GROWTH can happen without planning, but proper development can only happen with proper planning.
Given that premise, it should no longer be appropriate to use the term “inclusive growth”, and as an alternative, we should instead use the term “inclusive development”.
Similarly, we should no longer use the term “sustainable growth”, and as an alternative, we should instead use the term “sustainable development”. Using the two corrected terms, we should aim for development goals that are both inclusive and sustainable.
At the risk of stating the obvious, growth can happen even without goals, because the elements of growth come about independent of planning interventions.
In contrast, development could only happen with goals, because the outcomes should be measurable in order to know whether the goals have been met or not.
Again at the risk of stating the obvious, there has to be benchmarks to begin with, and the status of the goals have to be measured against the given benchmarks, in order to determine whether these goals have been met or not.
Way back during the term of President Fidel V. Ramos, the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) was created, designating the Director General of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) as Chairperson, and the Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) as Vice Chairperson.
The members of the Council were supposed to be “committed environmentalists” from several Departments, with the minimum rank of Bureau Director. The primary function of the Council was to “review and implement the commitments that the Philippines made in the light of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)”.
The secondary goal of the Council was to “establish guidelines and mechanics that will expand, concretize and operationalize the sustainable development principles as embodied in the Rio Declaration, the UNCED Agenda 21, the National Conservation Strategy, and the Philippine Agenda 21, and incorporate them in the preparation of the Medium Term Development Plan (MTDP) both at the national and local levels with active participation from the non-government sector and people’s organizations”.
Very clearly, the PCSD as it was created was strongly inclined towards sustainable development, albeit from a perspective that was limited only to the scope of the environment.
Fast forward to today, about 24 years later, so many changes have happened, and it is about time to review and change the purposes and members of the Council. For one, the UNCED Agenda 21 has already evolved into Conference of Parties 21 (COP21) that will soon become COP22.
The COP series, organized by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), is mainly about climate change and climate action. With all the hype and attention that was given to the 2015 COP Conference in Paris, it is very clear to the international community that the broader and bigger programs of the United Nations are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
To put this discussion in the right perspective, the Philippine Agenda 21 is supposed to be really just a localized adaptation of the UNCED Agenda 21. Given the fact that the latter has already evolved into COP21, it goes without saying that the former also has to evolve.
Take note however that both are only supposed to be inputs to the preparation of the MTDP. Also take note that the National Conservation Strategy is supposed to be the third source of inputs, but it seems that the said document was neither submitted nor approved. To give the benefit of the doubt to the DENR, being the Department that was tasked to prepare it, it may have been submitted but was not approved, or it may have been approved but was not released.
On the part of the NEDA, it is very clear based on their statements that their goal is “inclusive growth”. I do hope however that they would change that to “inclusive development”, because among everyone else, they should be the first to understand that it is not possible to plan for the inclusion of everyone in a process that could not be planned. It took a long time for the government to realize that disasters could not be coordinated; I hope that it will take the NEDA lesser time to realize that growth could not be planned because only development could be planned.
Fortunately, it appears that the PCSD has already adjusted its agenda to already include the SDGs, and perhaps the credit for that substantive shift should go to the NEDA, being the Secretariat of the PCSD. As I see it however, that is not enough, because the composition of the PCSD should already be changed to allow the membership of government agencies and private organizations that are involved in the 17 SDGs.
The reason for that is very simple. As it was originally created, it was only supposed to cover the environment, because at that time, sustainable development meant only the protection of the environment.
As it is now however, only 4 of the 17 SDGs are environment related namely Goal 6 (clean water and sanitation), Goal 13 (climate action), Goal 14 (life below water) and Goal 15 (life on land).
As it is generally understood now, what is “inclusive” should be sustainable, and what is “sustainable” should be inclusive. Although practically everything in our daily life is actually environment related, we should not be contented with an MTDP that is slanted only to the environment. In other words, we should have an MTDP that adopt the broader definition of sustainable development, as defined in the SDGs./PN
