2

State, Market, and Civil Society in Philippine Public Administration

LEDIVINA V. CARIÑO
The discipline of Public Administration and Governance (PAG) claims that it has moved
beyond the state and now encompasses market and civil society in its embrace. Unlike
Traditional Public Administration (TPA) that focuses on governmental management, PAG-
which incorporates the "governance paradigm"-is concerned with managing the affairs of
society, giving to each domain the role that it can do best. Setting aside the fact that what
each can best do is not settled even in the normative Public Administration theories, this
article will attempt two things: first, to depict the roles that each domain has played in the
development of the discipline, and second, to show how understanding those roles can help
better in moving Philippine Public Administration (PPA) forward.
To reach these objectives, I shall analyze the roles of these domains in the various streams
of Public Administration and how they reflect in our understanding of the modifier "public" in
its name. These allow for rough historical markers and provide a means of distilling a host of
concepts and theories that have illumined the art and science of this field of study over time.
THE STREAMS OF PHILIPPINE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Philippine Public Administration has navigated on four streams: Traditional Public
Administration (TPA), Development Administration (DevAd), New Public Administration (New
PA), and Public Administration and Governance (PAG).1 A stream designates a particular
set of convergent concepts and approaches in the teaching, research, and practice of Public
Administration. When dominant at a particular time, it would be recognized as "mainstream"
even though flows of other streams may join it as backdrop, assumptions,
Reprinted from the Philippine Journal of Public Administration, 52(2008/2-4), 139-166.

32 DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STUDY AND PRACTICE

or factors in the environment rather than as core objects of study. In the review of years of
research in the University of the Philippines National College of Publ development issues
were clearly the focus in the TPA and DevAd years. Neverthele Administration and
Governance (UP NCPAG), it emerged that internal management and research on
democracy and politics were conducted although not as prevalent as under
under New PA, and the PAG views the "public" as the people.
the "public" as "government," to the "public" as "a particular kind of goods and services
"public" in "public administration." The meaning has undergone transformation from and now
to the "public" as focus of and participant in protecting the general welfare. The as
government under TPA and DevAd, the "public" in "public goods" gained prominence
careers of these concepts have somewhat converged, such that the public was understood
A note on limitations. This analysis comprehends mainly how NCPAG has waded in of its
pioneering status and continued leadership in the Philippines, as well as the author's the
Philippine PA streams. I took the College as representative of the discipline by virtue here is
probably descriptive of the discipline in other Public Administration schools, greater
familiarity with its achievements and drawbacks. Nevertheless, a lot of what is said programs
in the Philippines (Cariño, Co, Dannug, Fernandez, & Tapales, 2004). based on what were
learned in the recent evaluation of all Public Administration graduate
Traditional Public Administration
away
Traditional Public Administration was what developed in the United States since the time of
Woodrow Wilson's seminal 1887 article, "The Study of Administration." Wilson called for
indigenizing Public Administration and the Americanization of the then-prevailing paradigm (I
used the term advisedly) largely coming from the cameralistics of Europe. The latter
emphasized law and finance in governmental management, leading Wilson to seek a focus
on the Deed and not the Will. In the U.S., Public Administration then moved from Law to
become a branch of Political Science. It differed from its mother field as it incorporated ideas
from other disciplines, not only philosophy and social science in which Political Science was
centered, but also engineering, economics, and business, which were the roots of the
"administration" part of its name. Wilson did not use the word "public" as he played midwife
in the birth of the discipline, but his ideas on what it should include went beyond simple
governmental management to issues of democracy and societal development that would be
more emphasized in its later usage. The advancement of democracy and public service
were clearly the aims of the study of administration that he and other political
scientists-turned-PA-scholars of his generation advocated. However, as it developed, even
though it remained within Political Science, American Public Administration was treated as a
vocational stepchild and was even omitted from the four Science Association (Caldwell,
1965). broad areas of Political Science in a 1962 report on the discipline by the American
Political
When the Bell Mission recommended the improvement of Philippine government through,
among others, the introduction of training and education in this field to the Philippine shores,
"public" and "administration" were already coupled. Courses on the introduction to the field
assumed a democratic government, and the civil service was expected to be accountable to
the people through political leadership. However, the bulk
of the courses were on how to manage the staff functions involving personnel, funds,
processes, and structures. The involvement of civil servants in politics was not the subject of
attention, except in a course on politics and administration where politics was the culprit, for
even then corruption had reared its ugly head. The idea of politics as the arena of competing
(but not necessarily illegitimate) interests and the values that should animate the process
were assumed rather than infused into the discussions. Most of the disciplines were worried
about how to improve governmental management, and for that it leaned on a more
developed area of administration, that of business management.
Development Administration
In a sense, the Philippines did not have a TPA period. Traditional Public Administration was
what the University of Michigan (TUM) technical assistance project brought, and its
curriculum was copied (including a course on Federal and State Government in a country
that, 55 years later, is still unitary). However, TUM was only the first project, and its mandate
was the same in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, and the rest of the technical assistance
projects that followed: to jumpstart in the new states the process of economic development.
