually strong landlord resistance to reform. This committee facilitated collective efforts among the

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state and societal pro-reform forces to identify major landholdings or ongoing local land disputes, and joint strategizing on how to defeat the landlords’ resistance in order to expedite expropriation and distribution of the land.

Distinct roles for each of the involved parties were mutually agreed. The NGOs and peasant organizations’ main responsibilities were as follows: organizing the potential peasant beneficiaries, especially on the contentious issue of ‘beneficiary inclusion-exclusion’; carrying out mass mobilizations locally, regionally and nationally and even mobilizing support internationally; and identifying the local DAR officials they wanted removed from office or a particular position. Meanwhile, the DAR’s responsibilities were preparing legal documents and draft legal decisions that were then brought back to the NGOs and peasant organizations for feedback before finalization; coordinating with other state agencies; checking and preventing possible violence from landlords; and removing from office or position local DAR officials about whom the NGOs and peasant organizations had filed complaints. Their joint plans were usually time-bound.

The dynamic and oftentimes conflict-ridden interaction between local DAR officials and local NGOs and peasant organizations was mediated by national-level DAR officials and NGOs in a variety of ways. Activists who were recruited into the top positions played an important role in this process. As Hector Soliman, former DAR Undersecretary, explained: ‘When a problem arises, formal position papers, formal dialogues and rallies were resorted to by these groups. But a lot of the discussions also take place in the backroom, informal channels… [If you are a top official] you ought to have extra long patience with peasant organizations. One must understand that peasants come from a long history of oppression. And so as a government official you must show them that you are seriously trying to solve the problem’22

Many pro-reform societal organizations found that in this type of a state-society interface where national government officials directly interact with autonomous civil society organizations even those local DAR officials who had a strong tendency to be ‘fence-sitters’, rent-seekers or outrightly opposed to land reform, were partly neutralized or even converted to reformism, since they knew that the top DAR leadership put importance on the joint state-society effort. As one veteran activist said, ‘When the local officials know that your organization has connections with their higher officials, they respect you and pay attention to your demands. But when they know that you have no contacts at the top, most won’t even give you the minimum attention, let alone respect.’23

The joint initiative proved relatively effective in hastening the process of land reform implementation. Later, the coverage of this joint committee expanded to 32 provinces (and the committee was renamed ‘Task Force 32’), and a major national rural social movement coalition, PARRDS, joined. Still later, the number of NGO and peasant organization participants multiplied to include the conservative reformists. The Task Force’s area of operation again expanded, to 40 provinces. The campaign was renamed ‘Project 40 Now!’ It became the main mechanism under the Garilao DAR through which peasant groups and NGOs interfaced with the reformist officials of the DAR in a systematic and programmatic way (although the first type of pro-reform state-society interface discussed above continued in parallel). This interface

22 Interview with Hector Soliman, 18 January 2002, Quezon City.23 Interview with Steve Quiambao, 14/21 May 1997, Netherlands.

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mechanism was also replicated at the lower levels of the provinces, where it became known as Provincial and Municipal Campaigns on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.

Notably, Project 40 Now! was not maintained during the post-Garilao period, due to fundamental divisions within the rural social movement groups with regard to terms of engagement with the Morales DAR (July 1998-January 2001). Instead, the relatively broad and systematic interface mechanism during the Morales period was the ‘Task Force Fast-Track’, which involved most of the network of groups that were formerly associated with the revolutionary Communist left and who turned to become progressive left reformists in pushing for land redistribution nationwide. Other NGOs and peasant organizations opted to boycott this initiative. Despite the boycott, though, the short-lived ‘Task Force Fast-Track’ carried out a relatively comprehensive work, especially in terms of locating ‘operational bottlenecks’ in the land acquisition and redistribution process. It made sensible recommendations on how to improve the operational mechanisms for quick and decisive expropriation actions. Unfortunately, the Task Force’s recommendations finalized in December 2000 were not to be transformed into practice, since Morales would be ousted from office the following month (DAR-TFFT, 2000).

In the end, somewhat ironically, the successful ouster of the Estrada presidency (and Morales DAR) through a combination of military and middle-class mobilization marked the end of the era of state-society interface mechanisms in land reform. In sharp contrast to the projections that this people’s mobilization (to oust a president) would bring meaningful reform with increased civil society participation, the exact opposite happened (Franco, 2004). Ultimately, the formal and systematic state-society interface tradition of Project 40 Now! and even Task Force Fast-Track were completely dismantled during the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, beginning in 2001 onward (Franco and Borras, 2005).

