When the news broke out several weeks ago that President Arroyo had appointed erstwhile Pampanga Governor Mark Lapid to head the Philippine Tourism Authority, a minor executive agency, it was clear that the second phase of the battle in Pampanga was about to begin.

Four years ago when I wrote about Akbayan, I entitled the piece “Impossible is Not So Easy”. It still feels impossible, but we now know more about why it is not so easy. In many ways the biggest obstacle is ourselves. Moving from older ways of being “Left” is proving to be much more complex, more difficult than we imagined. Its not as if this is a recent realization. The Political Report to the 2003 Akbayan Congress  said  “The limits to our development as a party are more internal than external. We remain imprisoned in old ways of understanding what being Left means. We have not yet mastered the art of accumulating power within a political system dominated by the Right while remaining true to our being a Left party.” We have remained a Left party, but we have not accumulated much political power.

This is an excerpt of a think piece on one of IPD’s political projects in the coming years. The conceptualization is still a work-in-progress.

The Institute for Popular Democracy has an interest in the interaction between innovation and reform in local governance on the one hand and local political participation on the other. We propose a conception of innovation among local government leaders and of its attendant political risk-taking as dependent on the emergence of active citizens groups and movements that are intimately engaged in cycles of legitimation, constituency building, implementation and monitoring of the nascent innovative approaches. Because innovation is politically disruptive and therefore risky to the officeholder it does not happen as often as it should where it must.