114 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition positive action on a desired Executive (EO) or Memorandum Order (MO). A number of civil society leaders have also “crossed over” to the Executive to hold cabinet level positions or portfolios and these include Ernesto Garilao, Horacio Morales, Edicio de la Torre, Karina Constantino-David, Corazon Soliman, Teresita Quintos-Deles, Joel Rocamora, and Ronald Llamas, to mention a few. The judiciary has not been spared from pressure coming from CSOs. Through CSOs engaged with human rights, political and electoral reform, environmental issues, anti-corruption, and other concerns, numerous cases have been led at every level of the judiciary, from municipal trial courts to the Supreme Court, and even in the graft and corruption investigative (Ombudsman) and judicial (Sandiganbayan) bodies. Like their interventions in Congress and the Executive, these initiatives have produced favorable decisions in a number of cases. In addition to ling their own cases, some CSOs have also constantly monitored court proceedings. These CSOs include organizations such as Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, KAISA's Court Watch and Legacy Court Watch (Romulo 2009). In sum, civil society has not fallen short in advocating changes. Unfortunately, their advocacies have been selectively heeded owing to the fact that many of the interests they pursue run counter to the interests of the elites who are entrenched in what should have been representative institutions. Moreover, equally powerful groups outside the state, particularly from the private sector, a number of whom have also extended their reach into civil society, have by far more strings to pull in the halls of public policy making institutions. For civil society, this reality should lead the groups to reect on an observation made many times that so far, the triumphs have been much more evident in the process than in the results (Isberto 1998). The limits of civil society's reach Attributing civil society's failure to facilitate substantive political and economic changes to the callousness of the state may end up to be nothing more than blame-shifting. Taking the state as necessarily infested with competing groups and interests, civil society must be able to attend to the factors that limit its own strengths, factors that have been recognized by many leaders and groups within. The rst limitation is that many civil society groups are found to be “projectoriented.” The plethora of activities does indicate the span of reach of civil society groups, with many of the activities rolled over in the same communities or replicated in other communities. However, these initiatives have been timebound, oriented towards specic rather than strategic goals, and external (either from larger NGOs or external funding agencies) fund dependent. One positive side of project-orientedness is that many of the initiatives that have clear or tangible outcomes are able to draw greater participation from the intended public. This derives from the palpable benets such as access to micro-