MEASURING SUCCESS IN LOCAL GOVERNANCE

How should success or failure in local governance be measured? How do we know whether an official who is seeking a re-election deserves another term or not? It appears that up to now, there are no nationally accepted standards yet for measuring performance in local governance. What this means is that there is really no central direction where governance is going, and that could be neither here nor there.

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First things first, I would like to make my point first that globalization per se is not bad. What is bad is our inability to compete in the global arena with our own products and services. What does local governance have to do with globalization? Standardization is one thing; compliance with global standards is another. Without standards to measure performance in local governance, I find it difficult to imagine that we could produce products and services that could compete globally.

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Without any doubt, crime and poverty are the two biggest problems that are confronting our local government units (LGUs) today. Over at the United Nations, the Human Development Index (HDI) has emerged as the globally accepted standard for measuring success or failure in promoting the “quality of life”. Just as an aside, Vice-President Noli De Castro somehow missed the point when he recently used the term “uplifting life”, instead of “uplifting the quality of life”. How does one uplift life?

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As a supplement to HDI, I think that it would be a good idea for the UN to also adopt a Human Security Index (HSI). As I see it, HDI pertains more to “prosperity”, which is the opposite of poverty. As I am proposing it, HSI should pertain more to “peace and order”, which is the opposite of crime. When combined, HSI and HDI could separately measure success or failure in reducing crime and poverty, or conversely, in achieving “prosperity” and “peace and order”.

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In theory, the Local Government Code (LGC) already provides for local autonomy. However, the Philippines is probably the only country in the world where the policemen, firemen and jailers are national employees even as they are assigned to work for the LGUs. In the structure of the bureaucracy, the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) and the Bureau of Jail Management & Penology (BJMP) are all under the Department of Interior & Local Government (DILG). In the old days, the term “Fire Department” was easily understood. Nowadays however, could anyone explain the meaning of “Fire Protection”?

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As I see it, “Jail Management & Penology” appears to be another misnomer, because in the first place, the “inmates” (I also don’t feel right about this term) in the custody of the LGUs are just “suspects”, people who have been accused of committing crimes, but have not yet been convicted. I other words, their “accommodations” should not even be called “jails”, and there is no “penology” that should happen yet. Add to that the fact that “rehabilitation” is the right approach in handling convicts, and not “penology”. Come to think of it, the local “jails” are supposed to be just “detention centers” or “dormitories”, to put it in another way.

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The police, fire and jail (dorm?) functions fall under the general category of “public safety”, which is more or less synonymous with “human security”. Right now, the “crime rate” is the popular standard for measuring “peace and order” in a locality. As I see it however, there is a need for a more encompassing standard that should also measure fire safety and jail security among others, the latter referring to the prevention of jailbreaks.

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I understand that the poverty rate is a very important measure to monitor, but as I see it, there is a need to broaden the measurement of the “quality of life”, and ideally it should look more on the positive side. In a manner of speaking, HDI is somehow synonymous with “prosperity rate”. In the terminology of the UN however, “human development” is usually measured in terms of “access” to goods and services.

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In order to apply the HDI approach to the local conditions, the LGUs should measure the percentage of their population that has access to specific goods and services. For instance, how many have access to ordinary potable tap water? How many have access to quality education? In both of these two examples, the bottom line is really money. People need money to pay the water company. Enrolling into a public school is no problem, but parents still need to spend more money to keep their kids in school.