State And Society In The Philippines Pdf
Agata Schweiss
Sandwich strategies relies on state-society synergy, not just initiatives from one or the other arena. The hypothesis is that when reformers in government tangibly reduce the risks/costs of collective action, that process can bolster state-society pro-reform coalitions that collaborate for change. While this process makes intuitive sense, it can follow diverse pathways and encounter many roadblocks. The dynamics, strengths and limitations of sandwich strategies have not been documented and analyzed systematically. The figure below shows a possible pathway of convergence and conflict between actors for and against change in both state and society.
Pathways Towards Power Shifts: State-Society Synergy, an article in World Development by Jonathan Fox, Rachel Sullivan Robinson, and Naomi Hossain, reports the study findings, encapsulated in this diagram of pathways to power shifts.
Jonathan Fox and Rachel Sullivan Robinson, from the faculty of the American University School of International Service, were the principal investigators on this project. Naomi Hossain gave additional analytical support. ARC partnered with the Centre for Democracy and Development in Nigeria and research consultant Oladeji Olaore.
This clear and nuanced introduction to the Philippines explores the ongoing dilemma of state-society relations, explaining the peculiar nature of a weak state that has managed to survive rebellions, dictatorship, and economic crisis, yet is unable to foster economic development and equality and guarantee long-term political stability.
The SPP evolved from a 1991 U.S. European Command decision to set up the Joint Contact Team Program in the Baltic Region with Reserve component Soldiers and Airmen. A subsequent National Guard Bureau proposal paired U.S. states with three nations emerging from the former Soviet Bloc and the SPP was born, becoming a key U.S. security cooperation tool, facilitating cooperation across all aspects of international civil-military affairs and encouraging people-to-people ties at the state level.
This cost-effective program is administered by the National Guard Bureau, guided by State Department foreign policy goals, and executed by the state adjutants general in support of combatant commander and U.S. Chief of Mission security cooperation objectives and Department of Defense policy goals.
Through SPP, the National Guard conducts military-to-military engagements in support of defense security goals but also leverages whole-of-society relationships and capabilities to facilitate broader interagency and corollary engagements spanning military, government, economic and social spheres.
We are grateful to all participants, paper presenters and session chairs, at the Extractive Bargains workshop for their engagement with, and comments on, various versions of this introductory chapter. We are also grateful to participants at a seminar held in the Department of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki. The chapter has been immeasurably improved as a result of these inputs.
As the world confronts climate change, environmental degradation, rampant social and economic inequalities, wars and insecurity, extractive activities have come under increasing scrutiny (Bridge, 2004); the uncertainty over the future of fossil fuel and mineral extraction has perhaps never been greater. When an increased global recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples is added, then it is evident that how extraction takes place has become a source of major contention with states finding themselves at the centre of conflicting pressures from extractive capital and civil society forces.
There are many studies of how resistance to extraction is taking place around the world (Arboleda, 2020; Svampa, 2019; Kroger, 2020; Willow, 2018) and how corporations are responding through a plethora of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives designed to placate their critics (Farkes, 2015). Relatively less attention has been paid to analysing how states have responded. This volume seeks to fill a part of that gap.
We define extractive bargains as the ways in which states attempt to convince different stakeholders and seek to establish some degree of consensus with societal actors about the need to pursue particular policies on resource extraction, whether that be the continuation, expansion or even reduction of extraction, for societal good. The purpose of examining state-society relations in the context of extractive bargains is not to reify the state or to suggest that it exists separate from society but to examine how it responds to, and seeks to shape, the actions of other social actors whether corporations, classes, social movements, Indigenous nations and groups or simply public opinion. Our conceptualization of state-society relations denotes a complex iteration of the broader assemblage of actors, power structures, institutions and coalitions that contribute to the justification for and material manifestations of resource extraction. This perspective challenges the tendency to see the state as a coherent or homogeneous entity working alongside other equally distinct entities. Exploring the state-society nexus as extractive bargains requires us to imagine a plethora of complex social forces and connections that operate through multiple channels to promote and/or resist extractivism. In other words, extractive bargains are dynamic and there is a dialectical process between states and social actors in the search for consensus as bargains constantly shift in their emphasis and scope.
Our primary objective in this book is to examine in detail and comparatively the ways in which different states have sought to construct these extractive bargains. We do so by examining case studies from 16 countries from both the Global North and Global South and including some majority Indigenous states. In selecting countries as case studies, we were conscious of finding countries where bargains may be said to have been offered. In some states, this is demonstrably not the case and the use of state violence is the standard response to civil society opposition. Of course, violence comes in different forms and is often present when examining natural resource extraction (Shapiro & McNeish, 2021). But violence is not the only, or necessarily the primary, mechanism which is used and in many states various efforts are made to obtain legitimacy; it is these states which are candidates for inclusion as case studies. We also selected cases where the direct benefits in terms of employment and tax revenue are not, in themselves, deemed sufficient to ensure public support for the extractive activity and other societal benefits have been promoted. These criteria guided us in our selection of case studies which include Australia, Bolivia, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Ghana, Greenland, Ireland, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden and Tanzania.
Our starting point therefore is the lacuna in the study of the intricate position of states in extractivism despite their role in navigating the plethora of societal and private actors and structures of power. While being cognizant of the challenges of methodological nationalism (i.e. maintaining the prevalence of the state as a primary unit of analysis), within the context of this book we see the extractive bargains conceptualization as an innovative way of unpacking the different strategies taken by states to negotiate support for various kinds of extractive (and even post-extractive) activities. A bargains approach is a particularly productive way of understanding policy framings and choices, why and how they come about, the ways in which they are challenged or resisted and the strategies being used to justify such choices as serving the broader societal good. At the very least, this book highlights how the process of negotiating such bargains is neither straightforward nor consistent across a number of important cases in the Global South and Global North.
The next section provides a more detailed conceptualization of the central notion of an extractive bargain by examining varieties of analytical and normative bargains. In setting the scene in this way, we also highlight some of the key insights from the case study chapters which follow.
In moving on to examine the content of specific extractive bargains, it is evident that state responses to extraction take many forms and need to be contextualized; we make use of the idea of Varieties of Extractive Bargains to capture and assess these responses. We propose to examine Varieties of Extractive Bargains along two axes. The first is the analytical and in which the content and social basis for bargains in specific state-level locations are identified, analysed and categorized. The second is a normative assessment of bargains and their ability to meet the challenges of a world beset with inequality, injustice and environmental crises at multiple scales. This requires the placement of bargains on a spectrum and analysing how each can be moved towards the progressive end of that spectrum.
It should be noted, and as will become clear in the examples provided, each type of bargain comes in several different forms and that, while we can identify a number of distinct conceptual ideal types of bargains, they may be invoked at different times by the same state and/or a state may commonly invoke more than one at the same point in time in an attempt to appeal to different social actors. Furthermore, while the type of bargain can be identified, many of the case studies reveal there are large gaps between what is promised and what is delivered, and opposition and resistance to the bargains on offer remain significant.
Indigenous-focused bargains, therefore, utilize a variety of mechanisms designed to offer Indigenous communities sources of income, through IBAs, for example, and in some cases offer forms of political power, such as constitutional protections, in exchange for largely ongoing resource extraction.
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