In summary, one category of reformist initiatives ‘from below’ consisted in an attempt to construct a predictable framework for state-society interaction that would complement more peasant-led and less programmatic collective actions by incorporating policy-oriented and operational issues in the interface with the DAR. That many value-added gains were made in this complementary effort is beyond doubt. However, it should also be noted that many of the gaps in peasant-led direct action were not yet fully covered by the complementary initiative operated mainly by NGOs. For example, while the agenda included issues like systematic operational mechanisms and other policy reforms, the bulk of efforts exerted remained limited to the pending cases put forward by autonomous peasant organizations and NGOs. The initiative failed to broaden its scope to cover, for instance, agendas that the state was reluctant to table, such as, importantly, a systematic accounting of the ‘missing lands’ that had been deducted quietly from the original CARP scope (see Borras, 2003). The Garilao-era interface mechanism also failed to realize the importance of public lands under the DAR and DENR jurisdictions (Borras, 2006b). Finally, it also, at times, resulted in a tendency among some NGO leaders to position as self-appointed ‘negotiators’ or ‘brokers’ between the government and local peasant associations, which was certainly not helpful in the context of the development of peasants’ organizational autonomy and capacity. Overall, like peasant-led direct action, the broader national-level initiative to improve the institutional context for land

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reform implementation had both strengths and weaknesses, even as it contributed to shaping the nature, character and extent of CARP land redistribution outcomes over time.

Independent initiatives from above

While it is true that in cases of public policies that aim to redistribute wealth and power state actors normally simply react to pressures from below, there are also times when independent reformist initiatives are carried out by reform-oriented state officials. This is true even in some cases of land reform historically where state actors normally act in favour of the poor when social mobilizations from below is high, though there are also times when state actors, on their own, conceive and instigate initiatives that later pull in societal actors towards reformism. One important way in which the Garilao DAR distinguished itself involved its efforts to gain greater control over the land reform process vis-à-vis other state agencies and institutions. For instance, to some extent, the Garilao DAR worked (successfully) to prevent the national legislature (Congress) from blocking the allotment of significant budget for land redistribution during yearly budget allocation process. The Garilao DAR can also be credited for working to bring about improvements, again quite successfully, in resolving agrarian law implementation cases within the bureaucracy despite the surge in actual number of cases during this period (see Table C, Annex), and such achievement in case resolution certainly speaks of his administration’s improved relationships with, or relative influence over, many other agencies that are linked in some ways in case resolution (e.g. Land Bank of the Philippines for land value assessment, the Land Management Bureau at the DENR, for survey-related disputes, and so on). This administration was also credited for the passage of a new law (Republic Act 8532) in February 1998 that extended the implementation period of CARP for another ten years or until 2008 and with additional budget allotment (for details, see Borras, 1999: 80-84). This administration can also be credited for preventing, to a large extent, the use of the police and military against the landless and near-landless claim makers. In fact, it was during this period when the police started to be mobilized by the DAR to physically install peasant beneficiaries to their awarded farmlands amidst landlord opposition and attempt to expel or prevent peasants from actually occupying the land. Meanwhile, unlike others before and after, this administration did not use the police to violently disperse protesting peasants. The Garilao DAR also gave priority to systematic data-banking and improving the quality of DAR data: computerized the data-banking system, professionals doing the job, and setting up checks and balances.

Apart from these efforts to gain greater control over the land reform process vis-à-vis other state agencies and institutions, another important independent initiative of the Garilao DAR that slowly drew in the active participation of NGOs and peasant organizations was the Agrarian Reform Community (ARC) development programme launched in 1993. An ARC was officially defined as a barangay or a cluster of contiguous barangays where a critical mass of farmers and farm workers were awaiting the full implementation of agrarian reform. ‘These farmers and farm workers will anchor the integrated development of the areas’ (DAR-BARBD, 2000: 18). By 2000, the DAR was able to launch some 1,000 ARCs nationwide, involving about a million hectares of (supposedly) ‘land reformed’ landholdings.

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Initially, most NGOs and peasant organizations were highly critical of the ARC development programme, and chose to not engage with it. Over time, however, many slowly began to be drawn into it. But this state-initiated interface between pro-reform forces within the state and in society developed relatively differently from the land dispute-centred political dynamics of land reform. In an ARC project, the conflict is primarily about the control over the nature, pace, extent and direction of development projects, such as training and education programmes for micro-credit and ‘social preparation’ programmes for infrastructure projects like road construction. In an ARC development project, the main challenge for state and non-state reform actors revolves around the issue of making the reform sector socio-economically productive and viable, an undertaking that requires capacity and skills different from those at the land reform stage.

