Special Interest.

I. Organizational Profile The Right to Know, Right Now! (R2KRN) Coalition has been a staunch advocate for the passage of the FOI Law since it was convened in 2002, initially as the…

Action for Economic Reforms (AER) is a public-interest organization that conducts policy analysis and advocacy on key macroeconomic and governance issues. Access to relevant and…

Bantay Kita (BK) is a national coalition with 84 members, and 70 network affiliates. Established in 2009 and formally registered in 2013, the Coalition advocates for transparency…

MARAWI CITY — As early as September last year – while battles were still going on here — the Provincial Government of Lanao del Sur and the Marawi City government had submitted a…

MARAWI CITY – The groundbreaking for the government’s ambitious rehabilitation of this city was supposed to take place today, the first anniversary of Marawi’s “liberation” from…

WE STAND by our story and take exception to the statement of Special Assistant to the President Christopher Lawrence “Bong” T. Go that our report on the multibillion-peso civil…

IT’S AS GOOD as it gets for Davao Region, home and bailiwick of President Rodrigo R. Duterte. And by the government’s own data, it’s as bad as it gets for many other regions of the…

THE GOVERNMENT awards a contractor-bidder a contract if its bid amount has been evaluated and found to be the “lowest calculated bid.”

THREE HAD been suspended or blacklisted, including one for submitting fake tax clearance certificates. One had its corporate registration revoked. The officers of four others are…

SINCE last May, the task force leading the government’s efforts to rebuild the Islamic City of Marawi in Lanao del Sur has been setting and resetting groundbreaking rites for a…

LAST JULY 2, after being declared ineligible to bid for the multibillion-peso contract to rebuild Marawi City’s conflict zone or “most affected area (MAA),” a consortium led by a…

ALMOST 42 years ago, an important document signed in Tripoli, Libya became a benchmark in the history of the Mindanao peace process. On 23 December 1976, the Government of the…

A FORTNIGHT AGO, a policy forum on the state of “Democracy and Governance in the Philippines: Deficit, Surplus, and Unfinished Business” was conducted by the PCIJ, in partnership…

THE WAR on drugs and the mass arrest of the loiterers and the shirtless under the Duterte administration have triggered a monstrous humanitarian crisis: Philippine jails and…

WHAT has happened to civil and political rights, and the rule of law, under two years of the Duterte administration?

IS the proposed shift to federalism “a Trojan horse to stay in power” for President Duterte and his political allies?

A “SELF-EXECUTING” ban on political dynasties is supposedly one of the crown jewels of the draft constitution for the pitch to shift to a federal system of government. It is paired…

WE ARE a nation of more than a hundred million people, but as of 2016, only one in every two Filipinos had registered as voters and could be allowed to participate in elections. If…

ONLY THREE of the proposed 18 federated regions have revenue collections larger than the fund transfers that they are getting from the national government in terms of Internal…

THE POOR abound in this country — Filipinos who cannot earn or raise the minimum income to meet the basic food and non-food requirements. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA)…

IF THE push for federalism is at core a variant of decentralization, the nation’s experience with the Local Government Code that passed in 1991 is an object lesson. Dr. Rosario G…