Disaster Management: Towards Building Community Resilience

Author(s):  
Lilybeth Musong Matunhay

Climate change is one of the major challenges faced by countries worldwide. In the Philippines, constant typhoons and flooding have exposed the vulnerability of disaster risk and reduction management of local communities, and such untold miseries increased the loss and damages of human lives and economic assets. While project management approach has been effectively applied to many fields and sectors, disaster management has yet to see its full benefits. Data from the Office of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) revealed that in 2014, the Municipality of Compostela had been awarded the “Seal of Good Local Governance on Disaster Preparedness” (SGLG). Thus, this captures the interest of the researcher to determine indicators of the local government unit’s disaster management that predict disaster resiliency to the major natural disasters occurring in the Municipality of Compostela for the last five years which include flooding and typhoon. This study employed a descriptive correlation design as the overall scheme in the conduct of the study. Specifically, Regression Analysis was utilized using disaster resiliency as the outcome variable and disaster management in terms of leadership structure, a guide to action management and partnerships and volunteerism as predictors. Results reveal that risk assessment and mapping,   partnerships with volunteer groups, civil society organizations (CSO) and business/private sectors, institutionalized planning and budgeting and functional incident command system significantly influence LGU’s resiliency towards flooding while partnerships with volunteer groups, CSO and business/private sectors, partnerships with other local governments and national government, institutionalized planning and budgeting and risk assessment and mapping significantly influence LGU’s resiliency towards typhoon.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sining Cuevas ◽  

Addressing climate change necessitates creating new, or building the capacity of old, institutions. Institutions are vital tools that determine the intensity by which climate change considerations are incorporated into the decision-making process, designs, and plans. This article aims to illustrate that it is necessary to understand the institutional environment where the CCA endeavors will be implemented such that local climate change adaptation (CCA) policies, plans, and programs can be implemented effectively. The paper also intends to demonstrate that, along with the scientific and technological discussions, institutional conversations should be among the initial vital steps in CCA planning, and that the institutional dimension should be the foundation of broader reforms toward an effective CCA implementation. The paper accomplished this by investigating the conditions in the local agriculture and CCA in the Philippines. The paper applied the Institutional Environment Matrix as the main analytical framework. The analysis showed that the existing institutional dynamics in the Philippines have impacted the effectiveness of the introduced CCA policies and efforts. The Local Government Code of the Philippines had counterproductive interplays with other institutional rules; first in agriculture, and afterwards, in CCA. The Code has devolved tasks to the local governments, provided local government units with extensive authority over their jurisdictions, and improved autonomy in local governance. However, it lacks the arrangements that would create (dis)incentives for individual and collective actions (i.e., rewards and penalties, payoffs on actions). Likewise, institutional mechanisms to support the devolution of government services are wanting. Such institutional environment in local governance has curtailed the effectiveness of local agricultural policies and the efficient implementation of new CCA policies. This article advocates that analyzing the institutional environment where the CCA endeavors will be implemented will enable policy makers and CCA planners to understand better and to have deeper perception of the interlinkages between and among institutional arrangements. In the case of the Philippines, if the local agricultural institutional environment was considered in the design and implementation of the CCA policies, institutional support mechanisms that can address the existing issues and concerns in local agriculture may have been incorporated into these policies. Such action may have helped implementers to avoid the same difficulties in operationalizing CCA initiatives. Accordingly, the paper analyzed how CCA is operationalized through an institutional lens, and presented how institutional analysis is important in policy making. It further demonstrated the complexity of institutional linkages and raised the conversation on the institutional dimension of CCA.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miho Ohara ◽  
◽  
Hisaya Sawano

The First Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Committee on Disaster Management Meeting established a framework for ASEAN-US cooperation on the Disaster Management Program in 2003, focusing on capability building for the Incident Command System (ICS). The ICS was then adopted as part of the on-scene disaster response system in the Republic of the Philippines as enacted by the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act in 2010. This study investigates the process of adopting the ICS, its current status, and future issues through interview surveys of local and national governments in the Philippines. After adopting and implementing of the ICS as the national disaster response system for the Philippines is investigated, the current status of the ICS at the local government level is surveyed in a flood-prone area of the Pampanga River basin in central Luzon. Results show that the ICS has been adopted on all levels of government – national, regional, provincial, municipal, and barangay, i.e., the country’s smallest administrative division. Each local government level has incorporated the ICS into its contingency plan. Several issues related to future disaster response planning and capacity building are then reviewed.