The ARC strategy, which was the ‘brainchild’ of Garilao, contributed to the cause of agrarian reform in the country. This is seen in at least three ways. First, the ARC concept was partly responsible for reinvigorating the interest of foreign donors in CARP. Within four years, through the ARC projects, the Garilao DAR had mobilized close to a billion dollars in foreign development assistance. Second, the ARC concept partly shielded CARP from the attacks of the anti-land reform forces that contended that lands awarded to peasants became unproductive. Whatever the limitations and drawbacks of the ARC concept, strategy and actual implementation, the Garilao DAR was able to produce empirical evidence that agrarian reform actually works, especially when systematic support services are delivered to the reform sector. The Garilao DAR used the ARC programme in its perennial arguments with members of congress during annual budget deliberations. In addition, with the serious and renewed interest of the foreign donor community, other anti-CARP state actors hesitated to attack the programme, careful not to antagonize the international donors. Finally, overall the ARC strategy can be seen as a ‘training ground’ for pro-reform forces within the state and in society for capacity-building and skills development related to rural development. For these reasons, subsequent DAR administrations decided to continue the ARC strategy.24

Nevertheless, in general, autonomous rural social movement groups have remained critical of the ARC concept, strategy and outcomes. Among the issues they raise is the exclusionary character of the ARC strategy, since only a fraction of land reform beneficiaries are actually covered by the programme. Many have realized, however, that defaulting on post-land reform development undertakings may only give ammunition to those looking for ways to edge land reform off of the state policy agenda. Hence, despite actual differences of opinion on rural development strategies, increasingly, societal actors have begun interfacing with the DAR officials in ARC developments.

Eventually, although uneven, integration of autonomous rural social movement groups in the ARC programme has resulted in at least two unexpected outcomes. On the one hand, and on a positive note, NGOs have discovered that many of the communities that were declared as ARCs in fact have pending land redistribution-related issues. Thus, while these communities were on record as having no pending issues about land tenure, NGO activists have ascertained otherwise. Some of these

24 For a relevant analysis of one of the important programs supporting the ARC strategy, refer to Fox and Gershman (2000).

23

NGOs have therefore ended up not only doing development projects, but also assisting peasants to consummate their land reform struggles. Such situations cut across ARC development levels, from those that are top-rated to those with lacklustre performance in development. Three sub-national comparative studies done by Franco and colleagues (namely, the ‘35 weakest ARC organizations’, 1999c; ‘top ARCs’, 1998; and ‘ARC and rural democratization’, 2000) are revealing: most formally declared ARCs in fact have substantial unresolved land disputes, so that many of those who benefit from the state development support are not the peasant beneficiaries but local elite, and many of the existing ARCs do not necessarily reflect the interests of the previously landless and land-poor segments of the communities.

Many NGOs were attracted to the ARC programmes primarily because these projects offered generous funds. One of the most important effects of many NGOs jumping onto the ARC bandwagon was, arguably, a significant drain of activist NGOs and individuals away from working on the land redistribution struggles. The latter became increasingly unattractive to local and foreign NGOs for several reasons: because of the political contentiousness of land redistribution struggles, because victorious outcomes are uncertain and unpredictable, and because they involved project components that were not easily funded (e.g.political mobilizations and organizing expenses). By the late 1990s, few international NGOs and development agencies were providing substantial support for land redistribution campaigns. Rather, ‘good governance, local governance’ and micro-finance within and outside ARCs soon became the favourites, despite the largely unresolved land question in the country.

Notably, the DAR and many NGOs, national and international, justified this bias by saying that after ‘widespread’ land transfers, the focus of development work ought now to turn to farm development – while glossing over the fact that successfully completed land transfers up to that point were in fact not nearly as ‘widespread’ as they were assumed to be. While in theory such contentions do not necessarily negate the need to continue working on land redistribution, actual funding and projects largely ceased flowing to the politically contentious land redistribution component of CARP in reality. Unfortunately, this same argument – emphasizing a dire post-land transfer scenario unless more funds went that way – was, and still is, used by anti-land reform elites within and outside government to justify continuing cuts in funding for land redistribution.

To be sure, the new state-society synergy did not automatically ensure full and meaningful implementation of land reform, since it still had to overcome anti-reform forces both within the state and in society, which could also be quite strong, especially when working in concert with each other. The construction of formidable state-society alliances by anti-reform forces helps to explain such notorious land reform failures: as Hacienda Looc (where previously awarded land was taken from peasant beneficiaries and ‘re-awarded’ to the country’s premier real estate firm), Mapalad (see Quitoriano, 2000), and Hacienda Luisita (where the extremely dubious stock distribution program was left un-monitored – see Carranza, 2004).25 Indeed, in

