Public Policy and Program Administration in the Philippines: A

Critical Discourse
Mark M. Alipio a,b
April 2020
a
Davao Doctors College, General Malvar St., Davao City 8000, Philippines
b
University of Southeastern Philippines, Mintal, Davao City 8000, Philippines

Abstract

This study was conducted to explore and describe the current public policy and program administration in the Philippines.
The approaches, roles, scope, practice, contributions, and discipline of public administration was first discussed, followed
by the history, heritage, and hubris of the Philippine public administration. Issues such as identity crises were revisited, as
well as in specific problems in Government Owned and Controlled Corporations. Finally, the nature and state of local
government of the Philippines were elucidated.

Keywords: Government, Philippines, Program Administration, Public Administration, Public Policy

1. Approaches, Roles and Scope of Public Administration

Chand and Chakrabarty (2012) contended that public administration is a generalized human activity,
concerned with the ordering of men and materials required to achieve collective social ends. In an attempt to
define the different aspects of public administration, these are described in nine relatively distinct approaches
that grow out of the different perspectives that shape its structures and functions. These are institutional
approach which emphasizes formal relationships and the separation of powers among the three branches of the
government, the structural approach which sees public administration as a non-political and a purely technical
organization based on certain scientific principles, behavioral approach which applies the knowledge of social
psychology, anthropology, psychology and many other disciplines in an effort to secure a better understanding
of the actual human behavior within organizations, system approach which views public administration as a
system of interrelated and interdependent parts and forces where demands from the people are considered as
inputs and the goods and services rendered by the government are the outputs, ecological approach which
views public bureaucracy as a social institution which is continuously interacting with the economic, political,
and sociocultural sub-systems of a society, comparative approach in which the administrative structures of
different nations are compared with the different cultural settings, the public policy which is concerned with
the public and their problems, to shape the society for its betterment, the political economy approach which
deals with the application of economic methods to political problems like the influence of elections on the
2 Alipio, M. (2020)

choice of economic policy and the public-choice approach which is a method to study the decisional processes
for the allocation of scarce resources in the society where the actions of the government should be consistent
with the values and interests of its citizens.

Sri, Jipson & Paul (2011) articulated that there are two divergent views regarding the nature of Public
Administration. These are the managerial view which involves only the work of those engaged in performing
managerial functions in an organization, namely, (POSDCORB): P – Planning, O – Organizing, S – Staffing,
D – Directing, CO – Coordinating, R – Reporting, and B – Budgeting and integral view which sees public
administration as the sum total of the manual, clerical and managerial activities.

There are two scopes of public administration: traditional and modern views. The traditional writers restrict
the scope of public administration to the executive branch of the government. The modern writers have
extended the scope of public administration to all the three branches of the government. According to them,
public administration is the whole government in action. They argue that the activities of the legislature and
the judiciary also affect and shape the functioning of public administration considerably. Thus, the study of
public administration includes the activities of the executive branch as well those aspects of the legislative and
judicial activities that have considerable impact on the functioning of public administration.

2. Public Administration as a Field of Study, Art, Science, Discipline, and Practice

Woodrow Wilson, the Father of Public Administration, advocated four concepts in his essay The Study of
Public Administration (1887) which are the separation of politics and administration, the comparative analysis
of political and private organizations, improving efficiency with business-like practices and attitudes toward
daily operations, and improving the effectiveness of public service through management and by training civil
servants, merit-based assessment. In this report, Public Administration as a field of study, art, science,
discipline, and practice were discussed. As a field of study, it focuses on the history, hows, whats, and whys of
Public Administration. As a field of art, it invokes the creative side of the public servant, whereas as a science,
it is mostly concentrated on the technical aspects of the topic. As a discipline, it has five branches and finally,
as a field of practice, it encapsulates all of the previously mentioned topics and applies those learnings into the
practical field of Public Administration.

3. Contributions of the Perspective of Public Administration

Cariño (1975), in her Journal, “Bureaucratic Norms, Corruption and Development”, gives the following types
of bureaucratic norms:

1. The first type covers universalistic norms. These are norms that regard parochial
considerations as primary, and many citizens, for their part, will seek out a friend before
transacting business in an office or finding none, will then go to an intermediary who does
know 'somebody there.

2. The second is a variant of the first, but with time as a salient factor. It may be called simply
priority norms. Since everyone is treated equally, an important organizational rule is: "first
come, first served." A bureaucratic would not give a latecomer any preference except in
 Alipio, M. (2020) 3

special cases. Thus, patients wait for their turn in a clinic, but the queue is disregarded when
an emergency case is brought in. This implies that the bureaucrat is not a machine and can
make alternative decisions in the light of the problem at hand. However, there are also
accepted criteria which would justify deviations without exposing the bureaucrat to charges
of corruption or favoritism.

