The Logic of NAPC Work

Joel Rocamora

published by the National Anti-Poverty Commission Issue #6

The Logic of NAPC Work2016

Issue #6

“…the NAPC provides a framework, a non-confrontational space for official representatives of the sectors to work out legislative and other policy issues and concrete programs with their partner government agencies. For the government agencies, this venue creates space for encounters with the sectors where both learn new ways of cooperating, instead of confronting each other.”

NAPC has a large mandate, a small budget, and on its own, not much power. We can coast and focus on NAPC’s “event organizing” and secretariat tasks. We have chosen instead to take up the challenge of President Aquino’s reform thrust, and to maximize the potential of organized sectors as support base for reform.

There are three keywords in the NAPC mandate: anti-poverty, sectors, and participation. They are linked in the idea that the PNoy government’s anti-poverty program is an empowerment program. The goal is to “empower” the poor, to provide them with the kind of assistance that will give them the confidence that, on their own, they can break out of poverty.

To empower the poor, they have to be assisted in organizing themselves for meaningful, and effective participation in shaping anti-poverty programs and projects. The organized sectors encompassed in the NAPC sectoral assemblies and councils will be the main actors in organizing the unorganized poor. Apart from participating in “invited spaces”, the poor should develop the capacity for “collective action” in support of asset reform.

These are the broad policy guidelines that have shaped the main areas of NAPC work:(1) Provide oversight and develop new programs for poverty reduction at both the national and local levels;(2) Develop venues for the participation of the poor through the localization program;(3) Working with the sectors, take a proactive role in pushing for asset reform.

These areas of work are legally mandated in Republic Act No. 8425, the law creating NAPC. Section 7 of RA 8425 states:The NAPC shall exercise the following powers and functions:

(4) Ensure meaningful representation and active participation of the basic sectors;

(6) Advocate for the mobilization of funds by the national and local governments to finance social reform and poverty alleviation programs and capability building activities of people's organizations;

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The main purpose of NAPC work with the sectors is to strengthen organizations of the poor and to organize the spaces for cooperation between the government and the sectors. Government engagement with civil society must be undertaken without generating dependence. The autonomy of civil society and organizations of the poor can best be supported through programs that help generate capacity for collective action for contentious politics.

One of the achievements we are proud of in our two years in NAPC is that we have not had the kinds of fights among the sectors that characterized the Commission through most of its existence. We managed to win over non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and people's organizations (POs) who were either excluded from NAPC in the past or were unwilling to participate because they believed it was dominated by one CSO political tendency. Today, for the first time, so-called ‘socdem’ and ‘natdem’ groups are in NAPC and working together. This inclusiveness is being threatened by organizational changes in the Bottom-up Budgeting (BUB) and in the administration of the Empowerment Fund.

The NAPC sectors are the organizational expression of the poor. They represent thousands of POs throughout the country who meet in sectoral assemblies and elect sectoral councils, who then nominate three council members from whom the President appoints an official sectoral representative. The NAPC sectors are the organizational base for the participation of the poor in government anti-poverty programs.

The Philippines is the only country in Asia with a legally-mandated process for selecting official representatives of the fourteen sectors listed in RA8425. This provides sectoral representatives, and their councils with official status in negotiating with government agencies.

Through the NAPC process, the sectors work out a reform agenda with their partner agencies. These agenda are then approved at en banc meetings chaired by the President.

This set-up creates a venue for organized encounters between the sectors and the government. While the sectors continue to use mass actions and other repertoires of collective action as a way to advance their advocacies, the NAPC provides a framework, a non-confrontational space for official representatives of the sectors to work out legislative and other policy issues and concrete programs with their partner government agencies. For the government agencies, this venue creates space for encounters with the sectors where both learn new ways of cooperating, instead of confronting each other.