Development trumped democracy as a value for Public Administration and it was what was
incorporated into individual syllabi and into the curriculum. Thus the era of DevAd can be
traced as starting in the 1950s also. In the West, a similar change in Public Administration
had taken place, but there, it was tellingly called "Comparative Administration." The point
cannot be made any clearer: what was DevAd to the Philippines was to them a comparison
of how the country was progressing against their (usually, American) standard. As Jones
(1976) put it:
The 1950s was a wonderful period. The "American dream" was the "world dream"-and the
best and quickest way to bring that dream into reality was thru the mechanism of The net
result of all of this enthusiastic action was a magic term public administration
..
and public administration experts were magicians of a sort. (pp. 99-100)
On the administration end, we had the techniques and methods of TPA. Development
administration was realized in our limited understanding of the "public"-as government trying
to bring about economic growth in the midst of rapid social change.
New Public Administration
"New Public Administration" was distinctly aimed at changing American Public
Administration, still under TPA, to a discipline that could address the vast problems affecting
American society-poverty, inequality, neglect of human rights, racism, global misadventures
(the issue then was Vietnam). Unlike comparative administration which was exported as
DevAd, New PA was not beamed at non-American communities, and the Philippines got it by
reading the literature and through connections with the global scientific community, not
through missionaries sent by the mother church as in the 1950s. Nevertheless, New PA
touched a responsive chord in the country. In the 1970s, the country was under martial law;
it was faced with the issues of poverty, inequality, and the absence of freedoms. Worse, the
country was supposed to improve a government that did not even admit the existence, let
alone the magnitude, of those problems.
even how they can be infused back into the curricula. Meanwhile, many
blossomed with the place of the values of social justice and freedom in the discipline and
New PA brought philosophy back into Public Administration-the literature
y American institutes
of
and departments of public administration had transformed themselves as schools public
policy, recognizing that if they continued to dichotomize politics and administration, I was not
exactly part of New PA since the policy focus started in the U.S. in the 1950s (Ocampo,
2003b). However, New PA moved forward
their efforts can be
empty. This
policy studies in the Philippines by its stress on goals and programs.
time
we did
In 1978, the UP NCPAG has had a second round of technical assistance, this t with Harvard
University, to assist the College in incorporating public policy into the curriculum (Ocampo,
2003b). Committed to the importance of administration, not join the bandwagon of becoming
a school of public policy (although Michigan did). Instead, what we developed was Public
Policy and Program Administration (PPPA), incorporating both the formulation and
implementation of public policy. This was new in the discipline. Recall that TPA focused on
the management of staff functions, in the vain hope that the proper combination of inputs
would produce better results. Public Policy and Program Administration made us consider
the whole policy cycle, including both the uplifting and unsavory aspects of politics. At the
same time, it emphasized the implementation of programs as a major aspect of the cycle,
something that was almost left to chance in the era which stressed the management of input
resources. Program goals became a worthy area of study, and we became acquainted not
only with the of implementation failures that are not due to lack of resources but also with
theory
failure, due to the disconnect between programs and goals.
types
The study of public policy brought about our second understanding of the meaning of
“public.” The “public” as government is centered on the mechanism that delivers goods and
services. The “public” that focuses on products looks at why certain goods are subject to
market failure and need to be distributed in a different way. Using a concept borrowed from
economics, some goods are called "public" by reason of the indivisibility and non-rivalry of
their benefits and their significant externalities. These goods are either largely delivered or
sought to be delivered by government, such as public health, infrastructure, and utilities, or
when delivered by business firms are the subject of regulation, such as public utilities. Public
goods differ from private goods and they are not sold in the open market or accessible to
anyone able to pay; rather they can be enjoyed by anyone whether they pay for them or not
as long as they are in the area of coverage.
The "public" in "public goods" gained significance in public administration as it went beyond
the simple management of input resources-personnel, finance, structures, and processes
(organization and management [O and M])-to tackle public policy. Dealing with its
formulation and implementation, Public Administration has to deal with why and how the
different goods and services government produces should be distributed. As already
mentioned, a lot of public goods are expected to come from government since, with the
indivisibility of benefits and without the use of the price mechanism, taxation would seem to
be the best means to fund their provision. Where the private sector is willing to provide them,
because of the indivisibility of benefits, non-rivalry, and externalities, economic and social
regulation is needed to make sure the services reach all the people and not just those who
can provide profits for the provider.
THE THREE DOMAINS IN PHILIPPINE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Philippine Public Administration was governmental management from its inception until
the
and dealt with the other domains of society from day one. This section describes how each
domain has been understood in each Public Administration stream and what it
contributes to or detracts from the discipline.
Government and Public Administration
Public Administration began as a discipline focused on the management of
field.
government
operations. For a time, our diploma program was even called the Certificate of Governmental
Management, assumed then to be a synonym for the formal name of the "Government" was
the referent of "public" when the discipline was exported to the Philippine shores in 1952.
The technical assistance project that the University of Michigan undertook was part of the
Bell Report recommendations and was aimed at having the newly independent state get to
its feet. Even then, charges of corruption and inefficiency were already being hurled at
government, and training and education in public esoteric part of technical assistance,
because even in the United States where Public administration was central to the solutions
proposed to meet them. This was not an Administration was formally born, government was
the main, if not the only, focus of
interest.
