The document discusses the influence of civil society organizations on climate change policies in the Philippines. It outlines the political opportunity theory of social movements which argues that favorable political conditions enhance mobilization and influence over policy outcomes. The proposed research will use quantitative methods like Poisson regression to analyze the relationship between political opportunities like Typhoon Ondoy, and variables like political mobilization, organization formation, and climate policy outcomes. It will also conduct a qualitative comparative case study of recent and older climate laws to further understand the impact of issue-specific opportunities on the policy process.

1. Augmented Political
Opportunities
and Enhanced Civil Society
Participation

3. • Recent government regulations like the
Smoking Ban in Metro Manila and the No
Plastic campaigns of some local
government units zero in on environmental
issues
• Popular campaigns like the “No to Mining
in Palawan” among others is also gaining
currency in policy advocacy networks
• Generally, after Ondoy, there seem to be
spike in the number of groups carrying
environmental issues in their agenda

4. “How do civil society organizations
influence state programs and
policies particularly on climate
change?”
• What mechanisms do they use to influence?
• Does the influence come from the group as a
collective or from individual members comprising
the group?
• What are the overt indicators of this influence?
• What is their degree of influence relative to other
groups with different advocacies?
• Why is the influence seemingly more apparent
just recently?

5. • Foremost, to provide some
explanation to the phenomenon of
“enhanced” civil society participation
on issues related to the environment
particularly on climate change
• To examine the result of the
“enhanced” activity based on the
response of the state as the main
political actor in policy formulation and
implementation

6. The significance in understanding this
interplay of political opportunity,
mobilization and political influence is
that “it is important, both as scholars
and citizens, to understand how
activists can make the most of their
opportunities and maximize their
influence under particular historical
circumstances”
(Meyer and Minkoff 2004)

7. •Period starting 1986 when democratization
opened the room for more political
participation
• Extensive data gathering will have to be
employed in so far as for example, getting
the number of environmental organizations
formed on a yearly basis
• Limit to a qualitative comparative case
study of the enactment of the Climate
Change Act of 2009 vis-à-vis older
landmark legislation

8. • Governance Framework of Policy
Formulation (i.e. State-Society Nexus)
There is an interplay between two main parties: the
“non-state actors were able to develop access to power
and resources and interacted with the state on their
concerns” and the state, on the other hand, uses “its
powers to accommodate and respond to non-state
actors according to its constitution, laws, policies and
administrative system”(Rebullida 2003:39).
• Political Opportunity Theory of Social
Movements
In brief, this theory assumes that movements increase
when there are favorable exogenous opportunities and
conversely, they fade when there are increasing

10. • “…it is a contested term with many definitions. Even
after 25 years of debate, there are still almost as
many notions of what civil society actually is as
academics who have tried to ‘tame’ this concept”
(Thomson 2006)
• In general though, civil society is usually held to be
the collective intermediary between the individual
and the state (Whaites 2000)
• It is “the arena, outside of the family, the state and
the market where people associate to advance
common interests.” (CIVICUS Civil Society Index
2006:11)

11. • Social movements as organized
collectivities aiming at some social change or
resisting that change (Kourvetaris 1996)
• They are “an organized and sustained
effort of a collectivity of interrelated
individuals, groups, and organizations to
promote or to resist social change with the
use of public protest activities.” (Neidhardt
and Rucht)

12. “What distinguishes social movements
from their institutional counterparts is
their political situation, that is, their
relative lack of direct power in the
government which causes them to rely
heavily on a repertoire of disorderly
tactics such as strikes, demonstrations,
violence, and protest activities to
accomplish political ends.”
(Morris and Herring 1987: 145)

13. “Movements are better defined as collective
challenges by people with common purposes and
solidarity in sustained interaction with elites,
opponents and authorities…they are created when
political opportunities open up for social actors who
usually lack them and that triggered by the incentives
created by political opportunities, combining
conventional and challenging forms of action and
building on social networks and cultural frames is
how movements overcome the obstacles to collective
action and sustain their interactions with opponents
and with the state.”
(Tarrow 1994)

14. • Primacy of power struggles
• Assumes a pluralistic structure where there will always
be political realignment because there will always be a
ground for discontent and protest
• Pluralistic nature of society accords it with the
necessary resources for mobilization
• Competing social movement organizations
continuously interact, realign and even transform each
other
• Social movements have organizational bases and a
definite leadership
• Participants are rational decision makers who analyze
their collective action efforts by weighing cost and
benefits and therefore that goals are worth pursuing

15. “The active role of civil society groups specifically in
policy formulation, the collaboration between state
and civil society actors and the strong support of
the administration are three important factors in
the making of the IPRA.”
(Lusterio-Rico 2006)
• Historically though, the governance framework
that is currently at work did not emerge until the
more democratic 1987 Constitution was framed
and more recently, and to a greater extent, until
the enactment of the Local Government Code of
1991.

