Managing The Politics of Reform Overhauling the Legal Infrastructure of Public Procurement in the Philippines

Because of the complexity and enormity of the task involved, many developing countries have found it daunting to address the problem of corruption. Ideally, one would like to launch a comprehensive reform of relevant institutions in order to tackle the problem, but with meager resources, most countries are unable to take this route. Corruption is like the Great Wall of China spanning hundreds of miles from east to west and the resources that most developing countries have are barely enough to scale or break through even a small part of the wall. The alternative for many is to focus their efforts on a few specific areas with the hope of leveraging success for future efforts in other areas. This monograph attempts to document and analyze one such effort - the recent procurement reforms in the Philippines.But the book is more than just a narrative analysis about an interesting effort at fighting corruption. It also reflects an attempt to grapple with the often ignored problems of implementing institutional reforms and, more specifically, with the challenge of managing the politics of change. Years of debate and research have led to a reasonably good understanding of what makes for bad or good governance or, in the economist's lingo, what constitutes a bad institutional equilibrium and what changes in the institutional landscape are needed to shift to a good equilibrium. But while the "what is" is well understood, it is the "how to (get from the bad to the good equilibrium)" that continues to stump reformers, policymakers, donors, and the like.This paper looks microscopically at the sequence of events that ultimately led to the passage of legislation that markedly altered the rules that governed public procurement in the Philippines and, from the emerging details, attempts to distill operationally useful lessons for managing the politics of a reform process.Campos, J. Edgardo is the author of 'Managing The Politics of Reform Overhauling the Legal Infrastructure of Public Procurement in the Philippines' with ISBN 9780821364352 and ISBN 0821364359.