Political Dimension: SAGE

As the various dimensions of inclusive and holistic sustainable development come into play, the Local Government Unit (LGU) needs to re-engineer itself to play a facilitative role in harmonizing, together with civil society and business, the dozens of initiatives that are emerging out of the SIAD process. Normally this would be a major task, requiring huge amounts of effort from those that would want to make SIAD happen. Fortunately, Zarraga is blessed with a pro-active, participatory, action-oriented, and strategic thinking mayor. Zarraga’s chief local executive, Mayor John H. Tarrosa, is also adept in leveraging provincial, regional and national government resources to help fund the town’s programs and projects.

In addition, the legislative leaders of the town, known collectively as the Sangguniang Bayan, or municipal legislative assembly, are equally progressive, pro-active and open to the SIAD innovations that are increasingly characterizing the town. They provide the necessary legislative support when needed on a timely and professional manner.

In the political dimension of Larga Sustainable Zarraga, the core sub-program is Society-Activated Governance by Example or SAGE.

Philippine politics has been, and continues mostly to be, personality and state-driven. As a result, the true potentials of the democratic process are not realized as power and decision-making continue to be concentrated in the hands of a few.

However, the complex nature of true development makes itself increasingly felt in the vicious cycle of ever-cascading problems that are not going away, triggering widespread calls for radical reforms in the political governance of the country. As a result, more and more political leaders are realizing that, to address systemic and interrelated challenges, they need to open the political space for the meaningful and constructive involvement of civil society (the key actor in the realm of culture as defined by Philippine Agenda 21) and business (the key actor in the economy).

SEA calls this approach, society-centered governance. It is a state of governance where the state, the market, and civil society come together and converge towards creating a common strategic and systemic approach to challenges facing society.

SAGE is the appropriate acronym for this sub-program in the political dimension of SIAD. The coming together of all key stakeholders in society to create a “solution ecosystem” around a specific challenge, results in the emergence of what scholars are calling “collective intelligence”, the intelligence of the whole. And “sage” ordinarily refers to an individual with profound, highly-usable knowledge that benefits the whole. Thus SAGE is an appropriate description for a converging process that produces collective wisdom, one that is more profound than any single individual involved in the process.

Figure 1 below illustrates the nature of “solution ecosystems” within the context of strategic societal threefolding partnerships and society-centered governance.