But what government was PPA interested in? Note that I am using the term "government"
and not the term "state," because the scope of TPA and DevAd was woefully small. We learn
in Introductory Political Science that the State has four main characteristics: people, territory,
sovereignty, and monopoly of violence and coercion. The government of concern at Public
Administration's birth dealt with only a small part of the fourth. No, PPA was not focused on
the control of force, but, as David Easton defined political science (of which in the US, Public
Administration is a subfield), it is "the authoritative allocation of values in a society" (Easton,
1953, p. 134). The government we studied was authoritative, but we did not dare to grasp (in
academic terms, that is) all the authoritative power allocation. We ignored the legislative and
judicial branches and focused only on the executive branch and the constitutional
commissions. Even then, the entire executive branch was not included, but only parts of its
career civil service. By definition, the civil service includes all elected officials and such
special services as the foreign service, the judiciary, and the armed forces. The UP NCPAG
has had students from all these services but hardly studies their management and
operations. Under the first two PPA streams, this was hardly necessary, since for the most
part the performance of staff functions would be the same regardless of the service or even
branch of government.
That changed as we moved to New PA and became interested not only in the input functions
but also in the policies and programs of government. That would be even more important
now as these substantive areas are formulated, implemented, and evaluated —ideally—the
full view and determined participation of the people.
other
Since the 1970s, the UP NCPAG has been in the forefront of research in health, ti-poverty,
population, elections, foreign debt, fiscal policy, education, and ogram areas. Among our
newest are telecommunications and spatial information policy administration. Every aspect
of human life can be a concern of public policy and we
many
STATE, MARKET, AND CIVIL SOCIETY 37
can be expected to have specialists in all of them. Nevertheless, we have huge gaps in the
range of public policy we have tackled. We have made inroads into the legislature- largely
consulting on the substance of policy-an important achievement-but we have not studied or
provided training for the administration of the legislature. We have left judicial administration
to the College of Law and the Supreme Court.
With the governance paradigm, PPA now includes not only the executive branch but also the
legislature and the judiciary. This is evident in the UN's Fostering Democratic Governance
Programme which also includes political parties, the leagues of local governments, and
many civil society organizations. The irony is that when the UN Development Programme's
Human Development Report 2002 focused on "deepening democracy," it discussed the
contribution of all other institutions but the bureaucracy. The oversight suggests that
because of the way Public Administration had drawn its scope in be turning in his previous
streams, it might have defined itself out of democracy discussions. Wilson may
grave.
Why is it significant to note that only a small slice of government was taken up? Because if
PPA is first of all governmental management, then political institutions of the country should
have been known, and how they and not just the civil service may be built and strengthened
to serve the public good. It would also help to know where the state and the nation are
headed, what is the bureaucracy's role in the State (if we insist on narrow scope), and then
expand our view to its role in society. In the 1990s, I tried to conduct a study of the civil
service in terms of the theories of the role of the state and the democratic or authoritarian
milieu in which it is working (Cariño, 1992). I found the Philippine civil service as a weak
institution vis-à-vis the political leadership, whether the latter be democratic or authoritarian.
It was also weak in comparison with the civil service of other states. The strong
bureaucracies had a vision for the development of their nation and their role in it. In some
cases, a strong bureaucracy can bring a country to the wrong direction. This is where the
political leadership must wield its power and maintain its accountability to the people. As you
know, it is a dynamic system, brimming with both conflict and consensus, and students must
be trained to take part in the vigorous debate of how the Philippines will become the Good
Society not with quick fixes, but with strong institutions.
There is one exception to the small slice of government that we have bitten into. This is the
area of local and regional governance. From the beginning, and despite that unfortunate
inclusion of Federal and State Government in the curriculum, this area, even when called
only "local governments," was our most complete subject. We studied the staff functions,
following TPA/DevAd, including local politics, electoral politics, local policies and programs,
and national-local relations. Since the 1990s, moreover, the Center for Local and Regional
Governance of the UP NCPAG has made a strong thrust into training for local legislators.
Unfortunately, the students have not taken advantage of this strength in the field to major on
it in large enough numbers. Also unfortunately, our expertise in the field has not led to the
development of strong local civil services.
38 DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STUDY AND PRACTICE
Business in Philippine Public Administration
The involvement of the two other domains of society in Public Administration preceded
interface with the discipline: as source of theories and techniques of Public Administration;
the acceptance of the governance paradigm in the Philippines. Both have three kinds of
public policies and programs. The analysis of the latter two may of course lead to new
Business administration as model for PPA. Despite the modifier "public," many theories of
organization recognized in the discipline are products of studies of private
sector organizations. These include scientific management and administrative
management,
some tenets of which should have been discarded after Herbert Simon (1946) unmasked
them as "proverbs" rather than products of scientific discoveries. The human relations school
was jumpstarted by the findings of research from the Western Electric Company (Mayo,
1933). However, it was a controversial project at that time, and questions continue to be
raised on it up to now concerning its neglect of the relations of labor and capital and the
society surrounding the company. The research, which found that employees responded to
attention more than the physical conditions of employment, was done s the Great
Depression loomed, possibly making any job acceptable regardless of work conditions (see,
for instance, Franke & Kaul, 1978; Gillespie, 1991). This fact has been largely ignored in
analyzing that research, showing that the interest was only on the internal organization. Also
there were studies in the University of Chicago that showed different results (as different
conclusions were found by those who conducted re-analysis of the data of the study). The
Hawthorne experiments gave birth to a "policy science too tied to managerial interests in
cooperation and productivity increases" (Burawoy, 2007, p. 3). Such a neglect does not
speak well of the adopting discipline whose institutions have society-wide significance.
