Country overview Philippines

The recent and rapid rise of digital technologies among citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) offers extensive possibilities of strengthening citizen voice not just on political issues, but also regarding the overall performance of the government in the Philippines. This is setting the stage for greater government accountability and transparency. With the advent of various state-of-the-art platforms and channels, the opportunities for political and social participation of citizens have significantly increased. Use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has changed relationships among citizens, organizations, public institutions, and the government. This State of Art Report examines how the Philippines is using technology to complement existing structures of citizen engagement. This includes the government's own initiatives to spur public involvement, as well as its partnerships with civil society and other actors to drive active citizen engagement in the country. The paper starts with a section on the existing policy and regulatory structure of ICTs and citizen engagement in the country, including a brief history of e-governance and an overview of the current state of ICT use in the Philippines. The second section zeroes in more closely on ICT-mediated structures of citizen engagement. It lists relevant examples of ICT initiatives and describes how such initiatives impact government responsiveness and citizen participation. The third and final section analyses whether and how ICT-mediated citizen engagement has caused shifts in meaning, norms, and power within the state-citizen dynamics.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ

Open data and citizen engagement, Philippines

Benigno Aquino III ran for the position of President of the Philippines in 2010, with a campaign slogan of “Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap" (when there is no corruption, there is no poverty). Following his win, his administration initiated reforms in government that focused on improving financial management, budget transparency, government procurement, and local government transparency. Key among these was in 2011 when the Philippines became one of the founding partners of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which aimed to provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. This case study explores the introduction and implementation of open data by the Government of the Philippines. It first presents the government's enabling motivations and how the programme was conceived, then looks into the introduction and implementation of open data in the Philippines using Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration as the analytical lens. It focuses on the key policy, technology, data, and public engagement components of the ODP implementation, including significant milestones and critical issues. The study aims to show how these work streams and the programme itself dealt with aligning the supply and demand sides of open data. It then assesses how effective open data has been as an ICT tool to achieve transparency and accountability and make significant shifts in meaning, power, and norms in the context of citizen engagement. At the same time, it looks at how such signification, domination, and legitimation - or the lack of - impacted on the effectiveness of the ODP as well.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ

Open Data in Philippines: from access to awareness

As a democratic country, the Philippines values citizen participation in ensuring that people's voices are heard and that they are part of important decision-making processes. ICT-mediated and enabled participation plays a particularly significant role in the Philippines, which is considered a leader in mobile telephony. However, despite high usage of ICTs, the country still lags behind its neighbours in terms of broadband infrastructure and Internet access, thus precluding the full realisation of ICT-mediated citizen engagement. This Brief makes a series of recommendations on the role and use of Open Data in the Philippines. It argues that Open Data initiatives cannot succeed without a greater framework and culture of openness, which includes interoperability of systems in government. Another aspect of developing such culture of openness is changing the attitudes of both government and public towards open data, as well as developing their technical capacity in information management. This brief is part of a series from IT for Change produced from its Voice or Chatter research project, which examines the relationship between ICT-mediated citizen engagement and democratic governance.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