3. The third includes efficiency norms. A bureaucrat is supposed to deliver the service in as
little time and with as little cost to the public as possible. However, he may delay service
through absenteeism or malingering, by losing relevant papers, by improper information to
clients as to what are needed, and through other conscious or unwitting forms of ineffectual
work.

4. The fourth type has to do with the use of a person's skill or professional training in serving a
client. The customs agent who describes gold jewelry as brass - whether by honest mistake
or collusion with the importer - is guilty of violating a technical norm. The first three norms
are applicable throughout the bureaucracy but the relevant technical norm would depend on
the function of the person in question. If a person is employed as a guard and performs the
duties of an assessor - perhaps to reduce the tax of a friend, then he has gone against
jurisdictional norms. In that case, he is not qualified to evaluate the commodity technically
and cannot strictly be bound by professional standards. Employees over-reaching their
functional boundaries are not uncommon.

4. Public Administration in the Philippines: History, Heritage and Hubris

The Public Administration in the Philippines comes from the different colonial regimes and idiosyncrasies
of Filipino ethos. It is a blend of western and indigenous practices and culture. It is a result of an agreement
between the United States Technical Assistance Program and the Philippine Government through the technical
cooperation of the University of Michigan to professionalize the government service.

Conscious of maintaining both “quality and relevance”, responding to the changing demands of its
clientele, and reflecting developments in the field of public administration, the Philippine program has
instituted the following changes: an emphasis on technique and technique-cum-practicum courses; the
introduction of new specialization in the MPA curriculum, namely, Public Policy and Program
Administration; the merging of organization and management and personnel management into the single field
of organizational studies, thus, reducing the areas of specialization in the MPA curriculum from five to four:
fiscal administration, public policy and program administration, local government and regional administration,
and organization studies; offering of the mid-career program designed for people holding mid-career or
supervisory positions; and offering of a new Diploma in public Management to give administrators an
opportunity to pursue training in public administration without having to pursue a longer master's degree
program.
4 Alipio, M. (2020)

5. The Identity Crisis in Public Administration Revisited: Some Definitional Issues and the Philippine
Settings

The identity crisis of Public Administration is really a problem on the American field of thought. This was
due to the fact that American Public Administration had its beginning in the discipline of Political Science. In
1948 D. Waldo, citing John M. Gaus, reflected on the direction and thrust of Public Administration as a field
of study. He noted that students of Public Administration have become more uncertain as to the ends, aims
and methods of Public Administration which they should advocate. The dilemma inquires into the nature and
definitional premises of the field where its theoretical postulates and principles are concerned. In 1968, issue
on determining the scope, nature and boundaries of the field, including the methods of studying and teaching it
emerged. The term “Identity Crisis” on Public Administration came out of being.

In the Philippine setting, the “Identity Crisis” on Public Administration never existed. This is due fact that
Public Administration has maintained some disciplinary independence from allied discipline and has not been
insecure with Political Science. The Politics-Administration Dichotomy has no strong tradition and is not
applicable here. And that the peculiarities of a developing country have necessitated Philippine Public
Administration to give emphasis on or favor to service type researches. The identity crisis is a problem that
belongs to the United States’ Public Administration and not to the Philippines. The burden of overcoming the
identity crisis in the Philippines becomes not only a question of deriving disciplinary boundaries as to
prescribing normative valuations for Public Administration at a universal, high-ordered level but on defining
an indigenous philosophy for teaching and practicing Public Administration in the country. The Identity
Crisis cannot and should not be narrowly viewed from Western Standards. The Identity Crisis should be
viewed from the perspective of development administration or from a field now called Development Public
Administration. Develop research programs that focuses on the problems in the country, looking into the
behavioral insurance of politics and administration, and the accompanying features that open the government
to development process.

6. Government Owned and Controlled Corporations (GOCCs) (Issues, Problems, and Policy Dilemmas)

The creation of the GOCCs was a necessity to bring about an equilibrium in the environment of private
enterprise and to bring closer to the people government services that were otherwise unreachable to a wider
spectrum of society. GOCCs primarily exist to satisfy public needs which is widely different from that of a
private corporation which was created primarily for the creation of profit but GOCCs also function to bring
about needed revenues for the government. The disastrous financial performance of the GOCCs in mid 50s
and 60s was widely attributed to incompetence, graft and corruption and financial mismanagement. The
growth of the number of GOCCs during the first 10 years of the Marcos regime was brought about by the need
for the national government to pursue wide ranging infrastructure projects all throughout the archipelago.
These were the glory days of the GOCCs wherein employees ‘salaries, wages and benefits differ largely from
that of government line agencies more so with their counterparts in the LGUs. GOCCs reached its peak t0 303
in 1984 during the Marcos regime. The downside was in the pursuit of the so-called socio-economic
development under Marcos’ New Society Philippines’ external debt ballooned to 22 billion dollars in 1982
from 7 billion dollars in 1977. Worst, some of these GOCCs exist to serve as milking cows for some of its
cronies and majority of these GOCCs had actually a duplication of function with other GOCCs. These GOCCs
were created for the purpose of political accommodation for its supporters and cronies. FM Jr. once served as
PHILCOMSAT president with a 21,000-dollar salary per month when such company was in the doldrums.
 Alipio, M. (2020) 5

