State versus Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: Comparative Analysis of Stable System Parameters, Policy Constraints and the Process of Delegitimation

Abstract

One of the challenges in understanding politics and public policy is to elucidate the interactions between the policy process and a broader context. In the scholarship on the advocacy coalition framework, this broader context is described as a set of variables called relatively stable parameters and is one of the most understudied areas within the framework. This paper aims to contribute to this area of scholarship by using the case of the indigenous peoples’ rights policy in the Philippines to illustrate the mechanisms that explain how relatively stable parameters are framed and used by political actors to constrain policy change and implementation. In particular, it illustrates that while the minority coalition used incremental shifts in the constitution to pass the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act, the dominant opposing coalition has activated and used relatively stable parameters associated with the Regalian Doctrine to restrict the formulation, prorogate the enactment, and weaken the implementation of the said policy. There were three interrelated mechanisms of constraint employed by the dominant opposing coalition, all of which relate to delegitimation of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act and its implementing agency.

Keywords:

• Advocacy Coalition Framework
• relatively stable parameters
• constitutional structure
• delegitimation
• policy analysis
• indigenous peoples’ rights
• Regalian Doctrine
• Philippines

Acknowledgments

My sincerest gratitude for the very helpful feedback from my anonymous reviewers, the editors of this special issue, and the authors who participated in the workshop. I would also like to dedicate this work to my mother, who patiently supported me in the making of this article, even in the last few days of her life.

Notes

^1. ACF scholars have emphasized that policy change and implementation are intertwined and that coalitions operate across stages  (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Weible et al. 2009). The ACF then can be used to analyze policy implementation, as demonstrated in a number of case studies (e.g. Andersson 1999; Ellison and Newmark 2010; Dela Santa 2013).

^2. Policy core beliefs represent basic normative commitments and causal perceptions across an entire policy subsystem (e.g. fundamental value priorities, such as economic development versus environmental protection).

^3. The Torrens system of land registration guarantees an indefeasible proof of ownership to those included in a register of land holdings maintained by the state.

^4. Legitimation here is defined as a process “by which cultural accounts from a larger social framework in which a social entity is nested are construed to explain and support the existence [and validity] of that social entity, whether that entity be a group, a structure of inequality, a position of authority or a social practice” (Berger et al. 1998:  380). It is a process that affects the establishment, persistence, and change of social organizational forms (Walker and Zelditch 1993).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio

Marvin Montefrio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science in De La Salle University, the Philippines. He holds a doctoral degree in environmental and natural resources policy from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Currently he is pursuing research in environmental and identity politics in the context of “low-carbon” agro-industrial development in the tropical uplands.