Thursday, March 27, 2008 [ manilatimes.net ]
By Rene Q. Bas Editor-In-Chief
POTENTIAL investors—heads of banks and investment companies—were brought together with executives of the “dream cities” participating in the Institute of Solidarity for Asia’s (ISA) Public Governance System (PGS) at Wednesday’s forum at the Hotel Sofitel in Manila.
All ISA forums, which coincide with its twice-a-year general conferences, will henceforth include potential investors, ISA founding chairman and CEO Jesus Estanislao told The Manila Times.
ISA awards PGS-participant cities and provinces, and gives formal recognition for their successful efforts in observing best practices in governance. The local units are graded on the basis of a scorecard borrowed from the Harvard Business School’s good-management scorecard for corporations.
“There is more to the Public Governance System than recognition, public acclaim and crowns of glory,” Estanislao, a former finance secretary during the Aquino presidency, said.
“At the end of the public governance rainbow must be pots of gold. There must be jobs created, livelihood opportunities opened up. There must be significant investments flowing in,” he added.
He said, as though reviewing the very aims of his internationally supported ISA foundation: “Markets are made more open by good governance practices. They have to be more fiercely competitive to bring down the gains of productivity and quality enhancement to the mass of our citizens.”
Government units that respond to ISA’s invitation to be a PGS partner must agree to envision themselves in the overall “Philippines 2030 Roadmap” that charts the way for Filipinos to reach 2030 as a happily productive, prosperous, well-governed and respected democratic nation.
The city or province’s executives, councilors, as well as representatives of civil society, then agree, in a signed covenant, to work toward the realization of a specific goal for the city or province.
More than 40 cities and provinces are ISA-PGS partners. Thirty-three institutions and civil society groups, including the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, are ISA’s institutional and sectoral partners.
The Center for International Private Enterprise in Washington, DC—a non-profit affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce and one of the four core institutes of the US National Endowment for Democracy—funds ISA’s core programs. The Public Government System program is one of these.
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