Author(s):  
Kayode J Samuel ◽  
Samuel B Agbola ◽  
Olorunfemi A Olojede

Local governance encompasses the involvement of local governments and other community-based organizations in participatory decision-making for efficient delivery of public services. In the developing world, however, the weakness of the local government and local governance has inhibited the efficient and effective delivery of these services. Relying on water and sanitation data and interviews of relevant officials, this study analyses the structure of governance of water supply and sanitation (WSS) at the community levels in selected medium-sized urban centres in Nigeria. Results showed that majority of the city dwellers lacked access to safe water and sanitation, an indication of convoluted, poorly regulated provision regimes and the waning capacity of local governments to galvanize local actions towards the efficient provision and management of these services at community levels. Multiple provision regimes, weak coordinating and regulatory frameworks characterize WSS governance. Further, the sub-national authorities’ encroachment on local government funds which deprived these tiers of government the resources they could have used in providing these essential services presents a major setback. Local governments require financial and constitutional autonomy to provide basic services to the people and supervise and coordinate the activities of other governmental and non-governmental actors involved in service provision.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 5478-5487
Author(s):  
Renejoy M. Bulos

Local governments in the Philippines are the nearest service units to its citizens. They are expected to deliver quality services to their constituents. As recipients of the different services, citizens are deemed in better position to assess whether quality services are delivered by the different municipalities in the country. In order to address the need to gather citizens’ feedback on the service delivery performance of the local government units (LGU), the Department of Interior and Local Government developed the Citizen Satisfaction Index System (CSIS). The municipality of Tumauini in the province of Isabela is one of the selected LGUs to implement the CSIS project in the country to measure its performance in service delivery for 2018. This study assessed the awareness and satisfaction of the people in Tumauini, Isabela on the services for Public Works and Infrastructure delivered by the LGU. There were 150 respondents selected using the multi-stage probability sampling method. In gathering the data needed, face to face interview was used with the aid of survey questionnaire. Overall, results revealed that citizens of Tumauini are aware and satisfied with the different service indicators of the Public Works and Infrastructure programs. Results of the study may help local government officials in crafting policies and making management decisions to improve the performance of the local government of Tumauini in the provision and delivery of Public Works and Infrastructure services to its constituents.


Author(s):  
Paula Gomes dos Santos ◽  
Carla Martinho

Public governance must ensure financial sustainability. This investigation aims to assess Portuguese local governments financial sustainability as the ability to service the upcoming obligations in commercial transactions (under the Late Payment Directive framework) and to study if accounting information enables public local governance with greater transparency and accountability about their financial sustainability. The study will focus on the 308 Portuguese local governments from 2009 to 2017. The number of local governments with average payment periods (PMPs) within 30 days had an increasing tendency. However, their adjusted average payment periods greatly exceed the 30 days, which means limited financial sustainability. In 2017, only 29% of the local governments have an adjusted PMP within 30 days against the 63% if it is used the officials PMPs. Therefore, accounting information does not enable public governance with greater transparency and accountability about Portuguese local government financial sustainability.


Author(s):  
Peter Demediuk ◽  
Stephen Burgess ◽  
Rolf Solli

Local governance occurs where a local government gives citizens a say in things that really matter to them, and e-governance initiatives provide electronic means to enable citizens to participate in this shared governing of the community. The clearer a local government is about the nature and degree to which it needs to act as a democracy actor (better citizens and better government) and/or a service delivery actor (better decision making), the greater the prospect that it can choose appropriate electronic means through an e-governance approach to meet those ends. In order to guide an e-governance practice and inform further research, this chapter: provides models that articulate the elements that constitute better decision making, better citizens, and better government, and presents examples from five local governments of how electronic means can satisfy particular ends.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
TRISTAN CANARE

