MELBOURNE, Australia (MindaNews/15 June) — There is anticipation brewing within the electorate, particularly amongst voters in Mindanao, that shifting to a federal form of government will be a hot issue in the coming Presidential campaign.
The growing tide of believers in this groundbreaking reform are certainly keen to put their cause front and center now even as some Presidentiables are still scrambling and angling for patrons and supporters.
Ironically, many of these federalism advocates appear to be crippled by the notion that shifting to a federal structure requires amending the Constitution. Consequently, they seem genuinely convinced that a “super-politico” is needed to make federalization a reality. But the prospects of the advocacy are really not that grim because federalizing under the current Constitutional regime can actually be done.
According to Professor Cheryl Saunders from the Melbourne Law School, in a paper entitled Options for Decentralizing Power: Federalism to Decentralization, the functions of government can be decentralized in various ways. And federalism is just one example of a decentralization arrangement among a spectrum of arrangements establishing greater or lesser degrees of local autonomy within a nation-state.
Pertinently, our Constitution does not mandate a specific decentralization arrangement. In fact, Section 3 of Article X has given Congress the responsibility to determine the structural mechanics of local autonomy. It is therefore conceivable to incorporate through simple legislation federalist principles in the current decentralized unitary structure.
Due to space constraints, I cannot go into the nuts and bolts of this proposition. However, it may interest our legislators (and Presidentiables) to institutionalize these three fundamental tenets of federalism in the Local Government Code (LGC) to reflect a federal governance framework.
First, the allocation of responsibilities between the central and local governments must be clear and coherent.[]
This is not exactly a pioneering innovation given the work done in the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro. Therefore, the only task required here is to come up with a broader national arrangement that exhibits this streamlined division of government labor.
The point to remember here is that the devolution of functions has to be formulated in such a way that the assignment of accountability is unequivocal. We do not want a distribution scheme that leaves everybody clueless as to which government office can be held answerable for our dissatisfaction. Neither do we want overlapping designations that allow government agents to pass the blame for failure to deliver public services to our satisfaction.
Second, the local government structure must reflect a collective approach to local governance. Obviously, the current model must be replaced because local political families have exploited the LGC to ensure the fate of the local government is highly dependent on the person holding the gubernatorial or mayoral office.
This shameless manipulation of the current decentralization arrangement has actually further entrenched the patronage relationship between the local executive and his constituency thereby allowing local politicos to enjoy an unhealthy and corrupting prominence in local governance.
An effective countermeasure against this pattern of patronage in local politics is to integrate a sense of community in the administration of the kapitolyo and the munisipyo. The local leadership structure itself must be configured to facilitate the collective governance mindset among the local constituency. An example of such would be a parliamentary type of configuration similar to the “leader-and-cabinet model” used by local governments in the United Kingdom and in Australia.
As a corollary to this restructuring, the mechanism of sectoral representation can be further enhanced in the local “cabinet” to widen and deepen community participation in policy formulation and implementation.[]