Local Governments, Civil Society, Democratization, and Development 133 World Bank-Asian Development Bank (2005) document on scal decentralization noted: The institutional environment at the sub-national level mirrors that at the national level…local governments display a subjugation of the public administration to the dominant political power which—as at the national level—has led to…a complex and enduring web of connections between political executives, civil servants, and business interests…It is important not to underestimate such obstacles in the quest for improvements…The workings of intergovernmental (scal, administrative, and political) relations are particularly vulnerable to the instability induced by 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. The assessment highlights several symptoms of the chief systemic constraint. The rst 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 benecial link between these elites and other more dominant forces beyond the state, specically 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 specically in providing rewards and allocations. And nally, though the document portrays the connections in a positive manner, the antidemocratic 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, specically 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