However, it does show how focused PA—and business and generic administration—was on
the internal administrative condition-and may have been carried away by something other
than disinterested science, at that (Marshall, 1998).
In the Philippines, Public Administration started out as a cross between Political Science and
Business Administration. While the first American directors and our early faculty were
recruited from political science and law, the first Filipino director was the dean of the College
of Business Administration. It would seem that some UP decision makers, as well as the
promoters of public administration in government, were comfortable with the notion that the
discipline of administration is generic and the rather than theory. differences of public
administration from business administration were issues of application
This idea was especially influential in the 1970s when UP was developing the management
education programs of its regional units. At that time, the Master of Management degree was
instituted, with business, public, and educational management as mere areas of
specialization. The theory of Public Administration was subsumed under a general course on
The Theory and Practice of Management; the Ecology of Administration and Human
Behavior in Organization were the other core courses, presumed to be the same in all kinds
of administration. The Public Management specialization focused on the institution of
government, although the courses were largely given as separate parts of the whole, with
the usual emphasis on staff functions like personnel administration, fiscal administration, and
organization and management. We did not pay too much attention
then to Graham Allison's (1983) important question: "Public and Private Management: Are
They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?"
The interaction of Public Administration with business firms is also significant in the study of
public enterprises, where it can serve as both model and point of departure. However,
despite strong faculty leadership of UP NCPAG (by Prof. Leonor Briones, later joined by Dr.
Maria Fe Mendoza), the subfield has hardly taken off.
Business management as a model has been implicitly set aside under New PA as it does not
have much to say about poverty, social justice, and participation. However, the private-sector
view of management has come back with a vengeance under New Public Management
(NPM) which uses corporate governance as a model for dealing with the ills of government
operations. Reviving managerialism in Public Administration, it is more positivist and
practical than New PA. Its emphasis on performance-motivated and oriented administration
has been incorporated into the rhetoric of the governance paradigm, its prescriptions for
efficiency, effectiveness, and results finding easy combination with the requirements of
accountability and the rule of law. However, NPM by itself mutes the democratic and values
thrust of the new paradigm. The governance paradigm's stress on citizenship is also in direct
conflict with NPM's view of the people as customers. Customers are private interested
persons who buy services they can afford. The power in this transaction usually lies with the
service suppliers (except in cases of buyers' markets). By contrast, citizens get services as a
matter of right. In addition, they are also private persons with a public perspective, with
interests in strengthening community values, and with potential power to change public
policy and political leaders. Reengineering a service for customers would not necessarily be
the same approach to use in dealing with citizens.
Business as provider of public goods. The second point of interaction with business firms is
in their involvement in the provision of public goods. The provision of public goods, by their
nature, does not lend itself easily to the same techniques as the pursuit of profit, since their
use and effects cannot be limited only to those able or willing to pay for them. Given the
goals of society, public goods should be delivered even in areas where most people do not
have the ability to pay for them. However, because usage is likely to be large (and therefore,
there are a large number of potential customers), business has into these areas as
commercially viable, even if in the process they are subjected found entry to regulation. A
business may be regulated as regards price rates, schedule of delivery, geographic area of
coverage, and other factors that in the free market are usually subject only to the law of
supply and demand. It is not uncommon, for instance, for public utilities to be required to
cover certain "missionary routes" so they can serve poorer segments of society.
This interface of government and business was potentially a strong suit in the DevAd era of
the UP NCPAG. At that time, Law as a discipline was represented by three to four members
of the faculty, and Regulatory Administration was in the original curriculum. However, the
subject has rarely been offered since the 1960s.
New PA pushed the relevance of regulation into the discipline as it underscored the analysis
of policies and programs according to their contribution to the public interest. The function of
regulation is part of PPPA but it has tended to be overshadowed there by programs with
direct government delivery of services. Thus, to a large extent, the government-business
connection has been confined to courses on PA and the Economic Order/PA and Economic
Development, an elective at the master's level although required at both bachelor and
doctoral levels.