25 By mid-2006 however the Macapagal-Arroyo administration cancelled the contract at Hacienda Luisita and started the process of land redistribution despite the Cojuangcos’ legal appeal at the Supreme Court. What motivated the Macapagal-Arroyo administration to carry out such a bold move was the fact that the Cojuangcos

24

retrospect, the opportunities and limits of a state-society bibingka strategy were partly explained by former DAR Secretary Ernesto Garilao himself (1999: xx):

The civil society partners of the DAR [Department of Agrarian Reform] were given all the opportunities to penetrate the state agrarian reform apparatus, get into alliances with national and local DAR bureaucrats, and use legal and extralegal political action to assert and seek favourable resolution of issues, concerns and interests…Not all the agrarian reform partners fully utilized this opening. But PEACE and PARRDS saw this democratic opening and maximized its gains…When reforms do not move as fast, it is easy to accuse government of lacking political will and sincerity, and other pejorative terms in the civil society cookbook. In many cases, reforms do not move fast because social pressure from the constituency is weak. Many have the mistaken notion that press releases and letters to the editor constitute sufficient social pressure…[P]easant social mobilization complemented by friendly media support is a more effective combination. State reforms are rarely won by state reformists alone. They are won…when the alliance between autonomous peasant organizations and state reformists is much stronger than whatever coalition of the anti-reformists within and outside government can mount.

Section 3. The Gradual Fading of State Reformism in the Post-Garilao Era

Unlike Fidel Ramos whose electoral mandate was extremely narrow, Joseph Estrada (July 1998 to January 2001) was elected with a phenomenally high electoral mandate. And unlike the Ramos administration, which consistently sought broad political alliances and consensus among various political groups and sectors, the Estrada presidency banked on its popular mandate and may not have felt obligated to reach out to other sectors and groups that did not support him in the electoral contest.

President Estrada appointed Horacio Morales, Jr., as DAR secretary. Morales was a well-known figure among NGOs. He was the former chairperson of the underground Communist-controlled revolutionary National Democratic Front in the 1970s until his arrest and detention in the early 1980s. Released from jail during the 1986 regime transition, he then joined and headed the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), a politically conservative NGO founded in the 1950s, and transformed it into an autonomous, progressive organization. In general, Morales took his cue from Ernesto Garilao on how to work as DAR secretary, but with some revisions and modifications, both deliberate and otherwise. Like Garilao, Morales recruited progressive NGO and academic activists to occupy top positions within the DAR, most of whom had long and deep knowledge of agrarian and rural reform and extensive exposure to militant peasant movements – e.g. Pancho Lara (Head Executive Assistant), Toinette Raquiza (Head Executive Assistant and later Assistant Secretary for Support Services), Carlito Añonuevo (Assistant Secretary for Support Services) and Conrado Navarro (Undersecretary for Operations), to name a few.26

earlier joined the opposition groups that were calling for the ouster of the President on charges of electoral fraud during the 2004 presidential election. Whether and how real redistributive land reform can be achieved in this process remains to be seen.26 Pancho Lara is perhaps one of the most important radical intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s who were behind the initiatives to assist in peasant movement building and framing the land reform debate in radical, progressive terms. Lara founded a number of NGOs (e.g. Philippine Peasant Institute or PPI; Management

25

Like Garilao, Morales recruited within the ranks of his immediate political community: those formerly associated with the revolutionary Communist left, but were later transformed into progressive left reformists. And like the Garilao DAR, the Morales DAR first consolidated its own alliance with its political community. Like the Garilao DAR, the Morales DAR adopted as strategy the pro-reform alliance with the broad spectrum of autonomous rural social movements. Morales decided to basically continue the reforms started by Garilao (see Morales, 1999). Changes within and outside the DAR, however, resulted in differences between the Garilao and Morales administrations in terms of implementation processes and actual redistribution outcomes.

First, a substantial portion of the autonomous rural social movement groups refused to critically engage the Estrada-Morales administration on the issue of agrarian reform. According to Morales, a section of the civil society working on agrarian reform was ‘anti-Estrada, anti-administration, anti-Morales, anti-DAR…they were not open to any dialogue’27. The subsequent problems in the relationship between some of these rural social movement groups and the Morales DAR were subject to varying, often competing, interpretations. But whatever the differences between Morales and these rural social movements, their impacts would be quite substantially negative on the process and outcome of land reform, since the pro-reform forces were divided, and so, relatively weakened. Second, the Morales DAR suffered amidst the negative political developments at the presidential level that affected CARP, e.g., President Estrada calling former Marcos crony and anti-land reform landlord, Danding Cojuangco, ‘godfather of land reform’, and directly lobbying for some of the land use conversion applications of his friends). By 2000, the political turmoil leading to the ouster of Estrada had, in one way or another, derailed the course of land reform. Third, these unfavourable political developments in state-society relations aggravated the already problematic condition of the land reform front. Recall that unlike the Garilao DAR, the Morales DAR was confronted with the most politically contentious private landholdings. Fourth, Morales failed to resist the imposition of President Estrada to take on as Undersecretary for Legal Affairs Danilo Lara, who was a former vice governor of Cavite, and a close associate of ex-governor of that province, both of whom were well-known anti-land reform officials in Cavite engaged in massive land use conversions for speculative real-estate deals. Finally, the Morales management style was not ‘hands-on’, in contrast to Garilao’s. This had some adverse impacts on his work within the bureaucracy.

