Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad today said that the Aquino administration will continue to intensify its campaign for budget openness, as the Cabinet Cluster on Good Governance and Anti-Corruption kicks off the two-day Good Governance Dialogues in Cebu City this week.
The Dialogues, which will be held from October 16-17 at the Crown Regency Hotel and Towers, is a regional forum that will spotlight the Administration’s open government and budget reform agenda. The event will bring together around 200 participants from the government, civil society, private sector, academe, development and aid organizations, and other people’s groups, with the aim of facilitating discussions that will promote greater transparency, accountability, and openness in the budget process.
The Cebu run of the Good Governance Dialogues represents the series’ Visayas leg, and will focus on gathering stakeholders from Regions VI, VII, VIII, and other nearby areas.
“Engaging Filipinos in the budget process takes more than just a couple of meetings and group discussions. We need to continue these conversations so that more Filipinos can become our active partners in governance and budget reform,” Abad said.
“The Good Governance Dialogues are a great way to connect with our peers and colleagues from various sectors. There’s so much that we’ve already accomplished in making the budget more participatory, but we still need the perspective of our stakeholders to make sure we don’t lose sight of our governance and development goals,” he continued.
The Visayas run of the Good Governance Dialogues comes in the wake of the Philippines’ success in the Open Government Partnership Summit in New York, where the country bagged the Gold Award for the Aquino administration’s Grassroots Participatory Budgeting (GPB) program.
“While we’ve installed several crucial reforms in the expenditure process, the GPB’s citizen-centric nature is what makes the program so groundbreaking. For the first time, communities were able to work with civil society groups and local governments to determine how the budget can respond to their needs. The result is an expenditure program that truly supports the people on the ground,” Abad said.
“We’re very happy that the international community recognizes the GPB as a pioneering effort towards participatory budgeting. It’s only right that we strengthen that same spirit of budget openness and citizen empowerment through fruitful dialogue with our partners and stakeholders,” he added.
The Good Governance Dialogues in Cebu was organized by the Good Governance Cluster—where the DBM serves as Secretariat—in partnership with the Union of Local Authorities in the Philippines (ULAP) and the International Center for Innovation, Transformation and Excellence in Governance (INCITEGov). The event is likewise supported by the Facilitating Public Investment initiative under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID-FPI).
