172 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy The assessment highlights several symptoms of the chief systemic constraint. The first is the subjugation by powerful political elites of the system of public administration at both the national and local level.25 The second is the reciprocal and privately beneficial link between these elites and other more dominant forces beyond the state, specifically those with business interests. The third is the impact of these dominant political and economic elites on intergovernmental relations, characterizing these relations as highly politicized specifically in providing rewards and allocations. And finally, though the document portrays the connections in a positive manner, the anti-democratic orientations of “strong” and “resourceful” national executive, legislative, and local political players. In sum, this enumeration of symptoms points to the chief constraint to any substantive progress of decentralization—the prevalence of a patrimonial oligarchic state.26 A NOTE ON MOVING FORWARD Despite their inadequacies, civil society and decentralization remain fertile and inter-linked grounds for democratization. Under a decentralized system, civil society groups are provided opportunities to intervene in more manageable spaces and could even use the scaffolding, despite its limitations, provided by the Local Government Code. It also does not take a national CSO to bring forth much more profound collaboration between civil society and political leaders at the local level, as shown by the case of Naga City.27 This will expand the horizontal base of CSOs from where they can subsequently scale up for much more potent national level action. Diamond has already referred to this phenomenon where national level NGOs (or broadly CSOs) “organize life parochially (Tusalem 2007).” This is not to dispel the importance of national level action, specifically as political opportunities open up for a sizeable fraction of civil society to either impel the state or intervening political society elements to act favorably on larger issues of political reform. In the prevailing atmosphere of renewed hope that a new political leadership offers, however, one civil society leader offers a reflection: Except for spontaneous outbursts of energy such as the two EDSAs, civil society does not have the capacity to shape political events. One reason is that it is imprisoned in First World discourse. It has achieved rare success only when 28 it, unconsciously, latches on to a winning faction of the elite.