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These spaces have been built at both the national and, more importantly, the local level. Poverty reduction planning at the municipal level, the center of gravity of BUB, is anchored on consultations by POs for coming up with concrete projects and giving voice to representatives of the poor in the Local Poverty Reduction Action Teams (LPRATs). Although POs are supposed to be equal partners of local government officials, they cannot be effective partners without prior consultations with members of their organizations.

The implementation of BUB 2013 showed the limited geographic reach of organized sectors and CSOs. We ended up having to work with NGOs and POs in cities and larger towns who then organized CSO participation in municipalities without established sectoral organizations. The demand for participation is the most important factor pushing the strengthening of CSO capacities. NAPC has also developed programs for CSO capability building.

We have actively worked to generate sectoral participation in BUB and other anti-poverty programs at the local level. Regional consultations “Harnessing Basic Sector/Civil Society Collectivity and Capacities on the Ground” for local sectoral organizations and other CSOs have been held in 17 regions. A six-month training program for 50 young community organizers run by a CSO consortium will finish in February 2013. We gave grants to three NGOs to generate “people's proposals” by urban poor groups in danger zones in Metro Manila for their relocation through the President’s P50 billion five year program. We have initiated a larger program for covering the informal settlers who cannot be reached by the three NGO grantees, the Social Preparation, Organizing and Technical Team (SPOTT) for informal settler families (ISFs) in danger zones.

Local Poverty Reduction Capacity BuildingConsultationsSectoral ParticipationPeople’s proposals

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We also ran a program of Empowerment Grants, providing a total of P50 million to 15 CSOs with projects covering 94 cities/municipalities. This was to be the pilot run of a larger capacity building assistance for CSOs. The initial grants were made to CSOs in various organizing areas (coconut farmers, Indigenous People, urban poor, BUB) to generate lessons on the administration of the larger program. A P250 million budget was given in the third quarter of 2011, but the bulk of these funds went to administering the BUB program. The P54 million empowerment grants were not transferred to NAPC until April 2012, making it difficult to go beyond the pilot run to a full-fledged implementation of the program.

The Empowerment Fund for FY 2013 has been transferred to DILG for implementation. NAPC was not consulted about this decision. At this point, it is not clear which of the NAPC capacity building programs for sectors and CSOs can be continued. The grants program will now be taken over by DILG. The “Harnessing Basic Sector/Civil Society Collectivity and Capacities on the Ground” regional meetings, the CO (community organizer) training program, and the work to generate “people's proposals” by urban poor groups in danger zones in Metro Manila were all funded out of Empowerment Program funds. We will continue these programs and find alternative sources of support for them.

Asset reform

One of the main reasons for poverty is that the poor have little in the way of assets, from secure homes in urban areas, to land in rural areas where more than 70 percent of the poor are. It has long been established policy of the government to change the distribution of economic assets through urban and rural asset reform. Working closely with the NAPC sectoral councils, and using the NAPC’s power to convene inter-agency projects, we have actively developed projects for pushing asset reform.

Empowerment Grants

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With limited staff and budget, we have had to be selective. In rural areas, we are focusing on coconut farmers and fisherfolk, sectors with the highest poverty incidence. In CARPER (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms) implementation, we concentrated on Hacienda Luisita and coconut lands, the largest remaining chunk of CARPable land among crop areas. These programs are all convergence programs with other government agencies: coconut with the Department of Agriculture (DA), Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA), and Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR); fisherfolk with the Bureau of Fish and Aquatic Resources (BFAR); ISFs with the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG); social preparation for the National Greening Program (NGP) with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP).

NAPC has played a lead role in the work of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on the coconut industry set up by the Presidential Management Staff in May 2011. It has taken a considerable amount of time to finalize the report to the President because of contentious issues on the disposition and administration of coco levy funds. These issues have now been resolved. The submission of the full report to the President only awaits a framework plan for developing the coconut industry being prepared by the Department of Agriculture.

