140 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy population, from 26.4 in 2006 to 26.5 in 2009 (Virola 2011). Though the lack of improvement in the poverty figure could be attributed to a host of exogenous and natural factors, the food and oil price crises of 2007, the global financial crisis from 2008, and the damaging typhoons of 2009, this is a telling account of how ineffectual the state has been in meeting its own commitment to halve poverty from its 1990 level (1991 poverty incidence among the population was 33.1%) by 2015, as defined by the UN Millennium Development Goals.1 The preceding chapters have already illuminated a number of institutional limits to democratization. These chapters lead us to believe that unless the state is relieved of its patrimonial character, with elite elements that are a priori opposed to substantial redistributive measures, all other factors that could facilitate democratization or produce “substantive” democracy are rendered insignificant. The earlier chapters also point to the fact that Philippine democratization, like all democratization processes, has not progressed in a linear fashion and has, for all intents and purposes, been stalled. Fortunately, the Philippines has not seen a reversal of the democratization process. A couple of the reasons for the sustenance of “procedural” democracy in the Philippines lies in two arenas of contestation that we will examine in this chapter—civil society and local governments after decentralization. The general concern of this chapter, therefore, is to explain how these two arenas, bruited to be “democratizers,” have facilitated democratization. In starting each section of this chapter, we provide an explanation of how each arena is expected to contribute to democratization, based on previous studies, both comparative and those that examined the Philippine experience. These previous studies and an examination of recent developments, lead us to argue that both arenas have suffered innate systemic limits and therefore have not really propelled the democratization process in the country. We elaborate on these limits in each section of this chapter. The first section reviews the dynamics within civil society. The section begins by examining the breadth of civil society, the initiatives and interventions it has undertaken and their outcomes. Though civil society has been a force that contributed to the political transition in 1986 and has successfully mobilized to deter a reversal of the democratization process, the section allows us to elaborate on the horizontal and vertical limits in civil society. As regards the horizontal limit, we re-articulate the view that the fissures within Philippine civil society have diluted its power vis-à-vis an impervious state. In relation to the vertical limit, this is divided into two levels.