EDITORIAL: Policy or Legislations is Not The Service

The practice of our governance system is to consider legislation and policy as the end product of government service, but it is not! Legislations need implementing rules and regulations, which are left to the implementing agencies to prepare. If the IRR is prepared, which usually, is just the same old system, there is still the last and the most important thing to hurdle - the service delivery system, or how the objective of the law is conveyed to the people. This is the perpetual problem.

There is a notion in public governance about the broken egg theory. The government as well as the private sector has the official and social responsibility to serve their respective constituencies, especially if it is about social development. They handle the resources and the obligation to do so. But performance is hindered by bureaucratic rules and habits that are hard to disentangle. So, the egg of governance remains broken and is not effectively and efficiently supplied.

The agencies and organizations are failing to understand and accept that service delivery is based on a project concept, that in order for policies, legislations, or implementing rules and regulations to be realized they must be considered as individual projects and therefore must follow strategies and guidelines of project delivery systems. This is the responsibility of the intermediary local government officials.

There are two paths of project service delivery: upward and downward. The upward system must start from the beneficiaries at the community or target group level. They must be able to assess their needs and transform these needs into actionable project proposals. The proposals must be assessed and approved by the mayor or whoever is authorized to approve them.

The downward path starts from the approval of the proposal, it is followed by the selection of the actual beneficiaries, the hiring of service contractors, the procurement of project requirements for training, enterprise or livelihood assistance, infrastructure and other requirements.

There is reason to believe that this system is known to the LGU officials or government line agencies, but there are also reasons to believe that there are no tools or guidelines to complete the system of service delivery. Furthermore, it is generally observed that there are no trained community facilitators to do the job of providing assistance to the target beneficiaries in ensuring that the system is followed.

LGUs or implementing agencies must undergo systems development and project delivery training to improve social and economic governance.