At the suggestion of DA Secretary Proceso Alcala, NAPC concentrated on developing a Coconut Industry Poverty Reduction Road Map. This road map covers an initial pilot run of 12 provinces with 315,425 poor coconut farmers. Each individual target beneficiary has been identified through the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Rural Areas (RSBSRA). The road map has four separate components — acceleration of agrarian reform, organization of small coco farmers and workers leading to the establishment of Local Coconut Industry Development Councils (LCIDCs), social protection coverage, and support for agro-industrial projects of coco farmers’ cooperatives. The road map has been approved by the PTF for submission to the President.

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NAPC Secretariat has been in close coordination with the NAPC Farmers and Landless Rural Workers Sectoral Council. We have also assisted in the formation of a Multi-sectoral Coco Alliance led by long-time leaders Oscar "Ka Oca" Santos and Wigberto "Ka Bobby" Tañada. The Council and the Alliance have been active in media work and have organized mass actions to push for government action.

NAPC has been one of the active members of the National Technical Working Group on Informal Settler Families (NTWG-ISF) which was created by the President in December 2010 under the leadership of the late DILG Secretary Jesse Robredo. The NTWG-ISF's mandate was to oversee and arrive at an alternative framework for the government’s ISF resettlement program. At the initiative of the NTWG-ISF, the President allocated P50 billion for a five-year program to relocate 106,000 ISFs in danger zones in Metro Manila. Under the NTWG are several committees, including the Social Preparation Committee headed by NAPC.

The implementation of the program was hindered by the lack of legal basis for the NTWG-ISF work, and by the allocation of the first P10 billion to the National Housing Agency by the Department of Budget and Management. NTWG-ISF's

framework was radically different from that of the NHA, making implementation of the first year of the program painfully slow. Under new leadership, the DILG has speeded up implementation of the second year funding. But one of the key members of the NTWG-ISF, the Kilusang Maralita (KM) has protested the violation of the policy of inclusiveness developed under Secretary Robredo in the accelerated program.

NAPC has been commissioned by the DENR to organize the “social fencing” component of NGP. The program aims to plant 1.5 billion trees covering 1.5 million hectares over a period of six years (2011-16) in forestlands, mangrove and protected areas, ancestral domains, civil and military reservations, urban areas under the greening plan of local government units, inactive and abandoned mine sites, and other suitable lands. The major tasks for this project are capacity building of stakeholders through community organizing; formulation of the community forestry/resource management plan; and implementation of these plans.

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There are 1,371,676 small fisherfolk families fishing in our municipal waters. The fisherfolk sector has a poverty incidence of 39.2 percent (Family Income and Expenditure Survey, 2012). More often than not they live in makeshift houses in danger zones near the sea coast and on the banks of rivers. The NAPC Artisanal Fisherfolk Sectoral Council identified settlement as their priority agenda during the 2011 National Sectoral Assembly. Fisherfolk settlement covers the lack of tenurial security, coastal disaster risks and climate change impacts, and unsustainable utilization/management of coastal and fisheries resources.

This social fencing project of the NGP emphasizes the conservation, protection, and development of resources supported by alternative livelihood opportunities. It is underpinned by “participatory decision-making and the equitable sharing of benefits and responsibilities by members.” The project also takes cognizance of diverse groups' use and claims on natural resources in the project sites. Thus, processes will be instigated to institute mechanisms to address potential conflict. NAPC is working closely with NCIP to speed up the processing of IP ancestral land rights and dealing with conflicts among IPs arising from the spread of mining in their areas.

To work out plans, an Inter-agency Task Force on Fisherfolk Settlement chaired by NAPC was created through the Joint NAPC-DA Administrative Order 2012-01 issued on June 13, 2012. The committee on site selection is headed by BFAR, with the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), DILG, DENR-Land Management Bureau, DAR, and NAPC Artisanal Fisherfolk Sectoral representative. The committee is tasked to formulate guidelines for the identification of resettlement areas, and to select relocation sites. The NAPC Fisherfolk Sectoral Council will lead the committee on social preparation, in close coordination with HUDCC and DILG through local housing boards. The committee will be in charge of beneficiary selection and identification of capacity building needs.