The continuity and change of reformist leadership at the DAR national office during the Morales period also impacted the local bureaucracy. To some extent, there was a demoralization and relative demobilization among the DAR field personnel during the period of increasing likelihood of Estrada (and so Morales) being ousted from power. Many local DAR personnel stopped reporting local accomplishments, trying to ‘save’ them for the anticipated new leadership in the event of the ouster of

Organization for Development and Empowerment or MODE) that proved to be, at varying points in time, critical allies to progressive peasant movements. Lara was among the first batch of key cadres within the revolutionary movement to call for the building of truly autonomous rural social movements. Raquiza was a former radical student activist who later joined the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM). Anonuevo was one of the founders of an important NGO think tank, Action for Economic Reforms (AER) and an important coastal resource oriented NGO, Tambuyog. Lara, Raquiza and Anonuevo all came from the radical left movement. Navarro came from PRRM and the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR). 27 Interview with Horacio Morales Jr., 18 January 2002, Quezon City.

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Estrada. Again, land redistribution during the 2000 and 2001 suffered due to transition politics. All these factors had an impact on accomplishment rates. The Morales DAR had a yearly average redistribution output that was just half that of the Garilao DAR, although the percentage shares of highly contentious lands and land acquisition and distribution modalities were far higher than his predecessors.

In the end, the Estrada presidency (and so the Morales DAR), lasted for only 30 months, before being ousted through a combined mobilization of largely urban-based middle and upper classes, supported by the Church and the media, and backed by the military on charges of corruption. Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took over the presidential seat in January 2001, and in spite of the earlier assurances by civil society leaders who had backed the ouster of Estrada – e.g. Dinky Soliman, Ging Deles, Leonardo Montemayor, Florencio Abad, and Rigoberto Tiglao, to name a few28 – that ‘asset reform’ would remain on the national agenda, the era of state reformism came to an abrupt end. The new president appointed politicians to head the DAR who had no background on agrarian reform and in dealing with autonomous social movements. Although some important land reform gains could be said to have transpired since 2001, they have been few and far between and largely overshadowed by the much larger number of land reform losses and by serious reversals in the land reform enabling environment as well. Three key interlinked reform losses have occurred since this administration took power. First, land use conversion to evade expropriation and favour real estate companies has become more rampant. Second, the administration started to violently repress peasant protests, regularly bringing in armed anti-riot police to violently break peasant camp-outs in front of DAR offices. More peasant leaders were assassinated during the Macapagal-Arroyo administration than during any other recent national administrations (see Franco, 2007; Franco and Borras, 2007). Third, corruption has returned in the DAR bureaucracy, and seems to have become even worse. For example, in 2004 the government recovered nearly US$700 million of ‘ill-gotten’ wealth from the Marcoses. By law the money should have been turned over for use in implementing the government land reform program.29 But the entire amount disappeared on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, and it is widely believed that the money was used to ensure Macapagal-Arroyo’s electoral victory.

In response, the bulk of the highly mobilized pro-land reform civil society coalition, whose sense of agrarian justice and state accountability to the landless rural poor was now sharply honed, has not stood idly. Accustomed to the tolerance and even appreciation shown to them by state reformists and attuned to the mechanisms of state-society interface that had been institutionalized during previous administrations, many land reform activists were initially disoriented by the change in political environment for land reform and vulnerable to the administration’s divide-and-rule tactics. But the broad coalition of groups most involved in the struggle have since regrouped and rallied to try to push the momentum back in favour of land reform, building pressures on the DAR at different levels of the system, from the 28 Dinky Soliman was the national coordinator of the CPAR coalition from 1987-1993; Florencio Abad was the former DAR Secretary in 1990; Ging Deles was with the conservative reformist group National Peace Conference; Leonardo Montemayor is one of the key leaders, at some point jointly with his father Jeremias, of the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF); Rigoberto Tiglao was formerly associated with the radical communist movement and himself conducted serious studies on the agrarian question in the country. 29 A new law was passed so that a portion of this recovered money could be used for the compensation of some 10,000 persons who were human rights violations victims under the Marcos dictatorship.

