132 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition Local governments' capacity to produce plans vary, reecting their ability to link these various plans and make it a useful bases for prioritizing programs to achieve local government goals. Local governments with full staff complements can readily comply with the required planning mandates while others, especially those with planning staff of 3-4 people are hard put to do the plans updates without outside assistance. In addition, the multiple plans required from local governments affect the timely completion of these plans, compromise the quality, accuracy, reliability, and timeliness of the data used, with mechanisms for monitoring results against targets not always apparent as part of the planning process. Many of the local governments are still in the process of harmonizing all their other plans into the three main plans (CDP, LDIP and AIP) in compliance with the Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1 Series of 2007. More important than the stafng pattern of LGUs, development planning at the local government level has not generated the involvement of private sector and civil society groups as mandated by the LGC. As TAF's RFA states: The expectation that the Local Development Council would serve as avenues for citizen participation has largely been unmet with the Council barely meeting the required number of sessions provided in the Code, although other specialized bodies like Local School Boards and Local Health Boards have continued to be more functional. Earlier assessments of the participation of CSOs in local governments point to a common denominator that restricts such participation—the disposition of local ofcials (Panadero 2006) (Capuno 2005). Aside from not being too receptive to the participation of CSOs in development planning, in particular, and to development planning itself, in general, we go back to examine how local chief executives have also contributed to the ypaper effect. As the BLGF (2008) study noted: Expenditure growth is greatly inuenced by the behavior of local bureaucrats. In the case of the Philippines, this can be intensied with the power of local chief executives in the budgeting process. Account manipulations can be a common activity to accommodate the preferences of local chief executives. In this light, the bureaucratic model of the ypaper effect is applicable in understanding the unexplained growth of provincial spending. Although provinces may lack nancial resources based on a revenue and expenditure mismatch, local ofcials could still inuence the priority programs and projects signicantly using the modest available resources.24 Systemic constraints As a political economic reading of the backdrop to decentralization, the