Programs such as Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan— Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI-CIDSS), a flagship initiative of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, have enhanced participatory mechanisms for identifying community priorities. However, their overall impact remains constrained by incongruency in budget prioritization, which prevents both the shift of decision-making power to communities as well as the correction of entrenched power asymmetries(Imbong, 2025). Moreover, the program’s implementation largely depends on the political will of LGUs to adopt and sustain it, further limiting its transformative potential(Aceron, 2022; Mansuri and Rao, 2004). Scholars have made similar observations of Bottom-Up Budgeting, the nationwide participatory budgeting program in the Philippines which ran from 2012 to 2016. Under Bottom-Up Budgeting, LGUs were incentivized to institutionalize consultative participation of CSOs and grassroots movements for additional funding, but the program overall failed to strengthen their capacity to hold their LGUs accountable to producing results(Aceron, 2019). The design itself concentrated power in the central government: National agencies determined a pre-set menu of projects for CSOs to choose from, ultimately assessing and deciding on whether the project would be accepted. This limited the capacity of CSOs to enact oversight and discouraged the participation of other groups who felt that their claim-making would be too closely controlled by the LGU. The cumulative effect of these dynamics is a system where decentralization is superficial. Instead of empowering citizens, particularly those from marginalized sectors, participatory mechanisms often serve to legitimize decisions that have already been made at higher levels of authority. The voices of women, Indigenous Peoples and grassroots organizations are formally included but substantively marginalized, while local elites continue to capture the bulk of resources and decision-making power. Securitized Development A critical barrier to gender-just governance in the Philippines is the securitization of development. Under the framework of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, state resources intended for poverty alleviation and rural development have been reframed as counterinsurgency initiatives. Development projects are justified not by their capacity to address landlessness, hunger or livelihood insecurity but by their perceived utility in suppressing dissent. This dynamic has produced a profound distortion in agenda setting, where priorities are defined through military goals and not community needs(Imbong, 2025). The gendered impacts of this securitization are severe. Women peasant activists—often at the forefront of organizing for land rights, food sovereignty and social protection—have become primary targets of harassment, red-tagging and violence(Zimmermann et al., 2025). CSOs, particularly those led by women, face coercion and intimidation when attempting to participate in governance spaces. What should be processes of participatory agenda setting are instead sites of silencing, where those most dispossessed are excluded under the guise of“security threats”. The result is a chilling effect: CSOs withdraw from engagement, and women’s priorities remain structurally invisible in policy deliberations. By redefining grassroots organizing as a threat, securitized development erodes both Upward Agenda Setting and Horizontal Accountability. Communities are denied the opportunity to articulate priorities grounded in lived experience, while accountability channels—audits, participatory monitoring and grievance mechanisms— become ineffective in an environment of fear and repression. Instead of being responsive to vulnerable sectors, the state reproduces coercive dynamics that deepen their marginalization. 5.2. Gaps in Accountability Systemic accountability gaps in the Philippines are sustained by fiscal opacity, fragmented devolution and coercive power relations that exclude citizens and civil society from meaningful oversight. While institutions like the Commission on Audit(COA) uphold procedural compliance, the absence of participatory and transformative accountability mechanisms allows corruption and intimidation to persist, undermining the impact of development projects. Fiscal Opacity According to an evaluation by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies(2025), the conceptually inadequate and poorly implemented devolution agenda has left institutional constraints that reduce LGU effectiveness. These include fiscal gaps, weak accountability and transparency mechanisms, and poor coordination between national and local governments. Hyper-fragmentation of LGUs creates bureaucracies that leave services uneven, vulnerable populations underserved and systems highly susceptible to corruption. LGU reports are prone to bundled budgeting, which obscures line-item expenditures and prevents citizens from knowing how much is actually allocated to services(Juco et al., 2004). This practice undermines fiscal transparency and makes it impossible to evaluate whether resources address the lived vulnerabilities of marginalized groups. By realigning functional assignments, unbundling expenditure data and strengthening inter-LGU cooperation, Claiming Power and Reshaping Governance: A Feminist Framework for the Philippines 15