27

bottom upward. Most significantly, land reform activists and advocates in society have increasingly had to focus their attention on reforming the DAR bureaucracy at the very top, in order to check serious anti-reform rollback attempts and as a prerequisite to unleashing reformist momentum once again at lower echelons. Between 2001 and 2005 there were four DAR secretaries, two of whom were expelled from the DAR under enormous pressure from rural social movements closely identified with the bibingka strategy (PARRDS, PEACE, UNORKA, among others) – in effect, the two were forced out of office after persistent and massive civil society mobilizations made it next to impossible for them to stay at the DAR helm (Franco and Borras, 2005).

One perhaps unanticipated or unavoidable outcome of these efforts to reform the bureaucracy is that the replacements of ousted secretaries have generally been worse than their predecessors in terms of hewing to an anti-reformist line. This suggests that while pressure from below has been politically strong enough to force a change in DAR leadership, it has not, unfortunately, been politically strong enough to actually ensure that the direction of that change would be for the better. This is not to criticize the effort or to question the ‘correctness’ of it in hindsight. Rather, it is clear that with the ouster of the Estrada government and the ascendancy to national power of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (consolidated by the flawed 2004 presidential election), the pro-reform coalition in civil society was forced into a very difficult position from the outset. One of the cardinal ‘preconditions’, in effect, for the appropriateness of the bibingka strategy is the presence of reformists within the state, especially at the top. Recent experience has shown that the loss of reformists at the top in particular has immediate and devastating effects on the dynamism and manoeuvrability of state reformists at lower echelons; even the most reliable former reformist allies have tended to retreat when they fail to get support for their actions from above under the current dispensation. The idea behind the post-2001 series of ouster campaigns directed against successive DAR secretary-appointees was precisely that social pressure from below had to be ‘turned up’ – more or less within the broad framework of what O’Brien (1996) calls ‘rightful resistance’ – in a concerted effort to restore the reformist presence within the state to its former glory. Unfortunately, so far, this tack has proven to be extremely difficult.

Meanwhile, more generally, it can also be said that today’s peasant organizations and their allies share some common political weaknesses that may need to be addressed sooner rather than later, in addition to their continued relative fragmentation. For one, their political strategies are overly focused on the expropriation of big private landholdings within the scope of CARP. Over-emphasis on this land type has, on most occasions, been at the expense of other crucial issues such as redistribution of public lands and tenancy reforms through leasehold. The explicit or implicit belief among most autonomous rural social movements in the mistaken notion that redistributive reform does not occur in public lands and leasehold largely accounts for the lack of attention given to these issues (Borras, 2006a). The lack of systematic attention to the ‘missing’ landholdings within the CARP scope is also common to organizations. These peasant associations engage the state only on policy issues that are included on the official policy scope, such as the landholdings included in the official land redistribution targets. This explains the absence of any significant, coherent and sustained protest from the peasant groups and NGOs against the exclusion of huge quantities of land from the official

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redistribution scope (ibid.). In addition, these peasant groups and NGOs generally give attention only to the specific landholdings on which they have direct intervention, usually those under their (foreign) funded projects; they tend to lose sight of their strategic role in the strategic challenge, which is to resolve the land question in society as a whole.

Concluding Remarks

Rural poor citizens who have been traditionally socially marginalized and politically excluded may engage in contentious politics vis-à-vis the state when their calculation of the risk involved and possible benefits brings them to a conclusion of a high possibility of a net gain. Changes in the political opportunity structure, and how these are perceived by concerned parties, are critical factors that determine when and how rural poor citizens will overtly engage the central state, especially on issues that involve calls for radical redistribution of wealth and power in society. The likelihood or actual passage of a progressive reformist law that affect the lives and livelihoods of a large section of the poor can be a powerful incentive for such an engagement. But as mentioned in the beginning of this paper, laws, even progressive laws, emerge but these are not self-interpreting and self-implementing (Houtzager and Franco, 2003). Hence, negotiation between different state and societal actors occurs in this context. And as Gaventa (2002: 10) explained, state-society negotiations around a reformist policy that matters to poor people are not smooth and conflict-free. He said:

Negotiation often means entering spaces for participation and expression of citizen voice. Our discussion of policy spaces, however, reminds us that they are rarely neutral. The fact that public spaces for participation exist, whether in rule of law or social practice, does not mean that they will always be used equally by various actors for realising rights of citizens. Rather, such space is itself socially and politically located, with dynamics of participation varying across different levels and arenas of citizen engagement, and across different types of policy spaces.

