Collaborating to Compete-The Governance Implications of Stakeholder Agendas at Mount Pulag National Park, the Philippines

摘要

Regional planning has long sought to manage places that extend across political boundaries. The international trend to decentralize governance and promote co-management of protected areas is consistent with emerging collaborative spatial planning theory (Healey, 1997, 1999, 2006), which suggests that through dialogue, parties assert multiple cultural perspectives, share knowledge, and forge shared landscape values as the basis of decisions. As a form of collaborative spatial planning, co-management specifies shared resource management power between national government and one or more local or indigenous communities. Both approaches assume decentralized governance systems. Although critics fault collaborative planning for glossing over historical and cultural contexts, and for ignoring power in decision making, few case studies ask why partners participate or how specific decentralized governance institutions affect plan implementation. This paper draws from a study of co-management at Mount Pulag National Park, the Philippines-a shared indigenous cultural landscape that was to be managed by a board representing multiple local, indigenous, and national jurisdictions. Tracing road decisions by two municipal partners, the paper summarizes how and why major stakeholders adopted and then circumvented protective policies by building duplicative road projects across fragile forests. In this context of changing indigenous rights, the same decentralization laws that enabled co-management also rewarded competition and strategic behavior that weakened the collaborative and fragmented the shared landscape. The case demonstrates the need to interrogate, rather than assume the benefits of decentralized governance and to study why stakeholders participate before relying on voluntary collaboration to manage regional landscapes. The initial version of this paper was presented to the 2006 annual meetings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Fort Worth, Texas.