The Local Governance Work Team focuses on developing tools that community organizers, participatory governance advocates and local governments can use to encourage collective action within communities. Our work in local governance could be construed as the technical component of a broader political project that aspires to weaken the institutional vestiges of clientelism and thus strengthen the chances of reformers and platform-based political parties to take power in the Philippines.Our work lends to the creation of the conditions in which transformative politics is likely to take root: where subordinate classes are exposed to deliberative encounters that contest entrenched power relations. These engagements are designed to underscore the value of organization and collective action as community actors identify and colonize crevices in the local state apparatus to enhance popular control of public decision-making.

The local governance work in IPD is animated by the idea that community collective action is an important approach not only for the provision of public goods but also for the empowerment of people who must engage politicians embedded in the persistent logic of patronage politics. Necessarily, the Team also seeks to define and understand key elements of the policy and political environment (local and national) that will support these incursions into the vast territory of patronage politics.

The Team works with national government agencies, local governments, cooperatives, the Barangay-Bayan Governance Consortium and other advocacy groups. It implements and documents pilot projects in participatory governance and municipal service delivery (specializing in water, waste and sanitation management, public markets and health), brings together experts and communities and facilitates capacity-building activities for its partners. It has set up the Ka-bayanihan Technical Support Fund to help finance community efforts to analyze how co-production and co-financing approaches can be initiated, replicated or enhanced.