Intergovernmental fiscal transfer (IFT) is one of the several sources of funds of sub-national governments. There are two general types of IFT — conditional and unconditional. In many developing economies including the Philippines, the usual existing IFT is a form of unconditional fiscal transfer called revenue shares. In the Philippines, this revenue-sharing scheme is called the internal revenue allotment (IRA). Empirical literature says that unconditional IFTs are the type of fiscal transfers with the least effect on local government spending. The literature posits that the reason for this is that local governments use these transfers to substitute for own-sourced revenues such as local taxes. This explanation was formalized through a framework presented in this paper. Using panel data from Philippine provinces for the years 2001 to 2015, this paper attempted to determine the effect of revenue shares, in the form of IRA, on local government expenditures. Using different econometric methodologies, this paper arrived at several conclusions. First, IRA has a strong positive effect on total local government spending with a marginal effect slightly greater than one — much higher than what comparable studies found using data from other countries. Secondly, the effect of IRA on local government expenditures is even stronger for provinces with relatively greater ability to generate its own funds. Next, IRA and other externally sourced revenues have much stronger marginal effects on local government spending than do own-sourced revenues. Finally, IRA has widely varying effects on different components of local government expenditures.


Author(s):  
Moazzam Ali Janjua ◽  
Rainer Rohdewohld

In 2013 and 2019, the local government legislation of the province of Punjab in Pakistan saw two rounds of major changes – each of which led to a new local government Act being passed. In 2013 the changes were driven by constitutional and judicial requirements and in 2019 by the political will of Pakistan’s new coalition government. This article analyses and compares the functional assignment (FA) architecture of the two Acts against a set of parameters. The study finds that marginal improvements to the FA architecture introduced by the 2019 Act are offset by continuing inconsistencies and lack of clarity over ‘who does what’ in the functions assigned to local governments. The authors suggest that improving the functionality of local governments requires full implementation of the design features of the new system, including institutional strengthening of provincial-level entities which regulate and oversee the local government system.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Khandakar Farid Uddin

Bangladesh has a history of political unrest and supremacy of the ruling party. Recently, representatives of the local government were suspended for being accused in cases of political violence. The ruling party is defining the suspensions as a legal process; on the contrary, the opposition political parties are claiming it as political hostility and a way of controlling local governments. There are shortages of research on contemporary political challenges and its consequences. Thus, this study considered local government representative suspensions as a case to exemplify the political hostility and local government crisis in Bangladesh. This study also demonstrated some theoretical points to frame the conceptual thoughts, likewise explained the status and some historical illustration of governmental intrusion over local government. Besides, this study applied the qualitative method to discover the research queries. Consequently, the analysis outlined substantial political supremacy and hostility in Bangladesh and its adverse impact on local governance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Widjonarko - ◽  
Brotosunaryo

The Sustainable Capacity Building for Decentralization (SCBD) project funded by the AsianDevelopment Bank (ADB) aimed to strengthen the capacity of local governments in Indonesia.Banjarnegara Regency was selected by the ministry of internal affairs for the implementation ofthe project. The SCBD Project in Banjarnegara consists of five components including frameworkof capacity building, institutional capacity building, human resources management, humanresources development and sustainable financial and budgeting. This project will is held in fiveyears using two funding schemes phases, donor funded the first 3 years (2009‐2011), thencontinued by the local government of Banjarnegara. During the 2009‐2011period, the projecthas finished all five components, PMU then conducted evaluation to ensure achievement of theSCBD’s main goal: strengthening local governance for delivering good public services. The expostevaluation method used to evaluate the SCBD Project for short term outcomes found thatthe project hasn’t directly improved the public services performance even having completed allfive components of the project. Most people in Banjarnegara Regency felt no significantimprovement of public services provided by the government. The ineffectiveness of publicservices can be understood, because not all of the components of the SCBD project had beenthoroughly implemented at local government level. Moreover, many activities of the projecttend to overlap implying lack of coordination among the project implementation units.Key words: evaluation, SCBD


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