Social Accountability in the MILF Negotiations

By Dr. Antonio G.M. La Viña 

This is the second of a series of columns I am writing on an emerging and powerful tool for good governance called social accountability. Originally, I planned in this column to discuss how we, as a society and as a body politic, can mainstream social accountability into our governance processes. I will still do that but, to illustrate the points I want to make, I decided to use as a jumping point two events this week that reminded me of how important social accountability is for good governance. Last Sunday, we celebrated the 28th anniversary of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. Since yesterday and continuing today, the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) are meeting in Kuala Lumpur to negotiate a peace agreement. In both cases, the aftermath of Aquino's assassination and the conduct of peace negotiations, the mainstreaming of social accountability would have (in the investigation of the former) and will (in how the outcome of the MILF peace negotiations will be accepted) make a difference.

I am particularly concerned that there is speculation that there is already a done, secret deal on Mindanao peace, one that has not been consulted with the people, especially the stakeholders from Mindanao. As a former participant in the peace negotiations and as someone who has observed these processes for a long time, I am confident that there is no such secret  agreement, the Tokyo meeting of President Aquino with MILF Chairman Murad notwithstanding. There is a long way to go before the peace negotiations reaches the final stages and I am sure the government and the MILF panels, who are trustworthy and experienced people, will be consulting with their respective constituencies at the appropriate time. However, if we have mainstreamed social accountability in our governance processes, there won't be as much speculation and unfounded fears as we are seeing now.

The mainstream of governance and accountability has always been governance and accountability provided: supplied by government institutions, consumed by a public whose only feedback to the suppliers is through the proverbial “formal channels”. These include their elected representatives (right up the Chief Executive in presidential systems of government), executive agencies, ombudsmen and the courts. These “channels” are set by law and/or are part and parcel of a formal democracy. Other than these channels, though—and despite the increasing emphasis on participatory governance in both academic literature and government practice—and other than “informal”, less structured means like protests, media, and the like, citizens have few recourses to constructively engage with their governments.

In practice, people find themselves isolated from the very government they elected. Powerful players like lobbyists, corporations, special interest groups, and the like usually exert greater influence over government (especially elected representatives) than ordinary citizens. This is more true and exacerbated in the context of developing country governance in East Asia. Countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Mongolia (where the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability – East Asia Pacific (ANSA-EAP), a program based at the Ateneo School of Government, has a presence) are marked by compromised governance due to weak institutions and enforcement; powerful personalities, families and organizations; and susceptibility of government personnel to corruption. In turn, people respond either with resistance—as we’ve seen in popular revolts in the Philippines and Indonesia—or apathy; the former leading to instability risks, and the latter to a culture of impunity.

Constructive engagement, on the other hand, is a whole other channel of relations between government and the governed, which is not wholly or mostly dependent on government initiative. For ANSA-EAP, their centerpiece of constructive engagement, as they describe it, is citizen monitoring: giving ordinary people their own means of affecting the design and implementation of policies which affect them the most. ANSA-EAP’s mission is to set social accountability as the nexus between government and civil society, uniting non-government organizations and citizen groups, government champions, and the academe, in a sustained effort to promote, refine, and ultimately mainstream social accountability as the way of doing the business of governance in the region, and holding governments accountable for policy outcomes.

Mainstreaming is a work of culture-building, teaching values and methods, building habits and institutions which compose and sustain a culture. ANSA-EAP’s method of doing so is through “action-oriented” learning programs, which allows people to hit the ground running. It combines school, practicum, and laboratory for governance, offering workshops, mentoring and coaching, and applying lessons learned in pilot social accountability and citizen monitoring projects, building up the citizenry’s capacity to participate in local governance. In the region, it provides the “infrastructure” for social accountability development: educational modules, best practices research and application, guidance and resources for programs and projects.

ANSA-EAP networks all those who have a stake in governance and social accountability through these projects, through research and academic discussion, information exchange and communications facilitation. It is not merely helping citizens confronting their governments for bad policy outcomes (inclusive of corruption and waste of public resources), which itself forms part of the current mainstream of governance and accountability. The aim is to help citizens talk to government, and work with government to ensure positive policy outcomes, transparent accountability, and inclusive and responsive governance. It transforms attitudes about accountability from cynicism to constructive engagement because it makes people not just part of the solution, but drivers and enablers of those solutions as well through citizen monitoring.

Citizens and citizen groups alone can’t make this dramatic transformation come about. It is important to locate individual government agents or coalition of such agents in power, officials who are interested in engaging with the citizenry they serve in new and transformative ways. Indeed, there are government officials, though, who wish to make a change or a difference in the communities they serve. These government champions can serve as friendly conduits for citizen groups, building up a friendly relationship between the governing and the governed, and thus the effective coalition for social accountability.

With this network of people and information-sharing in place, citizens may find that their voices and concerns about specific issues like health, education, or public infrastructure can actually gain traction in the halls of power. Programs like GWatch, Bantay Lansangan and CheckMySchool.org, of which ANSA-EAP has involvement as a partner or facilitator, give people the means to ensure their right to equitable and effective public service delivery—in the two cases mentioned, good roads and public education services. Popular cynicism is transformed by productive working relationships between government and civil society through social accountability projects. Theodore Roosevelt once said that the person who really counts in the world is the doer who does the work, and through citizen monitoring and social accountability, ANSA-EAP and its regional partners can help citizens really count in governance.

As our peace negotiators come back from Kuala Lumpur, I fervently hope that they will trust citizens enough to make them full participants, and not bystanders, in the peace process. Concretely, I wish that in the future the government and the MILF peace panels will welcome citizen engagement and monitoring of the negotiations, Otherwise, if social accountability is not mainstreamed in these MILF negotiations, it is bound to fail and peace will remain elusive.


The writer is Dean of the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG)  and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP).  This essay was first published in the 23 August 2011 online and print edition of the Manila Standard Today. It is featured in VOICES with the writer's permission. Dean La Viña can be reached through e-mail at tonylavs (at) gmail.com and twitter: tonylavs