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Poverty Programs

Section 7 of RA 8425 states:

The NAPC shall exercise the following powers and functions:

(1) Coordinate with different national and local government agencies and the private sector to assure full implementation of all social reform and poverty alleviation programs;

(2) Coordinate with local government units in the formulation of social reform and poverty alleviation programs for their respective areas in conformity with the National Anti-Poverty Action Agenda;

(3) Recommend policy and other measures to ensure the responsive implementation of the commitments under the SRA;

(5) Oversee, monitor and recommend measures to ensure the effective formulation, implementation and evaluation of policies, programs and resource allocation and management of social reform and poverty alleviation programs;

(7) Provide financial and non-financial incentives to local government units with counterpart resources for the implementation of social reform and poverty alleviation programs; and

(8) Submit an annual report to Congress including, but not limited to, all aspects of its operations and programs and project implementation, financial status and other relevant data as reflected by the basic reform indicator.

NAPC is the secretariat of the Human Development and Poverty Reduction (HDPR) Cabinet Cluster, providing minutes and agenda, and monitoring the work of cluster TWGs. We also exercise our oversight function by submitting reports to the two houses of Congress. We believe that RA 8425, the law creating NAPC requires us to do much more. The proliferation of poverty programs and projects, many small and ill-funded, with overlapping tasks and in the past, high leakage rates, requires sustained effort to rationalize the poverty strategy of the government.

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We have chosen to interpret the law creating NAPC proactively. We develop an idea, run it past HDPR, flesh out a program in TWGs with relevant agencies, and act as a secretariat once the project gets going. Our initiatives in CSO capacity building and in asset reform followed this process. So too with Salintubig, a joint project with DILG and the Department of Health providing small water project grants to poor municipalities. Because we are developing new reform programs, it is not enough to write up the policy and pass it on to the bureaucracy for implementation. New programs such as BUB need to be put into practice and revised in the course of implementation. More often than not, existing National Government Agencies (NGAs) and their regional staff need to be guided carefully. In NAPC-initiated projects, we have had to oversee the “implementation” of these programs, acting as secretariat or in the case of BUB, the Project Management Office (PMO).

One of NAPC’s problems is the overbroad interpretation of “NAPC is not an implementing agency.” Because the fund for BUB and for the empowerment program was coursed through DILG, less than two thirds of the P250 million allocated reached NAPC and way delayed at that. In fact, there is nothing we do (used to do) in BUB, or any of the

other projects we’re into for that matter, which constitutes “implementation”. We don’t construct infrastructure or deliver services. What we do is explicitly provided for in the law creating NAPC.

All of these initiatives are, at least conceptually, linked to a backbone made up of the large, national lifeline programs, Conditional Cash Transfer and PhilHealth, and the localization of poverty reduction through the BUB. In terms of investment, CCT and Philhealth are by far the largest poverty programs of the government. As PNoy puts it, these are salbabida programs, providing substantial assistance to the largest number of poor as quickly as possible. They were designed to also address longer term concerns about the education and health of the poor, especially children. By design, these are top down programs with little participation by the poor. They have to be complemented with programs built around local poverty planning where the poor can participate.

ASSET REFORM

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BUB is the main poverty reduction localization program of the government. It is designed to facilitate the participation of the poor and their organizations. The center of gravity of BUB is the municipality where organizing participation is easiest. Prior to the formal planning at the LPRAT, organizations of the poor meet to decide on what projects they want and who will represent them in the LPRAT. At least 50 percent of LPRATs have to come from POs; LPRATS are not accepted if they do not have the signatures of at least three CSO representatives. The regional meetings of NAPC sectors and CSO “service providers” organize this process. Organizing for asset reform will also feed into this process.