40 DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STUDY AND PRACTICE
The relationship of government and business received an
early boost in 1973, when
at a time
most
Gabriel U. Iglesias negotiated a professorial chair from San Miguel Corporation, a of the
company, the Chair focuses on government and business. It has been the when such
donations were rare. Named in honor of Don Andres Soriano, the late chair popular
professorial chair in NCPAG. It has been granted to several faculty members a s Augusto
Caesar Espiritu and Robert B. Stauffer. It
well as to such external luminaries
as
as
years
has been used for the advancement of policy studies in general, as well as areas where
market and state meet. However, there have been few takers in recent y
despite the increase of the monetary award.
of
not so
governance became a prime subject of research. The significance of the environment as
The link of government and business was not revived until the 2000s when regulatory an
issue and the presence of faculty with expertise in it can further make the interface c much
the role of business as subordinate to government in running the affairs of society, but why it
is not the major player: when dealing with government and the public at large,
government and business move to the core of PPA. Issues of regulation highlight
they could be institutions whose practices would not necessarily serve
first type
of interaction with business has been.
as models, as the
A young movement in the domain of the market dawned in the 1990s as many firms became
animated not only by the profit motive but also by their responsibility t society. Those who
take part in corporate social responsibility (CSR) interface not so much with the state as with
the larger society. Here is where business leaves mere customership and becomes involved
in issues of citizenship, within its own organizations as well as among the users of its
products and the larger society. Corporate social responsibility is changing business
administration also as moral sentiments emerge to join that business administration may
also be having its own redefinition of what the "business" the hidden hand as the domain's
regulatory mechanism. The acceptance of CSR suggests of business administration is
supposed to be and is moving closer to the latest sense of
the "public" in public administration.
Business as interest-bearers. Business also gets involved in policymaking and other
government operations. At its worst, it would be the operationalization of Karl Marx's
accusation of the State as simply the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Here, private
sector tycoons would be perceived as dictating the policies of the State which is powerless
to ignore it. US President Dwight Eisenhower decried the influence of the military- industrial
complex in his country, as in his time Ferdinand E. Marcos also accused the oligarchs of
unmitigated power (one of his excuses for declaring martial law) in the
Philippines.
At its best, this involvement would be firms expressing and advocating their interests in
certain policy areas in open debate with other sectors of society. Politics after all is an arena
of struggle where sectors of society may put forward their interests as values that contribute
to the overall public interest. In between these extremes lies a wide area of legitimate and
illegitimate business participation. Prominent activities are rent-seeking and corruption where
certain firms use the market mechanism to influence political and administrative decision
making. The influence can overlay the entire policy process- from getting favorable laws and
franchises to using loopholes or resorting to actual violation of laws covering contracts and
procurement. Specific corporations-sometimes entire industries—may so dominate the
personnel and processes of governance that
regulatory capture replaces regulation.
The UP NCPAG's foray into the illegitimate uses of power has tended to zero in on the ills
and weaknesses of governmental institutions. The activities of the other powerful domain
tend to be treated more lightly although its capture not only of regulation but of legislation
and other governmental processes are well-documented in the Philippines (see, for instance,
Basilio, 2006; Baylon, 2005; Briones & Gamboa, 2003; Coronel, 1998; De Dios, 1999). The
paradigm that includes the other domains in managing societal affairs needs to analyze the
underside of business more than ever before.
Public Administration, Civil Society, and the Voluntary Sector
This section starts with a clarification of terms used in voluntary sector management (VSM).
Then it deals with how PPA has interacted with the voluntary sector, particularly the
organizations in it comprising civil society. Philippine public administration relates with the
voluntary sector in the same ways it does with the market. However, the roles of these
organizations as interest-bearers and as providers of public goods have been recognized
ahead of their potential as a model for public administration. Thus the order of discussion in
this section differs from the earlier one.
Clarifying "voluntary sector," "civil society," and other terms in voluntary sector management.
Civil society is a new name for an old phenomenon; political philosophers as far apart in time
as Aristotle and John Locke viewed it as coterminous with the State, and it was only in the
18th century that it was clearly separated from the State. Through the years, the term has
taken up various meanings, so that UP NCPAG, in recognizing it as a subfield, decided to
use "voluntary sector management" to give it a more precise scope. "Voluntary sector" as a
term has not taken off in the Philippines and the trilogy of domains is always given as "state,
market, and civil society." This is partly why I have used "civil society" rather than "voluntary
sector" in the title of this article. Also, as this digression section hopes to make clear, except
in their role as service provider, much of the intersection of the voluntary sector with
Philippine Public Administration has been with that part of it that can technically be referred
to as "civil society."
usage in
The term "voluntary sector" has many advantages despite its relative lack of the Philippines.
The most important advantages for the purposes of this article are two factors. First, it
stresses the voluntarism inherent in the sector, underscoring its connection with citizenship
and an organization's conscious decision for involvement in public affairs. Second, it
subsumes the two types of organizations that lie between the state and the market: nonprofit
institutions (NPIs) on the one hand, and civil society on the other. Both types (that is, the
entire voluntary sector) exhibit the following characteristics that Lester Salamon and Helmut
Anheier (1997) call the structural-operational definition of nonprofit institutions only:
• Organized, meaning, institutionalized to some extent,
Private, prudently defined as institutionally separate from government, Self-governing, that
is, equipped to control its own activities,
• Nonprofit distributing, or not returning surplus generated to its owners or directors, and
Voluntary, involving some meaningful degree of service freely given and given for free (pp.
33-34).
