Philippine E-Journals

The View from the Province: Local Government Behavior and the Subnational Politics of Philippine Strategic Hedging

Jenan Naz

Discipline: Politics

 

Abstract:

Most accounts of Philippine hedging between the United States and China are written from Manila. They follow the president, the cabinet, and the diplomats, and they treat the provinces as the ground on which national decisions land. Yet hedging has to be implemented somewhere: at a naval base in Cagayan, on an island airstrip in Palawan, in the fishing waters off Zambales. This study examines how local government units (LGUs) respond when national hedging choices, chiefly Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) site designations and joint military exercises, arrive in their jurisdictions. Combining multi-level governance theory, center-periphery implementation theory, and a paradiplomacy typology adapted for a unitary state, it builds a four-category coding scheme: extension, autonomous, resistant, and anticipatory accommodation. Three provinces serve as cases. Cagayan's governor campaigned loudly against two EDCA sites but never moved to obstruct them administratively. Palawan's provincial board endorsed the Balabac site the day after it was announced and recast it as disaster relief. In Zambales, the national government dropped a proposed Subic site in advance, citing political sensitivity, while joint exercises have split coastal communities between livelihood losses and a sense of protection. LGU behavior, the cases suggest, reflects no fixed stance on hedging. It reflects how administrative capacity, economic exposure to China, and local memory of foreign military presence combine in a given place. Philippine provinces hold no veto over defense policy, but their informal leverage is real, and Manila already plans around it..