16. “In the governance framework, a new power relationship
has taken place between the people and the state,
between civil society and the state. Through its organizing
and mobilizing efforts, civil society has developed access
to governmental decision making and the people have
become empowered to participate in government. The
1987 Philippine Constitution and especially the 1991 Local
Government Code established a more people-oriented
governance system by mandating governing principles
and the mechanisms for civil society participation in the
government. In this new democratic space, the urban
poor sector’s coalition and network of non-government
organizations and people’s organizations succeeded in
exacting state response… by breakthrough and landmark
legislation and executive policies at national and local
levels of government. “
(Rebullida 2003)

17. “The state as a caretaker of the public domain and
provider of access to natural resources,
nevertheless, still determines the boundaries by
which resources could be used either in a
sustainable or unsustainable manner. Thus, the
nexus of interactions and transactions between the
state, on the one hand, and politicians, private
interests, environmental non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), and local communities, on
the other, would have to be taken into account in
any thoughtful assessment of the trajectory of
environmental politics in the Philippines.”
(Magno 2003)

18. •“Four decades of environmental awareness-
raising and campaigns for various
environmental causes” (Efreneo 2010)
• The democratization following the end of
the period of martial law opened more
doors for political participation and from
that point on, the environmental movement
emerged to grow and succeed in the arena
of policy formulation.

19. • when social movements that were initiated
during martial law became legal organizations
with more definite structures that address the
environmental agenda
• the theme of environmental organizations
shifted from environmental conservation to
sustainable development
• the congregation of different environmental
groups into larger alliances within the
movement
(Leonen 2000)

22. In summary, the researchers,
labeled the groups as “new
environmental movement” since
they go beyond the fundamentalist
norms of using only unconventional
tactics and instead use a large
degree of variation of activities
which include the conventional
mode like contacts with the
government.

23. •“Environmental groups have asserted that the
environmental issue in the Philippines is, more
than anything else, an equity issue.”
• “Among the essential purpose of the
environmental movement therefore is to
ensure that management of resources is given
to the small communities who should be the
main managers of the resources within their
localities.”
(Magno 2003)

25. The basic premise of the Political
Opportunity Theory in Social Movements is
that exogenous factors enhance or inhibit
prospects for mobilization, for particular
sorts of claims to be advanced rather than
others, for particular strategies of influence
to be exercised and for movements to affect
mainstream institutional politics and policy
(Meyer and Minkoff 2004).

26. POLITICAL
OPPORTUNITIES
STRUCTURAL
ISSUE-BASED
MOVEMENT
ACTIVITY
POLICY
OUTCOMES
In the Political Opportunity Theory of Social
Movements, augmented political opportunities,
whether structural in nature or issue-based, opens a
space that is more conducive to political participation
of movements and advocacies which in turn lead to
the effective integration of these policy platforms into
actual policy outcomes like Republic Acts and
Congressional bills or resolutions.

27. • The structural model includes variables that track
formal changes in rules and policies affecting
political access, as well as the changed practices
that follow from them.
(Meyer and Minkoff 2004:1467-1468)
• “Activists and officials monitor changes in the
political environment, looking for encouragement
for mobilization and for advocating policy reforms.
The model includes issue-specific and general
opportunity variables that savvy activist
entrepreneurs could read as invitations to
mobilize” (Meyer and Minkoff: 1470).

28. VARIABLE DATA NEEDED AND HOW IT WILL BE GATHERED
Political
Mobilization
Number of events and activities initiated by
environmental organizations in relation to their
environmental advocacy; this will be gathered through
organizational records through interviews
Organization
Formation
Number of environmental organizations that are
formed on a yearly basis; this will be gathered through
records from the Securities and Exchange Commission
where most NGOs are registered as a matter of
protocol
Policy
Outcome
Number of laws related to the environment that are
enacted per year; this can be taken from either the
journals of the House of Representatives or the Senate
or from the committee report of the concerned
legislative committee

30. • This proposed research will use both
quantitative and qualitative data
collection tools but will be centered on a
quantitative epistemological position
based on the Poisson regression analysis
patterned after Meyer and Minkoff’s
study of the relationship between
political opportunity and the dependent
variables of political mobilization, group
formation and policy outcome.

31. • A qualitative study based on Meyer
and Minkoff’s Poisson regression analysis
will be conducted on the data that will
be gathered.
• From this quantative analysis where
we aim to highlight the correlation of
Ondoy as an independent, issue-specific
variable of Political Opportunity on
mobilization, formulation and policy
response, we will take off to a
comparative qualitative analysis to
further elucidate our findings.

32. • The comparative case study will look into how
the Climate Change Act of 2009 was enacted after
Ondoy vis-à-vis how an older similar landmark
legislation (like maybe the Clean Air Act or the
Renewable Energy Act) was passed. In this
qualitative comparative analysis, we will look into
the significance of the variations in the elements
of the policy formulation process (i.e. which
groups were active in the enactment of the bill,
how did these groups lobby for the bill, what were
the issues at that time, how was it covered by
media groups) as can be explained by issue-
specific political opportunities that could largely
determine political mobilization and the resulting
policy response of the state.

33. • Level of Analysis: National in scope (but may
cover several significant legislations at the local
government level in line with the decentralization
of some policy formulation process after the
passing of the LGC of 1991, as the case may apply)
• Units of Analysis: Environmental Organizations
that are registered with the Securities and
Exchange Commission (some analysis may also
focus on the works of broader alliances of these
Environmental Organizations as parts of the
Environmental Movement, as the case may apply)