254 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Decentralization is another process that has been seen by many policymakers as a “magic ingredient” for democratization. But as a contested political process, it can ignite either a virtuous process of accessing and using power in a more democratic manner or a vicious cycle of further entrenching the already well-established power holders who lack public accountability. In assessing the country's decentralization experience, Holmes starts by noting three initial positive developments: 1) the provision of additional scal support to local government units (LGUs) through the internal revenue allotment (IRA) as mandated by the Local Government Code (LGC) passed in 1991; 2) the provision of technical and capability-building support by both national government agencies and multilateral and bilateral funding agencies; and 3) a generally satisfactory citizen appraisal as seen in public opinion surveys which seem to be supported by the many awards for exemplary governance practices and innovations given to selected LGUs (for instance, the Galing Pook Foundation awards started in 1994). In further analyzing the decentralization process, Holmes proceeds by identifying three major problems: statutory, organizational, and systemic. Reecting the rst major aw, no enabling law has been passed to implement the LGC's mandate to have sectoral representatives in the local legislative councils. The local legislative councils have to be distinguished from the special boards such as the Pre-Qualication, Bids and Awards committee, the local health board and the local school board which already include private representatives in many LGUs. The lack of this enabling law means that private citizens and civil society groups are denied access to the local legislative councils which can serve as an additional mechanism for advancing the public accountability of local ofcials. A second statutory aw lies in the “archaic, martial law-vintage” scal provisions in the LGC that have constrained the taxation powers of LGUs and in turn made them overly dependent on the IRA from the national government. The second problem discussed by Holmes concerns the organizational constraints faced by LGU personnel particularly in the area of development planning and tax administration. This has been aggravated by the lack of participation by the private sector and civil society groups in the local legislative and planning councils in the absence of an enabling law to enforce the original mandate of the LGC. Finally, Holmes examines the systemic constraints on the entire process of decentralization with the pervasive networks of patronage and clientelist ties linking national elites and local power holders. These constraints have resulted in what a World Bank-ADB document states as an “excessively politicized system of rewards and allocations, and by uneven institutional strength and resourcefulness among national executive, congressional, provincial, and city or municipal actors” as quoted by Holmes. More particularly, we see these debilitating practices in the use of huge government resources controlled by the executive to buy LGU ofcials off during electoral contests, the diversion of the IRA by local