Showing posts with label Land Use Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Land Use Policy. Show all posts

Sunday, October 20, 2019

WHAT KIND OF LAND USE POLICY WOULD BE OPTIMAL FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT?


There are three sets of conditions for a land use plan to have a positive and significant impact. First, it must have technical merit such that we know what issues need to be addressed and how to address them; second, it must have the political mandate and organizational capability to allow implementation; and third, it must be backed up by sufficient financial and other material resources.

Technical merit

The overall objective of a land use plan is to identify the most appropriate locations and promote efficient and safe environments of social activities (land uses). This includes transportation linkages among the various activities as well as administrative and other associated governance requirements. Ideally, it should also support the national government’s goal of inclusive growth, complement other sectoral development plans, and provide detail to regional and provincial land use policies. Its most immediate role, however, is to serve as the core of the CLUP, which is intended to guide or lead the LGU in the attainment of its goals and objectives. Typically, these goals and objectives are defined and measured by employment, income/poverty, education, health, and other development indicators.

We need not go into the details of the structure and components of a land use plan. As far as technical merit is concerned, we have already noted major shortcomings of land use plans which need to be addressed, in particular: the lack of consideration for the demand side, the lack of inter-local or metropolitan integration and multi-level analyses, the need to update basic planning principles and standards, and the need to integrate more effective disaster risk reduction measures. Two additional points, however, are worth mentioning.

In general, consideration should be given such that land using activities take place in areas that, in order of priority: (1) do not pose direct threats to public safety (disaster risk reduction measures); 
(2) enhance and protect lifeline systems (transport routes, communication lines, water and power service delivery); and (3) promote the sustainability of productive resources and keysupport services.

Implementation mandate and organization capability
The mandate of cities and municipalities to prepare, implement and enforce land use plans resides in the constitution, various provisions of the 1991 Local Government Code, Executive Orders 72 and 648, and Republic Act 7279. A full list is provided in the CLUP Guidebook prepared by the HLURB. Meanwhile, formal approval of a specific plan is given by the local development council following a prescribed process.

As mentioned earlier, the CLUP and its implementation instrument, the zoning ordinance, are intended to directly regulate land use in the country, as part of a set of plans that covers the entire national-regional-provincial-local hierarchy. However, consistency and integration within this multi-level and multi-sectoral hierarchy of plans are not yet in place.

Given this scenario, the enactment of a National Land Use Act (NLUA) could provide the much needed mandate to consolidate and integrate land use policies even while retaining LGU jurisdiction over land use planning and enforcement. Because it is a legislative act, however, the NLUA should defer from prescribing specific design and planning standards. Instead, it should refer these to the National Physical Framework Plan (NPFP). In this manner, the basic policies are established in the NLUA while design and planning standards that are subject to regular adjustments (because of technological changes for example) can be done accordingly without having to go through Congress. This also provides the NPFP, which to date serves only as a reference document, with the required implementation mandate.

As far as manpower is concerned, many LGUs do not have the sufficient number to conduct required planning activities. This is part of the reason for the low percentage of cities and
municipalities (35% of 1,610 cities and municipalities in 2008, according to the HLURB) that, in recent years, do not have any CLUP or do not have an updated CLUP. Most LGUs are likely to continue to encounter this problem because of the lack of qualified personnel, especially trained planners, in the country. 

As of 2008, there were only 609 registered Environmental Planners (authorized to sign subdivision and other urban/regional plans) in the Philippines; this number includes inactive and international-based planners. With only an average of 21 planners being added to the professional roster every year (during 2000-2008, according to the Philippine Institute of Environmental Planners), and assuming every registered Planner works for cities and municipalities, it will take 47 years for the number of planners to match the total number of cities and municipalities. Further aggravating the situation is the apparent large amount of planning tasks required of local planning offices such that, according to one estimate, one office is typically required to prepare 28 plans within three years. And this does not include non-planning responsibilities assigned to local planning officials. (Corpuz 2008) LGUs with larger operating budgets will have less difficulty but for the majority, and without external assistance, the lack of qualified personnel will continue to be a problem.

The other serious obstacles to the performance of the planning and implementation bureaucracy are the weak linkages within the planning-investment programming-budgeting-implementation process. Ideally, the PPAs proposed in the CLUP/CDP are prioritized as part of an investment programming exercise and incorporated into the annual budget for implementation. 

In the real world, however, few projects identified in the plan are actually implemented. (There is no actual data available for cities and municipalities but this is consistent with a recent study of provincial plans which found that only 15%-30% of the PPAs identified and listed in the plan are provided a budget.) (Carino, Corpuz and Manasan 2004) Further, some PPAs not identified in the plan are inserted into the budget for implementation. This suggests that political considerations dominate the budgeting and implementation end of the process. It is also in line with the reported “divide by n” resource allocation practice where LGU capital investment resources, however limited, are distributed among allies of the local political leadership.

It can be argued that if the quality of the plan and its PPAs is poor, because of the lack of available professional planners, for example, then the low implementation performance is not
necessarily bad or inconsequential, i.e. not implementing bad projects is good. Or conversely, quality is not important to begin with because of the low implementation performance, i.e. why waste time and resources to come up with a good plan if it is not likely to be implemented anyway. Further, the three-year tenure of the local leadership does not encourage or even makes it impractical to initiate a plan that looks seriously beyond the short term. This does not mean that bolder, longer term or more innovative land use plans and policies cannot be conceived and approved. Rather, it means that regardless of the plan, it is likely that actual development will be incremental. Having the right technical land use policies is good to have but not having them is not important or even relevant if the CLUP itself is not expected to play an important or catalytic role in the first place.

Ultimately, it is not enough to have good quality plans and projects; the entire planning investment programming-budgeting-implementation process and bureaucracy must also work efficiently in order to get desired developments in place.

The politicized nature of the budgeting and implementation stages contrasts with the more technical orientation of the planning stage of the process. To be sure, the local leadership may assert its vested interests and influence certain features of the plan but, as a whole, the planning stage is recognized as an exercise better left to technical experts. In the absence of such experts, the resulting plan may be compromised but, nonetheless, the prevailing view is that planning should be a technical exercise. This perception is reinforced by professional planners who consider the ideal plan as one devoid of or insulated from politics. Although there are exceptions, even public consultations intended to draw planning inputs and support from stakeholders are usually compliance-driven and marginally participative.

In summary, the weakness in the linkages among planning, investment programming, budgeting and implementation coincides with the gap between the technical orientation of planning on the one hand and the political nature of budgeting and implementation on the other. In the end, it is the latter that matters because regardless of the plan, other projects can be inserted into the budget and implemented.

How then, should the weakness be addressed? A logical approach is, first, (a) politicize the planning process by increasing or introducing genuine participation among stakeholders, thereby encouraging broader public ownership of the plan and enhancing the possibility that proposed projects are shepherded and implemented. Second, (b) increase the technical basis for budgeting and implementation in order to reduce the influence of a “dividing the spoils” approach to resource allocation. (Corpuz 2007)

Excerpts from: Arturo Corpuz, Land Use Policy Impacts on Human Development in the Philippines 2012/2013, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1ef4/7eead851d4eb561868fb46f491eb4d7dd02b.pdf

  I attended the Intensive Course in Environmental Planning (ICEP) last February 12-16, 2024 conducted by the Planning and Research Foundati...