In the particular case study examined in this paper, the ‘rule of law’ has certainly not been used equally by various contending actors in the policy process. But the Filipino rural poor citizens’ engagement with the state on issues of land and tenancy reforms has seen a ‘ratcheting up’ process over time in terms of contents of demands, building on previous (institutionalized) gains secured from the last cycle of claim making mobilizations. Furthermore, poor people need political and logistical resources to engage in contentious politics, and such resources are not always available to them. Thus, poor people have always sought alliance with other groups in society – and within the state, in order to extend the political reach of their mobilization. A pro-reform symbiotic, mutually reinforcing state-civil society national alliance is a promising strategy that could lead to unexpected policy outcomes that could benefit a large section of the poor. This is the main lesson that can be drawn from the Philippine land reform case that could help shed light on the main question of how and under what conditions does citizen engagement with the state contribute to the formation and implementation of national policies which have a positive impact on the lives of poor and excluded people. Concluding highlights of this particular case will be briefly discussed below.

29

The overall political environment for Philippine land reform has not remained fixed, but indeed has been changing over the years. Looking back, it could be said that land reform in the Philippines appears to have come full circle, wherein the structure and climate of opportunity has metamorphosed across four distinct periods. Following (i) the scandalous first years of CARP implementation during the Aquino administration (1988-92), the Philippines entered into (ii) a period of pro-reform breakthroughs and relative accomplishment when the DAR leadership passed to former the NGO director Ernesto Garilao (1992-1998) – a kind of ‘golden age’ of land reform. This was followed by (iii) the brief, controversial, contradictory but also still relatively productive era of CARP implementation in mainly privately owned and controlled lands under the Morales DAR (1998-January 2001), before descending rapidly into (iv) the unmistakable situation of gridlock that there is under the Macapagal-Arroyo administration today (January 2001-present). Against this backdrop of land reform ebbs and flows over time, the lessons and insights from the Philippine land reform experience, in terms of the nature of state-society action and interaction, from 1972 to the present, can be summarized in the following manner shown in Table 4:

Table 4: State-Society Mobilizations and Interaction in the context of state land reform implementation

Administration/Period

Degree of Social

Mobilizations‘from below’

Degree of State Reform

Initiatives ‘from above’

Degree of Pro-Reform

State-Society Interactions

Marcos(1972-1985) LOW-LOW LOW-LOW LOW-LOWAquino(1986-1992) LOW-LOW LOW-MEDIUM LOWRamos(1992-1998) HIGH HIGH HIGH

Estrada(1998-2000) HIGH MEDIUM-

HIGHMEDIUM

Macapagal-Arroyo

(2001—)HIGH LOW-LOW LOW

Note: Peasant mobilizations for agrarian reform during the Marcos and Aquino periods were of course quite high as well, but these were mainly manifested in clandestine/illegal actions associated with the communist movement. There was a resurgence of legal peasant movements beginning in the mid-1980s (including the birth of KMP and CPAR), but their campaigns focused on the land reform policymaking. Once it was clear that they did not get what they wanted during this process, they boycotted participation in the implementation of the land reform law.

The Philippine experience in land reform, particularly during the 1992-1998 period, makes clear the importance of first, the presence of both a high degree of social pressures from below and a high degree of independent state reform initiatives from

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above, and then a high degree of interaction between the two. Under certain circumstances reformers within government agencies can autonomously initiate reforms ‘from above’ that run counter to the interests of dominant social groups in society. By themselves, however, they are also likely to achieve only a limited impact. If state reforms are rarely won by state reformists alone, the same can also be said for the prospects of civil society-driven reform. Some types of civil society organisations – i.e. highly autonomous and capable organisations of the rural poor and their allies – can play a positive role in carrying out far-reaching redistribution of wealth and power in a given society through agrarian reform. The Philippine case also shows that on their own, even the most robust rural social movements are likely to achieve only a limited impact through their mobilizations ‘from below’. They likewise need to forge broader alliances, including in this case, coalitions with state actors.

The most promising condition is when autonomous mobilizations ‘from below’ by peasant movements and their allies meet with autonomous reformist initiatives by reformers ‘from above’ within governmental institutions. It is this kind of mutually reinforcing, symbiotic state-society interaction that is more likely to be able to overcome the considerable obstacles and constraints to redistributive agrarian reform, while taking advantage of the opportunities. This explains the reason behind the unexpected outcome in land reform implementation in the Philippines in general, and for the relatively successful land redistribution campaign during the 1992-1998 period. Moreover, recent developments in land reform implementation are further confirmation that the success of the strategy depends on meeting the prior conditions of the presence of both social pressures from below and independent state reformist initiatives from above. The absence, or more accurately, the diminution of state reformists, particularly at the top, leaves even highly mobilized social forces from below with nowhere to go institutionally, undermining momentum in favor of land reform, as has happened since 2001.