The program was launched in the first quarter of 2012, enabling municipalities to get funding for their Local Poverty Reduction Action Plans (LPRAPs) in the FY2013 budget. The original scope of BUB covered 609 of the poorest municipalities in the country. The poorest regions — two in Mindanao, Eastern Visayas, and Bicol — were prioritized in identifying the poor municipalities. Out of 609 municipalities, 595 succeeded in submitting LPRAPS. In the FY2013 BUB, municipalities could get a minimum of P8 million up to P30 million depending on the actual count of poor people in the municipality. Approved amounts averaged 50 to 60 percent of the municipal development fund from their Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA). For the FY2014 BUB, the number of participating municipalities has been increased to 1233, and the available amount doubled to P15 million to P50 million.

The BUB program has the potential to radically alter local-central government fiscal relations and introduce major good governance reforms. It can break the circuit of patronage, bypassing the regional offices of NGAs where governors and congressmen negotiate resources that they use for sustaining patronage networks with municipal mayors. Without access to this level, mayors become dependent on congressmen and governors. It is at the regional level where congressmen and governors develop relations with NGA regional directors and other officials with whom they share the spoils of patronage.

The original design of BUB bypassed the regional level. LPRAPS went directly to the national level, to NAPC which processed the LPRAPs, making sure there are no disallowed projects then organizing them by NGA, before turning them over to DBM. The advantage of having NAPC play this role is that NAPC has no regional offices, no long term regional staff with whom congressmen and governors could work out patronage relations. This design was recently changed by DBM, making Regional Poverty Reduction Action Teams (RPRATs) headed by DILG regional directors responsible for processing LPRAPs, giving them the power to approve or disapprove LPRAPs.

NAPC has never managed a program of this magnitude before. We succeeded in generating more than 90 percent of the LPRAPs from the 609 focus municipalities under less than favorable conditions. The process was telescoped into less than two months and the budget for the BUB PMO was not transferred from DILG until after the end

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The BUB program has the potential to radically alter local-central government fiscal relations and introduce major good governance reforms. It can break the circuit of patronage, bypassing the regional offices of NGAs where governors and congressmen negotiate resources that they use for sustaining patronage networks with municipal mayors. Without access to this level, mayors become dependent on congressmen and governors. It is at the regional level where congressmen and governors develop relations with NGA regional directors and other officials with whom they share the spoils of patronage.

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of the program, forcing NAPC to scramble to find resources from its own minuscule budget. The decision by the DBM and the DSWD to move the BUB PMO to DILG is occurring in the midst of implementation of BUB FY2014. We will assist this process, focusing on the following:

1. The production of LPRAPs at the municipal level, assuring maximum CSO participation. We will also push food production by the poor in school and community gardens. We are also developing the tools for assisting municipalities in developing plans for relocating residents from danger zones.

2. We will continue our data management work, maintaining the portal for BUB. We have also taken the lead in developing tools for rapid Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) surveys and finding the resources for assuring that all municipalities undertake CBMS surveys. This will enable the municipalities to develop baselines for their anti-poverty work.

3. Manage pilots for multi-municipality planning for economic development, the second phase of poverty reduction work. Using an “economic geography” framework, the project would link poorer municipalities to growth centers. Where municipalities would continue its poverty reduction focus, multi-municipality planning would emphasize transport and communications, and facilitating the transition from subsistence to market production by facilitating the development of marketing networks.

4. Organize CSO-led monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of BUB 2013. Since we do not have a budget for this work, we await DBM decision on our proposed budget.

About the Author:

Joel Rocamora is a political analyst and a seasoned civil society leader who has been working on issues of democracy, governance, and social movements for several decades. An activist-scholar, he finished his PhD in Politics, Asian Studies, and International Relations in Cornell University, and had been the head of the Institute for Popular Democracy, the Transnational Institute, the Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party, and member to a number of non-governmental organizations. From the parliament of the streets, he crossed over to the government and joined President Benigno Aquino’s Cabinet as the Lead Convenor of the National Anti-Poverty Commission.

BUB FY2014

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