Nonprofit institutions are members of the voluntary sector which are l
largely economic
units, consuming and producing goods and services, providing employment and facilities,
and generating funds and resources for society Examples are nonprofit hospitals, schools,
like business firms, except that they do not distribute profits to their founders, owners, or
broadcasting stations, and other organizations whose structure and operations are most
boards of directors. These are not the first examples of voluntary sector organizations
(VSOs) that people think about, but they legitimately belong to the sector and their nonprofit
status makes their contributions to society different from the contributions of
firms.
private
More congruent to the popular mind's image is that part of the voluntary sector that is civil
society: Civil society is composed of VSOS which are largely oriented to public policy and
the state. Some of them pursue a political agenda which makes them critics,
sources of policy ideas, and/or cooperators in government policies and
NPIs, I will use the more inclusive term, voluntary sector.
programs. Others
Or
provide public goods, some pointedly different from the government's and implicitly c
explicitly criticizing its practices, while others may focus on areas the latter does not serve or
reach. This is the meaning of civil society that I use in this article. When I include the main
beneficiaries of their activities, particularly the individuals at the grassroots, they a When civil
society organizations (CSOs) are composed of the citizens who are the intermediary
associations and are called "nongovernmental organizations" (NGOs). called "people's
organizations" (POS). If composed of persons other than these, they are "Nongovernmental
organization" as a term was recognized by the UN only in the 1970s. "Civil society" of which
they are a part gained new life in the late 1980s, after being in the forefront of political
philosophy during the Scottish Enlightenment and immediately after. The recent revival of
the term "civil society" was effected by citizens of Eastern Europe who wanted to regain the
power that was supposed to be theirs in a people's republic. This is partly why the notion of
civil society is very closely tied to citizenship. Civil society as interest-bearers. The liberal
theory of the role of the state has been assumed in Public Administration, with that the
assumption of democracy as the default government. Structurally, it also s bureaucratic
institutions as subordinate to the political leadership. Under this theory, organized citizens
can bring ideas for policy and into the state where their interests would be considered and
weighed for their contributions to the public interest. This interface takes place outside the
usual realm of public administration—that is, in the legislature or if in the executive branch,
only in the political leadership. The bureaucracy is supposed to be permeable by outside
forces only through this leadership, as overhead democracy warrants. Civil servants are
supposed to be clothed with Weber's formalistic impersonality. That is as far as theory goes.
type
of
program
In a Public Administration that puts the stress on internal management, this clash of interests
would only be noted when the public policy has been promulgated and it is time for
implementation. Nevertheless, since UP NCPAG always has had a lot of political and other
social scientists around, there was a lot of breaking out of the narrow confines of this theory.
Thus, the interchanges of the civil service were not recognized as well as the political
leaders in the executive and legislative branches-with associations and firms. Following
political science parlance of the time, the organizations that interacted with the state were
called "interest groups." Their advocacy or criticism of policy is identical to the work of what
today would be called CSOs, including, as mentioned above, both NGOs
and POs.
STATE, MARKET, AND CIVIL SOCIETY 43
However, it should be noted that interest groups are different from NGOs they are not
intermediary organizations representing their beneficiaries to the state. Rather, they
are
membership organizations representing themselves much like today's POS. But they also differ
radically from POS.
While we tend to think of POS as organizations of what are now called "basic sectors," this is not
the same constituency that most of the "interest groups" served. Rather, these pre-martial law
groups were composed of middle- or upper-class people (much like the membership of many
NGOs now). They pushed forward the interests and perspectives of their industry, their
profession, or their cause, not the social development of the disadvantaged, marginalized, and
underserved, for which civil society is now known. Thus when people's participation in
governance is discussed, the image in everyone's mind would probably not include the interest
groups of the DevAd period. Technically, however, the term "civil society" would still embrace
them, because the definition does not evaluate the cause being propagated as a qualification for
inclusion. It bears reiteration that civil society includes all organizations of citizens oriented to
the state, whether they are for the status quo or for radical social change, and whether their
membership is predominantly from the rich or from the poor. We study their governance, causes,
and impacts whether or not we agree with their choices.
I want to emphasize that interest-bearers from civil society have always been around and they
have affected governance since time immemorial. The sea change in the kind of organizations
we have recognized as involved in PPA seems to be a product of four factors. First, the process
of redemocratization in society and the opening of democratic space. Second, there has been a
rise in the number and noise of those representing the underprivileged. Moreover, they used to
specialize in opposing the state, but now also complement and cooperate with it. Third are
factors within the discipline itself. This refers to the change in the scope of the field as everyone
has become "enlightened" by new PA and especially now as people become more concerned
with the active citizenship of all classes of society. The fourth reason acknowledges changes in
the government which were dubbed "people-powered" in 1986. Whether truly people-powered or
not, it has restructured its bureaucracy so that NGO desks, management contracts with
communities, and civil society representation in many government councils are now
commonplace.
These being said, it is also necessary to repeat the warning of Lester Salamon (1994) that the
voluntary sector is not necessarily clothed in pure virtue. Our study of the voluntary sector in the
Philippines reveals that from time to time. It exhibits the following drawbacks:
Its claims to represent the people are often marred by questions of legitimacy and credibility,
stemming from self-appointment and incapacity to cover all the significant demands of the
citizenry. It is also plagued by lack of unity and of having all positions represented by at least one
organization in the sector. Yet its ability to lie at the whole range of the spectrum has not
improved its tolerance and capacity to respect contrary opinions. It has manifest inability to
accept compromises, on the one hand, and a tendency to represent narrow rather than the
general interest, on the other. Seeking to empower the people, it may instead mire them in greater
shackles of dependence. Decrying government corruption, it eschews demands of accountability
when it becomes the actor in center stage (Cariño, 2002a, p. 293).