The late 1980s and 1990s saw a new chapter in the existence of GOCCs. As per advice by the IMF/WB the
governments of Cory and FVR joined GATT. Thus, the need for government to embark on programs that
tackle devolution, decentralization, peso devaluation and privatization in order to spur wide-ranging socio-
economic development, to attract investors and encouraged competition. Thus, the national government had to
privatize some of its crown jewels. PAL, PLDT, San Miguel, Meralco, NPC and National Steel were among
the companies in which substantial government shares were auctioned off to private corporations, local and
international. However, the unabated growth of GOCCs still continue especially during Arroyo’s time. By the
time her term ended in 2010, there were 604 GOCCs and 446 of which were operational water districts. This
was primarily due to the absence of an effective monitoring system to supervise the activities of GOCCs.

The passage of Executive Order no. 936, which created the GCMC (Government Corporate Monitoring
Committee) and Presidential Proclamation no. 50 addressed the issues concerning GOCCs. P.D. No. 50 in
particular authorized GOCC privatization. Thus, GOCCs were reduced to 158 from 604 in 2010.

But what really addressed comprehensively the issues, concerns and policies of GOCCs was the passage of
the GOCC Governance Act of 2011 (R.A. no. 10149). This law rationalizes the GOCC sector and created the
GCG (Governance Commission for GOCCs). This body has the power/function to ascertain whether a GOCC
should be: reorganized; merged; streamlined; abolished; or privatized. As of late through the recommendation
of the GCG, President Duterte through an executive order abolished the Phil. Sugar Corporation
(PHILSUCOR). Established in 1983 to provide financial assistance to sugar cane farmers according to GCG
had already outlived its primary function as it already duplicated the function of the Land Bank of the
Philippines and other government GFIs in giving financial assistance to farmers. Furthermore, COA found out
in 2017, that it released money amounting to 203 million pesos not to sugar cane farmers directly but to
capitalists with businesses not related to sugar. Gone really are the glory days of the GOCC with the passage
of R.A. no. 10149.

The role of government embarking on a wide-ranging socio-economic development instead of the private
sector taking the lead especially in the early 1970s could be attributed to the Development Administration
model or Development management model or Postcolonial Development model. Governments veered away
from the rigid practice of the Colonial Bureaucratic Model in the pursuit of wide-ranging socio-economic
development programs such as economic growth, poverty eradication, income generation, national building
and so on. It is an administrative system that was expected to enhance socio-economic growth progress in
postcolonial developing countries (Haque 2007 page 8, Theory and Practice of Public Administration in
Southeast Asia) Government undertaking various socio-economic activities necessitated the creation of
GOCCs to handle the multitude of tasks of such undertaking. However, this also contributed to an unabated
growth of GOCCs which in the long run required the passage of laws to rationalize the operations of the
GOCCs.

In recent times, government adopted the NPM (New Public Management) model in its approach to socio-
economic development. In this manner, government partnered with the private sector in undertaking critical
infrastructure projects through the so-called Public-Private-Partnership. Recent PPP projects include the new
Mactan International Terminal. NPM model allows government to be the impetus in providing the favorable
environment for private sector participation in the pursuit of the common goal of socio-economic
development.
6 Alipio, M. (2020)

7. Nature and State of Local Government in the Philippines

United Nations (1966) defines local governments as subordinate entities, having no inherent powers and
must look up to the higher governmental level for delegation of authority. Furthermore, these are “geographic
subdivisions”; or restricted geographic areas, dealing with those matters which concern the people living in a
particular locality. Two important elements are found in any definition of local government: the presence of a
higher authority and territorial boundary. According to the United Nations (1966), while local governments do
not have inherent powers, they do have legal authority to exercise their powers.

The existence of several layers of local governments in the Philippines may be attributed to its geographic
peculiarities, centralist experience and the historical basis of its barangays. The International Union of Local
Authorities (2016) noted that the number of layers of local government depends on: geography, number of
basic units, degree of centralization and population. The power to create municipal corporations “is inherent in
sovereignty.” In the Philippines, the power is vested in the legislature. Thus, Congress by law creates LGUs,
although plebiscite among the affected residents is a pre-requisite before actual operation. According to Maas
(1959), editor of Area and Power, local government is presented as a manner of dividing power by area or
authority. He pointed out that the creation of local government units is “advantageous for the promotion of
rural development”. Local governments are a means of providing self-identity, especially in ethnically
homogenous communities.

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