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the trend of decentralization in other parts. And yesterday, our keynote speaker talked
about how local governance is not fashionable. I mean he didn’t say that way, but, at
least in the West. They’re talking about local governments not at least in researches.
But I raise a question and said, as the matter of fact, here in the region we are
become to focus on local governments within the context of our theme for the
conference democratization. And you have stronger governments in the Philippines,
Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, and Japan. Well of course, in Korea… in here in
Thailand, it does come to maybe a pause for a while.
So, I will talk about the importance of decentralization. These are the trends of
decentralization. We’ve totally democratized, and local autonomy.
I know, I have about six more minutes, Mr. Chairman.
The next slide is really are about decentralization in Central Asia. It’s all in the
paper, to bring about more equity. Let me now go to… I’m sorry, this is not the way
to make a presentation. I apologize because…
But anyway, what I wanted to do is locate decentralization in the Philippines, in
the region. And it’s all about the democratization. It’s all about participation. It’s all
about capacity building.
So, this slide just talks about lessons learned for devolution. I got that from
Mr. Dayao. He talked about the importance of capacity building. Mr. Makdugal, and
of course our other Thai friend. He’s here, I’m sorry, from Thailand, who also talked
about the importance of decentralization.
So, later on, as our organization have said, you will have a copy of this slide.
So, I think these are very important lessons learned for decentralization, from the
Philippines, from Japan, oh, ok.
So, the Philippines, so I have said earlier that decentralization is really one that
focuses on local governance. And in the Philippines, even during the Spanish time,
we were talking about the Españas, then barangays are villages. And when Philippines
Republic saw through history. They have had many attempts to strengthen our local
governments. Point, local governments are important. Point, they’re frontlines of
democracy. However, it was not only until 1992 when the fundamental reforms at the
local level which have brought about by the local government goal. The point,
therefore, is that, yes, we recognize local governments, but didn’t really have a strong
move towards decentralization, until 1992 when we passed our local government goal
which is in our constitution. So, this is how many local governments we have in the
Philippines: 81 provinces, 60 municipalities and barangays. If you note, because I also
ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ learned over the past 25 years, 27 years, we might have too many local
go to the discussion on what are the potential reforms. You know what! What we’ve
governments. One way in the context of decentralization, within the context of
capacity building, is to amalgamate local governments to come together rather than
separation. And I think it came up in the discussion yesterday when we talked about
sometimes we have too many. I think our speaker from England talked about that.