44 DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STUDY AND PRACTICE
as structures
public goods and services. From the 1980s onwards, CSOs became prominent a The voluntary
sector as service providers. Both parts of the voluntary sector provide providing public goods,
usually as competitors of the government rather than as its complement or collaborator. This
coincided with the embrace of New PA and the growing services or providing unfair competition
to other service providers. Moreover, they were goods, they did not seem to need economic
regulation because they were not selling their usually going into areas underserved or to people
unreached by regular government services. Thus from one view, especially that of the martial law
government, they were providing an alternative delivery system, one that like the government did
not depend on ripe for political regulation. But for those studying Public Administration, they
were ability to pay, and one that like the private sector seemed efficient and effective.
Effectiveness also expanded in that it meant better results in reaching the poor, a theme in Public
Administration that would hold up a new meaning of "public," particularly for the post- Marcos
governments. This was the emphasis on the public as the focus, if not the lifeblood However, the
recognition of civil society as an alternative delivery system is a late recognition of the voluntary
sector's role in service provision. It should be mentioned that the other half of the sector-the
NPIS-have been providing public goods since the start of the American regime. American
missionaries and philanthropists established hospitals,
of government.
orphanages, schools, and other institutions on a not-for-profit basis. While not
exclusively
for the poor, they were pointedly not only for the rich. This was a sharp difference from he
Spanish-era hospitals, for instance, which opened their doors to those who could fford them and
gave only prayers to the rest of the population (Kwantes, 1989). However, the difference in
governance styles of these nonprofits from regular business or government
has been left unstudied by both business and public administration.
The voluntary sector as source of potential models for PPA. While the management of business
firms has been held up as models from the days of TPA right up to the incorporation of business
reform into the governance paradigm, the voluntary sector has not been seen as providing
lessons for PPA. I can offer two explanations for this attitude. First, it is because the
identification of organizations as an actor in PPA has been late in coming, propelled only by the
acceptance of the governance paradigm. Partly it is also because the sector is not sufficiently
studied by both the organizations themselves and the academe. As a result, they have simply
done what TPA did and what the governance paradigm now does: embrace corporate
governance as their own model for governance.
I submit that VSM can enrich PPA in both the administration aspect and the public aspect of the
discipline. In the administration aspect, it can provide other models than corporate governance.
For instance, their recruitment of staff with known commitment to their causes is different from
the required neutrality of civil servants. It results in fewer clock-watchers and more innovations in
service provision, with voluntarism built into the personnel's psyche, even if they are paid staff
and not volunteers. A wholesale adoption of this into the civil service may be fraught with danger.
Too easily can the cause become loyalty to the government of the day. Nevertheless, there are
too many civil servants whom the poor call "kaaway" (enemy) rather than "karamay"
(sympathizer) whose performance can be immeasurably improved by their political commitment
to the objectives of their agency. For instance, some employees of the Department of Agrarian
Reform
STATE, MARKET, AND CIVIL SOCIETY 45
were reported to have harangued tenants who did not agree with the payment scheme they
prepared in connivance with landlords. How can a cause incorporated in law be pushed by civil
servants in other than the Spanish-era stance of "obedezco pero no cumplo" (I obey but I do not
comply)? Clearly there is a need to study how recruitment of civil servants can be improved with
a dose of learning from the best of both worlds- governmental as well as voluntary sector
management.
A second example where the voluntary sector may enrich public administration is in the area of
regulation and accountability. The sector as a whole has escaped regulation by the State. But it
has recognized that the behavior of its member-entities can go astray, so it has instituted
mechanisms for self-regulation. This is not new-guilds of the Middle Ages might have invented
this mode. Since then, one of the tests of an occupation attaining the status of a profession is its
ability to regulate itself. In a sense, this is the price a profession pays for society's recognition
that it is an important part of society because it is not just enriching its members but also
rendering public service.
In a comparative study of the governance of these organizations in various Asian countries, the
author was able to extract a collective governance model from the way small, generally
unregistered organizations were ran (Cariño, 2008). Its policy-administration relationship
introduces an integration which was not considered, given the familiarity with the
politics-administration dichotomy. The members are more active here than in corporate
governance, being (in addition to tradition) a source of policy, easily sliding into leadership roles,
often working as volunteers, and being implementers as well. Decision making by consensus
rather than majority vote means that different views are not allowed to divide the group; rather,
the organization tries to find points where general agreement is possible, thus preventing
factional splits. Accountability to their communities and constituencies is kept through modes
understandable to them, sometimes through such traditions as community reporting through
songs and theater. The presence of familiar concepts like accountability, policy-administration
relations, group decision making, and leadership— but with a different twist-enriches the qualities
that these concepts may encompass. Besides, while unlikely to be applicable to the national
bureaucracy, some aspects of collective governance may be developed for use by locally based
organizations and local government units.
