Collaborating to Compete—The Governance Implications of Stakeholder Agendas at Mount Pulag National Park, the Philippines

Abstract

Regional planning has long sought to manage places that extend across political boundaries. The international trend to decentralize governance and promote co-management of protected areas is consistent with emerging collaborative spatial planning theory (Healey, 1997, 1999, 2006), which suggests that through dialogue, parties assert multiple cultural perspectives, share knowledge, and forge shared landscape values as the basis of decisions. As a form of collaborative spatial planning, co-management specifies shared resource management power between national government and one or more local or indigenous communities. Both approaches assume decentralized governance systems. Although critics fault collaborative planning for glossing over historical and cultural contexts, and for ignoring power in decision making, few case studies ask why partners participate or how specific decentralized governance institutions affect plan implementation. This paper draws from a study of co-management at Mount Pulag National Park, the Philippines—a shared indigenous cultural landscape that was to be managed by a board representing multiple local, indigenous, and national jurisdictions. Tracing road decisions by two municipal partners, the paper summarizes how and why major stakeholders adopted and then circumvented protective policies by building duplicative road projects across fragile forests. In this context of changing indigenous rights, the same decentralization laws that enabled co-management also rewarded competition and strategic behavior that weakened the collaborative and fragmented the shared landscape. The case demonstrates the need to interrogate, rather than assume the benefits of decentralized governance and to study why stakeholders participate before relying on voluntary collaboration to manage regional landscapes. The initial version of this paper was presented to the 2006 annual meetings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Fort Worth, Texas.

Keywords:

• Collaborative planning
• decentralization
• regional planning
• protected areas
• indigenous peoples
• co-management
• Philippines

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was completed with the assistance of Erik Donn Ignacio, research assistant through a David Boren NSEP fellowship and in affiliation with the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines, Baguio City, the National College of Public Administration and Governance and School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of the Philippines, Diliman. The author also thanks cooperating personnel from Mt. Pulag National Park, the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Cordillera Regional Development Council, National Commmission on Indigenous Peoples, and other agencies, leaders, and residents of local jurisdictions discussed herein.

Notes

 1. Hutchcroft (2001) created a framework for differentiating types of political and administrative decentralization. The Philippines has elected local officials and locally elected national officials who work together on development for their areas. Barangay officials are also elected. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is administratively decentralized to regions, but lands are nationally owned and controlled; whereas the national highway agency district offices respond to local and national politicians in their funding and infrastructure priorities.

 2. See Pinel (2007) for a complete description of this history and the role of the DENR in controlling the “collaborative.” Power struggles existed between both participants and between the PAMB members and the DENR/EU.

 3. The maps in Figures 3 were produced by the University of Wisconsin, Madison Cartography Lab with base maps from the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Shaded areas show schematics of ancestral domain claims made or proposed by the five municipalities represented on the Mount Pulag PAMB. The Tinoc/Kalanguya claim is on the top left and the Kabayan claim for the Ibajoi, Kalanguya and Kankanaey peoples is on the top right. Lusod is located mid-way down the right side of the park boundary where the Kayapa claim is shown to begin.

 4. After the Marcos rule, the 1987 constitution recognized indigenous self-determination and land rights, and provided for Cordillera regional autonomy. When autonomy and the proposed Kalanguya Province failed to become law, local governments assumed political leadership for indigenous rights that could also give local governments access to revenue from the predominantly nationally controlled natural resources of this largely forested region, under provisions of the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act. The Act provided for a share in developments (interpreted to include parks) affecting ancestral territory and for national forest land ownership to be transferred to claimant indigenous peoples. After several court challenges, implementation began in 2000.

 5. See Finin (1991) for the role of American governance in creating regional indigenous identity in the Cordillera through the earlier creation of Mountain Province. American rule of the early twentieth century also established the mountain vegetable industry centered in Baguio City (originally a high-elevation military retreat and later the summer capital of the Philippines) and recognized the indigenous “Mountain Province,” administered by the US government with trained members of elite families serving as local government officials. Whereas some elite Ibaloi rice farmers obtained American land titles in the 1930s and were educated to assume local and regional leadership positions, the Kalanguya, known as the “forest dwellers” were poor swidden (slash and burn) agriculturalists and hunters who have tried to enter the vegetable gardening industry by clearing uplands where cabbage and similar crops will grow.

 6. Communities had mixed interests, including protection of the watershed (deaths from mudslides are well known), development opportunities, and gaining land for livelihood. The KTO and Ibaloi indigenous rights activists recommended participation until the subsequent provisions of the 1997 Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA), when combined with the Local Government Code, changed the perceived choices. The IPRA rules stipulated that previously recognized ancestral domain claims would be given community ancestral domain title after being validated, but specified no form of indigenous self-government other than “elders.” In addition, families could receive indigenous land title to their own farms (National Commission on Indigenous Peoples Cordillera Administrative Region, 2003). The IPRA also included stipulations for indigenous peoples to approve and receive benefits from national resource development projects, perhaps including parks (NIPAS, IPRA, and the Local Government Code are summarized in Table 1). (see June Prill Brett. “Changes in Indigenous common property regimes and development policies in the northern Philippines”. 2001 Manuscript: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00001109/00/June_Prill_brett.pdf)

 7. Although the DENR retained control of national resources, local governments shared authority for land-use planning and community forest and watershed management, including in the buffer areas around parks (Serote, 2004).

 8. Three communities in the park area—Lusod, Tawangan, and Karao—were declared agricultural reform communities in the late 1990s through a memorandum with the DENR and the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). Tawangan is entirely within the park. Although not discussed in this paper, this designation, the loss of Japan International Development Funds for roads and irrigation systems, and the original ineligibility of Tinoc for the funds, set the stage for conflicts with neighboring jurisdictions. A third community, Ekip, Bokod, complied with environmental review and modified its road request (DAR, 1993).

 9. Philippine law provides for economic zones, a tool customarily used to establish export-based industrial zones exempt from certain taxes or regulations. Ifugao Province passed ordinances in 2002 to form four such zones, named as barangays of Tinoc, in areas claimed by Nueva Viscaya Province and Benguet Province (Kabayan). The province supplies P150,000 annually in addition to Tinoc support for boards that are appointed by Tinoc officials. The zone is in Luhong sitio of Lusod, the edge of the Kabayan and Tinoc ancestral domain boundaries surveyed in 2006. Ifugao officials confirmed in an interview that its purpose was to reclaim the political jurisdiction “encroached” on by Kabayan.

10. Research involved observation and analysis of several ancestral boundary disputes along the border of Mount Pulag. In each case one side accused the other of not understanding history and of confusing ancestral domain with municipal boundaries. Yet all these disputes were within communities of the same ethnicity, and they fought over the historical American municipal/watershed boundaries. Three municipalities showed the peak of Mount Pulag and the area designated for tourism as within their boundary.

11. Pursuant to Section 12 of the IPRA, “All ancestral lands that have been continuously used by indigenous communities and peoples for 30 years, including those with slopes of more than 18 degrees, are hereby classified as alienable and disposable agricultural lands and may be surveyed and titled' (Coalition for Indigenous Peoples” Rights and Ancestral Claims, 1999).