If the land reform process in the Philippines today has any hope of regaining its former state-society synergy and momentum, then this problem will have to be addressed. Indeed, it is this understanding that has provided the basic logic behind the repeated efforts since 2001 by the broadly united civil society pro-land reform coalition to ‘reset’ the playing field, so to speak, by attempting to engineer from below the replacement of successive harmful DAR leaderships. But if the ‘fall’ of successive DAR leaderships since 2001 is testament of the political strength of the pro-land reform coalition, Macapagal-Arroyo’s subsequent ‘failure’ to appoint a decidedly pro-reform DAR secretary points to this coalition’s current political weakness as well. This suggests that, unlike before, conditions are now ripe for the forging of a potentially more meaningful alliance between the pro-land reform coalition and those within the larger civil society space who are opposed to the current Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

Annex

Table A: CARP’s Land Redistribution Accomplishment, in Hectares (1972–2005)

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Total Land Redistribution by Land Type , Under the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR)*

Land Area (in hectare)

Private Lands 2,036,201

OLT 576,556CA 289,250VOS 494,133VLT 514,277GFI 161,985

Government-Owned Lands: 1,530,790

KKK 737,512LE 70,658Settlement 722,620

Sub-Total 3,566,991

Total Land Redistribution by Land Type Under the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)**(Public/State Lands)

A&D 1, 295,559 CBFM 1, 042,088

Sub-Total 2, 337,647

TOTAL 5,904,638

---------------Notes: CARP = Comprehensive Agrarian Reform ProgramLAD = Land Acquisition and Distribution; OLT = Operation Land Transfer; CA = compulsory acquisition; VOS = voluntary offer-to-sell; VLT = voluntary land transfer; GFI = government financial institution; KKK = Kilusang Kabuhayan at Kaunlaran; LE = Landed Estate; A&D = Alienable and Disposable LandCBFM = Community-Based Forest Management.* DAR data = 1972 to 31 March 2005** DENR data = beginning 1987 to 31 December 2004

Sources: DAR (2005); DENR (2004).

Table B: Yearly Summary of Leasehold Accomplishment, Area in Hectares, by Region and by Year (as of 1986 to 2003)

Phil Reg 1 Reg 2 CAR Reg 3 Reg 4 Reg 5 Reg 6 Reg 7 Reg 8 Reg 9 Reg 10 Reg 11

1986 572999 80736 55312 4209 112636 68284 30090 73759 18980 33691 12343 24885 369751987 5250 92 2206 93 1884 0 0 0 554 0 422 0 0

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1988 17330 95 2400 1647 944 0 0 0 0 0 11583 0 6611989 17643 0 0 1871 0 614 0 0 12797 138 23 0 22011990 75267 5388 1808 213 6713 1211 23 2358 1321 3534 8221 12662 309181991 258900 13753 1921 396 6289 26810 410 3991 11396 30945 50731 77878 343801992 203646 11473 18015 340 4272 17035 1631 5681 20087 35597 28929 34847 227281993 123269 11141 3517 93 4222 9740 2570 8171 8750 22858 17703 16022 155301994 89521 11585 3666 74 1626 8218 1402 6310 4819 20325 3321 10651 149221995 33976 2963 1988 25 849 3061 1194 1579 1769 9191 1663 403 73111996 27527 1183 1453 0 1086 1505 886 1828 1118 9170 523 3766 49901997 14762 191 489 9 433 1415 2060 579 317 2532 375 2978 26911998 13450 111 1338 12 396 486 790 1431 530 3485 166 1451 26571999 15202 108 1031 24 341 1976 670 1172 820 2727 290 1196 27162000 14297 224 853 11 315 758 853 1148 1289 3008 648 823 17432001 15190 5 620 0 312 1776 2492 900 729 5200 360 945 6222002 18349 204 887 7 525 2,524 1,553 1,172 1,266 4,533 297 2975 6742003 29983 223 1,117 0 493 4,298 4,002 1,397 1,269 6,242 1,445 2,660 709Total 1.483 139043 95997 9017 142006 141113 42579 108007 84546 177201 136941 187562 180423

Source: DAR-PS (2003)

Table C: Number of Agrarian Cases Resolved Per Year, 1988-2000

Year Agrarian Cases Resolved

Per cent of Total

1988 67 0.041989 1,107 11990 683 0.4 1991 3,981 21992 4,692 31993 8,872 51994 11,248 61995 25,949 141996 31,816 181997 31,823 181998 15,260 81999 23,832 132000 20,578 11Total 179,980

Source: Franco (2005)

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