But more than developing the "administration" in "public administration," the voluntary sector,
particularly civil society, assists in deepening the understanding of the "public" in "public
administration." When they interact with government, CSOs have not been hampered by the idea
that "public" questions are the realm of government or by the need to study if a need is a public
good before deciding to produce it. Most of them have simply assumed that the causes they
serve contribute to the public interest. Armed with that, they feel equal to government as a
representative of the people. In dedication to their advocacy, they organize and conscienticize so
that they can actively actualize the public interest. This does not mean that they are always right.
Causes are numerous and touch all human concerns so it is not possible that all their views can
be equally right. Nevertheless, in their participation in dialogue and deliberation, they make the
public alive. It is not simply the textbook discussion of "sovereignty residing in the people" or the
philosopher's view of the consent of the governed. What the voluntary sector forces PPA to do is
to recognize the validity of the people's participation in governance and to teach some ways to
incorporate the publics' view into a relevant formulation of the public interest.

46 DIMENSIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STUDY AND PRACTICE

LESSONS FROM THE STUDY OF THE THREE DOMAINS IN PHILIPPINE PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION
This little exploration has shown that the state, market, and civil society play different roles
understanding of the governance paradigm. The explicit recognition of their contributions in PPA.
The approaches and practices of these domains can help improve the forces us to analyze how
their presence impacts on the theories and concepts of PPA. The first lesson here relates to our
view of government, the institution that used to define the scope of the field. It suggests that
even as market and civil society are encompassed in the people's purview, it is also a must to
strengthen the people's grasp of the management of the State. This requires regarding as within
our purview all branches and services of government and not just a small part of it. The wider
scope implied by the governance paradigm should make us strive for a more comprehensive
understanding
of the institution that is still the enabler and orchestrator of most programs
needs for human development.
that society
The second lesson is the need to examine what models market and civil society hold up for
Public Administration and Governance. Business Administration theories and techniques got into
PPA at its birth. In the 1950s, business management seemed to typify generic administration-and
thus how administration should be done in all institutions, even in government. This perspective
became muted when New PA put the problems of society at the forefront. It has come back in
New Public Management, coupling with the governance paradigm. As many scholars have
already warned, corporate governance cannot be grafted en toto in Public Administration without
sacrificing some of the discipline's most cherished values and methods. Thus the model that
business offers to
Public Administration must be analyzed at every turn.
On the other hand, the entry of the voluntary sector, especially civil society, in the studies of
Public Administration is different from the role business management originally played in it. Civil
society organizations have been regarded as "alternative delivery systems," a different way of
administering. Although it has been acknowledged that lessons may be learned from them, for
instance, through their emphasis on participation and their ability to reach what government
does not, they remain "other," a different way of managing, not a model for administering the
public domain (understood as government or the state). Voluntary sector management originally
entered the discipline as a parallel field, not as the source of models for PPA. However, some of
the emerging governance aspects of the sector merit further study as possibilities for changing
the management of
government.
The third lesson is the significant role of interest in each domain's entry into the field. Every
organization has interests, and some private interests may be achieved as part of the public
interest, while some are selfish and contrary to the general welfare. The proliferation of business
firms and CSOs dipping their hands into governance requires militancy on the part of those who
would preserve the public interest. These guardians are in the state, market, and civil society, just
as those seeking only their private interest are also represented in all those domains. This
suggests to me that politics, and particularly democratic politics, must be a central part of the
discipline and not just an unstudied assumption. Public administration does not have an invisible
hand like economics, where self-interested individuals manage to produce the social good of
efficiency by allowing the free operation of the market. The scholar's counterpart is the noisy
intersection of STATE, MARKET,
several interests which everyone is free to join, open and transparent rather than hidden
transactions, all within the rule of law. A policy would emerge from this crucible, and it cannot be
known if the debate has produced the policy that embodies the public interest except in
hindsight, so trust is the important commodity of all the participations in the interaction. This
suggests strong doses of interest group theory in the discipline, though updated with the
dimensions introduced by the entry of intermediary organizations, disadvantaged groups, and
other new participants of the latest stream of PPA.
and to
The fourth lesson is one already well-noted in the discipline. This is the recognition of what the
voluntary sector offers to governmental management as an alternative delivery system. Its ability
to innovate in service provision, to reach underserved areas, transform beneficiaries from
passive recipients to active participants was the first quality of VSM that caught the attention of
PPA scholars. To this can be added the mode of collective governance that may provide new
approaches to leadership, decision making, and accountability that may be adapted for the rest
of Public Administration.
governance
The fifth lesson is the need for PPA to pay more attention to the function of regulation. The
private sector has entered public administration not only as a model of but also as an entity
subject to oversight and control lest its actions undermine the goals of government. It is thus an
instrument of governance that government must regulate and manage. If the voluntary sector
does not police itself adequately through self-regulation, government oversight could very well be
forthcoming.
Finally, the two domains force us to be more attentive to the third meaning of "public," in terms of
how they can contribute to citizenship and the public interest. It behooves us therefore not only
to improve the management part of Public Administration, but also our special core, the public in
public administration.
There are more lessons to extract from our improved understanding of the workings of state,
market, and civil society in Philippine public administration. I hope at least this article has shown
that to call our discipline Public Administration and Governance, we should not only look at the
private sector as a model for administration but also realize that the voluntary sector is also
providing us models to improve PPA through more attention to the public in public
administration.
nine Public Administration?"